What kinds of things need improvement in Doom?

[Nine Inch Heels]

1 hour ago, 42PercentHealth said:

Barons don't need to exist, IMO. (I know, I know... here comes the "doors with health" cavalry.)

You know... Personal taste aside... If all you see in a baron is a door with health, by all means, don't use them in your maps.

 

BUT: Barons are much more than just HP sponges, if you build your fights such that they can actually put some pressure on you. Claustrophobic areas with Barons is :pogchamp:, and barons can very well be a nice piece in a combat puzzle. If managed properly, they can also be useful as "moving walls" that you may want between you and some hefty damage dealers. That aside, they make for nice cybie killers, so if you ever have a surplus of cybies in a fight after everything else is dead, they might be well worth adding to the encounter at some point to up the pace a little bit when there's a lack of firepower involved.

 

There's a lot to be said about Baron use that I personally think isn't particularly interesting, especially since I feel it's been done in a lot of maps in ways that didn't work for me personally, but barons are cool. I'm just saying.

[42PercentHealth]

^ You make some good points. I'll concede.

[SGS Man]

Damage RNG. Either it should not exist at all or should be more controlled.

 

RNG in games is a double-edged sword. It can increase the skill ceiling if the random effects can be reacted or responded to, but it can also curb the skill ceiling if the effects are beyond player control.

 

Doom uses RNG in enemy movement, enemy firing, and bullet spread. All of these three components increase the skill ceiling and depth of the game, since enemy movement and firing creates a dynamic environment that tests the player, while bullet spread properties demand that the player have a good understanding of ammunition management and weapon use cases. These effectively make Doom gameplay what it is, and mappers have used these to harrowing effect.

 

However, I see no reason why Doom couldn't use a constant high damage or a random high damage value instead of such insane variation in damage values.

 

For instance, a Revenant could launch a missile into your face for 60 damage or 50-80 damage instead of 10-80 damage. Limiting enemy damage values wouldn't even affect Doom gameplay all that much since one of the core tenets of Doom gameplay is avoiding damage to the best of one's ability, and all primary sources of damage arise from enemy movement and firing. Heck, even a constant low damage or a random low damage value would be better than the current implementation since it would allow two playstyles - one revolving around tanking hits in exchange for dealing damage, and the other being "the air is lava". Having lower damage in general would allow for massive maps that stretch the player to the point of exhaustion and beyond (potentially even larger than the ones today). However, I'd still say having high constant/random damage would be better, since we could have lethal short maps and grand struggles simultaneously. There could be the occasional tanking of hits too, thereby increasing the toolkit of the player.

 

Regarding random player damage, I'd suggest that it be moved to the higher end since lowering player damage values increases the grindiness of maps, which would go against the flow and pacing of Doom in general. Knowing that the player can kill a Hell Knight with 3 point-blank Super Shotgun blasts or an opponent in deathmatch with 2 point-blank Shotgun blasts would allow for more nuanced game-plans and approaches to maps in general. This could also be exploited by mappers by creating stricter ammo-starvation maps. The fact that a skilled player could still lose horribly due to a series of bad dice-rolls isn't something I'm rather pleased about.

 

This would affect SP (and maybe MP) in a rather positive light. When a similar topic was raised in the "Things about Doom that annoy you" thread, rdwpa used the harder maps of 'Dimensions' by Killer5 as examples where Doom's monster behavior RNG becomes unmanageable after a point, effectively stonewalling both mapper and player potential. Regarding MP deathmatch, I've noticed that more modern mapsets use weapons with a lot more consistency in damage values, although I would like to be corrected in this point if I am mistaken. Regardless, I'd definitely say that minimizing the effect of damage RNG in Doom is beneficial.

Edited May 22, 2018 by SGS Man : Better phrasing of rdwpa's points

[MattGuy1990]

Enemies having different death animations according to how much damages the weapon makes (like the revenant being being splitted in half by a super shotgun shot, or reduced to bones by a rocket), instead of it being random like in current mods. Also, enemies showing different kind of body damages to showcase how close they are to death.

[Aquila Chrysaetos]

That one can be done in a way. Assigning a specific damage type to each weapon and creating a death state to match that damage type will cause something like that. The latter, showing damage, could also be done, but that would be hell to write in DECORATE.

[Redwind]

The map order in Thy Flesh Consumed should really be changed. Other than that, for me Doom's fine as it is.

