GZDoom: Soulless Void Eater V. 0.328 Now with more Silent Hill...

NOTICE: This project will no longer be further developed.
It is 2 playable levels (3 with the secret one).

The second and secret ones are rather large.
Version 0.331:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zJwpSYSSKAsLJLU2KfXQ8rYhSx80otcv/view?usp=drive_link

After 25 years I should really play something new anyway.
Game Pile of Shame, I´m coming for you ... :-)

I'll give it a shot , but definitely cant do even half of those recommendations. What I can tell you is that your settings are probably overly high for what you are trying to achieve with darkness.

Best setup for modless GZDoom is actually Build Lighting, Fog turned on, -> Postprocessing set to Uncharted 2 Pallete. On Doom 2 vanilla with those settings there are literally pitch black areas in Map02.

Addendum--- I gave it a try under my settings I said up top there, and yup it does the creepy vibe good!

My Issue is that its quite a bit confusing. Definitely want a Flashlight mod on this beast, unless I just completely missed it. Its confusing cuz you get jumped really early with strong monsters and way not enough ammo or more than a pistol. The setting is excellent, but I'd have to play it with not so much darkness to even stand a chance.

2nd edit--- I'm uploading a video to show my settings on it. The recording resolution is kind of low, but you'll get the gist because I go clear down into the basement. I'm doing this to help you because I'm running this on a half potato and it did excellent.

3rd edit--- Video its only 3 minutes long. 

4thedit---On the thing about strong monsters. I played it under Standard lighting and figured out what the issue was. Basically I went into the bathroom and was tripping some line def that was causing Mr Translucent to come out of his closet way way earlier than he was supposed to! If I'm gauging the flow right he was supposed to be your miniboss dude right before you activate the Red key switch. You definitely need to look into that one for sure! 

A flashlight is not supposed to be required.
There is a flashlight in the game, but you are supposed to get it in Map03, the Hospital.
The one of the very rare spots in the later game where zero brightness sectors will be encountered.
You can´t use Build Sector lighting with my maps, it just doesnt work.
Make a backup copy of your own GZDoom.ini file, so you don´t lose your preferred settings for your
regular Doom encounters and change the mandatory settings, I listed them for a reason:
Gamma to 1.0 (the default value)
Brightness to -0.05
Contrast to 1.1
Sector lighting to 'Standard'
and turn the Uncharted postprocessing completely off, it makes everything extremely dark.
These things above are a must to make my maps look correct.
I mean the opening section was almost unrecognizable to me and not due to the compressed video,
the pillars aren`t supposed to be black, and the basement in your video is not dark, it is pure solid black.
There is supposed to be a decent amount of faint ambient light, you are supposed to still see
the walls.
In my first 2 maps there aren´t supposed to be any pitch black areas.
The basement should be dark, but you are supposed to still see regardless.
There should be even more options turned on, but given your available renderingpower, performance
has to be considered in this case.
I´m surprised how well it runs though.

Now regarding the difficulty and the "Boss" encounter:
There is enough ammo for all of the enemies in the level.
Explore and search. Collect every single clip. Every shot counts.

Conserve ammo if neccessary.
There are many secrets, all of them marked in one way or another, that can make things MUCH easier.
Look out for things that look off or don´t make logical sense, they lead to secrets.
Mr. Translucent is technically a secret, not a Boss.
Also, Mr. Translucent isn´t even half as tough as he appears.
Also also: infighting is always your friend (although it is also easily doable without).

And for the pistol, yes. The pistol is the workhorse of Map01 and half of Map02.
I hate that the pistol is basically irrelevant in 98% of Doom maps.
Most of the time the Shotgun is the de facto starting weapon and then it escalates very
quickly to the Rocket Launcher.
I want every weapon to matter.

I gave Map02 a try since I seen about everything Map01 had to offer.

Of course I expect the Map01 endfight to be done with the pistol.
It is not hard, not even on Ultra Violence.
And if it is too hard: Tough luck.
The lower the difficulty setting the more ammo appears and the less enemies appear.
If you choose a skill that punches over your skill then lower it.
You even get a starting shotgun on Hey, Not Too Rough and a Soulsphere right before the ending fight.

The problem is you expecting it to be able to play like most Doom Maps:
Shotgun and often even Super Shotgun from the get go and no real opposition until the Rocketlauncher, followed often by an most of the time absolutely rediculous spike in difficulty.
It is supposed to let you survive, not dominate, at least not until the second half of the game.

