Gameplay Mod Walpurgis- 0.99 (For Doom, Heretic, Hexen) [NEW RELEASE!!!]

[Mangudai]

I finished Ultimate doom. I'm satisfied by the warrior playthrough. The last episode made me realize that the axe is redundant after a certain while, and greatsword and hammer are way better (I liked the AOE of the hammer better than the one of the Sword).

Some more things to note:
1) While playing, I didn't enjoy much the flaming sprites when creatures are burning. The issue is that the flames are, according to me, too huge, and they kinda make impossible to see. I would like them to be toned down, for better visibility. I kinda got accustomed to them, but I think it's worth noting.

2) The flashing smoke is another thing that irks me (for the mage), blue hands weapon, but I told you about this one already.
 

3) The greatsword has no description when upgrading.
 

4) Is there anywhere a manual of how the items were changed and what they do?

5) What is the scepter that you get as item for? 

Edited February 4, 2021 by Mangudai

[eharper256]

34 minutes ago, Mangudai said:

delete.

 

???

[Mangudai]

It was a double post ;)

[eharper256]

24 minutes ago, Mangudai said:

I finished Ultimate doom. I'm satisfied by the warrior playthrough. The last episode made me realize that the axe is redundant after a certain while, and greatsword and hammer are way better (I liked the AOE of the hammer better than the one of the Sword).

Some more things to note:
1) While playing, I didn't enjoy much the flaming sprites when creatures are burning. The issue is that the flames are, according to me, too huge, and they kinda make impossible to see. I would like them to be toned down, for better visibility. I kinda got accustomed to them, but I think it's worth noting.

2) The flashing smoke is another thing that irks me (for the mage), blue hands weapon, but I told you about this one already.
 

3) The greatsword has no description when upgrading.
 

4) Is there anywhere a manual of how the items were changed and what they do?

5) What is the scepter that you get as item for? 

1. They are generic ones at the moment; eventually I'll make individual burning animations per enemy. They're big so that they cover up the monster sprite that's burning. The pyromaniacs who commented on them when they first appeared loved them though lol.

 

3. It doesn't have upgrades right now; none of the ultimates do. I should probably make it so that the code prevents you from wasting your upgrades on it I guess.

 

4. I guess I can make a helpcard for this. Each one is very similar to its old Hexen counterpart but I guess not everyone knows that, so its a good idea.

 

5. Its a 'Wand of Hitscan'. Some Doom levels need you to hit distant targets with hitscans (notably Romero's Sigil) for progression or secret so I include it as a default item (since your walp projectiles might not be able to hit or you might not have any ranged).

[Mangudai]

1. I guess they are up to personal preference
3. Try to find upgrades, these are one of the reasons one should look around for secrets
4. ;)
5. Ah... imagine me trying to use it to kill a CyberDemon.

By the way, druid is pretty great.

[eharper256]

Glad you like the Druid; she's had alot of tweaks since her first release in 0.9 and I agree that she's in a pretty good place now.

 

1. Don't worry, I also think the flames need some work; its just that it's alot more work to do individual burning sprites than a generic workaround.

3. Ultimate upgrades will eventually happen, they're one of the last priorities though since they're already very strong weapons (and will probably use x2 upgrades per shot).

5. Lol, its technically possible, the wand DOES do 1 damage a hit in order to register the hitscan. Special challenge run for the masochists I guess.

[Mangudai]

I've played half of doom 2 and I want to offer other feedback.

Current difficulty I'm playing on is Ultraviolence.

1) The monsters do not do enough dmg. The only one that seems to hit good is the cacodemon, especially on melee range. the damage done by the rest is disappointing. I realized this after I met the archvile, he did almost no dmg, while normally it is a force to be reckoned with. Same can be said for other creatures.

2) Is there a way to restore the dmg that Doom 2 monsters do normally?

3) After a certain while you finish upgrading all the stuff. So, can you use the books for something, or are they for naught?

[eharper256]

Thanks for playing again.

 

One thing to say straight off is that Vanilla Doom2 at UV is a fair bit less dangerous than most contemporary megawads at UV, which often have three or four times the enemies, less armour, and far more unfair layouts, so it can be hard to fully reconcile the differences.

 

1/2) I realise that I seem to have accidently nerfed the Imp's fireball when I tweaked with the effects so yeah that only does 5-7 damage at the moment (lol). I'll get that fixed. Other than that, though, monster damage hasn't changed much from vanilla. All I've done is make it so that you get less extreme spikes from the RNG from the Revenant and Mancubus, and made it so damage is more consistent. Did you know- a Vanilla revenant missile is so random that it can roll anywhere between 8 and 80 damage!!! Now its just always going to hit in the 20-40's range. Archvile is unchanged.

