Scimitar Final Beta Feedback Thread

[cycloid]

Get it here: http://www.cyclomedia.co.uk/doom/wads/scimi-b2.zip

Home Page: http://www.cyclomedia.co.uk/doom/scimitar.asp

This is the final beta, up next will be the release candidate.

Notes:

1. The dagger and scimitar sprites are still rubbiish placeholders and this is unlikely to change, what i'd weally weally like is for someone nice to provide some, otherwise I'll just end up using the samurai sword and the name scimitar will be a bit pointless. not the end of the world though.

2. I've not had much chance to fully playtest it across ports so if you need to noclip to get past something i apologise

3. my wife could go into labour any second, so if i dissapear offline for a couple of weeks that'll be why!

4. This is currently targetted at "boom derived" ports, it makes extensive use of boom features so zDoom compatibility will have to be worked in later, if i get chance ... if it's possible! The main test engines have been winMBF and eternity but i doubt prBoom will present any problems

enjoy!

[Chrono_T]

Meh, yeah the sword and knife sprites are pretty bad fitting (different hands too). Heh, you could either A: replace everything with something new with the same type of hands, or B: put doomguy hands on them. Besides that, the levels arn't bad, and the enemies are fun to kill.

[cycloid]

Well, 14 people have downloaded it according to my logs and only one person left any comments, i guess that means it's perfect already :-)

i might finally get chance to play through very thouroughly myself this weekend and take notes about the monster/ammo/health and such

[Checkmate]

I liked it. I died about three levels in but I'll try it again when I get the chance. I especially liked the continuity from level to level...

[cycloid]

glad to hear you're enjoying it. If you think it's too hard on your chosen skill level let me know, this is a feedback thread after all :-)

[Searcher]

Continuity is nice. Nice fast little levels. Logical and progressive. Ammo is reasonable, health is just the tiniest bit light, for first play, but might be much easier with each play. It may well be just fine.

Berserks might be nice for those that want to try tyson on those maps.

Only noticed one texture alignment issue so far and it was fairly minimal. I wasn't really looking for them either.

On map 5 (E1m5) I did a yellow key grab after walking across a window ledge then fell into the patio area. I was then trapped in those two rooms. you might want to put a switch inside one of those rooms in addition to what you already have so you can't get trapped in there. I had not first opened those doors and had come into it from the "back"

Nice job so far. Back to map 6.

[Checkmate]

Ok I played through the end of the 'sewer' level using glboom. Some notes:

Level 3
-Was able to grab the shotgun without the chaingunner trap being activated.
-You need to jump to get the box of shells near the ruins(no jumping in prboom)
Level 4
-Picked up backpack without opening the secret wall by the scimitar
Level 5
-Hellknight gets stuck in place near blue key
Level 8
-missing texture at start causing HOM
-'The sewers' is much much bigger than the previous levels

Also thought the scimitar was pretty weak considering the wad's name. Even killing lowly demons with it takes 2 wacks in most cases.

I like the 'clean' look of the levels a lot. Also the variety between them. When I get to finish I'll post the rest...

[Checkmate]

Played some more...
-At the very end of the level following the 'sewers' there's a missing texture/HOM.
-On the following level there's a switch high up. I'm guessing it's a secret but it can't be shot in Prboom because you can't aim up unless there's a monster on the same plane.
-On the same level you have to be able to jump to get the '100% health' powerup(right after getting the blue key).
-I couldn't progress on the next level(Flood) after I killed all the little white cacoes...
CM

[cycloid]

Thanks for all that feedback, good stuff.

The scimitar and dagger are supposed to be mean enough that the beserk is not needed. Any thoughts on how strong they should be then? being able to kill a demon in one blow with the scimitar is a good suggestion

as for your aiming/jumping issues, some of them you can circumvent, at no point have i tested these maps with vlook or jumping (so if a switch is high up you may be able to shoot it from a high up place nearby, for example)... but i will give it a thorough prboom testing to test everything you've found.

map05 key grab, well spotted :-) originally there wasnt a wall closing the ledge in so you could grab the key and just jump off, so it's an oversight on my part

map08 is big, it actually started off as two maps which i werent happy with so joined them together, but the map size does start to increase at that point anyway, if i get time i will open it up so it'll still be physically as large but hopefully not as much as a drag

map11 - flood - the gates are on a timer, controlled by a voodoo doll, you may simply have had to wait, but again, i'll check it out in prboom, it might be getting stuck

[Dave666]

Works fine on GZDOOM for me... hmmf


Idea's


Knife, strike combo. Tapping faster should allow you to stab, slash and stab again, or something.


Scimitar, Slash combo? Block?

Maybe something to deflect bullets with, I don't know.
Slash combo? Maybe make the sword go at first like that, reverse it and make it come from the left then maybe from the right again and then from up. Just naming some stuff. I don't know if it's even possible.

About strength, and all. The knife/scimitar shouldn't be heard. If you fire the knife or scimitar somewhat everyone is alerted on the map, bad.

Strength, Knife should be able to kill a zombie in 1 hit, seeing the punch takes 2 <Sometimes 3> to kill a zombie.

Scimitar should be able to kill a demon in one hit, unless you are going to add the combo.

Well, I'm out of ideas so far.

And I think most of these things can only be done on gzdoom...

buuuut... yeah...

Don't saying you have to.

[cycloid]

Yeah this is boom-compatible so the weapons are very limited to the dehacked patch, would love to make the knife/sword silent (to enemies) but alas can not. The strengths you mention ARE what i plan for though.