"Map02: I had to kill the fog on that one cuz it was wrecking my performance"...
Why do I even mention in the opening post that a reasonably capable PC is required when there is surprise that my mod doesnt run well on underpowered hardware?

What are your specs? How low went your framerate?
 

"The YUGE but is that it is impossible to find a working door."
Can you just walk into foreign peoples houses in your city?
Apart from that the front doors have been locked in an attempt to hide and keep the monsters outside.
The door you are supposed to go in is already wide open and most other doors are either marked with a keycard reader or are approachable from two sides anyway, like the door inside the gunshop.
Further the whole map is non-linear.
You have two keycards that are completely freely accessible right from the very beginning.
Only the yellow key is locked away and opens the only door in the city that is even marked with the yellow keycard doorframes.

Me in the opening post: "It is slow paced and has a focus on exploration".
"because there aint a lot of action in that map either at least during the wandering lost phase at the beginning."
Why am I even writing anything in that opening post when I seemingly get surprised Pikachu face that what I wrote is in the game is actually in the game?
That´s why I wrote half a book and tried to put as many screenshots as the data cap allowed.
To be as precise and transparent as possible what a potential player is getting into.
And now you are telling me to practically change the whole art direction, which is impossible anyway due to the way my sky is set up, at least not without putting in considerable amount of alterations.
I have the feeling that there is no real place for anything that isn´t vanilla compatible maps.
So I guess I abandon my project.

There's no reason to abandon it at all. Its a really neat short map set, and has awesome theatrical scripting. 

I would totally post this over at ZDoom Forum since its meant for GZDoom and I haven't seen it over there yet.  I personally post all my own projects on ModDB, here and ZDoom.

There's a lot of people that'll love this, myself included because I eat up wads like this every chance I get. Literally Kudos, this really was well done.

I list myself as a game tester here on Doomworld specifically because I love testing maps and custom games. My forte is GZDoom, and specifically with the really custom non-vanilla game types. On my reviews, I don't pull my thoughts at all. On a grand project like this one there is a lot of ground to cover, and I was just pointing out the rough parts I was seeing,  especially on technical stuff, and especially game balance. My forte on Doom modding is weapons and monster modding and with that comes a lot of game balance testing. All of my mods are with specifically GZDoom so I know how to fix a lot of issues specifically on fighting and custom monster/weapon balance ratios. 

I gave you a far more in depth review than most other wads I test specifically because this is my forte. I have never done a video review until this point because this mod excited me on its craftsmanship.  <3

It was sarcastic. I´m not the most positive person around.
I don´t abandon a project I spend already a year on and I asked about the specs and framerates to have some info with which I can draw parallels in how performance scales to other systems relative to my own.
I will shortly, possibly even today, do a no secret run on Ultra Violence of my mod to demonstrate that it is effordlessly possible with plenty of ressources left, although the second map is considerably harder without any secrets.
There are at least four secrets in the City that one stumbles over by just exploring the enviroment which already grant around 40 additional shotgun shells.
These are secrets I have to actively avoid to not accidentally get them during fights.
I had a video done yesterday but it was tied to a fair bit of frustration, so I decided to sleep a night over and do it again.
And as for your 'forte' as you call it (not really fully sure what you mean with that), I let my 12 year old son test my mod four days ago, letting him in completely cold and telling him nothing and giving no hints. He normally plays mostly Mega Man and the Mega Man X series at the moment.
He played on Hurt Me Plenty.
Not only did he find secrets I would not have expected but also made it through both maps with only three quicksaves, no deaths and almost annihilated my set up opposition near the ending of the map.
He ended with over 100% Health and Armor and had 46 Shells and 200 Bullets left, way more than I had anticipated.
The only empty gun was the Uzi.
So i´m not sure if balancing is of any issue.

Friendly piece of advice.
If you respond condescendingly to what very much looks like the first time you've received feedback on a project, people are far less likely to play your work. "Get good scrub" arguments will just make people roll their eyes and move on to something else.

On 10/15/2021 at 7:07 AM, Thysamithan said:

I have the feeling that there is no real place for anything that isn't vanilla compatible maps.

This is also amusingly far from the truth.

A massive part of a modder/mapper's job is managing the expectations of the player. Yes it's good to want to stick to a creative vision but if people are consisnently 'not playing the way their supposed to' then it's time to look at whether you've conveyed that well enough.

And things like this?

