Mutabor [on /idgames]

[IvanDobrovski]

Your map looks alright but doesn't play as well. The encounters are repetitive, the non-lineraity IMO definitely doesn't play in your favor here. You need to texture different sections of map differently or make some standing out architecture. Nothing really stood out to me to discern different parts of the map from each other. I got lost too often. Some of the secrets are too elaborate for the little payoff they give. (The hidden switch shoot things give no feedback to the user to tell what just happened by shooting them) Most secrets even punish you for finding them with monsters, which I'm alright with but the payoff is weak. I think you can improve this map further. I played on UV and just exited after one and a half hours with 11 secrets found.

[Horus]

FDA attached. I had a lot of fun with this until I died. The battle I died on is definitely not FDAable lol

0_mutabor.rar

[Aurelius]

14 hours ago, Caleb13 said:

Anyone else has run out of ammo during the first cyberdemon fight? I played version 1b on HMP and I already had very little ammo left before I dropped into the cyber arena.

I don't if it's your issue specifically, but target prioritization is a good habit of getting into. Conserve ammo in situations where a monster does not pose an immediate threat, and most likely won't in the near future. Make steady progress and don't try to clear out each room completely when you first get into them. Also, infighting was a very viable tactic in a lot of the fights, so use that to your advantage. Make the mobs do the work for you.

[tourniquet]

15 hours ago, Caleb13 said:

Anyone else has run out of ammo

 

I generally tried to encourage players to focus a bit more on infighting, especially in some of the larger encounters. Ammo shortage has been addressed multiple times during playtesting and i've applied some changes yet it still isn't perfect as i've noticed after watching some FDA'S/Videos. It's partially depending on the route you pick but definitely in need of some further changes.

 

12 hours ago, IvanDobrovski said:

Stuff

 

A lot of valid points, a few of them were even brought up during playtesting. Some aspects of the overall design are simply to retain vanilla comapt others are just due the way i like to make maps. I consider mutabor in a lot of ways more as a proof of concept than something to appeal a vast majority of players, the overall reception right now is already way beyond what i was expecting. There are definitely a few things i'll need to change but i doubt those will make the map a lot more enjoyable for you. But thanks for the input, much appreciated.

 

7 hours ago, Horus said:

FDA attached.

 

Thanks for the demo, very helpful indeed. Sorry about the ammo problems, your struggle was quite obvious and it's definitely a subject to change.

There's a certain gimmick to the encounter you've died at but you have to be a bit observant.

[baja blast rd.]

Hey, played this again, in prBoom+ cl2. First time since the FDA a while back so I managed to forget a good chunk of progression. Sought out some new fights, including one of the most dangerous exit fights. It's not all that informative in the fights I'd already visited, I'd say, so I wouldn't recommend hustling to watch it. 

 

mut02_cpt.zip

[adamadam]

This was a really damn good level!  Most of the major battles have something you can do to make them much more manageable, and I'd not seen those things put into levels before.  The green key card fight was especially cool, loved the design!  Use of god-mode definitely required to figure things out, then redo the battles normally.  Was glad the battles weren't just the "run in a circle for a five minutes waiting for everything to in-fight" variety.

 

I didn't have much trouble finding my way, though I know I'd go insane if I ever tried for 100%.  On my own managed just 2 secrets found.  Killed all the cyberdemons on UV - at first I actually made it to the exit without attacking a single cyberdemon, then went back to hunt them down.

 

Regarding ammo, I think the distribution was good, I never had enough to allow me to brute-force a battle, making me rethink what's happening and find the alternate, more efficient approach.  Some of the optional areas would have been nice if they'd be unreachable prior to obtaining the BFG.

 

Played keyboard controls only, no freelook or jumping/crouching, and never felt like the lack of those features was detrimental to the map.

 

Very well done!

 

 

Only glitchy area I saw, gzdoom 4.3.3, was the large floating platform - close to the cyberdemon the platform has like a bermuda triangle, depending on where i'm standing, objects (including weapon projectiles) inside the area are invisible.

Edited March 16, 2020 by adamadam

[Redneckerz]

Gets a R667 mention soon. I mean, a new map by a Cacoward winner @tourniquet, what's not to love?

[tchkb]

A bit of a weird inconsistency I've noticed when looking at the map in level editor: you seem to have used DeHackEd to change Commander Keens into Zombiemen and Wolfenstein SS into Chaingunners (presumably to limit the ammo players get from them), but the map still has some stray vanilla Zombies and Chaingunners.

I'm not really complaining, considering how tight ammo management is in the map, but is this "inconsistency" a conscious decision on your part or merely something you missed while finishing the map?

