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Vorpal

Minor Gameplay Mod [updated 2/3/2016]

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Sometimes when I get bored I fiddle about with zdoom's decorate, most of the time it's me struggling with syntax and then bugging others for help on why X/Y/Z doesn't work. I've made a few unreleased mods, but this is the first one where I didn't steal any code only stole a little code and so I don't mind showing people, and maybe y'all will help with bugs and whatnot since I am hopeless as a scripter.

Objective: attempt to modernize (i.e. make harder for the modern player)the gameplay while staying in spirit with the base game, and also tone down some gameplay imbalances. The biggest offenders of vanilla gameplay for me are: predictability of certain enemies, redundancy of certain enemy roles, and pain-state spamming via chaingun/plasma. Ultimately I also want to translate this to EDF for Eternity Engine as well and drop zdoom completely, but I haven't learned how that engine Does Stuff(tm) yet.

This is NOT intended to ever be an overhaul of every aspect of Doom's gameplay - but only to identify certain gameplay "holes" and surgically address them. It is also NOT a smooth graphics overhaul and special effects overhaul with bullet shells and smoke everywhere (but feel free to modify it yourself, if that's your cup of tea)


Features:
*pistol now has a (minor) role as a close quarters panic weapon, in that it can fire quickly and inaccurately
*shotgun animation no longer blocks so much screen real-estate, and has a vertical element in its pellet spread
*chaingun firing rate reduced, damage increased, enemy knockback increased.
*rocket ammo reduced to 30 (60 with backpack)
*plasmagun provides a high damage burst, though costly and chaotic
*cell ammo reduced to 15 (30 with backpack)
*bfg consumes 2 cells - so it behaves as in vanilla

*arachnotron pursues the player with a new firing pattern and lower HP, instead of the stationary and effortlessly dodge-able vanilla behavior
*lost soul size and HP reduced
*mancubus projectile vectors are randomized and staggered, for more unpredictability


Here's a video.

Or download it and try it out:
bsp_deco_v6.zip
bsp_deco_v6.txt

Some points I would appreciate some help/ideas on would be:
*How to get an enemy to change target, do something, then return to its original target?

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*make pistol feel less awkward?


A better sound. And it doesn't feel natural that you can't simply hold down the fire button to shoot at an intermediate rate. I'm fine with rapid fire requiring clickspam, but I don't like having to do that to fire anything at all. I don't want to subject my clicky finger to RSI. (I have experienced this as an instrumentalist, and it sucks.)

I don't like the shotgun and chaingun changes. The shotgun is pretty cool as is, and the obtrusion feels "right" somehow; I never noticed it being an annoyance in the first place. The swinging across the screen looks badass. The chaingun would be better (more pleasing to use, less redundant) with inverse changes: lowered damage per bullet, faster rate of fire, with the latter outpacing the former.

The effect of all of these changes is to homogenize the bullet weapons. #3 loses its character, #4 loses its niche as a fast hitscanner and becomes more like a souped-up pistol, which -- well of course -- #2 actually is now, to a lesser degree. :) The recent Valiant changed the pistol and chaingun well, imo.

You should also replace the plasma firing sounds (I think that should be a staple in every weapons mod anyway).

The Mancubus fire pattern is a nice idea but it looks ugly, the trajectories the shots take, and the Mancubus didn't need a lot of fixing anyway. It hardly even looks like the fireballs are emanating from the cannon. It's just weird.

I battled against some Arachnotrons and they are even less threatening now. The changes are like a permanent form of the helpful aspects of partial invisibility (worse aim) but with none of the harmful aspects (unpredictability). A substantial % of the cells should be fired straight ahead, imo. Both the Mancubus and Arachnotron are now totally harmless except when surrounding the player in high numbers -- most of their shots go off into obstacles.

The changes might be better suited to extremely wide-open areas, but then there's also in-fighting to worry about.

A lot of your actual and proposed changes kind of violate the "if it ain't broke ..." principle and ignore more urgent fixes -- like the revenant's sprite-hitbox incongruence (other monsters have this problem too, iirc). I'd much rather see changes to the hell nobles, too; they actually need it.

Hope this helps. :)

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Minor credit issue: Weapons of Saturn was created by me, not wildweasel. I can remove the vent holes for the shotgun in exchange for proper crediting if you're interested.