[baja blast rd.]

7 hours ago, SGS Man said:

In the "Things about Doom that annoy you" thread, rdwpa used 'Dimensions' by Killer5 as an example where all the different aspects of Doom RNG become unmanageable after a point

 

Fairly loose attribution that doesn't accurately reflect my thoughts. I referred to the harder maps of Dimensions ('the most lethal encounters' was implied, but not directly stated), and to just monster behavior RNG. It was also in the context of a separate larger discussion about RNG in Doom started by another poster, since your phrasing can be interpreted as me deciding to randomly complain about that mapset. 

 

Edited May 22, 2018 by rdwpa

[Pegleg]

14 hours ago, Saint_Guy said:

Berserk would always be, that would be your normal melee damage.

You would also start with the chainsaw.
The chainsaws stats should be changed to the stats in doom64 so its a weapon that might actually be a good idea to use.

Then you would want to add gas for the chainsaw as "ammo" so that you'd have a reason to switch back and forth between chainsaw and fist, especially combined with fraggle's "monsters can hear a running chainsaw" idea.

[Reisal]

Rearrange some maps in episode 4 so the first 2 maps aren't total nightmare starters.

[Koko Ricky]

2 hours ago, Glaice said:

Rearrange some maps in episode 4 so the first 2 maps aren't total nightmare starters.

That's really the only thing wrong with E4. It gets a lot of flack as being this forgettable slog, and I think the low ammo count of those maps has a lot to do with it, as opposed to the entire episode being poorly designed.

[SaladBadger]

bugfixes, i guess. as usual there's not a lot that mechanically annoys me. i guess if i wanted to be picky I could point at things like shells being generally better per unit than bullets, or how the bfg stomps on the plasma rifle using the same ammo, but i mean, we've all gotten along with these things fairly fine.

 

hell i mean we even get along fine with all the bugs, but i find them more annoying than most of the weirder bits of the gameplay oddities. and then if you start squashing some bugs speedrunning becomes a bit less interesting, so any would-be time travelers, be sure to figure out how much of an impact they'd have before sneaking your cool bugfix into the game's code, heh.

[Swalzi]

Add a temporary 15% damage taken reduction property to the Blur Sphere. Green armor becomes 48% damage reduction, blue armor becomes 65% damage reduction when Blur Sphere is picked up for its duration. Single Player / COOP only. It's cool that DECORATE is around to fulfill this.

[Chezza]

17 hours ago, MattGuy1990 said:

Enemies having different death animations according to how much damages the weapon makes (like the revenant being being splitted in half by a super shotgun shot, or reduced to bones by a rocket), instead of it being random like in current mods. Also, enemies showing different kind of body damages to showcase how close they are to death.

You're probably not a fan of BD but that does have deaths based on damage amount, types for specific weapons and even per limb.

[The_SloVinator]

No infinite height, Cacos & souls don't get pushed all the way back when shot, better hit detection, Nightmare difficulty without respawning.

[Grimosaur]

Make lost souls have less health. That is all.

[MarketAnarchy]

On 5/23/2018 at 3:02 AM, The_SloVinator said:

No infinite height, Cacos & souls don't get pushed all the way back when shot, better hit detection, Nightmare difficulty without respawning.

 

Isn't there a -fast modifier that is essentially nightmare w/o respawning?

[kb1]

At first, I thought the question was about what needs improvement about today's ports. Because just about everything mentioned in this thread is not only possible nowadays, but can be found online. And, people are working on those that remain. It's a good time for Doom.

 

On 5/21/2018 at 8:56 PM, Saint_Guy said:

The single shotty would be deleted from the game, it sucks. Super shotty should be the only shotgun.

Blasphemy! The single shotgun is faster, uses half the ammo, and is better for long-range. Moreso than any other weapon combo, I'd vote that the single barrel and double barrel are both essential.

 

On 5/21/2018 at 11:17 PM, fraggle said:

Monsters should be able to hear a running chainsaw and should not be able to hear a fist swung in midair.

Agreed. I'd go so far as to think that maybe they got these two backwards by mistake.

 

On 5/22/2018 at 2:46 AM, SGS Man said:

Damage RNG. Either it should not exist at all or should be more controlled.

