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ElMagnifico

Combat Redux (version 1.0.0 released!)

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Description

Hello everyone, I have made this mod to make Doom more realistic and
enjoyable. Only using scripts it has a very small file size. Even so the
changes are far reaching and (I hope) innovative, as listed below. I have
tried to strike a balance that is both difficult and fun, please let me know
if I have succeeded. The main features of this mod are as follows.

  • It is now possible to headshot most monsters and the player, even in
    multiplayer. Headshots apply a multiplier to damage rather than dealing
    some preset amount.
  • Several guns in the game have had their behaviour changed for balance,
    fun, and to make them more unique.
  • All guns now have proper viewkick based recoil, in other words not just a
    series of preset pitch adjustments.
  • Weapons can now be aimed to reduce recoil, and will also apply a weapon
    specific zoom. Crouching also reduces recoil somewhat.
  • The player's mobility (speed and jumping ability) is affected by the
    current weapon.
  • All weapons and monsters have had the damage they deal increased.
    Explosions are larger.
  • Armor is now more effective to make up for this, but not to the point
    of negating the increased damage.
  • Ammo availability has been reduced to help balance the increased damage.
    However if you are very low on shells or bullets then you will get a few
    extra the next time you pick some up. This is to prevent ammo starvation on
    difficult third party maps. You must still be accurate, wasting ammo is not
    an option :p.
  • When a player's health goes below 30% they cannot run or jump. This is
    meant to simulate being wounded. After a short time without getting hurt
    the player will regenerate their health back up to 30%, restoring mobility.
    This is not game-breaking because of the increased damage monsters deal.
  • Monsters are faster, and have had some behaviour changes.
  • If using the Skulltag version of this mod then their is a 1/6 chance that
    any ordinary monster with a Skulltag cousin will be upgraded to that cousin,
    for example Imp -> Dark Imp. Cacodemons can be upgraded twice into an
    Abaddon, this happens 1/36 of the time.
  • Many other little changes.
Compatibility and Running

This mod requires Zandronum v2.0 or higher to run. AFAIK this mod will work
with all game modes and third party maps. Obviously it will not work with
mods that heavily change weapons, items, or monsters. Aesthetic only mods
should work fine.

Download
Difficulty Warning

Playing with this mod on I'm Too Young to Die is about equivalent to playing
vanilla doom on Ultra-Violence, possibly a little tougher still. Armor is
essential, try to get some ASAP. Also in most situations you cannot run into
a room guns blazing, you will be destroyed. A little strategy is required.
Please bear this in mind :).

Feedback

I'm happy to hear any suggestions you might have about improving this mod.
Please bear in mind that I don't have the ability to create new graphics, sfx,
etc... so new feature will likely have to rely on scripts.

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Unfortunately not. The only sensible body part to get bonus damage against would be the eye. However getting a hitbox floating around just the eye would be hard to do. Given that they are floating heads I decided to leave them out. The headshot-able monsters are:

  • Any Player;
  • Zombie Men;
  • Shotgun Guys;
  • SuperShotgun Guys;
  • Chaingun Guys;
  • Imps;
  • Dark Imps;
  • Baron Of Hells;
  • Hell Knights;
  • Belphegors;
  • Revenants;
  • Mancubi;
  • Hectebi;
  • Archviles;
  • Cyberdemons; and
  • The WolfensteinSSs.

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No sorry. I'd like to support them but I've had to make use of some Zandronum specific features to get things working. That and setting "APROP_Speed" on ZDoom and GZDoom seems to be broken as it also affects weapon fire rate. This isn't the case on Zandronum.

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The "wounded" state will screw over finishing levels requiring faster speed movement from a higher level to a lower platform so you may reconsider this addition.

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Glaice said:

The "wounded" state will screw over finishing levels requiring faster speed movement from a higher level to a lower platform so you may reconsider this addition.

You may have to elaborate I'm afraid. After not being hurt for a few seconds the player will regenerate their health back up to not being wounded (30%). Thus it would only "screw over finishing levels" if you both have to move quickly and tank fire at the same time. With the increased damage monsters deal tanking fire just isn't an option anyway. Does this help?

SavageCorona said:

who now?

Those monsters are from Skulltag, see this link. They only appear in the Skulltag compatible version of this mod, which is included in the same archive.

