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GooberMan

Prime Directive v1.01, and commentary video

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If you missed the post on the main page, Prime Directive is the follow-up to Space Station Omega - one of the best WADs of 2003 according to Doomworld's own 10 Years of Doom feature.

Version 1.01 is released! Get it from the idgames archive (or if it hasn't updated to version 1.01 yet, my Google Drive).

What has changed in this version?

  • Marines now have their weapons colour coded
  • SSG marines now have a reload time
  • Someone found a rather major dead end with the yellow key, so there is now a safety barrier in place
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes
A bit of a FAQ is in order here before you consider this download too.

FAQ said:

Does this work with weapons mods?

No. I define a new player class, and all vanilla weapons are reimplemented with tracking abilities. Weapons mods cannot deal with this. If you want to make it work with your favourite weapons mod, by all means do it yourself and release a patch/remixed version for the community. Prime Directive is released under a Creative Commons license and as such remixing is encouraged.

Should I play this if I can't stand story in Doom mods?

No. This is not the mod for you.

Should I play this if I can't stand RPG elements in Doom mods?

Maybe. If you can stand the story, there is a path you can take through the mod that doesn't want you to level up a weapon. The Gateway Experiments aim to give the player choice and freedom, so while I don't signpost things the choice of progression is entirely up to you.

Should I 100% this thing? What have I missed?

There are some pretty silly goals required to 100% this mapset. That's intentional. The idea of 100% completing a game is something I find a bit silly, especially in such a choice-driven experience as Prime Directive, so there's some silly things you need to do to 100% it. More interesting though is how little percentage you can complete it in...


Further to this, I have recorded a commentary and (near) 100% playthrough for Prime Directive. If you don't want to play, or you want some insight in to the plot and how I approached creating it, then devote two and a half hours of your life to listening to my voice and watching the following:

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A far more detailed review than I was expecting. Good read. It did highlight that I didn't take in to account everyone's settings correctly. I hinted through dialogue that you'd need the crouch and jump buttons... but promptly forgot that purists wouldn't use freeaim. Derp.

Just a note: Altfire is the heal mode (and scales according to how powered up you are). I tried to hint that through the "one hand to destroy, one hand to heal" dialogue, but I guess it wasn't that successful.

The Cronenberg body horror is definitely an angle I was pursuing, but the ongoing plot is more of a deconstruction of the video-game-hero power fantasy and the people that play them (the decision of what you tell Elaine after returning from hell is one of my favourite parts - no amount of power and skill with the game mechanics can save you there). The end of Prime Directive is when that part of the plot starts to get really interesting. I know, I should stop teasing right?

EDIT: I did notice when I started making this that the community may not be all receptive to the playstyle being put forward. The "VANILLA IS BEST" backlash was in full swing, and weapons mods pretty much comprised the bulk of ZDoom-based output. The audience it has found though loves it. So yay for that.

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GooberMan said:

A far more detailed review than I was expecting. Good read. It did highlight that I didn't take in to account everyone's settings correctly. I hinted through dialogue that you'd need the crouch and jump buttons... but promptly forgot that purists wouldn't use freeaim. Derp.

Just a note: Altfire is the heal mode (and scales according to how powered up you are). I tried to hint that through the "one hand to destroy, one hand to heal" dialogue, but I guess it wasn't that successful.


I was using freeaim, but with autoaim enabled. The altfire thing completely slipped by, though. I tried using it but I must not have set it up when I set up the most recent version of GZDoom at the time and failed to check to make sure when I was playing around.

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Shameless necrobump!

I know this one has been mostly overlooked by the community (it really doesn't fit the playstyles that are popular these days), but for those that have played it I'm still quite interested to grab the autosaves from when you enter the final/epilogue map. I've got enough debugging things in there that I can inspect some values I'm interested in and get an idea as to how people not so much play the game as to how they deal with the NPCs within.

It's the kind of thing I'd do behind the scenes if it weren't in the Doom engine (ie upload that data to a web server etc). So hey, if you do decide to send this along it's completely consensual amirite?

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