[adamadam]

I'm actually curious about a couple of the battles and if how I fought them was intended

 

Spoiler

Blue key area, I noticed that where you grab the plasma rifle, firing your weapon doesn't alert the monsters, so I alerted them one by one, brought them back to the plasma rifle corner, and easily killed them.

BFG area, I lowered the entrance/exit platform, then grabbed the BFG, had just enough time to run back up the exit platform.  I lowered the platform while staying up top, a group of monsters enter riding up, from the next platform over it was very easy to have this smaller group in-fight while dodging the occasional revenant missile, then kill off the one or two remainers.  Circle around & repeat.

Do have a question, is it possible to battle the exit cyberdemon fight without the BFG?  I tried and seemed impossible.  With the BFG I ended up taking a shot at the revenant cluster, then the barons, hit the switch, run for the lift to bail out, once everything but the cyberdemon was dead, dropped back down for an easy kill.  Took several attempts to get a good initial run clearing out the barons & needing the cyberdemon distracted with in-fighting.

 

[adamadam]

22 minutes ago, tchkb said:

A bit of a weird inconsistency I've noticed when looking at the map in level editor: you seem to have used DeHackEd to change Commander Keens into Zombiemen and Wolfenstein SS into Chaingunners (presumably to limit the ammo players get from them), but the map still has some stray vanilla Zombies and Chaingunners.

I'm not really complaining, considering how tight ammo management is in the map, but is this "inconsistency" a conscious decision on your part or merely something you missed while finishing the map?

 

When the one area opens up with the horde of zombiemen, my first thought was joy at all the ammo i'd be gaining!  Then I was like... what???  Good times

[baja blast rd.]

Zombie hordes are especially prone to intercepts overflows in vanilla -- which are triggered when a hitscan attack crosses >128 things (or lines). For that reason, replacing zombies with zombeens like this is a sound prophylactic. A BTSX e2 map does the same. Ammo considerations are a definite benefit in this case too.

[tourniquet]

12 hours ago, adamadam said:

This was a really damn good level!

 

Thanks, glad to hear you've enjoyed it.

 

12 hours ago, adamadam said:

Only glitchy area I saw, gzdoom 4.3.3, was the large floating platform - close to the cyberdemon the platform has like a bermuda triangle

 

Heh, thats an interesting curiousity, no idea whats causing it and i probably won't try to fix it, it was a hassle to make this area run flawless in vanilla + it feels like quite a achievement to break gzdoom with something that works perfectly fine in Vanilla Doom LUL

 

56 minutes ago, tchkb said:

"inconsistency"

 

All of it is intended, @rdwpa 's post above already answers a part of your question, also to prevent ammo farming

 

Nazis were replaced with chaingunners to prevent CG drops

Regular Chaingunners are a lot tankier (like 4 or 5 times the health) and only show up in certain encounters in HNTR

 

40 minutes ago, adamadam said:

Blue key area, I noticed that where you grab the plasma rifle, firing your weapon doesn't alert the monsters, so I alerted them one by one, brought them back to the plasma rifle corner, and easily killed them.

 

Yeah i've noticed that issue after watching some recent demos, i'll try to fix this with the next update.

 

43 minutes ago, adamadam said:

BFG area, I lowered the entrance/exit platform, then grabbed the BFG, had just enough time to run back up the exit platform.  I lowered the platform while staying up top, a group of monsters enter riding up, from the next platform over it was very easy to have this smaller group in-fight while dodging the occasional revenant missile, then kill off the one or two remainers.  Circle around & repeat.

 

I almost thought someone would try to cheese the BFG fight this way, i'll gonna check if i can solve it by making the lift fast, otherwise i have to live with it as i simply don't have any more blockmap space for convoluted mechanisms.

 

47 minutes ago, adamadam said:

Do have a question, is it possible to battle the exit cyberdemon fight without the BFG?

 

It's certainly the toughest exit fight but it's definitely possible without the BFG.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

1 minute ago, tourniquet said:

Regular Chaingunners are a lot tankier (like 4 or 5 times the health) and only show up in certain encounters in HNTR

 

Wow, am I glad to read this. I thought I was going crazy, or getting unbelievably trash RNG from the Chaingun for whatever strange reason, when it seemed -- as though randomly -- certain ones just refused to die. Good to know! 

[blkndsludgeguywholovesdoom]

Hello there. Long time lurker, like 9th time poster as a different name. This map (as are all your maps) is amazing to look at and play. I had a question about the start of the map, for where it teleports the player to in the map. Sometimes it teleports me to the area with a stair way and a switch with two ways out of that stairwell. A few other times it teleports me to a closed area with a switch. And a third time (due to me changing the skill) it teleports me to a third area. Is there a way to know where you will end up when you launch yourself off the beginning ledge? I have tried several different options. I am also using the latest Beautiful Doom SVN release (with the monsters and weapons turned off because your decorate work is amazing here). Anyways here are the two areas with pictures. edit: Figured out how to spoiler images. I am guessing this has to do with which difficulty you pick? Also sorry if this is something done throughout the Doom world and I a dumb player of 20 years never knew this fact. Consider me a curious possible future mapper. If this is a thing, how do you do it? Thanks again. 