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Wow Lippeth, that's got to be the biggest airhead thing I've done on these forums (and there have been many). Fixed the crediting, since while I joke about "stealing" resources, I take it seriously when borrowing others' resources and I full derped here.

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Haha, no worries, I've had my share of goofs as well. I'm forever tormented with comments I've left on idgames. But I can still add the original Doom barrel to the shotgun if you want.

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What I like:

-gameplay mods that tweak the way combat is balanced (while retaining the majority of original behavior) are something I enjoy seeing, especially the different approaches taken by different people.

-it is very satisfying to run up to an imp, spam 'fire', and unload six bullets into its stupid face before it can retaliate.

-the vertical spread on the shotgun seems appropriate.

-the lost souls in general. Gameplay is so much smoother when they don't take forever to kill, and they do somehow look more natural at a smaller scale. My own (to be finished) gameplay rebalancing mod / mapset has very similar lost soul edits.

-making the arachnotron plasma less damaging gives the player a little more leeway to momentarily run into their stream of fire without it meaning instant death, encouraging more liberal use.


What I'm meh about :

-being forced to tap the fire key for every pistol shot gets old way before the exit to MAP01. Timing of the flash frames also seems off(?).

-Doom64-esque simplified shotgun animation could be combined with faster firing rate or something. I miss the classic cocking frames (can't say I've ever minded it blocking the screen, but plasma blocking the screen does bother me, so to each their own). If doing away with those frames meant that the shotgun's damage per second approached that of the SSG, I'd be able to embrace the change more easily.

-The new chaingun is painful to use, and feels unnaturally crippled. One of the only things the standard chaingun has going for it is the ability to stunlock opponents in their pain states, and this one can't even do that any more. Despite the damage boost, it still has terrible damage per second, terrible damage per shot, and terrible ammo capacity, compared to all the other bread and butter weapons (SSG, rocket launcher, plasmagun). It feels almost like a crappy nerfed shotgun now.

-very minor gripe, but a few untouched aspects of gameplay that personally stand out as bigger sources of imbalance than those addressed, e.g. revenant missiles doing more damage (up to 80HP) than they need to, the Baron of Hell posing miniscule threat but taking forever to kill, etc. As mentioned, though, I like seeing different perspectives on what an ideal balance in Doom looks like, so please keep going.

-what rdwpa said about the new mancubus and arachnotron. I actually found MAP07 (with -fast) much easier with this mod, and the mancubus' shots no longer look like they're even coming out of its cannons.

Vorpal said:

The biggest offenders of vanilla gameplay for me are: predictability of certain enemies, redundancy of certain enemy roles, and pain-state spamming via chaingun/plasma.

I completely agree about redundancy being an issue (with the mancubus and revenant, how much do we still need the hell knight? With the hell knight, how much do we still need the baron?). On the other hand, predictable (yet varied) attack patterns are part of the basic gameplay I enjoy. Your motivation to change them seems understandable, though.

However, I see the ability to stun monsters via pain states as an important part of the game's existing balance. Unless you're facing only small resistance from a single direction, it's impossible to stun more than an enemy or two at a time. The tactical decision of which monsters, if any, to disable from afar, is part of the fun. I don't think this provides the player undue advantage in combat, given that the weapons which can reliably stun either, 1) have low damage and ammo capacity (chaingun), 2) use ammo that is shared by a vastly more damage-efficient weapon (plasmagun), or 3) require you to be dangerously close to your target (chainsaw).

Also is there a parameter that governs how likely an enemy is going to attack

There is the MinMissileChance property, as well as the MISSILEMORE and MISSILEEVENMORE actor flags (linked on that same page).

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Although I have my own personal gameplay mod, I still enjoy seeing other people's modification that spice up the game a bit. Thanks for sharing.

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Thanks for the responses, some of what you guys are saying is spot on, some of it I completely disagree with though ;-)

rdwpa said re: pistol:


And it doesn't feel natural that you can't simply hold down the fire button to shoot at an intermediate rate.