On 10/14/2021 at 7:24 PM, Thysamithan said:

Sector lighting to 'Standard'

Can be forced through mapinfo. If you absolutely need certain settings to be applied it's on you to do your level best to find a way to force them through mapinfo and cvars.

2 hours ago, Thysamithan said:

I will shortly, possibly even today, do a no secret run on Ultra Violence of my mod to demonstrate that it is effordlessly possible with plenty of ressources left, although the second map is considerably harder without any secrets.
There are at least four secrets in the City that one stumbles over by just exploring the enviroment which already grant around 40 additional shotgun shells.
These are secrets I have to actively avoid to not accidentally get them during fights.

This is all super easy for you to say since you're the creator of the set. Of course you're going to know exactly how to beat your fights and where to find secrets. The whole point is that it's more or less practical for other people to find those secrets and beat the fights, which you're only going to know through getting feedback. Post your thread and ask for a lock if you don't want that. 

On 10/14/2021 at 2:07 PM, Thysamithan said:

"The YUGE but is that it is impossible to find a working door."
Can you just walk into foreign peoples houses in your city?
Apart from that the front doors have been locked in an attempt to hide and keep the monsters outside.
The door you are supposed to go in is already wide open and most other doors are either marked with a keycard reader or are approachable from two sides anyway, like the door inside the gunshop.

Funny thing, that, this is a video game you're building a level for. Rules of reality don't apply. 

I'll give this a shot later, but when you adopt such a defensive attitude when handling legitimate feedback, it's not encouraging. In fact, it dissuades any further feedback as well as community engagement. People usually give constructive criticism to help you out, it's not an attack.

As a good example, you asked kalensar to provide his PC specs only after automatically assuming that his problem was his "underpowered hardware". There are many different things that can cause slowdown, it's not always directly related to "ur PC sux". Even if that is the cause, that kind of data can be useful in terms of optimizing your mod and increasing compatibility.

As for the fact that your 12 year old plays Mega Man and Mega Man X, nobody cares because it's irrelevant. The people on Doomworld aren't your kid, they're providing their own personal feedback. Everybody has different levels of capability and you saying "yeah well my 12 year old can beat it" doesn't help anybody.

Other people have given you plenty of usable tips and advice on the way you handle feedback, so I'll keep that to a minimum. I will say that you could probably cut down 75% of your OP and still convey all the necessary information. Most people glaze over the text and will miss a large portion of it anyway, so you should focus on the bare essentials. Dictating the visual settings and play style in such a fashion can also easily turn off people, especially since you haven't established yourself as a mapper worth going the extra mile for. As Bridge adviced, you should set up as many settings via MAPINFO to prevent people from accidentally choosing a wrong setting. For example, I didn't read your post and went in blind, with some settings probably not quite as you'd have wanted, but I still had a good time with it. I can say that to a high degree the map speaks for itself, so trimming the excess from your OP is a good idea. Less is more here, and suggestions go over much better than demands. Also, the way you write gives off very pompous and condescending vibes as mentioned by others, so learning to be more humble and positive will go a long way. Being an ass to people who go about their way to play your thing is a surefire way to get even less attention.

Regarding the thing itself, I played through the first map, and quite liked it. The horror atmosphere is conveyed quite well and you support that with clever use of ambient sounds, scripted sequences and environmental storytelling. I think setting the mood and keeping up the tension is your strong point, and I was genuinely tense while playing some of the parts. The feeling of coming back to open air after grabbing the red key felt really good.

Gameplay-wise the pacing was as it was advertised, and certainly is on the slow-burn side of things. Playing on UV, I found the difficulty to be well balanced. I never ran out of ammo, and was mostly alright with health. You use mid tiers sparingly, which makes the encounters where they show up more meaningful. I wasn't constantly blasted from all directions, and you weren't afraid to take breaks in action to keep up the tension. Going from exploring eerie hallways and never quite knowing what's behind the corner, to blasting some low tier fodder with the pistol kept things feeling fresh. The final fight was quite meaty, but infighting did most of the work and just prioritizing targets was enough to get by.

You've got something good going here, so don't squander it by having a bad attitude. 

I have no interest in arguing.
I will answer only to anything directly related to my project but I will not answer to anything else.

1 hour ago, Aurelius said:

Regarding the thing itself, I played through the first map, and quite liked it.

Very relieved that you liked it.

Probably I will indeed shorten the opening post...

2 hours ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

And things like this?

