Sunlust Officially Released

[40oz]

After a development time of almost two and a half years, and a two-month long public beta testing stage, dream team Ribbiks (swtw, sd20x6, crumpets) and Dannebubinga (c-shock, c-shock2) have officially and finally released their suspiciously named collaborative 32-level Boom-compatible megawad entitled Sunlust.

Don't be fooled by the wonderfully, visually attractive screenshots. Sunlust is a distinctly challenging megawad, designed to put even the toughest expert Doom players to the test, and designed to counter the norm of most Doomers playing exclusively on Ultra Violence. But that's okay since Sunlust has been extensively tuned for each difficulty setting, and the duo encourages players to play on Hey Not Too Rough or Hurt Me Plenty for their first time. If that's not enough, it has also been tested in Zandronum in Cooperative and Survival Cooperative so you and your space marine friends can venture through the beast together!

Sunlust features many new maps designed specially for the project, but also features some mostly refurbished unreleased maps that were intended for other projects, such as what would have been dannebubinga's Combat Shock 3(!), and some unused stuff that almost landed in Ribbiks' Swim With The Whales. Hopefully Sunlust will help pave the way for a new trend in mapping pairs and small teams working together to release more highly-anticipated megawads such as this one. While there's no talk of an official Sunlust sequel, Ribbiks states he'll have more projects to release in the the future. For now, us Space Marines certainly have our work cut out for us!

[Obsidian]

Hahahaha, so that's why MAP32 has it's name. :P

[Buckshot]

...and up goes my dedicated coop and survival/extreme servers for sunlust on zandro.

fantastic megawad!

[Tristan]

Obsidian said:

Hahahaha, so that's why MAP32 has it's name. :P

and MAP29, depending on how you look at it, heh
Great post 40oz, we need more stuff like this in the news forum

[Captain Ventris]

This is a great thing to have on the front page, and we really do have enough high profile projects to get that news page hopping with more than just multiplayer events. Great job. :)

[dannebubinga]

Thanks for the article 40oz!

[SyntherAugustus]

Oh boy.

*boots it on HMP in hopes of a smooth run*

[40oz]

dannebubinga said:

Thanks for the article 40oz!

No, thank you for the maps!!

[deathbringer]

Wow, I remember that green screenshot from back when I got bored with Doom and left the community for... about two and a half years, probably.
Now, how are Securitron 3, Millenium, KDiZDiD and Twice Risen coming along? ...oh.

[DoomMasta]

I tried it out on Hurt Me Plenty for the first time, it is challenging as stated. I started off at the beginning in MAP01 and became way too difficult by MAP10 halfway through. Am fond of the level design layout, very impressive. Love to see more of this variety as well. :D

[Hekksy]

Does this wad use voodoo dolls?

[Enjay]

Good fun so far. Some very nice levels. Slaughtery gameplay is not really my taste but these maps are impressive.

Why are there so many sprites in the WAD? Are they fixed sprites or something?

[Phml]

suspiciously named

So that is a thing.

Wads&Mods thread holds the 4th place in an uncookied Google search. Great maps are truly better than porn.

[dannebubinga]

Vulture said:

Does this wad use voodoo dolls?

Yes. Never inside of the gameplay areas though.

Enjay said:

Why are there so many sprites in the WAD? Are they fixed sprites or something?

It's replaced sprites. Most of the awful columns are replaced with decorations like impaled heads and different colors of the floating skull thing.

[Springy]

Caught wind of this news earlier. In response to this; I immediately booked most of next week off (hopefully that will be approved) just so I can play this, (especially map 24 and that wank worthy finale). All I can say is; about bloody time and well done for finally releasing it, can't complain as two of my favourite mappers of recent years have been involved.

[Enjay]

dannebubinga said:

It's replaced sprites. Most of the awful columns are replaced with decorations like impaled heads and different colors of the floating skull thing.

But there seem to be most, if not all, the other sprites in there too - including monsters, powerups, weapons (HUD and pickup)... and, without looking at them in too much detail, they seem to just be unaltered copies of the original sprites.

[SyntherAugustus]

There is a palette change that causes some of the reds (mostly the Chaingun guy, the revenant, and a few others that use bright bloody reds) to be different. Run a mod like Smooth Doom and you'll notice it.

BTSX does something similar, but the differences are nowhere near as drastic with Sunlust.

[Enjay]

Ah, that makes sense. I did notice that a playpal was in there too but the changes were subtle enough that without looking too hard, I couldn't really see that it was particularly different from the default. I see the differences that it makes now though.

[A.K.]

I can see why the authors recommend not going above HMP. I died 5 times on MAP01 from all of the monster traps. This thing really IS a monster using vanilla monsters.

Truly proof that you dont need to use DECORATE to make a challenging game.

[TheMightyHeracross]

...what does DECORATE have to do with this? Was it really called for to bash ZDoom out of the blue?

[A.K.]

TheMightyHeracross said:

...what does DECORATE have to do with this? Was it really called for to bash ZDoom out of the blue?

I didn't insult the addition of DECORATE, I pointed out that if you are a DooM level designer/modder, you don't need to use DECORATE to make a challenging/interesting megawad.

[Astral-Doomer]

Badass, so far. :-) Some of the best dooming, I've had since, ever. ;-) Only beat the first level but its very balanced & beautiful. Nice job making this grand mega-wad! B-)

[Vermil]

One can get stuck in the northern bit of sector 240 on Map10, to the right of thing 560.