Two questionable mods

[Da Werecat]

I've been digging through backups a few months ago, and I stumbled upon my old Doom 3 directory. Being in the camp of people disappointed with the game's subtler aspects, I did some tinkering back in the day. This resulted in a number of mod folders exhibiting varying degrees of uselessness. Two of them I thought were alright to vomit into the world, but I only got around to do it now.

 

materials

 

The first one was an attempt at rectifying the game being stuck in 1997 in regards to its material effects handling. Seriously, one footstep sound (set) for the entire game? Not counting different characters and liquids, Quake 3 already had two. Even though the second one was applied to, like, 2% of the game's surfaces.

Then you get interesting aesthetic solutions like trying to chainsaw the fleshy growths and getting sparks in your face.

 

It took me about a week of grinding through material declarations, figuring out SDK, and so on. In order to fix as many of such errors as possible, I also had to modify some of the maps. This was probably the main reason I wasn't too eager to share the results - in addition to the mod's size feeling like a lot at the time, including barely modified id maps felt like a serious copyright violation. But I doubt a whole lot of people would care at this point.

 

Aside from those changes, the goal was to preserve the look and feel of the game as much as possible. One major exception is my Amazing Chaingun Improvement that makes it look like you're actually holding the thing instead of it being glued to your chin. It was a horrible hack job involving me combining two meshes in a text editor (!), but it turned out surprisingly inoffensive, so I kept it.

 

 

I also attempted to fix some of the bugs, like halos remaining after some of the light sources were deleted, but didn't have much success. Judging by my own test map, I could've added more effects, but stopped at laying the groundwork.

 

aweap

 

Stands for Alpha Weapons. This is an older mod, so it doesn't contain much of the other one's material changes. On the other hand, the experience of blasting someone point-blank should be improved.

 

As the title implies, it was supposed to follow the spirit (if not the letter) of how the leaked alpha treated weapons and combat effects, but I also briefly used it as a test bed for some other crap.

 

Besides the obvious changes like replacing weapon skins and sounds, behavior was also modified. The shotgun in particular is very different: it shoots less pellets with a narrower spread, and is considerably faster. It also only has 5 shells in the magazine, and you load them one at a time. Despite this, I think it's pretty fun to use, and I finished the entire game without running into balance problems.

 

The shotgun still uses the "new" model because the old one wasn't available at the time. When it was converted much later, I didn't even like it - its normal map looks wrong in the finalized engine.

 

Imp has Reznor sounds for some reason, but not other monsters - aside from body thuds maybe.

 

Gore is less cartoony. There are more squishy sounds when bullets pierce the flesh (may still be a little muted due to some weird coding I'm not sure I dealt with at the time). Bullet hole decals aren't as ridiculously oversized (dirty hack alert #18: I just padded the image with more white), and there are new effects like plasma burn marks.

 

Demons disintegrate, but humans don't, unless you blow them up or crush them with a door. Disintegrating is important for the final boss sequence, and also because ragdolls in the game are garbage.

Apparently, my updated lost soul went into this mod. I didn't even notice until I uploaded it. It was made to resemble its own concept art more - gas burner flames, glowing eyes, creepy teeth, and some additional gore. Most of such updated art assets are fairly crude, but sorta work.