Can be forced through mapinfo. If you absolutely need certain settings to be applied it's on you to do your level best to find a way to force them through mapinfo and cvars.

Thank you for the information.
I will look into the zdoom wiki to get the details.

How do I delete a post?

 

Pretty awesome work i got legit scared for some reason and ended it there lol

For some reason, I keep getting micro stutters every four or five seconds. Do you happen to know anything about this? It's likely something on my end, but I haven't figured it out yet. Seems CPU-related. I have a GTX 1060, i7 3770. I haven't had this problem before. I would like to keep playing, but the stutters kind of kill the overall atmosphere, especially in a WAD with a horror theme.

Overall, it looks pretty nice visually. There are some textures that I think could be swapped out in some places though. A few areas look somewhat rough in terms of textures and detail/architecture. I'll give you some examples with screenshots when I get this working.

So I've tried the first level...

you nailed the resident evil 4 like vibe and that is very cool and the way you use darkness and light is fantastic (but could be better with dynamic lights)!!

The parking lot exit is especially impressive!

The way it transforms back and fourth is amazing!

However, had the cars been able to explode and therefore serve as a kind of barrels then it would have been even better.

but your system requirements are waaaay off....

this is essentially vanilla doom with a few GZDoom tricks and a few voxels... you mostly use sector lighting vs dynamic lights... the chairs are sprites, there are no actual models

I would add more voxels for stuff like chairs, boxes etc,

then I would make heavy use of 3D floors, dynamic lights and finally then I would replace ALL sprites with 3D models... like weapons, monsters, powerups etc

currently

it flies on this old gaming laptop from 2016, just like a bog standard doom 2 vanilla game would do

with the system requirements you mention, then you will have PLENTY of performance available to improve the visuals even more

I can't offer usefull insights regarding the use of textures since I am impressively bad at selecting textures when I make maps

Tearing and microstutter always happens in GZDoom and other ports... nomatter what level I play... so I have come to accept it as part of the experience when using modern source ports.

2 hours ago, CBM said:

I would add more voxels for stuff like chairs, boxes etc,

then I would make heavy use of 3D floors, dynamic lights and finally then I would replace ALL sprites with 3D models... like weapons, monsters, powerups etc

Voxels get turned into regular models anyways so just use models.

3 minutes ago, Major Arlene said:

Voxels get turned into regular models anyways so just use models.

Cool, thats good to know. Thanks.

Voxels tend to be less accurate than models.

I've been experimenting with voxels to create chairs etc.

I believe OBJ and MD3 are the only model formats that should be used (MD2 animation is very wobbly but that is on ID, not GZDoom)

Great WAD...How do we get going from level 3?

Looks awesome. Downloading as soon as I get home: love horror vibe stuff.

Hopefully my poor potato PC can handle it.

Does it run on zandronum by any chance? Runs smoother on my pc than gzdoom usually.

1 hour ago, Lobo said:

Looks awesome. Downloading as soon as I get home: love horror vibe stuff.

Hopefully my poor potato PC can handle it.

Does it run on zandronum by any chance? Runs smoother on my pc than gzdoom usually.

Nope. It has no chance of running on Zandronum due to the coding involved. It does run on LZDoom though, as I have tested it on there. It was pretty close with no many noticeable errors.

Oh man... so many replies.
 

7 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

For some reason, I keep getting micro stutters every four or five seconds. Do you happen to know anything about this?

No, no clue. The only things I noted were that Vulkan runs faster and perfectly smooth while OpenGL is a bit slower with a slightly fluctuating framerate.
Another thing I noticed was microstutter when 'Precache GL Textures' (I think) was turned off, but it stuttered only every time a voxel object appeared for the very first time.
For example stutter when the Ambulance is getting into the rendered scene for the first time, but after that the ambulance doesn´t cause any stutter anymore.
But since I turned on 'Precache GL' everything performs at 144 Frames at all times.
So I don´t have a solid idea what the cause can be.
 

5 hours ago, CBM said:

you nailed the resident evil 4 like vibe

Funny, I never played Resident Evil 4.
Probably I will give the first map a few makeovers. There are still parts and minor details that I´m not fully satisfied with, mainly they clash with the more realistically set second map. But I would only add dynamic lights because removing any sectors used for the sector lighting would be work intensive pain.

5 hours ago, CBM said:

The parking lot exit is especially impressive!

The way it transforms back and fourth is amazing!