The vanilla pistol has no combat role at all in Doom, other than perhaps to educate a first time player how to fire a weapon. I gave it a pain-state spam capability at the expense of losing the ability to just hold the fire button, since I'm trying to punish that gameplay mechanic. Unless I get a better idea for a pistol role, it'll remain as a panic weapon.

rdwpa said re: manc:

The Mancubus fire pattern is a nice idea but it looks ugly, the trajectories the shots take, and the Mancubus didn't need a lot of fixing anyway. It hardly even looks like the fireballs are emanating from the cannon. It's just weird.


I agree, I just fudged the coordinates of where the projectiles spawn since I don't know their exact values. I'd like to get them to mimic the vanilla mancubus origin coordinates exactly, and then give them a slightly more random trajectory, because the vanilla mancubus is completely harmless in its predictability.

rdwpa said re: arachnotron:

Both the Mancubus and Arachnotron are now totally harmless except when surrounding the player in high numbers -- most of their shots go off into obstacles.


For me the Mancubus is much more difficult now and in a good place in terms of difficulty. The Arachnotron I agree is wimpier than vanilla, but I intend to make its attack pattern more dangerous. The only reason it's not, is because I need to steal/make a "charge-up" sound before firing, otherwise it's ridiculously hard.

rdwpa said:

A lot of your actual and proposed changes kind of violate the "if it ain't broke ..." principle and ignore more urgent fixes -- like the revenant's sprite-hitbox incongruence (other monsters have this problem too, iirc). I'd much rather see changes to the hell nobles, too; they actually need it.


I have thought about the Revenant issue but decided against it. I didn't mind changing the lost soul to be smaller, sure it may access some tunnels/areas it couldn't before, due to its new size - but making the Revenant taller to fit its sprite would potentially make them stuck in various id maps and pwads, which is not worth the change IMO. As for the knight and baron, I feel their roles are pretty good with the knight as "an imp that takes more time to kill and forces the player to make priority target assessments" and the baron as something that can deny the player access to an area/escape route since he's like a moving wall of HP.

SFoZ911 said re: shotgun:

Doom64-esque simplified shotgun animation could be combined with faster firing rate or something.


Eeeheehee, it would be more satisfying I agree, but no I dont want to mess with the dps of what could be considered the benchmark Doom weapon, upon which all others are measured

SFoZ911 said re: chaingun:

Despite the damage boost, it still has terrible damage per second, terrible damage per shot, and terrible ammo capacity, compared to all the other bread and butter weapons


I removed its role as a pain-state spammer and will stand by that to my grave, heh heh. Although I gave it a new role as a high efficiency weapon in terms of damage per shot (15-45 now versus 5-15 in vanilla, I think). If I can figure out a way to make the bullets pierce, this would increase further.

Thanks for the observations and discussion, I definitely have some new gameplay areas that I would like to address as a result.

Oh and Lippeth, if you did have non-vented shotgun sprites, I would love that! Are you the one who made those sprite edits in the first place (the slightly altered perspective frames and the way the hand moves)? I've seen them used in so many different mods now, I think a lot of us love those edits :-)

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Vorpal said:

I'm trying to punish that gameplay mechanic.

Punish all you want but please don't do it by inflicting physical pain!

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Haha hey, I'm not forcing anyone to click that fast, click slowly if it suits you. Or just play as if you were playing vanilla, i.e. immediately find a weapon that isn't the pistol, never to return.

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I dislike the concept of limiting usage of an advantageous gameplay mechanic by physically uncomfortable controls.

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Eeeheehee, it would be more satisfying I agree, but no I dont want to mess with the dps of what could be considered the benchmark Doom weapon, upon which all others are measured

I personally don't see the shotgun retaining the role of "benchmark Doom weapon" beyond Knee Deep in the Dead; certainly not since Doom 2 shifted things around. To me, the SSG, rocket launcher, and plasma gun are all more worthy of that title, as they're all pretty evenly balanced with each other and against the game's enemies. The shotgun is mostly relegated to being an introductory weapon (i.e. a better 'pistol'), or a less efficient SSG with some niche long-range applications.

I removed its role as a pain-state spammer and will stand by that to my grave, heh heh. Although I gave it a new role as a high efficiency weapon in terms of damage per shot (15-45 now versus 5-15 in vanilla, I think). If I can figure out a way to make the bullets pierce, this would increase further.

