Difficulty Detection Dehacked Patches v0.1

[40oz]

I've heard of all different kinds of ways for a mapper to test his own map on different difficulty levels, like a strong player will play intentionally sloppily, or with keyboard only when used to mouselook, or with -fast monsters on. And conversely, a lesser skilled player may play with god mode or with saves to focus on higher difficulty scenarios. I don't believe these are very good or accurate ways to implement skill levels.

That said, I decided I'd make some dehacked patches designed to support internal playtesting by making slight alterations to gameplay that are intended to simulate how the game might play across different skill calibers of players, without reconstructing the foundation of the game.

I've tried the patches on some easy Doom levels like Doom's Knee Deep in the Dead and Icarus, and on some harder ones like CHORDG.wad and Swim with the Whales, and it seems to work okay, as I was able to successfully play the easier wads with minor challenge, and the harder wads a bit casually. It's in its early stages and could probably do with better examination of differently skilled players, perhaps with some volunteers to playtest stuff with it for me :)

Anyway, the intended purpose for these patches are for map testing only. They're designed to put a level designer in the perspective of a player of a differently skilled player during testing. For example,

If you are a pretty skilled player who just finished designing a level carefully crafted for Ultra Violence, run through your map one more time with easytest.deh loaded. This will give monsters a slight boost in hit points, faster attacks, harder to predict reaction times, faster fire rates, etc. included to simulate the challenge a novice player may have with predicting monsters' behavior. If the map is too hard, you may be able to home in on the struggle areas for a lesser skilled player, and you could reduce monsters, or add more health/ammo on skill 2 or 3 without an external playtester telling you your map is too hard on easy mode.

Likewise, if you aren't a very strong player, and have just finished a map, give it a run with hardtest.deh, which will make all monsters and pickups fullbright, boost the players' weapons fire rate a bit, give monsters a delay before attacking, slow fireballs down, etc. If you find the map to be too easy with the patch, then your map maybe lacking in clever ambushes or monster quantities that an expert player would crave.

Release the map without these dehacked patches you tested with your level and (hopefully) the map should have difficulty levels implemented in a fair way. Details are in the text files.

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[scifista42]

I doubt that this would become a 100% reliable way how to properly implement difficulty settings without playtesters or a standard "guess", anyway I find this impressive. It indeed works as a "simulation" of some kind, though the changes are relatively little, but I haven't tested it with whole long levels yet. I might find it useful, thanks for making and sharing the patches.

[plums]

That's a really clever idea, well done.

[Ribbiks]

-Pinky Demons and Spectres have had their pain chances
taken away to make them more likely to box the player in.

this is an interesting idea in itself. coupled with a slight boost in hp I could see this actually making demons directly threatening, instead of just threatening by proxy.

[40oz]

I'm sure there are specific case situations that would make certain aspects of these patches unreliable, and dehacked isn't without its limitations, so some of the things I would have liked to do couldn't be done, but I was careful to give notoriously devious or annoying monsters (shotgun guys, chaingunners, lost souls, revenants) an extra spike in deadliness in easytest, while generic plain fireball monsters didn't get much at all, as they're pretty basic even for a newbie.

I couldn't think of much to do with the archvile though. Its flame duration is a sensitive thing to touch, as players kinda have that part of the archvile memorized. I can't think of much besides an extra boost in health, lowered pain chance. Not much else that won't really hurt the game.

I hope these baselines are pretty good though.

[plums]

40oz said:

I couldn't think of much to do with the archvile though. Its flame duration is a sensitive thing to touch, as players kinda have that part of the archvile memorized. I can't think of much besides an extra boost in health, lowered pain chance. Not much else that won't really hurt the game.

Faster movement and resurrection speed? Doesn't make much difference for one on its own, but when it's in a crowd of enemies or with another AV it can be easy for them to overwhelm the player.