Doom -1 | Negative One: Beyond the Experiment [Development Thread]

On 5/24/2021 at 8:51 AM, PinkFlamingo said:

Hmm, "uncut" sounds like last years' version had content cut out of it, which isn't really the case.

How about "expanded edition" or simply "expanded"?

Sounds good!

On 5/24/2021 at 5:51 PM, PinkFlamingo said:

Version 6.35 (Map 22 updated)

 

Map 22 has been polished:

- Monster/Item placement revised

- Difficulty settings implemented (and overall difficulty is increased)

- Many unused tags removed

- A small amount of detail has been added to areas that felt bare and unfinished

 

In this map, there is some advertisement for another project. I wasn't sure what to do with this. For now, I left it in as it was part of a secret but it feels very much out of place.

 

Download: https://www.mediafire.com/file/83t5k7a2k3g2yt2/NEGATIVEONE_v6.35.rar/file

 

Next... I will reserve MAP 15 (oh boy!). I am not planning to change it much. I just want to be sure it can be finished with 100% kills.

 

 

Hmm, "uncut" sounds like last years' version had content cut out of it, which isn't really the case.

How about "expanded edition" or simply "expanded"?

It was not an advertisement for another project, it was just a user profile avatar... like you can likely still find in many of the maps.

But if they are limited to the credits map then they should be removed in all of the maps except the credits map.

I have finally played through map 15 and managed to get all kills after two hours, LOL. The map is actually not as hard as I thought and there is enough variety in the environment to keep it interesting until the end. I actually enjoyed it. I discovered a few mistakes during my playthrough (missing texture, multiple adjacent sectors tagged as a secret, ...) and I will fix those. I will also try to implement difficulty settings now that I know how the map plays. Hopefully I can have a polished by the end of this weekend.

On 5/31/2021 at 11:06 AM, CBM said:

It was not an advertisement for another project, it was just a user profile avatar... like you can likely still find in many of the maps.

But if they are limited to the credits map then they should be removed in all of the maps except the credits map.

No, I was not refferring to your avatar, but to something called "Dangan Rompa, Light Hope" ? I believe it was related to ElioAF because their Avatar is on these as well?

On 5/25/2021 at 4:07 PM, Rosh Fragger said:

Negative One: Beyond the Experiment sounds cool

Ok. Seems like the majority likes this so lets go with that.

1 hour ago, PinkFlamingo said:

No, I was not refferring to your avatar, but to something called "Dangan Rompa, Light Hope" ? I believe it was related to ElioAF because their Avatar is on these as well?

Ahh ok

10 hours ago, PinkFlamingo said:

I have finally played through map 15 and managed to get all kills after two hours, LOL. The map is actually not as hard as I thought and there is enough variety in the environment to keep it interesting until the end. I actually enjoyed it. I discovered a few mistakes during my playthrough (missing texture, multiple adjacent sectors tagged as a secret, ...) and I will fix those. I will also try to implement difficulty settings now that I know how the map plays. Hopefully I can have a polished by the end of this weekend.

Just want to, first of all, appreciate your countless hours of love and dedication put into this wad; you alone have improved this project significantly! <3 

Regarding the monster count, can you please keep the overall difficulty and number of enemies higher for multiplayer mode? For singleplayer, it makes sense to implement proper difficulty and remove/untick extra monsters while adding extra items/ammo etc. But can you keep the multiplayer spiciness of the maps intact by not removing the extra monsters but just giving them only multiplayer flag or something (so maps are actually challenging in multiplayer and not so much in singleplayer.) Map15 and Map18 could really use tons of monsters for a good multiplayer survival or coop experience... :)

2 hours ago, Rosh Fragger said:

 

Just want to, first of all, appreciate your countless hours of love and dedication put into this wad; you alone have improved this project significantly! <3 

 

Regarding the monster count, can you please keep the overall difficulty and number of enemies higher for multiplayer mode? For singleplayer, it makes sense to implement proper difficulty and remove/untick extra monsters while adding extra items/ammo etc. But can you keep the multiplayer spiciness of the maps intact by not removing the extra monsters but just giving them only multiplayer flag or something (so maps are actually challenging in multiplayer and not so much in singleplayer.) Map15 and Map18 could really use tons of monsters for a good multiplayer survival or coop experience... :)

I was not going to reduce the monster count. Its perfect for this size of map. My current concern is the excessive amount of ammo though. Especially the shotgun ammo. Could I remove some of those shotgun boxes? Or are they meant for multiplayer? I could simply flag them multiplayer only.

3 minutes ago, PinkFlamingo said:

 

I was not going to reduce the monster count. Its perfect for this size of map. My current concern is the excessive amount of ammo though. Especially the shotgun ammo. Could I remove some of those shotgun boxes? Or are they meant for multiplayer? I could simply flag them multiplayer only.

