Dmon 1.2 Released

[beast]

It is just over a year since I released Dmon, so here is the next update on my WAD analysis tool to help balance your maps.

 

What is Dmon?

It tries to help map creators answer:

• The percentage of monsters that use hitscan attacks
• How much health and armor pickups there are, relative to how much damage monsters can do to the player
• The amount of damage the player can inflict on monsters, given the amount of ammo

 

Version 1.2 has a number of big changes.

 

The most obvious is the output format into rows. A new `--pivot` option provides to old style if you prefer stats in columns, but you will need a larger terminal than the standard 80 columns.

 

The second big change is how ratios are calculated:

• Health and Armor ratios are the total health pickups *over* total monster attack points
• Ammo ratios are the total ammo damage *over* total monster hit points

 

A bit more about hit points, attack points and ammo damages:

• Monster attack points are taken as the median damage done per monster. For monsters with both melee and ranged attacks, the damage for each is added.
• Bullet damage is taken as the median damage done by the Chaingun per tap of the trigger.
• Shell damage is taken as the median damage done by the shotgun per attack. This choice over the super shotgun is due to the commonality of the weapon across DOOM I and II. The difference in damage may be significant, but what is important is that the same metric is used consistently against baselines, providing a constant comparison.

• Rocket damage is taken as the median damage done by the rocket launcher per direct hit (no blast damage).

• Plasma damage is taken as the median damage done by the plasma gun per shot.

 

To illustrate with some examples:

• health/AP of 1 indicates the player can fully heal (100%) if every monster on the map gets one attack against the player, assuming median damage is dealt.
• armor/AP of 0.5 tells us there is 50% armor pickups relative to total monster attack points, if every monster on the map gets one attack against the player, assuming median damage is dealt.
• bullet/HP of 1 indicates enough rounds to kill each monster at least once, assuming the median amount of damage is inflicted per shot.
• rocket/HP of 3 means you can deal enough damage to kill every monster 3 times over with rockets.

 

A practical example, comparing Doom The Way Id Did:

dmon DTWID.wad E3M9 --diff

[DTWID.wad E3M9 versus DOOM2]
                  EASY  MEDIUM    HARD
hitscan %          -16     -10      -7
health/AP          +.1    +.02     +.1
armor/AP           +.3     +.2     +.1
bullet/HP          +.4     +.4     +.4
shell/HP            +1     +.8     +.7
rocket/HP          +.3     +.3     +.2
plasma/HP          +.3     +.3     +.2
flags                p               p

• The map has 7% less hitscan monsters than the Doom II average, on the hard skill
• The map has a +1 shell/HP more than the Doom II average on the easy skill. The total shell/HP for this map is 3 (listed without --diff) so enough shells to kill all monsters 3 times over.
• health, armor, bullets, rockets and plasma are fractionally different than the Doom II average. So the map is very near the baseline in terms of items versus monsters.

 

 

The version of Omgifol has also been updated, and this version sees Python 3 compatibility.
 

As usual you can run from source (both Python 2.7, Python 3.8 are tested to work). A Windows executable is provided for the rest (built with py2exe).

 

Download links and installation instructions

[Dranyan]

This sounds useful. Definitely gonna download it now...