 

However, I imagine most of the problem is that Hexen Armour works a fair bit differently to Doom Armour. Most of the time in regular Doom, you're looking at a flat 33% or 50% damage reduction from Green or Blue Armour. But Hexen Armour gives you damage reduction % equal to its current HP% (so at 100+ armour, you also take no damage, it all goes to armour).

 

In Vanilla Doom II, you can expect a reasonable quantity of armour drops so its possible to find yourself damage free sometimes.

 

If you like, I can add a CVAR option to Doom Monsters to allow the old random projectiles; but that makes it very hard for the Myrmidon to make it to melee range on contemporary maps, and means the Druid and Magister can easily get one-shot by Revenants if they have no armour, which isn't very fun.

 

Alternatively, you can consider using a Monster Mod for more challenge. Load these after Walpurgis in your list, and they should work flawlessly. Colorful Hell, Champions, and VDP Monster Randomiser are good choices.

 

3) Yeah, if you've upgraded everything then upgrade items becomes useless. Obviously, I can't predict how many you might get in a given playthrough. I suppose I could add in a function for them to change into a different item if you use one with a fully upgraded weapon. That might come in the future.

Edited February 10, 2021 by eharper256

[Mangudai]

Thanks for the detailed reply. 

I would like to suggest another alternative for these books.

Would it be possible to actually add a menu, after you've already upgraded the weapons, where you can start to upgrade health, armor, and various properties of weapons\spells?

For example, +5 health pool, +2 armor, etc etc. These are pretty simple tweaks (and not that interesting), but they at least provide a reason to keep exploring and finding these tomes.
 

Or new properties for spells (e.g the lightning spell reaching further, the fire spreading on npc if they touch it, etc etc)

Or new properties for weapons (for example, for warrior, axe having flame effect that burns people and also spreads it, or sword that you can cast and actually start swinging all around killing people, or hammer that gets thrown on the wall or floor and makes initially a blast wave that pushes monster away, than that blast wave, if upgraded becomes a thunder wave). 

These above are some of the things I would add to make the player feel rewarded by the usage of weapons. Using the warrior sword, right clicking and casting the spell is certainly great, but it is not that awesome, nor it's clear to the player how the sphere itself affects him. This is referred to the fact that I play Dead be dead or no reload and more than once I got crushed because I didn't know if the charging sphere would hit me or not.

For the monsters, I will think about your suggestion.

I know it's a lot to take, but I enjoy your mod and as such, I had to write here.
 

[eharper256]

Trouble is; I don't want Walp to go full RPG; that already exists (its called Wrath of Chronos). In Wrath of Chronos, the abilities and stat-ups are interesting and I appreciate the effort they put in, but IMHO, the whole affair is very clunky, complicated and busy, and the menus are at best a chore to navigate.

 

My design goal is to keep away from really complicated stuff, as I don't think it suits the Doom-gameplay style, so having one-time upgrades to weapons is the limit.

 

Alternate Upgrade paths and properties are not completely off the table, but each one is a HUGE amount of work. I mean seriously huge.

 

Quietus works best if you have room to move around. If you detonate a fully charged torpedo next to your face, you will kill or gravely injure yourself for sure. Specifically; it has up 13 stages of charge, with an AOE starting at roughly the width of an Imp, and that AOE is multiplied by the level of charge. At max, that means its hitting an area about three times the width of a rocket explosion for about 450 damage.

 

Its the same with not using the Crux Calicus Black Hole in close quarters (lol). Don't forget that the Testing Map exists in the Walpurgis Options; you can use that to get a feel for what everything does!

Edited February 10, 2021 by eharper256

[Mangudai]

I didn't know about Wrath of Cronos for Hexen. I checked on the .net and saw there are two rpg mod for Hexen, Wrath of Cronos and Korax mod (recently re-released). Thanks a lot for making me know about the existence of these mods, I didn't even think something like that would exist.

Said this, I'll be looking forward to playing the next version of your mod.

I'm curious about which direction you will be choosing for the mod: I thought that it would go in a rpg way, due to the fact that after having found all these books to upgrade the weapons, there is a lack of progression that makes me uninterested on finding all the secrets on a level.  


By the way, how do I activate the testing map? I can't see anywhere in the options.

Well, I enjoyed your mod, thank you for it.
 

Edited February 12, 2021 by Mangudai

[eharper256]

9 hours ago, Mangudai said:

I'm curious about which direction you will be choosing for the mod: I thought that it would go in a rpg way, due to the fact that after having found all these books to upgrade the weapons, there is a lack of progression that makes me uninterested on finding all the secrets on a level.  

By the way, how do I activate the testing map? I can't see anywhere in the options.

Well, I enjoyed your mod, thank you for it.

 

My intent is to have a mod that is similar to Trailblazer and Heretical, or Doom 2016; in that it is primarily action based, but there are still player choices to made on the character side of things with a light resource management element (choosing which upgrades, switching between your arsenal depending on the situation).