Since ammo even respawns in most multiplayer game settings, so that much excessive ammo shouldn't really be required. My suggestion would be to keep a good balance between removing some ammo and flagging some for multiplayer only :)

I have not been working on this, but that is because my maps are mostly done and the soundtrack is uploaded to my channel anyway. If you want, I will do the idgames release.

v6.36

https://www.mediafire.com/file/bgjnszh23tr1f8g/NEGATIVEONE_v6.36.7z/file

MAP13

- Added more detail to the restrooms (Lights, textures, etc.)

- Rearranged the chairs in the dining area

- Decluttered the CBM pool near the end of the map

Unfortunately IRL stuff kept me from working on the map as much as I had hoped... plus my mind kept drawing a blank as to how I could or should change things. This might be my last addition unless there's anything else I could help out with.

Version 6.37

https://www.mediafire.com/file/aq982psdbiqnems/NEGATIVEONE_v6.37.rar/file

Map 15 revised and tested.

Changes:

- Few changes to the starting area: couple of extra medikits at the start and a soulsphere in the lake. You can grab an early devil staff in the building behind the mancubi, but it is guarded by a Cyberdemon. Changed some monster blocking linedefs so the Cyberdemon can actually chase you.

- Ammo balanced: There is still plenty of ammo to kill everything, but you are no longer swimming in it.

- Difficulties implemented: 'hard' is pretty much the same as before (1500 monsters), 'easy' removes or replaces some of the harder enemies (chaingunners, revenants, ...) but the map is still challenging with over 1000 monsters, 'medium' is somewhat in between. Similar to hard but with slightly smaller monster invasions.

I tested the map several times on 'easy' and 'hard' and both skill levels were enjoyable.

Now I am going to reserve map 18 :-)

I feel like we should make some sort of archive containing every single version. Would be really cool to see how things changed over time!

8 hours ago, EpicTyphlosion said:

I feel like we should make some sort of archive containing every single version. Would be really cool to see how things changed over time!

I have a folder full of different negativeone's versions, also every version i uploaded is in this mega.nz folder:

https://mega.nz/folder/GPQiQJBI#fQ8J-Vor6R6Q8Fl5BhRqrQ

(i dont have all versions but ok)

Also im going to reserve MAP27, to keep detailing it

Decided to play the latest version v6.37 from PinkFlamingo, the last version I played being v5.73. There's some nice work been done since then!

One oddity I noticed is that MAP11 now uses the same music as MAP25. Not sure what happened there, but I'm so used to that music on MAP25's I'd prefer for MAP11's to either be reverted to change to something new :)

13 minutes ago, NiGHTMARE said:

One oddity I noticed is that MAP11 now uses the same music as MAP25. Not sure what happened there, but I'm so used to that music on MAP25's I'd prefer for MAP11's to either be reverted to change to something new :)

We already concluded the soundtrack changes. What is left to do @PinkFlamingo

What happened is that I replaced Map 11's music (something from Castlevania) because - at the time - I thought it was not an appropriate Midi for the darker mood that I was going for with Map 11; and because I thought it was better to have more original music rather than music from different games (see version 6.10, page 8 of this thread). My idea was to later replace the Map 25 Midi with something else, as well as replace some of the other songs in the final "hell" episode (Maps 21 to 30) but I never mentioned this in this thread.

Somewhere before I reached my revision of Maps 21 to 30, Roebloz uploaded the Negative One soundtrack on his Youtube channel because he assumed that the soundtrack was no longer going to change (see his post on page 10 of this thread). When I changed some of the songs in the final episode, Roebloz protested against that (see version 6.27 on page 11 of this thread). I apologized and reverted the songs back to their originals. I began to realize that I shouldn't force my vision onto this project too much. This is still supposed to be a community project and if people had chosen their favorite songs, maybe I shouldn't be changing them.

That being said. It is kinda weird that Map 11's music now is the same as Map 25's music. We could either change Map 11 back to the Castlevania theme, or change Map 25 into something else, or we could just leave everything as it is. I don't really want to make any decision here.

At the moment the following is left to do:

- Map 18 (currently reserved by me) must have its gameplay tested and must be cleaned up/polished to the same standard as the other maps (I will do this now).

- Map 27 (currently reserved by Urrova) also must have its gameplay tested and polished. I will also play through it after I am finished with Map 18.

- Map 32, the so-called credit map is not really a good map to play. I would like to add more gameplay to it. Make it a map that's actually worth playing. Feel free to make edits if you wish.

- Map 33 I don't know. It is the only map in the set that is currently not accessible from anywhere and it is not particularly good looking. Feel free to make edits to it if you wish.

- Credits need to be updated: I was going to add all the names of users that made changes in this thread to the individual map credits and we need some kind of general credit screen that lists everybody's name.

- A modified title screen: I was going to add 'Beyond the Experiment' (see discussion above) and 'Doomworld Forum Members 2020/2021" to the title screen.

- A revision of the story text that plays during intermissions (the final text is still the original Doom 2 one I think). I suggest we have an open discussion about this on this thread.