It was a lot of work and experimentation. It was even more a downer when I later read that I apparently can just change walltextures with ACS at runtime, so I could have had it achieved with much less work.
Level transformations will be an ongoing thing through the maps and I will try to ramp up the complexity and unpredictability.

5 hours ago, CBM said:

but your system requirements are waaaay off....

 

this is essentially vanilla doom with a few GZDoom tricks and a few voxels... you mostly use sector lighting vs dynamic lights... the chairs are sprites, there are no actual models

I can only guess. It is very unpractical when one only has a rather strong PC and no Average or weaker machines for testing.
Where I am most people around me aren´t big into gaming... or rather at all and they would be picky about me trying out "this gaming stuff".
What would your rough estimation be for a fluid 60 Frames setup. But keep in mind, later levels will only grow in complexity.
But generally I want to finish the project in itself first before improving on the visual side.
It depends on how much time the project will take in total and how much problems possible improvements will bring along.
But at least then I would have a complete mapset, so if polishing would go wrong it wouldn´t waste time and take away from the main thing.
 

5 hours ago, Naarok0fkor said:

Great WAD...How do we get going from level 3?

Level 3 is just a cluster of boxy rooms at the moment and very early in development.
I am still shifting around rough layouts. I want to let the hospital make sense structurally and conceptually.
Also I have to still figure out the scares, how to achieve the desired atmosphere and how to get things to work in the constraints of the engine, since I don´t use 3D Models.

2 hours ago, Lobo said:

Looks awesome. Downloading as soon as I get home: love horror vibe stuff.

Hopefully my poor potato PC can handle it.

Does it run on zandronum by any chance? Runs smoother on my pc than gzdoom usually.

I installed Zandronum and tried it, but it gives out an error message 'unknown player property: 'Player.viewbob' '.
So I assume that it will not work.

2 hours ago, kalensar said:

 

Nope. It has no chance of running on Zandronum due to the coding involved. It does run on LZDoom though, as I have tested it on there. It was pretty close with no many noticeable errors.

Now you have made me curious. I will try LZDoom as well and see what it looks like.

I gave LZDoom a try. The first map ran great and was almost indistinguishable except for the hard shadows of dynamic lights, which I liked better.
But the second map had problems. The numbers on the houses were not rendered instead showing the white and blue missing texture checkerboard and the performance was very low, at times falling to 42 Frames per second, where GZDoom ran with mostly consistent 144 Frames.
Purely visually LZDoom is spot on and almost Identical, with just being a barely noticable bit brighter than GZ on the same settings.
Very interesting port.

UPDATE: I had to update 0.328 due to an incorrect Player-Start in Map31.
The Player startpoint is now fixed.
So please redownload to have the fixed version.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

First major update with version 0.328.
One new completed Map (Map31) and countless tweaking and fixing.
All relevant infos are in the opening post.

Downloaded the mod but I'm getting this script error:

Script error, "Soulless Void Eater 0.328.pk3:demonic props.wad:DECORATE" line 234:
"ONLYVISIBLEINMIRRORS" is an unknown flag

A way to fix it?

400 mb? Jesus. 😳

On 9/27/2022 at 4:18 PM, _Cybermind_ said:

Downloaded the mod but I'm getting this script error:

Script error, "Soulless Void Eater 0.328.pk3:demonic props.wad:DECORATE" line 234:
"ONLYVISIBLEINMIRRORS" is an unknown flag

A way to fix it?

You need the latest GZDoom for it.
It is in relation to an effect I use. GZDoom 4.8.1 and 4.8.2 will both work.
And above of course when they come out...

On 9/28/2022 at 12:56 AM, NaliSeed said:

400 mb? Jesus. 😳

It is more or less content complete, but a lot is unused as of now.
I could make it smaller, but I would have to edit a ton od scripts and take care of resulting
conflicts and errors and rewrite it again every time I need to add back some of the assets
when their planned appearences come up.
Way too much additional work for the already too limited time I have.

This project will no longer be further developed.
There are just too many things with GZDoom especially and the Doom Engine in general that don´t
fit my needs and bother me beyond frustration.
The problems lie in the beast itself, it is the wrong tool to use for my specific ideas and concepts
around what I want to make, so there isn´t much that could be changed to ease the problems that
I have with the engine.
Nonetheless I learned a lot and brought a nice map or two to Doomguy, so it was worth it.
I will learn for and switch to real 3D, which will make things easier and harder at the same time,
but at least I won´t have to think around corners anymore, when doing something that is trivial
with polygons and I will have total control over all aspects of future projects.