It's not high enough efficiency to make up for the tedious firing rate, IMO. Your chaingun bullet still only deals less than half the damage of a single shotgun shell, which is itself only 2/3s as efficient as using the SSG. The new chaingun's role (slow intermittent stream of reasonably ammo efficient damage ) overlaps with the shotgun's so much at this point that they might as well be a single gun.

Putting both my own distaste for the sluggisness, and the lost ability to stun enemies aside, I think the chaingun is still nerfed by the scale of these changes. It seems to fire more than 300% slower, and deals only 300% its original damage per shot. Multiple penetration would be a very nice, but I would still avoid using this weapon as much as possible because all the fun has been sucked out of it. I wouldn't mind these mechanics for a pistol replacement, as that'd make it slightly more relevant against mid-tier enemies.

Or just play as if you were playing vanilla, i.e. immediately find a weapon that isn't the pistol, never to return.


So long as it isn't the awkward chaingun. =p

Something I noticed: is there a reason for replacing some of the pistol sprites with seemingly identical copies in the PK3? A couple of them have new offsets ( like PISGB0 vs HGEDB0 ), but others ( like PISGC0 vs HGEDC0 ) look the same. This also looks broken in freedoom (and likely any project with custom pistol sprites), because your decorate definition doesn't redefine all the weapon states (Ready, Select, Deselect). So in Freedoom, the pistol looks normal until you pull the trigger, whereupon it takes on the Doom graphics during the firing frames.

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Vorpal said:

Oh and Lippeth, if you did have non-vented shotgun sprites, I would love that! Are you the one who made those sprite edits in the first place (the slightly altered perspective frames and the way the hand moves)? I've seen them used in so many different mods now, I think a lot of us love those edits :-)

I haven't seen anyone make the shotgun pump like that before I made these sprites originally, but I can't say who did it first. Here's your mod with the classic shotgun barrel, I hope you like it!

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Modified enemies don't FACETARGET all the way through their attack states, so if you run out of the way they end up shooting projectiles at the player while somehow facing the complete opposite direction.

Why is shotgun animation changed? How does that in any way effect gameplay? Also, it's a chaingun, by all means it needs to be fast, or it's just a horrible shotgun. At this point it's even worse than the pistol.

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Jaxxoon R said:

Also, it's a chaingun, by all means it needs to be fast, or it's just a horrible shotgun. At this point it's even worse than the pistol.

On that note, if you're dead set on removing the chaingun's painlocking capability, you don't necessarily need to slow its rate of fire down at all; you can just disable it from causing pain. The damage type, etc, of a hitscan attack like A_FireBullets is specified by its puff actor, and you can create a custom chaingun bullet puff that will never make its target flinch, like so:

Spoiler

// PainlessPuff - disables hitscan pain state infliction
ACTOR PainlessPuff : BulletPuff
{
	+PAINLESS
}

// Shortened the frame durations and changed puff type 
ACTOR chain_bsp : Chaingun replaces Chaingun
{
Weapon.SlotNumber 4
	States
	{
	Fire:
		TNT1 A 0 A_PlaySound("chainfire", CHAN_WEAPON)
		TNT1 A 0 A_GunFlash
		PKCG A 1 A_FireBullets(5.6, 0, 1, 12, "PainlessPuff")    // - using custom puff type to disable pain
		PKCG BCD 1
		PKCG A 1 
		PKCG A 1 A_ReFire
		Goto Ready
	
	Flash:
		TNT1 A 0 A_Jump(128,4)
	    PKCF A 1 Bright A_Light1
		PKCF B 1 Bright A_Light2
		TNT1 A 2 A_Light0
		Goto LightDone
		PKCF C 1 Bright A_Light1
		PKCF D 1 Bright A_Light2
		TNT1 A 2 A_Light0
		Goto LightDone
	}
}

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I've spent considerable time, but only making minimal progress, on updating to a new version (see original post)

The biggest thing is the plasmagun, which I wanted to change for many reasons:

a) the projectiles behave essentially the same as every other projectile in doom
b) its stunlocking role is already present via vanilla chainsaw/chaingun
c) it's too good at stunlocking powerful enemies (though I have not fixed this aspect yet)
d) when you picked up the plasmagun for the very first time, you were expecting something cooler

Right now I've changed it to fire an accelerating projectile that does little damage, but hangs in the air and barfs out damaging plasma goop. I'm bad at special effects so it looks lame (even though I stole and modified the effects code). It still causes pain-state locking of enemies, but I just don't feel like fixing that at the moment, since I don't want to spend time on something that I might scrap completely. Curious what people think about how to improve it.