- Finally, a comprehensive readme.txt that explains a bit what this project is about and how it came to be, and that also gives full credits to everyone involved. I was thinking that someone can start this and post it here. Then, we could all add some extra information as we see fit.

Guess I'll add one more thing to this project, a new TITLEPIC. The zip folder has the unpaletted pdn (Paintdotnet) file if there's any changes you want to make.

TITLEPIC.zip

13 hours ago, LoneAlpha2401 said:

Guess I'll add one more thing to this project, a new TITLEPIC. The zip folder has the unpaletted pdn (Paintdotnet) file if there's any changes you want to make.

TITLEPIC.zip

Looks very nice :-D lets use it

EDIT: Just realized: There is no chainsaw or plasma gun in Negative One...

3 hours ago, PinkFlamingo said:

EDIT: Just realized: There is no chainsaw or plasma gun in Negative One...

And I felt there's something wrong on the image but couldn't realize what's actually it is lol

Also what kind of weapon we have instead of plasma gun?

EDIT:

I just can't remember

1 minute ago, SilverMiner said:

Also what kind of weapon we have instead of plasma gun?

Its a demonic looking weapon that sometimes shoots homing shots

23 hours ago, PinkFlamingo said:

Somewhere before I reached my revision of Maps 21 to 30, Roebloz uploaded the Negative One soundtrack on his Youtube channel because he assumed that the soundtrack was no longer going to change (see his post on page 10 of this thread). When I changed some of the songs in the final episode, Roebloz protested against that (see version 6.27 on page 11 of this thread). I apologized and reverted the songs back to their originals. I began to realize that I shouldn't force my vision onto this project too much. This is still supposed to be a community project and if people had chosen their favorite songs, maybe I shouldn't be changing them.

I myself am sorry for doing the same thing, but I didn't really want to have to change my uploads.

23 hours ago, PinkFlamingo said:

That being said. It is kinda weird that Map 11's music now is the same as Map 25's music. We could either change Map 11 back to the Castlevania theme, or change Map 25 into something else, or we could just leave everything as it is. I don't really want to make any decision here.

We could just leave it as is, it's not like Doom 1 and Doom 2 (And most PWADs) reuse music across levels.

23 hours ago, PinkFlamingo said:

- Map 32, the so-called credit map is not really a good map to play. I would like to add more gameplay to it. Make it a map that's actually worth playing. Feel free to make edits if you wish.

- Map 33 I don't know. It is the only map in the set that is currently not accessible from anywhere and it is not particularly good looking. Feel free to make edits to it if you wish.

For both of these maps, they are supposed to be Easter egg/Developer maps. I think MAP32 can be left alone, same thing for MAP33. Although I think what could be possible is to insert a super secret exit in MAP03 or somewhere else (Wolf3D E2M8 Aardwolf level of cryptic) so that you won't find it unless you know it's there.

20 hours ago, LoneAlpha2401 said:

Guess I'll add one more thing to this project, a new TITLEPIC. The zip folder has the unpaletted pdn (Paintdotnet) file if there's any changes you want to make.

TITLEPIC.zip

This looks cool, but I hate the Freedoom face. (Seriously who had the idea?)

On 6/5/2021 at 6:16 AM, Rosh Fragger said:

Since ammo even respawns in most multiplayer game settings, so that much excessive ammo shouldn't really be required. My suggestion would be to keep a good balance between removing some ammo and flagging some for multiplayer only :)

I've seen people playing survival with no respawning items. If there's extra monsters on multiplayer it would be best to have extra multiplayer-only ammo, after all if respawning items is enabled then it doesn't really matter how much is there since you can infinitely wait for more.

7 hours ago, PinkFlamingo said:

Just realized: There is no chainsaw or plasma gun in Negative One

It's been a while, I honestly forgot. What should I swap those out with then?

EDIT: I'm swapping the plasma gun with the gauntlets to keep the lightning effect.

Sorry about the double post, I just finished the updated TITLEPIC.

TITLEPIC_new.zip

When will this be finished? Is this just an ongoing adventure forever?

13 minutes ago, Dubbag said:

When will this be finished? Is this just an ongoing adventure forever?

Maybe! ;)

In all seriousness, I think it'll be up to Flamingo since they've been doing most of the polishing up lately. Plus as much as I'd like it to keep going, everything's pretty much complete. Plus we could really benefit from an /idgames release.

...20 years later- Cacowards 2041- "Longest bug fix thread ever"! lol

17 hours ago, LoneAlpha2401 said:

Sorry about the double post, I just finished the updated TITLEPIC.

TITLEPIC_new.zip

He has a right arm instead of the left?

I prefer the titlepic with chainsaw and plasma gun

@NiGHTMARE is one of the most contributing members of this project, but his name and avatar is still not there in Map32...

Reserving map 33, i started working on this map 2-3 days ago and my first small update is technically ready (im going to upload after next version of map 27 to add some rooms and other things)

i finished my edits on map27. i will reserve MAP28 to block the player the access to the IoS if its in a deathmatch game, and MAP32 to add Nightmare's avatar