More-controlled, maybe. RNGs in games play a lot of roles, especially a very important, often-overlooked role:

RNGs fill in the gaps in the simulation. RNGs can be used in place of some otherwise complicated mechanisms. For example, monster movement AI: You can build extremely complex behavior logic, smart path-finders, etc. Or, you can throw a random number generator in there, and simulate the complex behavior, to some degree.

 

For damage, the RNG simulates bullets that pass through, without hitting major organs, or even bullets that nick an arm. Again, you could build multiple hit boxes into the monsters, or just throw an RNG in there, and get nearly the same effect much more efficiently.

 

Without the various RNG usage in Doom, monster movement would be predictable, the same number of shots would always kill a monster, etc. It might get quite boring. (Actually, for Doom specifically, it might be kinda fun, but the patterns would be very obvious.)

 

There are so many variables in the real world, affecting interactions on a subatomic level, a cosmic level, and everything inbetween. Trying to simulate all of those variables in a game has diminishing returns...and probably would not be noticed. And, it would be very prohibitive, performance-wise. The RNG simulates those interactions, costs almost nothing performance-wise, and eliminates obvious patterns.

 

Not too long after Pac-man was released, people learned that, if they followed exact patterns and hugged the turns, they could predict the monster's movements exactly, and win the game each time they played.

 

So, for Ms. Pac-Man, the developers slightly modified the monster logic, by reading a count register in the CPU, and used its value to adjust monster behavior. This eliminated the patterns, allowing the score to again reflect the skill level of the players.

[MarketAnarchy]

2 minutes ago, kb1 said:

So, for Ms. Pac-Man, the developers slightly modified the monster logic, by reading a count register in the CPU, and used its value to adjust monster behavior. This eliminated the patterns, allowing the score to again reflect the skill level of the players.

Didn't know that about Ms. Pac-Man, that's actually pretty damn cool.

[whirledtsar]

53 minutes ago, kb1 said:

Agreed. I'd go so far as to think that maybe they got these two backwards by mistake.

I imagine it's because they just didn't have the time, budget, and/or motivation to code in exceptions and new logic to the way monsters are alerted (weapon discharge, physical contact, and line of sight) for the chainsaw and fists.

[kb1]

1 hour ago, MarketAnarchy said:

Didn't know that about Ms. Pac-Man, that's actually pretty damn cool.

Yeah, Ms. Pac-Man used a Z-80 CPU, which had a special register used to assist in the refresh of the cheap DRAM so often used then. The R register increments each CPU cycle, mod 128. Normally the register contents can be asserted on the address bus to initiate DRAM refresh inbetween cycles. But when used for AI, that was enough to introduce some pseudo-randomness into the decision of which way to turn at intersections.

 

Fun fact: The R register is also writable, so if you have a system that uses R to refresh its DRAM, and you continuously write to the R register in a loop, you can cause the machine's DRAM to fail! This can be a (somewhat) clever way to determine if you're running in an emulator, not unlike drowning possible witches to prove they are not, in fact witches. So, yeah, if you write to R a bunch of times, then test memory (assuming the program's memory is still intact), you can determine if you're in an emulator.

 

38 minutes ago, whirledtsar said:

I imagine it's because they just didn't have the time, budget, and/or motivation to code in exceptions and new logic to the way monsters are alerted (weapon discharge, physical contact, and line of sight) for the chainsaw and fists.

Yeah. Or, maybe they forgot. My guess is, after they got Doom halfway working, they spent all of their time playing, and forgot to look for bugs :) I can forgive them for this - been there.

[GarrettChan]

On 5/21/2018 at 11:46 PM, SGS Man said:

For instance, a Revenant could launch a missile into your face for 60 damage or 50-80 damage instead of 10-80 damage.

Actually I don't know why 50~80 would be better than 10~80. Would you kindly explain you thought behind this to me? I'm very curious, or maybe you just pull out an example, not really the implementation.

[Spie812]

-Make the pistol not useless, like in Valiant.

-Infinite height gets in the way far more often than it should.

-Crispy Doom's randomly mirrored corpses and colored blood.

[The_SloVinator]

6 hours ago, MarketAnarchy said:

 

Isn't there a -fast modifier that is essentially nightmare w/o respawning?

The things I mentioned, could be avoided by using the advanced source port but the topic is about what improvements would you implement in the OG DooM.

[Cacodemon345]

1 minute ago, The_SloVinator said:

OG DooM.

