DBP25: Dead But Dreaming

[Catpho]

 

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times he was snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it.

       -- H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

 

Dead But Dreaming is your descent into madness, disguised as a 12-level limit-removing episode for Doom 2 summoned by @dmdr and the occult folks of Doomer Boards.

 

IMPORTANT!: This mapset is balanced exclusively for the Nightmare! skill setting. Please play on that difficulty for the intended experience. This mapset also requires a source port that supports UMAPINFO, which at the time of writing only includes PrBoom-Plus 2.5.1.7um and a recent version of GZDoom.

 

/idgames (Remember to read the IMPORTANT! section)

 

Screenshots:

 

MAPLIST:
01 .The Artifact / Big Ol' Billy
02. Scathing Ruin / Phobus
03. Wound Spirals / Scrangus McBrickdad/Jaxxoon R
04. Nyartholep's Palace / morpheuskitami
05. Celephaian Fragment / dmdr
06. O Zon Mezzamalech / Big Ol' Billy
07. The Temple of Shabbith-Ka / Doom_RO
08. Forbidden Sepulchre / dmdr
09. Cheshire / Joe-Ilya
10. The Phobos Horror / Vertigo
11. Catacombs Below the Skai / dmdr

 

??. Unknown, Unnamed / temp (uncover all the horrors best left forgotten in the Forbidden Sepulchre to unleash this beast...)

 

Previous projects:

Spoiler

2020:

-Dungeons and Demons
-Occult Secrets of the Third Reich on Mars
-Biotech is Godzilla
-Evil Egypt

-Spaceballs: The Sequel: The Search For More DBP Maps

 

For every DBP ever, please check the Doom Wiki article!

 

Sidequests:
-Fall of Society

Previous Downloads:

Spoiler

-V1 + Hotfix (Load both together)

-V2

 

Edited January 7, 2021 by Catpho

[TheOrganGrinder]

Lovecraft WADs are My Jam, so this is definitely of interest to me, but my Google skills are failing me; do you know if ZDoom 2.8.1 supports UMAPINFO as needed for this mapset?

[Alper002]

6 minutes ago, TheOrganGrinder said:

do you know if ZDoom 2.8.1 supports UMAPINFO as needed for this mapset?

Can confirm that UMAPINFO is not supported by ZDoom 2.8.1. However, it would be possible to make it work in a version of zdoom like that if a standard MAPINFO was used in conjunction with UMAPINFO. Looking in the wad file however, I can see that only UMAPINFO is present.

[seed]

Well fuck me, a... Nightmare megawad? Holy shit man.

 

I really wonder how bad this can get honestly :D .

 

14 minutes ago, TheOrganGrinder said:

do you know if ZDoom 2.8.1 supports UMAPINFO as needed for this mapset?

 

Nope, UMAPINFO is so far a unique feature present only in Graf's PrBoom and most recent versions of GZDoom.

[Uni]

1 hour ago, Catpho said:

IMPORTANT!: This mapset is balanced exclusively for the Nightmare! skill setting.

 

Then I guess @Can't play on Nightmare won't be playing this one for sure.

 

Looks cool though, it's an interesting theme.

[Catpho]

@TheOrganGrinder Alper & seed pretty much sums it up. Will edit the OP for clarity!

As for why MAPINFO isn't also there... You'd have to ask dmdr for details :P

[dmdr]

I used UMAPINFO because UMAPINFO is cool and we're currently in a chicken/egg situation where the chickens (port authors) aren't gonna implement it unless there are enough eggs (wads) that use it, but the eggs aren't being laid cos the chickens haven't made their nests. Anyway, since I was in a position to do so, I figured I could  smear my eggs all over the walls and hopefully get the chooks laying.

What the hell am I talking about again?

 

Anyway since it's come up a couple times already I'll provide a MAPINFO for the next version as a courtesy for those who don't wanna use PrBoom-Plus, although the docs on the ZDoom wiki are kinda making my eyes glaze over a bit. In the meantime, GZDoom does have a software renderer if that's what you prefer.

[Can't play on Nightmare]

36 minutes ago, Uni said:

 

Then I guess @Can't play on Nightmare won't be playing this one for sure.

 

Looks cool though, it's an interesting theme.

 

Is this MegaWad only for one difficulty?

[P41R47]

45 minutes ago, Uni said:

Then I guess @Can't play on Nightmare won't be playing this one for sure.

You are playing with things worst than death itself, fool!

You made use of the forbidden cursed words and now something more nefarious and dangerous than the great Chthulu itself, more chaotic that the blond idiot god on his darkthrone in the center of the nothingness, has been summoned above my post.

