Knee-Deep in KDiZD (original project thread archived from 2008)

[32in24MaintenanceBot]

edit: ARGH remember to log out first, kids

[Belial]

printz said:

You'll unhelp the hardcore Doomers who want to not have ammo and have the challengez. :-<

I'm not an hardcore Doomer...

I think I'm gonna cry now.

[esselfortium]

printz said:

Good, you probably caught it that Z1M3 is too long to fit vDoom, and it won't annoy you anymore this time, letting you play to the end. You'll say KDiKDiZD is the Wad of the Week so Graf Zahl can sleep happy that you praised his yearly work ;)

What, does any reference to Nazi have to mean devolvement? Other than the fact that it's an overused lame joke, similar to Doom 2's two lame secret levels?

You'll unhelp the hardcore Doomers who want to not have ammo and have the challengez. :-<

I didn't say I made it easier. Having to pistol monsters to death for an entire map is annoying. It's not fun.

How, by any means, did you manage to make bullet casings not waste ammo... AHEM, DOUBLE THE CONSUMPTION PER SHOT??? That would save the problem, but make it look unrealistic and patchy. But what the hell do I really have to care? I don't, cuz it plays good.

You can change the amount of ammo used per BFG shot in dehacked. Set it to 0, use A_FireBFG to fire the bullet casings, and away you go.
edit: This doesn't work right in Chocodoom 1.0.0, but it's fixed in the latest SVN build.

[esselfortium]

Finally, the moment you've all been waiting for!

I recorded a somewhat casual, slow-paced showoff demo of Knee-Deep in KDiZD z1m1.

It's in mp4 format. I've tested it in Quicktime, MPlayer, and VLC. It seems to work best in Quicktime. There are some audio desyncing issues that I couldn't fix. On my computer, at least, the audio stays in sync better in Quicktime. Your mileage may vary.

http://sl4.startan3.com/kdikdizd-preview.zip (29mb)

Note that I don't normally play that poorly. I was out of practice, plus I was trying to take it kind of slow and show off the map. Cut me some slack :p

Enjoy!

[Reckoner]

This is looking great! I am very impressed with the accuracy with which you redid the maps. I'm really looking forward to playing this!

How is the progress going with the rest of the maps? Can we get an estimate on how much has been completed so far?

[esselfortium]

Thanks! :D

I've done the first room and hallway of z1m4, Tango has done a bit of work on z1m6, Brinks has done the intro area of z1m7, and Tun has done somewhere around 40% of z1m9. To be honest, none of us have done much work on this for the past couple of weeks. :\

[kristus]

More compressed than a Youtube clip and horribly desynced. Yay..Some nice effects in there. kudos.

[Reckoner]

esselfortium said:

To be honest, none of us have done much work on this for the past couple of weeks. :\

While I really like your attention to detail, I'm not sure that emulating the KDiZD development cycle and release schedule is really necessary. I don't want to see the release getting pushed back to 1990.

[esselfortium]

kristus said:

More compressed than a Youtube clip and horribly desynced. Yay..Some nice effects in there. kudos.

Sorry about the issues with the video. My first try encoding it resulted in a 72mb file that was desynced even more badly. I blame Snapz Pro for recording the audio desynced in the first place, and iMovie/Quicktime for not being able to start the sound consistently with the video so that I had no idea whether I had corrected it or not. :(

[Tango]

Reckoner said:

While I really like your attention to detail, I'm not sure that emulating the KDiZD development cycle and release schedule is really necessary. I don't want to see the release getting pushed back to 1990.

Yes, neither do we. I personally would like to get this finished before I was born.

[GreyGhost]

I think Reckoner's forgotten that the development timeline runs in reverse for this project. :-)

esselfortium said:

I recorded a somewhat casual, slow-paced showoff demo of Knee-Deep in KDiZD z1m1.

Downloading as I type...

[Manc]

Huge shells are huge!

[esselfortium]

I haven't scaled them down yet :(

[Butts]

yargh this is amazing

[scorpion]

Any chance of the video being mirrored somewhere? It seems I can't download it from its current location.

[exp(x)]

Status report, bitches.