...or OG DooM 2.

[zodiac]

On 5/21/2018 at 7:34 PM, Nine Inch Heels said:

Doom needs more enemies that have a low HP to high damage ratio, or simply put: Glassy stuff, akin to revenants or chaingunners, or magnolia's "green cyberdemons". It could also use smaller melee monsters that are potent at swarming players quickly, dealing considerable damage if left unchecked, and more mobile due to their smaller size. I would also like a low HP Lost soul variant that causes small explosions when killed, and only when killed (kinda like flying barrels, in a way).

 

Agree with all of this, if you want to chase the player your choices are revs or demons, which isn't ideal. If I had to pick just a handful, I'd add:

• A fast, higher-damage but still weak imp-type enemy. Having something that the normal shotgun and chaingun work well on is great for weapon progression on adventure-style maps.
• An equivalent of the Green Cyberdemon, but with brighter projectiles (rockets can blend in, especially if there's now several of this type of monster
• A demon bug for melee. Flying lets it get over terrain, and a sting attack animation would just look cool. I'd give it increased reach vs. standard melee, so you need to make a quick decision to either back away immediately or try to kill it before it finishes.
• The weak, suicide explosion lost souls as what pain elementals spit out, so it's a tactical choice to leave the PE

Weapons: use the Valiant Pistol/Chaingun with 600 ammo, but also make the pistol the one that's accurate for sniping so it's not useless (flavor as a rifle if you like). Give the standard zombies the faster pistol too, that makes them just enough of a threat to use.

 

Items: I'm going to be unoriginal and say I'd take the ZDoom-optional invisibility where monster don't see you unless you make more noise, and a shorter quad damage or a 30 sec double damage. (a 30 second quad on a BFG is pure overkill).

 

RNG: I'd like to see projectiles deal reduced damage if they nick you instead of hitting head on. A 'glancing hit' might deal half damage, like how a near-miss with a rocket deals about half with its tracers. To calculate glancing you could check where the hit would be if projectile and player moved one more tick: closer to the player centerpoint is more damage.

[ImpieEyez95]

Something that really bugs me regarding the doom beastiary (specifically Pinkies/Demons) are that their eyes glow a bright yellow, and I always felt that aesthetically, their blood/ whatever comes out of them? plasma? should also be yellow. 

[stochastic]

Each monster having its own unique set of pain noises. As it is, most monsters share the same pain noise, and I believe each monster only has one noise they make. More variety of noises would be cool, especially if they were based off the damage inflicted by Doomguy's weapons (ex. a severe scream of pain when shot with a rocket launcher, but a mild irritated growl when shot with the pistol, and everything in between). 

[jointritual]

I’d like to see more frames of animation for the monsters etc but unfortunately it would probably be a nightmare to implement.

[Aquila Chrysaetos]

2 hours ago, jointritual said:

I’d like to see more frames of animation for the monsters etc but unfortunately it would probably be a nightmare to implement.

Smooth Doom does that in combination with everything else that's animated, save the textures, though there's an add-on for those, too.

[galileo31dos01]

- Less hit points for the lost soul, the PSX version has the right amount. 

- Spiderdemons must have a size (and pain chance) reduction, that will give them more opportunities for infight simulators, among other stuff, because cyberdemon to clean stuff for you is fine but too mainstream nowadays. 

- Pain Elementals could have a melee attack, why not.

- The pistol from STRAIN should be the standard, or double pistols, anything that gives the player a reason to press "2" for other than shooting a switch.

- Agreed with Spectre01 on the shotgun topic, the inconsistency is similar with the berserk usage, if low-HP monsters (imps mainly) don't die at least in one hit, the kill feels unsatisfying, which leads to the vanilla melee action, how many times you wanted to hit a tiny dude that's touching your nose, and the fist didn't do shit?? This was changed in ZDoom and it's a big weird plus there. 

- Another attack frame for the cyberdemon, it's the only monster that doesn't prepare itself to shoot, even former humans stop and then pew pew, cyberdemons stop+shoot at the same time (the time between stopping and shooting is indistinguishable). Cybruisers from Valiant and mini cyberdemons from STRAIN are examples of rocket shooters that aren't any less effective (as far as ranged attacks go) for having short times of preparation. I'm thinking of cinematic purposes, because it's only a minor thing.

 

That's all I can think right now.