 

Not even the nightmare nor any player may lay to rest now, and with this strange pandemic aeons, even doom itself may be doomed.

 

God, forgive us!

 

 

[Alper002]

Something's up with the switch before the green key in MAP04... where it seems like it should be, there's a void you can't press on. Behind it, however(in unplayable void space!!!) there's a pressable switch. Found this out when checking in an editor to find progression.

Screenshots for in-game consequences(UMAPINFO prboom+):

Spoiler

 

While I'm at it, found a slime trail (I think?) in MAP03:

Spoiler

 

Not finished the mapset yet, but it's been a huge amount of fun rushing through these maps to desperately find the exit! And dying a lot, too!

[dmdr]

goddammit. Thanks @Alper002, the former is my fault, I was fixing up some texture stuff after submission -- although I see I missed a few misaligned textures -- and apparently flipped the one-sided linedef the switch is on somehow... after I tested it to make sure it was working. Sigh.

Here's an emergency fix: https://doomshack.org/uploads/nyartholepspalace_dmdr-bsp.wad

( @Catpho can you please add that to the OP)

 

The other thing looks like a node problem, I'll rebuild them but it's nearly my bed time so it can wait 'til rc2.

 

[Pegleg]

@Nine Inch Heels
I recall you lamenting that there weren't many maps/sets balanced around Nightmare. This one is.
 

"IMPORTANT!: This mapset is balanced exclusively for the Nightmare! skill setting. Please play on that difficulty for the intended experience. This mapset also requires a source port that supports UMAPINFO, which at the time of writing only includes PrBoom-Plus 2.5.1.7um and the latest version of GZDoom."

[TheOrganGrinder]

Thanks for the quick and clear answers all, who knows maybe this'll be my prompt to play on something other than ZDoom for a change.

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 hours ago, Pegleg said:

I recall you lamenting that there weren't many maps/sets balanced around Nightmare. This one is.

It is indeed, and in my opinion it is a bit of a mixed bag, but I don't wanna start off with pointing at things that rubbed me the way...

 

So let's see here...
I played through the set real quick, didn't bother going for 100% secrets or anything, so there's a chance I missed some hidden areas. What I think was the main dish started around map 04 to map 05, where maps started to make slightly better use of the difficulty's unique traits, before that it was largely "hitscanners + backtracking" that would threaten the player's health, because nothing else really did.

Difficulty wise there is certainly some variety, but I'd argue that most people should be able to handle the maps, perhaps with a little bit of practice, but overall everything seems very doable.

 

All in all I don't have anything to complain about with regards to visuals, though some of the sprites definitely seemed a little "alien" to me, like for instance what I'd call "small caco with googly eye". I get that it's hard to argue about cacos with googly eyes, because cacos, but.... googly eye also...

 

From a conceptual point of view, the fundamental method of thingplacing the maps is in the ballpark of "less but more dangerous monsters", which is a decent way to ensure that the maps remain playable for a wider audience, which I think isn't the worst course of action for something that is a little more on the "experimental/novelty" side. You unleash stuff over time in small to medium-ish amounts and let it rip. To me that's fair game, in most of these maps it works perfectly fine, but there was one map I've had a few gripes with, so I'll go over that real quick:

This right here is the exit of map 05, with its respective teleport closets:

(probably should have rotated this by 90°)

 

Anyway, this is one here is, in my opinion, kind of a mechanical blunder. These closets there feed monsters to the teledests on the exit stairs, with said teledests being spread out to ensure that players need to fight their way through in order to reach the finish line. Good idea, but not executed in a particularly "trustworthy" manner. The problem is that these closets never ever seem to "close", and the respawning on NM happens at random after a short period of time has passed, so you never know if something respawns, when it happens, and where the respective respawned monster will show up on these stairs. So, it's perfectly within the realms of possibility that just when the player decides to make a dash for the exit, a freshly reborn monster will show up in their path, potentially resulting in a devastating melee attack that may be unavoidable and perhaps even deadly. This is one of those things I've been thinking about when I had the idea of making purpose-built maps for NM-difficulty, and it was high on the list of things I personally would want to avoid at all costs, since it is a pretty shitty way to go out. So I would suggest hooking these closets up to a conveyor based timer, to make sure that, at some point, players don't run into situations that can deprive them of any and all agency.

 

At the time of playing this one blind, I did not know that maybe there was a way to at least partially disarm this "system" (unless I'm looking at it wrong), as well as obtaining a bigger boomstick than the RL, so I'm willing to concede that it can be made to be much easier than going up against the entire wall of meat with just the RL, but I'd also consider the tiny detail that the respective switch that does the trick can be missed quite easily, since it is placed within a secret of its own, which is already not necessarily easy to spot. I had to look up the (admittedly short) sequence in the builder in order to even catch on to it in the first place.

