Need testers

I'm looking for some people to test out my new wad. It's very big, so I'm sure there's some texture bugs I missed. UV and HMP are both implemented, although it's meant to be played on UV. Requires the latest version of ZDoom.

I hope to release this to newstuff in about a week, but I'll listen to any suggestions anyone has until then. I spent a lot of time trying to perfect the gameplay, but I suppose not everyone has the same idea of what good gameplay is.

Download: http://rapidshare.de/files/8521558/vile_pwrout.zip.html

And some screens:

I gave up after running around trying to figure out wtf I was supposed to do, getting swarmed by constantly spawning monsters after the 2nd generator and triggering some 'unknown script 12' line.

Not nearly enough ammo, definitely not my type of gameplay. Nice map though.

Maybe I'll try it again tomorrow.

Sorry that you didn't like it. The wad is a tad experimental, so that might alienate people looking for just plain classic doom. But I think there's plenty of ammo and that fight is not endless.

Nice map ideas, crap gameplay. See there's this helpful thing in Doom called ammo. It becomes rather important when you've got 3 hell knights, 2 imps, a shotgun sarge and two or three pinkies within a very small area, with the only two exits blocked by said horde and you only have 11 shells. NOT FUN.

Either ditch some of the monsters in the spot, give the player more shells, or all the time you've spent on the level will be wasted, cause any sane player will quit on the spot and delete it.

Challenge the player by creating interesting fights. Those are fun. Games are meant to be fun. Creating challenge by depriving them of ammo is fucking annoying. I know some players like it, but for me having to constantly "rehearse" fights is a supreme pain in the ass and a waste of time when there's so many other fun WADs to play.

In the room you get teleported into there's an invisible wall that hinder you from getting some ammo that you will need later. It's letting you throuh when you turned the power on later, and I assume this is to force the player to run past the monsters when they spawned to get the ammo. Give the wall something to be there for. As it is now, people will think it's a bug. Or atleast sloppy work.

There were plenty of ammo, unlike what Belial and Joel said. And the gameplay was quite nice, nothing spectacular that far into the map though. But it might build up towards it.

The texturing was quite sloppy. Misalignments, missplaced textures.

The generators switches could use an actual switch texture. Or something to distinguish it.
Also, use scripts or something to turn off the jumping, since people generally fail at reading the txt file.

EDIT: Props to you for using textures in an unconventional way. Wish you had made the geometry to match the textures though.

Oh well, clearly my idea of a fun map is completely different from everybody elses. I had a feeling the initial hell knight battle would turn people off, but I like it, so it's staying.

If the difficulty is the only issue (its hard, I know, the hell knight fight is nothing), I'll add more health and ammo, and make the current UV some secret extra-hard mode that I have to figure out some way of activating. I think it's more fun the way it is though. I actually let up on the detailing a lot in order to work on gameplay, but people liked it better when I just focused 90% on detail, so I'll go back to doing that.

IMO I think it should stay as it is. Ammo is ample. If people find it too hard/frustrating/whatever, they can play a lower skill level.

Anyway, if Belial doesn't like something. Don't take that too hard, he doesn't like anything.

Wow, feels like I'm back in high school. Grow up, learn to read, whatever.

I beat the map and I have to agree with Kristus. Once you get to the ammo secret and past the cybers ammo is not a problem. But before that there are a couple of fights that are very annoying, like the barons after the yellow key generator, the demons in the corridor near the blue key, evading the cybers to go for the bfg, and the arachs at the bfg itself. The cybers can be killed without risky playing so that's not a problem. IMO moving the SSG to the yellow key generator room could help the gameplay a bit. Also, while evading 3 cybers I didn't really enjoy having to hit the switch to open the bars. IMO it would be better to have them open before you get there and close them as soon as you get past them.

Not nearly enough ammo, definitely not my type of gameplay. Nice map though.

Maybe I'll try it again tomorrow.

Based on what you said, I would not have made a different interpretation Belial.

11 shells to take on that many bad guys is not ample for "non insane" players. I tried to cause in-fighting, but no matter which way I ran to cause it between two groups I just ran into more bad guys. Did I miss an ammo stash leading up to that point?

Kristus is correct about the invisible wall. You should never block the player without cause.

However you think the gameplay should be Vile in terms of difficulty/resources, you cannot trust your perception of it. You're too close to it. You designed the thing. You know where every bad guy is, where every last bullet is. It's only natural you will find it easy.

Even regular testers who've played the level several times will lose their objectivity to a point as well.

JoelMurdoch said:

Based on what you said, I would not have made a different interpretation Belial.

I was referring to

Don't take that too hard, he doesn't like anything

which is utter bullshit.

if you weren't taking yourself so incredibly serious 100% of the time you probably wouldn't be such a total tard, or stiff.

