Interception II (31 New Levels for Doom II - Live on idgames)

[hawkwind]

I can confirm that there is a serious bug with map27. The player can stand on sector 906, face

east, and walk through lines 485 and/or 5086. These lines should be flagged impassible.

If this is what you were referrng to bltzkrg22, good find.

 

While at it, I noticed that the floors of sectors 497 and 498 should have had the flat CEIL5_2.

And the mid tex on sidedef 10848 needs an x alignment of 34

Edited November 11, 2020 by hawkwind

[bltzkrg22]

So, I completed the megawad. Here’s my playthrough of Interception II. Unless I run out of motivation, I’ll write my opinion on each map over the next week or so.

 

Spoiler

 

[Mr. Duk]

I've played through about half of this. It's FANTASTIC. I like it better than the first one, too (which I also liked).

 

I have noticed some odd visual quirks, like a clipping error in Map 02 in that early room with the Arch-Vile, or a Revenant being cut in half in Map 13 when you first go underwater. I'm playing with the latest GZDoom using Software Rendering.

 

I also checked out the later levels (which are usually the most slaughter map-y) and Map 28 was giving me major performance grief. I have a good card (RTX Super 2070) so it should be able to handle 1000+ monsters in Doom. Everything else appeared to play perfectly well. Eviternity also gave me some grief in the last couple of levels, both Software and Hardware, so sometimes I guess it is what it is.

[Caleb13]

I know it's probably too late to fix them, but here are some problems I noticed during my playthrough. Unfortunately, at least two of them are game-breaking (I played in GZdoom 4.5.0 on UV):

 

MAP02: there is critical ammo shortage after start. I had about 100 bullets and 20 shells from MAP01, but I completely run out during the blue key cacodemon fight. That happened because I chose a "wrong" path and went to the key before I found the chainsaw. The ammo then suddenly becomes plentiful behind the blue door, so this could be fixed by redistributing some ammo towards the start.

 

MAP04: sectors 922, 924 etc. shouldn't be damaging.

 

MAP06: door 1081 is marked with red skulls, but actually requires yellow key.

 

MAP09: door 226 is marked with red skulls, but you don't need the key to open it.

 

MAP13: the player should be able to lower the cylinder (sector 294) also from the outside, I got stuck between it and linedef 2655. Alternatively, you could increase the outer gap.

 

MAP27: the player can jump over ship railings into water, with no way out. This can very easily happen near stacked boxes (linedef 5086), but it's possible other areas are vulnerable, too. I think the big yellow door (sector 1655) should be re-openable from the inside (linedef 4568 should be DR, not D1). Oh, and the teleporter to the ship (sector 2255) is not very obvious, I found it only because I noticed it in automap after fruitlessly running aroud for 5 minutes. It would help if it had the standard "teleport pentagram" floor texture.

 

MAP28: Lost souls in sector 4062 can't get out and thus 100% kills is impossible. The secret BFG switch (linedef 37807) is not counted as secret, or at least it didn't work for me. From the gameplay standpoint, there are lots of highly-damaging floors, but too few radsuits. They're barely enough if the player already knows where he needs to go, but not for general exploration. And the jumping puzzle near end was pure BS, I just used cheats to fly over it.    

 

MAP30: the monster conveyors are poorly designed, in one instance, two cyberdemons didn't teleport in because the destination pads were blocked by other monsters. See the screenshot below, this happened in 3 from 4 times I fought the final boss. Edit: possibly the easiest fix would be to make the conveyor looping, i.e. teleport the monsters back to its start if they fail to teleport out.

 

Edited November 27, 2020 by Caleb13

[galileo31dos01]

5 hours ago, Caleb13 said:

MAP28: Lost souls in sector 4062 can't get out and thus 100% kills is impossible. The secret BFG switch (linedef 37807) is not counted as secret, or at least it didn't work for me. From the gameplay standpoint, there are lots of highly-damaging floors, but too few radsuits. They're barely enough if the player already knows where he needs to go, but not for general exploration. And the jumping puzzle near end was pure BS, I just used cheats to fly over it.    

 

Thanks for reporting the lost soul thing. For whatever unknown reasons, the tags in the sector windows disappeared at some point (and I really mean "unknown" because they used to open until the very last time I tested the map myself, but weird things tend to happen in gzdoom builder). I hope to get this fixed soon.

 

The bonus BFG after the platforming is a security check, not meant to be an official secret. It's in case anyone somehow overlooks or skips the other BFG that needs two skulls, which can be a serious problem for later.

 

The radsuit count seemed fair to me and playtesters, though upon checking the map one of them wasn't flagged on easy by mistake, so besides fixing that I might put another somewhere for HMP/HNTR. For the fighting right after the YK there's two that cover the minimum required to live, an extra on skills 1/2, there's another extra behind the SMM and one nearby a lift which becomes accessible as you raise the bridge - to be more precised, it's on sector 1452. Since there's no reason to explore on lava anymore (unless maybe if you didn't find the secret mega), I didn't see the point of adding more radsuits but again another extra for lower skills wouldn't hurt.

 

And about the platforming, as a keyboarder myself and quite bad at controlling doomguy's momentum, I designed it to be friendly enough for all skills existing for blind first times. If you look around a bit before doing anything, you can get a decent picture of what the first part is about, almost everything is telegraphed somehow (:

[VoanHead]

Sorry for the bump, but this lil thing has been bugging me. I'm not sure if it's a sourceport thing, but the midis for the maps reset to the beginning if you die and continue off on pistol start, or when you die and load a save. Using PrBoom+ UMAPINFO latest ver.

[JadingTsunami]

2 hours ago, VoanHead said:

Sorry for the bump, but this lil thing has been bugging me. I'm not sure if it's a sourceport thing, but the midis for the maps reset to the beginning if you die and continue off on pistol start, or when you die and load a save. Using PrBoom+ UMAPINFO latest ver.

 

This was a bug in the PrBoom+ UMAPINFO version. It's fixed in the latest development builds.

[VoanHead]

Gotcha, I'll have to re-download a new version of UMAPINFO. Love this wad btw, I'm a complete sucker for the gothic and nature themed maps you fellas made.

[Steinkrauz]

Found a small bug in Map07 that makes it unplayable in k8Vavoom (and any other ports with more precise bounds checking than the original). The chamber for the archvile used to resurrect the mancubus is too tight, so with a more accurate bounds check the archvile gots stuck in the wall, then mancubus stays dead and a player cannot move forward without cheats.