 

I did manage to get through without the BFG after a couple tries, with some "fuckery", but I reckon this one may ruffle some feathers, so I'd suggest having a backup mechanism in place that eventually shuts the system down entirely, so that players who missed the relevant secrets, and are a bit less patient than I am, have a more reasonable shot at this one.

Edited July 2, 2020 by Nine Inch Heels

[Salt-Man Z]

Man, every time I upgrade GZDoom I have to spend half an hour reimplementing all of my settings, and my performance gets worse...

[ReaperAA]

A wad designed for Nightmare? I will definitely try it out.

 

Although I wholly expect to get recked a few times bacause I am a slow paced player and I also don't play at nightmare or even UV fast for that matter.

[MAN_WITH_GUN]

*The most content is the NM-Speed runs*

 

*And i saw this*

 

 

[Bauul]

9 hours ago, dmdr said:

I used UMAPINFO because UMAPINFO is cool and we're currently in a chicken/egg situation where the chickens (port authors) aren't gonna implement it unless there are enough eggs (wads) that use it, but the eggs aren't being laid cos the chickens haven't made their nests. Anyway, since I was in a position to do so, I figured I could  smear my eggs all over the walls and hopefully get the chooks laying.

 

I wholly and 100% approve of this move.  UMAPINFO is a very solid idea, and I'd love to see more mapsets making use of it.  Good on you for taking the initiative.

 

4 hours ago, Salt-Man Z said:

Man, every time I upgrade GZDoom I have to spend half an hour reimplementing all of my settings, and my performance gets worse...

 

Just copy your gzdoom-[windowsusername].ini file from your old GZDoom folder to your new one, and all your settings will remain.  It's occasionally useful to let GZDoom build a new one just to refresh things, but generally you can just migrate your settings over.  Or even just copy the new GZDoom files over the top of your old ones.

 

[Phobus]

13 minutes ago, Bauul said:

Or even just copy the new GZDoom files over the top of your old ones.

I didn't even realise this wasn't how people updated GZDoom! I can't remember the last time I built a new user config...

 

Also, this map set genuinely gets my blood pumping. I've only played the first four maps continuous since release (and tested a few others previously), but the nearest equivalent is Serious Sam: TFE on Serious difficulty, for me. I'm just always on edge and constantly fighting the urge to save. I feel like anybody daunted by Nightmare should try the UV-equivalent "Pleasant Daydream" difficulty, though. Once you know the layout of a map, it's way more approachable on Nightmare as you don't need to stumble across objectives whilst doing your headless chicken routine!

[baja blast rd.]

14 hours ago, Catpho said:

This mapset also requires a source port that supports UMAPINFO, which at the time of writing only includes PrBoom-Plus 2.5.1.7um and the latest version of GZDoom.

 

The OP should read "a recent version of GZDoom." UMAPINFO support has been around in GZDoom for a while, but everything 4.2.0 and later is "up to date" re its support, according to ZDF changelogs. 

 

[GarrettChan]

Spoiler

 

Part 1 of blind playthrough.

 

Other than forcing me to switch to another sourceport, which totally screwed up my movement, Map01~03 are pretty fun.

[dmdr]

Alrighty I had a go at this mapinfo business. RC2 is likely to arrive in a day or two after the krew do a bit of coop testing, but people who absolutely must have them now ( @TheOrganGrinder) can find them here:

https://doomshack.org/uploads/dbp25-mapinfos.wad

There's a ZMAPINFO for old ZDoom and an EMAPINFO for Eternity, which may require a very recent DRDTeam build (I couldn't get it to exit to the secret map properly until I updated EE, at which point it was fine). These aren't extensively tested but what I did check is working OK. Team Eternity pls support UMAPINFO soon thx

 

Thanks to everyone who has checked it out so far and esp. @GarrettChan for the video. Sorry about your mouse :'(

 

I should reply to @Nine Inch Heels, as I'm the author of that map. Firstly, I think the image provided is a little deceptive as the 15 dudes on the left don't appear unless a specific sequence of actions is followed (this is Lovecraft inspired; poking around in dark corners isn't necessarily a good idea) and are unlikely to be found on a casual playthrough -- really only dedicated secret hunters are likely to encounter them.