I was reffering to that whenever something isn't exactly as you are used to, you diss it for being incorrect. Comments like "It's too cramped, it's not good game play if it's cramped." you state these things as facts. Which IMO just means you're an inflexible bore. You put off your opinion as a state of fact. Which it of course isn't. Agreeably this can be debated, as it is a fact that it's your opinion, but it's not a fact that it's poor because you say so. But, just like I suggested that Vile shouldn't take your comments too seriously since I don't. I don't think you should take mine too seriously either. Since it's really only about my perception of you from several countries away over the internet. Wich makes it all pretty nonsensical.

Joel: But you only need to take out two or three imps and shotgunners to get to the shotgun shells pack in the next room. So you do have ample ammount of ammo. Only bother I have with this, is that that is the ONLY way to solve it successfully. It caters to resourcefull game play planning from the player. But it's still linear.

I'll have to wait for more responses, but when I made certain fights I knew I was probably going to recieve death threats in the mail. Hey, I like being evil like that. Besides, there's always HMP.

I'll make these changes though:

The blocking line will be removed. I'll teleport the ammo in instead. Yes, that was lazy of me, I admit. But even after the tons and tons of shortcuts i took, this map still took several months to make.

In the post yellow key fight, i'll stop the teleporting after the second revenant pair (right now it ends when the barons die, or you exit that area).

The super shotgun stays where it is (it would ruin the next fight), and I'm not giving any extra ammo for the hell knight battle.

Just make a barriar or something.

Hmm, yeah, better idea. Reason 2 for putting that there was to prevent the player from wandering too far when the lights were off(if the candles weren't a hint enough). Not that they could get anywhere, but I wanted that part to be as linear as possible so people wouldn't get lost.

Personally. The Lighs were enough, and the added nonlinearity would have added suspence.

I played the wad,
I 'd say I was surprised
by the quantity of original detaillings;
I've found the ideas of computers for doors, elevators, etc very cool too.
I think now you should have maybe more sound for machinery stuff.

Now you have a cool wad for sure, but it could be a really stunning wad putting more storyline and non-linearity on it.

Thanks for mapping.

More sounds would be a good idea, make it sound more alive. The map truely is impressive Vile, it really is. I think it would be a shame to have such a great map that you've obviously put a great deal of time and thought into because what are, really, quite minor gameplay issues. Is an extra box of shells to ensure all players are covered for really that big a deal? I wouldn't think so myself. You have to give players room to make mistakes, miss a couple of shots, go the wrong way and encounter a couple of bad guys before you expected them to, play things different to you, that kind of thing.

Difficulty was not the issue I was bringing up, but whether the map was fun or not. I could've survived the fight after a couple of reloads, but personally I think all battles should be winnable without the player having to memorise the layout after restoring their save game a couple of times.

I look forward to seeing the revised version.

I wanted more sounds too. Anyone know of any more free sound effects archives? I found one, but it didn't have too many usable sounds.

cactus said:

I played the wad,
I 'd say I was surprised
by the quantity of original detaillings;
I've found the ideas of computers for doors, elevators, etc very cool too.
I think now you should have maybe more sound for machinery stuff.

Now you have a cool wad for sure, but it could be a really stunning wad putting more storyline and non-linearity on it.

Thanks for mapping.

I think it has a good degree of non-linearity once you turn on enough generators. As for storyline, you'll have to wait for Sanity Bleeds to come out for that.

Vile1011 said:

I wanted more sounds too. Anyone know of any more free sound effects archives? I found one, but it didn't have too many usable sounds.

Make a list and I'll see what I can come up with.

JoelMurdoch said:

Make a list and I'll see what I can come up with.

A power-up sound for starting up the generators, and maybe a sound for the two pumps that lead to the plasma gun. Various machinery noises wouldn't hurt either. Thanks.

JoelMurdoch said:

Is an extra box of shells to ensure all players are covered for really that big a deal? I wouldn't think so myself.

There is an auto-save directly before the hell knight battle you know, so its not that big a deal to get killed and try again. What I will do is make the shells more visible, instead of being at the ends of the T-hallway, they'll be along the middle, so you'll pick them up automatically as you're running away from the knights.

Usual suspect sound places came up short, I'm afraid. Lots of bleeps and blops, nothing really gritty enough :(

JoelMurdoch said:

Usual suspect sound places came up short, I'm afraid. Lots of bleeps and blops, nothing really gritty enough :(

Oh well, I'm in no hurry to release this anyway. The whole thing turned out to be a huge disaster, so I may just put the fixed version for download here and skip newstuff altogether.

What disaster? Some people didn't agree on your decisions with the wad. What did you expect? And if you ask for testers, you have to expect that they will tell you what they don't like about it.

Don't be so fucking emo.