[cycloid]

Update:

ok so i finally got around to starting work on the RC, so far:

Weapons:

Knife : now 50 hp damage max, seems to be 50/50 wether or not it takes 1 or 2 hits to kill an imp, humans usually take only 1

Scimitar : now 120 hp max and a little faster, seems fine for dealing with demons, faster than the chainsaw at taking them down at least

Monsters :

Calfdemon : fixed death frames, falls to floor, should also be ressurectable now

Maps :

MAP 05 : added tripwires to open the yellow key area's doors from inside
MAP 10 : fixed the 100% health platform
MAP 11 : fixed the prBoom voodoo script issue, now possible to progress

Next : going to attempt to rework some weapon sprites i found on the net (inc ninja wars, or whatever it was called) to make the knife and scimitar anims at least a bit better.

[cycloid]

Right, i did it, using my elite photoshop skills and doomguy dloved hands harvested from elsewhere i made a passible set of knife sprites. they're not going to blow anyone away but they look a lot better than they did

here's a mockup, the timing wont be the same i just bashed a gif together, BTW i spelt knife wrong in the filename, heh

[SirTimberWolf]

Hey this is neat. (Short I know, sorry. :)

Congrats on the little one regardless ^_^

[Shadow Dweller]

you should give him a couple of these...

[cycloid]

More progress, the knife sprites are integrated into the wad with the deh patch quite nicely. And I've finally cleaned up MAP08, i chopped off the first quarter of the map and made the exit switch sequence about 100 times clearer (it was very puzzle-like originally, will save that sort of stuff for some kind of puzzle wad). Played through it on UV and got out alive after 3 attempts, heh, so i consider it done. Have played through maps 1-7 also on UV with IDDQD on and taken notes down (a texture alignment here, a monster placement there) so they'll be "final" fairly soon. Now that 08 is done i can finally carry on the clean up.

So far testing is going well in PrBOOM 224 which has produced a few bugs (thanks for spotting some Checkmate) but WinMBF remains the "base" port. once I've played through all the maps in PrBoom, Eternity 3.3x and Win MBF and am happy i will consider this whole thing done, zDoom is NOT a boom-based port and i do a LOT of Boom stuff in these maps so I'm not likely to test it as I simply don't have the time.

[Grazza]

cycloid said:

So far testing is going well in PrBOOM 224 which has produced a few bugs

That's an old version with some major bugs in its dehacked support. By using that for testing, you could end up wasting some time trying to solve non-existent problems with your map.

[cycloid]

oh, right, the main DEH bug i've come across is that it ignores Thing Bit mnenomics (at least the ones Whacked2 generates). i.e. Bits: SOLID + SHOOTABLE will have no effect but Bits: 123456 will work just fine. Aside from that it seems OK. What version do you recommend as a "base" prBoom for maximum compatibility bashing? i can never get 202 to run (it crashes) and is 226 really that much different?

[myk]

Use the current one, v2.4.5. You can use the compatibility level 9 for precise Boom v2.02 behavior.

[Grazza]

If you want to test for strict Boom compatibility, then prboom 2.02 is by definition the best choice of course (short of running Boom 2.02 itself), but if you can't run that, then the latest version is best.

I think some dehacked bugs came in at the time of the merger between prboom and lxdoom. So most 2.1.x and 2.2.x versions had worse dehacked support than 2.02. For instance, 2.2.4 still had bugs that impacted STRAIN and stopped Hacx from being playable at all (Bits = 0 was wrongly processed, for instance). These bugs have gradually been getting fixed since. The actual release with the most fixes is plus-2.4.6.1 - this features stuff from the official 2.4.6 SVN version (as it was a few weeks ago) and from prboom+, which include some deh fixes, as you'll see from the changelog.

[cycloid]

OK thanks, so far it seems to be working fine in 224 with just that bits mnenomics fix, i'll probably still get the latest prboom-plus to test against that and hopefully it'll work in both. hopefully, heh.

[cycloid]

OK, maps 09 and 10 have been tweaked and are "complete" though they're a bit hard on UV I had to use saves just to get through myself and was down to 1% for a while on 10 (but since reshuffled the health pickups) but the nature of the sewers maps means you can bait and bottleneck. Anyone trying to just wade in to these will get bitten hard, heh.

[cycloid]

Played through and tweaked 11,12,13,14 and 15, all of which needed monster, ammo and health tweaks. Of course this is me playing knowing where everthing is but I've tested these without using secrets or the knife or scimitar so there's a buffer zone for those of you who get lost or use up all your ammo during spray and pray panic moments :-)

So basically all i have left to do is finish the UV tweaking (the lower skill levels just have a weapon gifted to you at the start and/or an extra bit of health strewn about) for the final episode, and go back over ep1 just to be sure.. then sort out the bloody scimitar sprite, which i might get done today. Hope to make it in time for newstuff 294 or 295, it's my 30th birthday on the 27th Oct so i'd very much like to get it out the door by then :-)

old git, i know

[cycloid]

(31),16,17 and 18 are all playtested and tweaked up on UV, the three arenas each have a choice the player needs to make at the start (slightly inspired by fragport's arenas) so i had to thouroughly balance them in 3 ways. 16 and 17 needed a LOT of work to get the balance right, having far too little health and ammo for the liberal scatterings of revenants and such so this has definitely been a worthwhile exersise. As they approach the penultimate map19 though they are getting HARD, not in a million-monsters-in-your-face way but a, oh crap, two mancubi and i only have the standard SG with 18 shells, kinda way. It does lend them a more of a puzzle aspect than an outright shoot-em-up aspect, what to kill in what order is still more or less up to the player but diving in (from a pistol start at least) WILL get you killed quickly. Playing through you'll have had the SSG for quite some time so they won't be quite as outright lethal.

Left to do:

consider expanding map 17 a little
finalise map19 and map20
pistol start episode 1 one-last-time

finish the scimitar sprites (which are now half done using my 'leet photoshop skills)(i.e. they're probably crap!)