That said, I do admit that there's a little bit of a difficulty spike there, but the hardest part of that encounter is the first couple of seconds when the pinkies teleport in and you're at serious risk of blowing yourself up if you react to them too slowly (certainly this is the point where I most often died during my own tests); after that it's just a matter of lobbing rockets down a corridor at 4 HKs and 1 baron. These generally die before the approx 40 second median respawn time has elapsed (for people unfamiliar with NM, respawn chance is random but becomes more likely over time), and the player is free and clear to get up to the exit. So, while your scenario of being killed to an unlucky spawn is possible it honestly never happened to me; one playtester (vigilantdoomer) achieved a death exit after copping an HK ball in the back as he rushed the exit, but given the demon in question spawned long before he tried to run past that's not quite the same thing. Overall I think that what you're describing is a bit of an edge case and just as likely, and obnoxious, in any other map with corridors, but luck is absolutely a factor in this set and not something we can mitigate much -- it's the nature of NM.

Lastly, the door you came in by will reopen in about 30 seconds so if things do get too hot, running away then going back in through the other side after the monsters have dispersed is also (eventually) an option.

[Nine Inch Heels]

1 hour ago, dmdr said:

Firstly, I think the image provided is a little deceptive as the 15 dudes on the left don't appear unless a specific sequence of actions is followed (this is Lovecraft inspired; poking around in dark corners isn't necessarily a good idea) and are unlikely to be found on a casual playthrough -- really only dedicated secret hunters are likely to encounter them.

Well, that's the thing, I had them show up despite not finding the secret. If I'm "reading" the map correctly after your explanation (which I don't think I did the first time around, seems I got it entirely backwards, actually), they should only show up if I also get access to the BFG in the very same exit room, but I only got one (barons), and not the other (BFG). I'm also certain that I did see more than just 1 baron at the same time. So I'm confused as to what went wrong there, because that outcome shouldn't even be possible. I wouldn't have said anything if it were mostly just HKs and pinks, either, because that's reasonably easy fodder to handle with that many rockets in the bag, and I reckon it should be very doable in a reliable fashion, too.

 

Here, I just went in on UV, and just rushed to the exit on about the same route I took during my blind NM attempt, and I got the barons, but not the BFG. it's neither on the floor there, nor is it in my inventory.
Picture taken moments before disaster as I fumble for the screenshot key:


EDIT: So, I'm stumped... I'll try this with GZDoom next time I play, or I dunno, I'll re-download the maps, and perhaps even the source port, maybe that fixes it. I'm definitely willing to concede that perhaps something went wrong on my end, rather than yours, I'm just not sure where to even start looking.

Edited July 3, 2020 by Nine Inch Heels

[dmdr]

@Nine Inch Heels OK, yeah, that changes things, definitely a bug. Don't suppose you can share a demo or something? I'm looking in the editor and can't see how this could happen (only the one line should be able to raise those floors) so further investigation is obviously necessary. Thanks for letting me know about this!

[Nine Inch Heels]

Heh, same area in LZDoom:

I'm beginning to think something went wrong with Prb+ version that I grabbed, so it appears to be a problem on my end. I don't suppose you ever had the same issue with prb+um during testing that I had in my previous post?

[dmdr]

I had some issues with the BFG appearing prematurely, which was related to the green key progression, but that was reproducible in Crispy and I narrowed it down to one bad switch so I just changed the map. I've never seen the barons appear without warning like that though.

[Nine Inch Heels]

So, what I'll do is I'll record a demo with prb2517um on NM difficult tomorrow (it's a bit late here by now), and I guess we'll see what that does then. Like if it desyncs or whatever. I'm just a bit too tired to play quickly and semi-properly now, heh.

[dmdr]

Awesome, keen to see it. Hopefully it's just the port playing up.

[seed]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/668830334

 

So I did a let's play of this earlier. Quite solid and actually fair to play on NM for once, it does show it was meant for it. Nice new enemies, graphics, and the atmosphere is almost surreal at times. Weapons sounds are a bit all over the place though. What I was not too fond of, however, would be the final fight on MAP09, I get the intention and all but couldn't help but feel I was being massively trolled by the mapper. It's not even the constant dying that that part involved, I don't mind that in hard maps or in general at all.

 

I also found the first two-three maps a bit too dark, whereas all the others were well lit. Maybe it's just me and my crappy monitor but eh, whatever. Crazy how consistently good these projects are as of late.

[Nine Inch Heels]

@dmdr Here's the demo: dbp25_05_exit.zip

 

I recorded this one after downloading the source port again, and deleting the older PrB+2517 from my system before unpacking the new files. This time everything seemed to work as it should as per your post, and the demo plays back just fine for me. I suppose if this demo plays back properly for you as well, and makes it to the exit, then it's probably just some hiccup when I previously installed the source port. So have a look at this one, and see if you can verify that it works fine, because if not, I'd need to to also re-download the WAD again, and then give it another shot.