 

If WoC is your cuppa tea then all the power to you. I love RPG's myself; especially turn-based tactical ones and dungeon crawler types; and Skyrim SE is one of my most played Steam games. I just feel that its a bit weird when combined with the Doom engine, which I always see as all action (and I'm mostly glad with how Bethesda handled the remakes though I was less impressed with Eternal than I was with 2016).

 

The Test map is the first option on the Walpurgis options menu. You can see it on this video:

(though there is now 1 extra sub-menu in between since this was recorded, but not much change).

[Mangudai]

Found the testing map in the end. I don't even know how I missed it ..

Thanks for your detailed reply. Good modding.

[eharper256]

No problem, enjoy.

[eharper256]

Big thanks to Terminus for streaming Walpurgis in his channel last night. Check out the footage here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/912620823?t=01h19m05s

And his Doom channel link is:
https://www.twitch.tv/motiterminus

 

(sadly it seems that embeds from Twitch don't seem to work properly on Doomworld)

[UnknDoomer]

Tried to start it with

"Script error, "elfgp.wad:GLDEFS" line 33:
Warning: dynamic lights attached to non-existent actor SunProjectile1

 

Script error, "Hexen_Walpurgis-JT-0.92.pk3:menudef" line 6:
Unknown keyword 'Size'".

 

[Global.Autoload]
path=E:\Games\Old\Doom\Hexen_Walpurgis-JT-0.92.pk3
path=E:\Games\Old\Doom\elfgp.wad

 

Same thing with https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110051/

Edited February 16, 2021 by UnknDoomer

[eharper256]

Unfortunately Elf Gets Pissed is horribly incompatible with Walpurgis. It adds in a unique player and weapon classes preventing Walp from doing the same, and it fact adds its own Lightbringer as well (lol). Basically, Walp will have trouble with anything that adds new weapons and players.

 

Quote

Script error, "Hexen_Walpurgis-JT-0.92.pk3:menudef" line 6:
Unknown keyword 'Size'".

^ This, however, means you've got an old version of GZDoom. It must be 4.5. It cannot be less, and I think LZDoom is still behind without having this updated. But if you confirm it is LZDoom you are using, then I can submit it as a bug report if you don't want to do it yourself and can confirm that's the issue.

[UnknDoomer]

4.4.2. Got 4.5.0. Runs but in EGP switch on first map not working + weapons the same / no classes to choose from... Well. It has glitches with Heretical Doom too. So I guess I better stick to other WAD's in that case.

Hexen: RoC works fine now.

Edited February 16, 2021 by UnknDoomer

[eharper256]

Yes, I'd imagine Heretical has the same problems with EGP. It does a weird replacer job on the playerclass for some reason. If the map then forces this class to be used, Walpurgis won't be able to initialise its class menu.

4.5.0 is required because the GZDoom developers decided to completely change the pixel size algorithm in this version, breaking any mods that didn't update to include the new 'size' trait.

 

But of course, the old GZDoom doesn't have the 'size' command as it didn't exist, so including this crashes any old version. Its a bit of pain, honestly.

[CorianderCastor]

I did manage to do a run of the Hexen OC (as it were) as the druid. Mostly just primary fired with second weapon. Occasionally used third weapon, mostly primary and tertiary fire. Was only playing on Normal (as I do,) so...

 

The hordes in Dungeons is definitely something.

 

56 minutes ago, eharper256 said:

Its a bit of pain, honestly.

 

'Tis the price of unbridled progress.

[eharper256]

16 minutes ago, PaquoCastor said:

I did manage to do a run of the Hexen OC (as it were) as the druid. Mostly just primary fired with second weapon. Occasionally used third weapon, mostly primary and tertiary fire. Was only playing on Normal (as I do,) so...

 

The hordes in Dungeons is definitely something.

Good to hear you made it through the Vanilla campaign with Druid without issues. A bit surprised you don't mention using the Ichival at all, though its good to hear that the Wolf Form is now solid enough to carry you through alot of content (it really wasn't in 0.91, the Hebiko Sceptre was the go-to required weapon).

[CorianderCastor]

The bow is probably good for speed killing hordes, but it still took me less than four hours to beat the game. Poison everywhere seemed good enough. Honestly the sceptre works well on bosses too. Zedek was a pushover with flechette and third weapon tertiary fire spam.

[UnknDoomer]

Currently playing

with mod as druid.

 

Questions:

 

1. It's right that ice monsters deal zero damage to hero in wolf form?

 

Have some suggestions for future build:

 

1. Add more items. Like, for example, each hero can use up to 5 unique onces instead of just 2.

2. New monsters. Can be 2-3 more high tiers of existing one (similar to Complex Doom; sprites recolor and sort of such things) or new, for example 5-10 types. Can be based on

resource pack. Some folks already bulding their maps around it.