Also Mithran, I implemented your painless damage type idea and credited you, though I didn't use it the way you expected ;-P

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scifista42 said:

I dislike the concept of limiting usage of an advantageous gameplay mechanic by physically uncomfortable controls.


never get into competitive beat-'em-up play

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Updated again to v3, among other changes from v2 are:

plasmagun behavior refined a bit (but visually it is still cucky)
shotgun animation looks a lot nicer
cacodemon can strafe
pistol feels less awkward (but is still awkward)

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Still kicking this around, updated a bit:

cacodemon reverted to standard doom2 caco
revenant is more dangerous, but dies faster
chaingun sounds downsampled to be more in line with the rest of doom's sounds
other misc. tweaks and fixes

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The only thing I really hate about this is the chaingun. You took away the entire point of a machinegun-like weapon being in the game. In fact now there are no rapid fire weapons besides the weak ass pistol. The duration of the plasma goop could be longer too. I also found a glitch running this under Zandronum (just happened to be the port that comes up when I double click wads) where you get the default pistol unless you do the give all cheat and then you have two pistols, being the default one and the new edited one which apparently seems to play the firing sound twice.

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SavageCorona said:

The only thing I really hate about this is the chaingun. You took away the entire point of a machinegun-like weapon being in the game. In fact now there are no rapid fire weapons besides the weak ass pistol. The duration of the plasma goop could be longer too. I also found a glitch running this under Zandronum (just happened to be the port that comes up when I double click wads) where you get the default pistol unless you do the give all cheat and then you have two pistols, being the default one and the new edited one which apparently seems to play the firing sound twice.


Maybe I could make an altfire weapon mode that gives the chaingun its vanilla behavior, but that kinda goes against my goals for the mod in regards to toning down pain-state gameplay. The new plasmagun behavior however has the ability to lock enemies in the pain-state, at the expense of being inefficient ammo usage in most cases and the splash can damage the player.

You're welcome to play with the code and speed up the chaingun (or anything) for your own personal version of the mod. That's how I started on this, picking apart other people's DECORATE code and figuring out how they accomplished things.

As far as zandronum is concerned, I dunno anything about it really, I am targeting zdoom only for now. I'd like to make an Eternity Engine version too, but that would require me to devote some serious time and coffee to learning a new format, and I keep telling myself "I'll start... next week"

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Zandronum is based on GZDoom but it is oh so very slightly different. I'm not much of a coder myself so I'm not exactly sure how to make it 100% compatible with both or even how to make it 100% Zandronum compatible to begin with.

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Finally noticed (and fixed) the pistol firing frame blort. That's the only change for the current version but probably sortof a big annoyance once you noticed the 3 tic delay! Download url is in the OP

As far as people who hate specific things but enjoy others in this mod, often it just involves editing a single lump by two characters to get it to your tastes. Namely, the DECORATE lump and just comment out (add two forward slashes "//") the module you don't like. Most of the naming is self explanatory but "hg" is handgun, "sg" is shotgun, "cg" is chaingun.

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Updated again, scrapped the plasmagun again in favor of yet another design, thanks to some help from scifista42. I quite like this design, it gives the plasmagun a very high burst damage capability but is chaotic and much less inefficient than a (properly executed) BFG shot. I am imagining its main use for long queues of enemies like in the demonstration video, or as the goto weapon for those long elevator rides where you don't know what the mapper is about to assault you with at the end.

Damage might need to be tweaked but I'm mostly happy with it. I am also toying with a simple screenshake effect on bfg blasts, not sure if it is cool or just annoying though, and perhaps I am losing my original focus of the mod with such a feature ;-p

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The plasmagun from the v6 download doesn't work, because you renamed the PlasmaNew actor to something else, but the weapon still tries to fire PlasmaNew.

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Whoops fixed, that's what I get for last minute changes and not testing

edit: also I need to fix the damage type on it, as right now it isn't hurting bosses, d'oh

edit2: ok fixed and fixed

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