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Capellan

SPECTRUM (limit removing Ult Doom episode) - now on idgames

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I won't spoil it here, but HAK3180 shows how to get that in his playthrough on his "I will play and record your maps" thread - one of only two secrets he got on m4, actually

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OMG I figured it out. Well, that was dumb of me. 5/6 found (three armor bonus secrets - you love your pillars, don't ya? and two plasma rifles). The last one remains unknown.

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By "pillars" do you just mean "lowering floors"?  I don't know that I like them per se, but they're compact and you never have to worry about them disappearing into the sky :)

 

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I was talking about the hints, Capellan. Two of the armor bonus secrets rely on one of the pillars being somewhat different. I would go into more detail but I've no idea how to use spoiler tags.

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I played the first few maps last night. Pretty cool, and surprisingly tough with the scarcity of health and abundance of flanking shotgunners. Makes me check my corners a lot and I like it. Nice work, looking forward to finishing the rest!

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Made some minor tweaks to M5 and updated the file linked in the OP.  Also includes the texture alignment fixes for M6.

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E3M9: So in a mapset that expunges brown, it makes sense that the secret map is almost all brown. And it looks fabulous. Great texture flow with all the earth tones. It's never boring to look at with its mix of metals, woods, Brnpipe and other goodies.

 

I first played this on HNTR continuous from M6 and, perhaps not surprisingly, survived. You had a nice hot start with all those converging Imps, but with a well-stocked shotgun I was able to demolish them easily. I found 2 secrets, the PG and the Blue Armor, before I found myself in a locked room for The Easiest Cyb Fight Ever. You gave me a BFG and I was shocked when I stumbled over an Ivuln as well. After killing Cybie it was time to clean up all those ledge Imps and exit the map, satisfied and feeling like a badass. So I guess it's a bit of a breather map.

 

That left me feeling guilty, so I decided to pistol start it on UV. The beginning is more hectic until you get a real weapon -- CG in my case -- and from there it's again a methodical slaughter of the somewhat weak opposition, but while easy, the combat is always engaging as new monsters continue to filter in from all points of the compass. The presence of a Baron made me change my plans, not tackling him until I found stronger weaponry -- the RL and PG worked nicely -- and then it was off to fight Cybie. This time, I snagged the secret Soulsphere as well, which was a comfort because I was quite low on ammo.

 

This ammo shortage resulted in rockets being my main weapon to kill Cybie, but once that was accomplished, the real nail-biting began because I had very little ammo to deal with the ledge Imps and the Cacos that get released once you go up there. In fact, here's a visual aid to show what I had left at the exit. As a bonus, you can see horizontally misaligned Skintek on the left.

gZI3oYJ.png

 

So there it is, only 7 shells! I'm thinking a little more ammo might be nice in this map. ;)

 

All in all, a great-looking map that's easy yet fun to play, but it needs more ammo for all those ancient keyboarders with faulty aim. ;)

 

Edit: One more thing, that's another very nice midi by @Taw Tu'lki. It sounds good and has a solid drive to it that kept my interest and just "felt right" for Doom.

Edited by Steve D

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8 hours ago, Steve D said:

You gave me a BFG and I was shocked when I stumbled over an Ivuln as well.

 

It is HNTR, Steve :)

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On 8/5/2019 at 3:19 PM, Capellan said:

 

It is HNTR, Steve :)

 

Indeed it is, but it was a shockingly easy fight on UV as well. Definitely a relaxed outing against Herr Cybie.

 

Now on to E3M7!

 

A fitting map for the penultimate slot. I'm guessing this is the largest Adam map I've ever played, with over 350 monsters on HNTR. I managed 3 secrets, including the parkour Soulsphere, but alas, not the Blue Armor. Combat was tough throughout, but somewhat repetitive in that it consisted mostly of severe incidental combat and teleport invasions where monsters were scattered throughout a general area and then converged on you, so they hit you in dribs and drabs and they just kept coming. I found myself itching for a big fight or 2 instead of the constant chipping away at my health by roaming hitscanners. Surprisingly, I only died 3 times.

 

Shotgunners, zombieboys, Cacos and Lost Souls were the primary threat. Pinkies and Spectres served as ammo sponges and moving meat walls, and I had to keep on my toes to avoid being cornered or dying from buckshot poisoning while distracted by demons.

 

I suffered brutal damage from shotgunners on the many occasions when I had to backtrack to collect ammo from dead hitscanners. Shotgunners from the last teleport invasion, or perhaps earlier ones, occasionally became stuck on oddly-shaped walls, and the only thing that could un-stick them was me walking blindly past their position, with predictable results. Oh, those merciless RNG rolls!

 

The ending seemed a bit anticlimactic on HNTR. When I snagged the BFG, pressed a switch and saw the exit column descending, I expected a Cyb to appear, but no dice. I then rode the column up and got some light "The Shaft" action before I reached the true exit, after which I fired up GZDB, looked for Cybs on this map and was stunned to learn there were none, on any difficulty setting.

 

Visually, the map is outstanding, more hellish than previous levels, with a distinctly menacing atmosphere. As you collect keys, the map opens up and becomes more interconnected, and there are numerous opportunities to practice your parkour skills. Health and ammo is tight as usual, but to a lesser extreme than some previous maps. Secrets are quite tough to figure out apart from the 3 easy ones I found. All in all, it's the same bag of tricks found in previous maps writ large. In some ways it was a bit exhausting as Adam's roamer wizardry meant you had to keep checking your six, worried about being blindsided by the odd zombieboy or stealthy Caco. I might have preferred the map be about a third smaller if only to reduce the amount of constant tension.

 

The free BFG at the end, at a time when almost all the monsters are dead, seems like a gift for continuers about to face the boss fight in M8. Knowing Adam, I anticipate that M8 will be a real map and not just a Mastermind arena. 