 

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

[tourniquet]

33 minutes ago, blkndsludgeguywholovesdoom said:

 I am guessing this has to do with which difficulty you pick?

 

You guessed it right, every skill starts in a different location. This can be done by setting the flags of the teleport destinations to the specific skill you want them to work. 3 different sectors with the same tag and 3 teleport destinations set to UV/HMP/HNTR only respectively. Also glad to hear you enjoyed your playthrough.

[tourniquet]

Hi, I've updated the OP with a new version, Mutabor_v2b

 

Changes:

 

Spoiler

- A more OPL optimized version of diranir.mid with less overlapping notes and a bit more variation

- additional ammo for HMP

- minor changes to the BK fight to prevent cheesing it via abusing sound block lines

 

Unless someone spots any further issues or bugs, I'll upload this version to /idgames in the near future.

[tourniquet]

/idgames upload is pending, I'll update the OP once it's on the archives. In the meantime you can grab the final version here if you're interested.

 

adieu

[Austinado]

Map01

 

I did enjoyed the transparent bridges, the map is quite fun and can be a challenge. Still i have found it a little bit confusing, and think i did not needed all the keys to end the map. Still..it was quite a ride!

 

 

[SilverMiner]

Why lost souls and pain elementals aren't green?

[Crunchynut44]

How did I miss this? Seriously one hell of a map, visuals are second to none the game play while not typically my taste was very cool due to the fact that the different difficulties cause you to start at different positions. Had a blast playing this, and more than anything thanks for the clean automap that was much appreciated!

[tourniquet]

Heh, i reckon a clean automap is somewhat mandatory for such a complex and confusing layout. Glad to hear you kinda enjoyed it.

 

3 hours ago, SilverMiner said:

Why lost souls and pain elementals aren't green?

 

Dunno, i think a green PE would look plain ugly.

[tourniquet]

It's on /idgames

[EffinghamHuffnagel]

On 4/1/2020 at 8:08 AM, tourniquet said:

Dunno, i think a green PE would look plain ugly.

 

All green, yes. But using the Plasma Elemental sprites from realm667 and the green-fire Lost Soul sprites from Lexus Alyus's Realm of the Green Soul would probably look pretty nice, and certainly appropriate.

 

[tourniquet]

Yeah those might actually look decent, however too late to implement them and i won't bother updating the idgames version.

[tchkb]

Here's a halfassed UV-Max demo for MAP01 from the 21.03 version (the one right before the final idgames upload) with two very obvious fuckups that cost me over a minute total. I hate the double rate of fire chaingun you put in final version (it doesn't fit the map's enemy composition) and probably just won't bother rerouting the entire map from scratch. Also the new music sounds awful, I had to replace it with the old MUS myself because it was really grating on my ears.

Also attaching UV-Speed run I did back in v1b, showing the speed of Blue Key route.

mutabor_old-3211.zip

mutabor_v1b-210.zip

[dobu gabu maru]

Very very happy to see more tourniquet maps!

[tourniquet]

8 hours ago, tchkb said:

Demos

 

Thx for the demos, 32 is still a pretty impressive time despite minor mistakes. Out of curiosity, how does the sped up CG affect your routing?

[tchkb]

My old route uses regular Chaingun extensively to snipe a lot of random faraway Imps and hitscanners without running past anything, for which I have just barely enough ammo up until the run's midway point where ammo stops being such a huge concern. Double fire rate means that I'm using double the ammo for each individual enemy (I can't let go of fire button in a span of two tics, so it's always refired and the second pair of bullets nearly always misses because of the distances involved) and I simply won't have enough bullets to work with until late into the map. The solution to this would be a combination of using regular Shotgun against certain randoms and running past specific randoms and killing them later instead of killing everything as soon as possible like I have in my old route. And then I'd need to find certain close-range targets to mow down with Chaingun instead of SSG to make up for time lost to the above changes, except there won't be many said targets in the first place because my route is already built around extensive rocket and BFG use in the second half and I don't get a significant bullet surplus until like 25 minutes into the old route's 30-31 minute run. So basically your double fire rate chaingun adds another layer of complexity to routing the map instead of actually making the player's life easier.

[tourniquet]

Makes sense, i mainly tweaked the CG speed to balance HNTR a bit more. Bummer this ruined your current strats, would have been cool to get a max for the final version.