 

3. Add an additional, #5, class - necromancer that can cast friendly skeletons (require two types of mana; alive up to 30 seconds) or black raven (require one type of mana; alive up to 60 seconds; one of the old Heretic mods have had sort of a feature).

4. Add an option to one of the heroes, magic related one I guess fill fit in the best way, that allow to fly for a limited time.

Edited February 17, 2021 by UnknDoomer

[eharper256]

On 2/16/2021 at 3:24 PM, PaquoCastor said:

The bow is probably good for speed killing hordes, but it still took me less than four hours to beat the game. Poison everywhere seemed good enough. Honestly the sceptre works well on bosses too. Zedek was a pushover with flechette and third weapon tertiary fire spam.

Wow, you must play Vanilla Hexen way more than I do lol. I can still get lost in Seven Portals when doing testing runs lol. Zedek running into pitcher plants is quite entertaining but yeah I can see why that would work to murder him quickly. XD

 

4 hours ago, UnknDoomer said:

.... STUFF...

1A. Yes, it gains Ice resistance. I suppose it does make Guardian of Ice a bit easy for the Druid in Hexen right now, but otherwise it shouldn't affect much. Eventually, the Wendigo will gain other damage types and attacks to offset this.

 

1. Unique spell-scrolls or wands are already planned eventually. Maybe by the 1.0 version but it might be a post-gold feature, we'll see.

2. Already planned, will be the last thing before the final version. The unique Hexen bosses are already in.

3. No. Wrath of Chronos already has a Necro class, and I'm not doing a generic necro. A 5th class is possible though its a huge amount of extra work. Right now, a Rogue or Soldier class to give another big physical class are the most likely, but these are merely ghosts of a plan, again, probably post 1.0 stuff, because again, a new class is massive, massive, monumental work.

4. Wings of Wrath already exist in the Raven games though? I wouldn't want to add it to Doom; it can hugely break level progression. Heck, Jumping can break level progression in Doom.

[UnknDoomer]

3. Then, perhaps, items for any class to use for spawn them?

4. Yes.

[eharper256]

3. Summonable critter items like a Maulotaur might be possible in future.

4. ???

[UnknDoomer]

Just finished NaNoHexen 2019. Combines fine, no bugs found.

 

5. Small suggestion - heroes, seems to, can randomly talk to much if you heat the wall/press the door. I've played as druid and she tell "fire" or "bird" too often.

 

 

6. Do you have a Discord? There is one member of russian community they looking for some talk. He is working on huge rebalance mod for "Brutal Doom V20" called "Schism". Draws many ideas from others good modifications, same as I've heard have a talk time to time with Romero on some issues. His plans includes Heretic and Hexen too. Discord channel - https://discord.gg/UxsKY7Fu

[CorianderCastor]

On 2/17/2021 at 11:57 AM, eharper256 said:

Wow, you must play Vanilla Hexen way more than I do lol.

When the H+H pack dropped on GOG, I decided to finally play the full saga (I've had only finished the idtech 1 games before.) I also did a fighter playthrough with expansion while going through Hexen II. I was playing this run during my local co-op run in Chocolate. I also downloaded all the archives in idgames/levels/hexen and played through about forty user maps recently.

 

Just one of those jags.

 

Of course, I used to be a semi-regular on Hexen Skulltag servers.

 

Some notes: I had Wings of Wraiths carry over hubs. I got the fourth weapon at the end of the first hub. GZDoom 4.5

[eharper256]

Fair enough.

Hmm... the Wings probably shouldn't do that, and you also shouldn't get all the ult pieces in Seven Portals. I guess I'll need to put in a Druid Identifier of some kind when replacing the ultimate weapons. The problem with Hexen maps is they are hard-code designed for the 3 classes by default. I'll look into seeing what can be done though.

 

Yes, there is a Discord channel for Walpurgis. https://discord.gg/rxsKfFp

It's pretty dead though; probably because its an auto-kicker. But its meant as a 'leave feedback here if you don't have a doomworld/zdoom forum account' type place rather than a discussion hub.

 

EDIT: Fixed the Wings; I must have had a derp moment as I gave them an interhubamount property.

Edited February 19, 2021 by eharper256

[eharper256]

New Video!

 

This is the first eight minutes of my playthrough of Lullaby, a new gorgeous map by Danlex (with the Magister). Get it here:

I'm probably should have changed my recording settings before trying something like this as this was already 4 Gb for 8 mins of play (lol) which is why I stopped there. Still gives you a nice taster of the level though.

Interestingly revealed to me an edge case of a glitch that can happen with Fulgur as well; apparently if a monster dies, is electrocuted, and falls off a high ledge all at once, it continually electrocutes as a corpse. I haven't been able to repeat it again, of course. Bastard Mancubus ruining the video. XD