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traversd

map balance tool?

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Map balance tool.

Does such a thing exist? I've been chatting to megadoomer a bit re:playtesting for the 1994 pack and wondered if such a tool or plugin/feature existed in any editors. (read: i'm stuck on a train and my mind is beginning to wander)

Just musing that it would do the following:
*totals health, ammo
*totals 1 hit max damage from each monster in map.
*totals hit points of each ammo unit did 3/4's damage.
*perhaps give a ratio for both health and ammo compared to potential damage given/received as well?

Then compares the 4 totals to for mapper to then tweak as preferred.

Not a replacement for playtesting of course and would be difficult to cater for AVs, player proximity to ammo/health etc. If such a thing existed i wonder what existing maps might show?

carry on ;o)
Travers

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You're going to get a lot of comments along the line of "map balance is an art not a science" or something so I might as well be the first. :)

The big problem with this is that enemies can vary hugely in danger depending on the circumstances. Position, ammo and weapon availability etc. It seems to me that this would be absurdly difficult to get anything worthwhile from.

Also consider extremely non-linear maps, the order you tackle things in would result in different scenarios being more/less dangerous by the time you reach them. How would you mathematically represent this?

Ultimately it sounds futile. It's the same sort of problem Oblige and AeoD have with health and ammo balancing, both struggle to get an effective balance because you can't break it down into a simple algorithm. There's too many factors at play.

If all you want is a count of the things in your map, each thing then "weighted" differently depending on what it is, with the final numbers added up and compared, I'm sure somebody can cook one up easily, there's just been no reason to do that.

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Jim Flynn's STAT.EXE does more or less what you describe. I recall it has some issues with multiplayer stuff (don't recall what exactly - whether it counted them even for SP stats, maybe), but you'll be taking the results with a large pinch of salt in any case, naturally.

There are other tools along those lines too; I recall Yonatan Donner created one, whose name I forget. Edit: Doom Things Analyzer.

more info

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For ammo balance it would be useful to simply compare (a) the total damage which can be inflicted by the ammo on the map with (b) the total health of all monsters on the map.

For monsters you could roughly estimate how much damage each would do, total that and compare with the total of health/armor on the map, though I think the results would be very inaccurate (potentially wrong by a factor of 3 or more), making the result almost useless.

Doing a simulation of the battles (the way OBLIGE does) is probably not feasible on arbitrary maps, since it is very hard to take any old map and decompose it into a set of rooms, and figure out which order the rooms are visited in (taking locked doors and switched doors into account), so you know which weapons the player will have at any point. Then there's the problem Melon mentions that position of monsters, amount of cover (etc) can greatly affect how much damage they can do to a player.

Perhaps a lesser goal where the user could select a group of monsters and items, and the editor could simulate that particular battle and suggest the amount of health to provide -- that may be the best way.

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Grazza said:

I recall Yonatan Donner created one, whose name I forget. Edit: Doom Things Analyzer.


reading the instructions it seems this is what i had in mind, and more. cool stuff.

i appreciate that tools like this cant calculate all possible scenarios, and that mapping is not a science. was just wondering if such a tool allowed that sort of analysis.

cheers guys

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WAD Spy is another map stats analysis tool, probably the most recent of the bunch. It is based on WadWhat, a program even older than DMTHA.

While their output provides a useful picture of a map's stats, sometimes the reports can be unexplicably bizarre. Take d2reload.wad MAP30, for example. Both DMTHA and WAD Spy correctly detect there are two Cybers (4000 hit points each) and two Spider Masterminds (3000 hp each) in this level, and then proceed to report the total monster hitpoints as 3873 and 3782 respectively.

You'll need more than a pinch of salt for such cases. ;)

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Never_Again said:

WAD Spy is another map stats analysis tool, probably the most recent of the bunch. It is based on WadWhat, a program even older than DMTHA.

While their output provides a useful picture of a map's stats, sometimes the reports can be unexplicably bizarre. Take d2reload.wad MAP30, for example. Both DMTHA and WAD Spy correctly detect there are two Cybers (4000 hit points each) and two Spider Masterminds (3000 hp each) in this level, and then proceed to report the total monster hitpoints as 3873 and 3782 respectively.

You'll need more than a pinch of salt for such cases. ;)

It secretly divides hp by ten.

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The better ones have probably been listed (Donner's and Flynn's) but recently I looked up all the ones I was aware of and listed them in this thread.

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