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50 minutes ago, Capellan said:

Can't have a cyber!  Cybers are brown.

 

 

Face-palm!!!!!

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As I mentioned in one of the videos, I switched to Crispy when 5.6 came out. M8 crashed on me. 

Spoiler

It seemed to have to do with the custom boss.

I'll try -cl 3 next time, but I won't be able to give you a pure FDA. I also won't have it available for a few days.

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1 hour ago, HAK3180 said:

As I mentioned in one of the videos, I switched to Crispy when 5.6 came out. M8 crashed on me. 

M8 crashed on you with Crispy 5.6?

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@fabian, yes. I will say that I had idclipped some, but I didn't think to anywhere inaccessible. I'll try to recreate it after I get a recording done for Capellan.

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I tried and failed to recreate the crash I experienced before. I would chalk it up to some anomaly not related to the source port.

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You probably used some pre-5.6 version then. It used to crash there and I applied the fix to the 5.6 release. 

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@fabian, I would have assumed so, but I checked right away. I use "run" for Crispy. Windows keeps that history. I never loaded Spectrum except in 5.6. I even made sure the "crispy-doom.exe" in my 5.6 folder was indeed 5.6.

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I just tried M8 with Crispy and didn't have any issues playing it to completion.  Not sure what happened with your first attempt.

 

@fabian any plans to support higher resolutions in Crispy?  Smoother images are pretty much the only thing that keeps me using prboom+ these days.

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Thanks for checking. Please report back if you ever experience that crash again, Crispy must never crash. 

 

@Capellan No, there won't be any higher resolutions than 640x409 in Crispy. 

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I've started playing this in GZDoom on HNTR (as is my new tradition) and it's a far sight tougher than anything else I've played on this difficulty so far! Not too bad though, and I've only died once on M3 so far, as I came in with 9 health due to hitscanner attrition in M2. The secrets are well-hidden enough that I'm not finding all that many before moving on, which is a good sign. I've found a missing upper texture in M2, in one of the side areas that#s hidden on the automap near the end. Here's a screenshot to help with my vague description:

 

R2IK2z6.png

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10 minutes ago, Phobus said:

I've found a missing upper texture in M2, in one of the side areas that#s hidden on the automap near the end. Here's a screenshot to help with my vague description:

 

Thanks.  Fixed and link updated.

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It took me a surprisingly long time to realise there were no imps and that there was a reason for it, but I eventually twigged around about M7. It's a fun map set and the hitscanner attrition means that it's never exactly low risk, despite the OG Doom cast (boss monster aside). The layouts are great and what secrets I did find were reasonably clever, so I'm assuming the ones I did miss (including the secret exit) were just as clever and I was being unobservant. Good job, all in all. Glad I gave it a go! Continuous eventually did turn into being an advantage from M5 onward, as the presence of more tougher enemies meant less zombies in a given area, so I got through M7 finding a couple of secrets and came into the final map quite powerful. I've seen those sprites in ZDoom maps, so I had to guess at the DeHackEd behaviour in the end. Beat him first time anyway.

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I found E3M3 hard to finish as it took me a while to find the exit. E3M4 and E3M5 I really enjoyed, though both of those had a lot of peek-and-shoot monster placement, the design and detailing is super. I am really like Spectrum so far, I usually stop to admire the detailing after the monsters are slain.

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At this stage, I'm likely to wrap up the playtest around the end of the month, so if you want to have your say, now's the time to do it :)

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So at last I played the boss map -- 3 days ago. :D Just took awhile before I got around to uploading a screenshot. More on that later.

 

It was pretty good as boss maps go. I died twice to the weird-looking creature in your well-done arena. It also killed a couple Barons for me. I can't say I was in love with the monster, maybe because its movement was so slow and deliberate. I might have liked it better if it moved more like a Caco, or if there had been more health and ammo but also 3 boss monsters. 3 flying bosses would be a rough go. How much HP does it have relative to a Cyb? It ate a lot of plasma and several rockets before disintegrating. It also had an attack similar to the modified Archie in Alien Bastards.

 

The only real critique I have is the texture cutoff in this screenshot;

 

Spoiler

zGJO4C6.png

 

This is repeated on the other side. It would look much nicer if you cleaned that up.

 

Overall, this is a fantastic E3 mapset of varying brutality. M2 had my number more than any other map, though it was easy for other players. By contrast, I had an easier time with M7 than others did, though it still did a number on me. ;) The layouts and detailing were perfect for a sort of "enhanced old-school" mapset, and the familiar Capellan tropes of tight resources, numerous hitscanners, and well-planned monster pathing for efficient use of your dangerous roamers, made for consistently exciting gameplay without resorting to a lot of high-HP monsters. I thought it was great. Now do an E4! :)

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8 hours ago, Steve D said:

I can't say I was in love with the monster, maybe because its movement was so slow and deliberate. I might have liked it better if it moved more like a Caco

 

It's actually faster than a caco.

 

I don't think of this as "an E3 mapset" myself.  It just happens to be in E3, mostly for the sky :)

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2 hours ago, Capellan said:

 

I don't think of this as "an E3 mapset" myself.  It just happens to be in E3, mostly for the sky :)

 

Do an E4 mapset anyway. I wanna see what kind of twisted evil shit you come up with using that orange sky, metal, wood and Gstone theme. I need to bleed. :D

 

So what would you call Spectrum, E2 with an E3 sky?

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41 minutes ago, Steve D said:

So what would you call Spectrum, E2 with an E3 sky?

 

I'd just call it an episode that avoids brown :)  I guess you could argue the blend of techbase and hellishness (with the latter being more prominent the deeper you go) is thematically closer to E2 than any of the other original episodes, but I wasn't consciously aligning to any episode.

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