[esselfortium]

/me coughs

er..heh

I've gotten kind of sidetracked with the billion other projects that I owe work for, plus I got somewhat bored and frustrated with trying to simplify other peoples' finished work into something that doom2.exe can handle.

It's not dead, but I'm not particularly motivated to work on it right now. At the very least, I'll release the vanillafied z1m1 eventually, but don't give up all hope yet. :p

And of course if you'd like to help with the other maps! *nudge nudge nudge*

[Edward850]

I offered to help, but I never got a response.

[printz]

esselfortium said:

plus I got somewhat bored and frustrated

Breathe deeply, sleep a day, and all this boredom and frustration which seemed inescapable, is actually over!

[Mechadon]

Mek would love to help, but Mek is very busy :(

[esselfortium]

Okay!

So, progress is underway again on this.

I've done a bunch of work on z1m4 in the past few days. The first main room, with the four small doors around it, is done, as are the little rooms beyond those doors, including the underwater switch where you turn on the reactor or whatever the heck it is that turns the water into nukage, turns on a bunch of lights, and unlocks a door. (Yes, the one switch does all these things.) Some screenshots of that are here: http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/kdikdizd/m4-omgnukage/

Feel free to yell at Tango to get moving on z1m6. :|

In dehacked news, I've replaced the Mauler Demon with the Blood Demon as its lost soul attack was somehow causing crashes. Even though I said I wasn't going to do this, I'm currently working on implementing Magmantis with the remaining frames I have. (Yes, there are still a couple frames left. This will almost certainly be the last of them, though I seem to keep finding a few more every time I look). Once that's done I'm probably going to ditch the Stone Imp and replace it with the Satyr, since the Satyr is used much more often and has more original sprites.

To compensate for Magmantis not being as large as its KDiZD equivalent, and also just to mix things up a bit, the arena will likely be quite a bit different. I have a few ideas in mind, though nothing is set in stone yet.

Now go and reply to this thread to let me know that people do actually still care about this thing :P

[Tango]

This project seems really cool. Is this a joke, though? If not, I'd really like to be part of the team.

[esselfortium]

Tango said:

This project seems really cool. Is this a joke, though? If not, I'd really like to be part of the team.

fgdhfjgkhlj;kl'

[Edward850]

Now I wish I wasn't working on Gamma, because I could help you if I had the time.

[esselfortium]

I took some screenshots of Magmantis in a crappy test arena I threw together in 5 minutes.
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/kdikdizd/magmantis/capture_20042008_205659.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/kdikdizd/magmantis/capture_20042008_205527.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/kdikdizd/magmantis/capture_20042008_205622.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/kdikdizd/magmantis/capture_20042008_205454.png

Currently its two attacks are a Scythe2-Afrit-ish barrage of several projectile types, and a Lost Soul spawner, but I've got to say that I'm not happy with the Lost Soul spawning at all. If I can get together enough frames to give it something like the Arch-Vile's fire attack, I might do that. Alternately I might just stick with the Afritish attack only.

Despite being about the same height as the Cyberdemon, it feels very short. I can't actually make it taller, but the perceived height problem could be lessened by using the vanilla deep-water trick so that the player will sink into the lava a bit as well, and adjusting the sprite offsets of Magmantis to appear at the same ground level it does now. The gigantic arms sticking out of the top of it are the main cause of the problem though, as they take up just about the entire upper half of some of the sprites. I don't think there's really much I can do about that without getting entirely new sprites made for it, though...:(

[Butts]

amazing.

[Mechadon]

Yay for low res! I could hardly make the monster out...but it's still amazing that you've been able to pull that off.

[Scuba Steve]

Chop the Rear arms off... they are really hideous and look bolted on. They don't do anything, either.

[esselfortium]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. They take up like 40% of the thing's height and bring its head to about doomguy's eye level. Either that or beg you to make a new set of sprites based on the concept art :D :D :D

[Creaphis]

Keep working on this! It's too awesome to not exist.

I have no idea how you got that reactor room to work. I have a feeling that picking the map apart in Doombuilder wouldn't even answer that question.