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Yeah. As a matter of fact my favourite weapon changes were to the BFG10k and Railgun, both of which you won't see unless you play the Skulltag version.

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Well i played it and i don't like it, i mean realism just dosen't fit well in doom.
But either way i just hope that this dosen't become the next Hard Doom, because this thing of Doom fad sucks.

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J.B.R said:

Well i played it and i don't like it, i mean realism just dosen't fit well in doom.
But either way i just hope that this dosen't become the next Hard Doom, because this thing of Doom fad sucks.


I'm happy that you tried it, and am sorry you didn't like it, but rather than wishing ill could you tell me what would improve the mod for you?

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ElMagnifico said:

I happy that you tried it, and am sorry you didn't like it, but rather than wishing ill could you tell me what would improve the mod for you?

What would improve the mod for me would be removing the following:

All guns now have proper viewkick based recoil, in other words not just a
series of preset pitch adjustments.

Weapons can now be aimed to reduce recoil, and will also apply a weapon
specific zoom. Crouching also reduces recoil somewhat.

The player's mobility (speed and jumping ability) is affected by the
current weapon.

When a player's health goes below 30% they cannot run or jump. This is
meant to simulate being wounded. After a short time without getting hurt
the player will regenerate their health back up to 30%, restoring mobility.
This is not game-breaking because of the increased damage monsters deal.

This is Doom, not CS nor COD, i hate when people make mods with mechanics from CS or COD.

And also having Zdoom/GZdoom support.

I hope that these words were not in vain.

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Thank you for your feedback. I am not of the opinion that a mechanic is bad just because it is found in other games; even games which are unpopular or poorly thought of. As it happens I have never played Counter Strike or Call of Duty. However if other people agree with you then I will gladly remove those mechanics from the mod. I am concerned that such a move would leave my mod notably lacking in unique features. Perhaps turning these mechanics down without removing them might be a better move?

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ElMagnifico said:

However if other people agree with you then I will gladly remove those mechanics from the mod. I am concerned that such a move would leave my mod notably lacking in unique features. Perhaps turning these mechanics down without removing them might be a better move?

Hmm, well about unique features, have a look at some popular mods like BD, Faspons, at ZDoom forums, also maybe turning these mechanics down could work.

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ElMagnifico said:

Thanks for trying it out. :)
BTW, what made you motion sick? Was it the recoil? the zoom? both? something else?


It's the way the camera just flails around when you shoot, particularly with the chaingun. The plasma gun was actually the most fine and reminded me a little of the recoil mechanics in Counter Strike but the chaingun was the worst and just made me sick.

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Thank you SavageCorona :).

I thought the Chaingun was too OP for how easy it is to find and get ammo for. Thus I balanced it with recoil. Moving increases weapon recoil; crouching and aiming reduce it. So I had expected people to use it whilst staying in one place, crouching and aiming, which makes the recoil manageable. The plasma rifle is a much more portable automatic weapon, but it and it's ammo are much rarer.

This is of course moot now since it looks like I will need to reduce recoil on all weapons anyway. Only problem is this will mess with weapon balance :p.

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You'd be surprised, I did some testing with friends and it turns out just having your aim lost temporarily makes the gun harder to use, even though it corrects itself. I believe this is because it prevents you from tracking the opponent whilst moving. In other words you need to get a new clean shot each time. However if I reduce recoil this will also be moot.

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Well, as you said "harder to use"... Harder to use = less fun and more annoying to use = not good. Specially when the reason why it's harder to use is arbitrary, which recoil is. In my view, Doom has little-to-no arbitrarily reduced comfort for the player, and that's why it's good. Don't blame players for being accustomized to this comfort, it's natural. Instead, try to not spoil their comfort - that's my advice.

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Thank you for your feedback scifista42 :). And sorry, I didn't mean to come across as if I was blaming people. However I disagree with what you say about "harder to use = less fun and more annoying to use". The weapon itself is much more powerful now, and the recoil increases the skill necessary to use it. I believe this creates a satisfying sort of difficulty. It gives the weapon some unique character; the shotguns have the worsed recoil but are absolutely devastating in the right hands.

In any case I can see that most people don't like the recoil as it is, so I will be revisiting it soon. Does anyone have an opinion on how to maintain weapon balance? I don't want this to become a power fantasy mod, or to go back to the defaults where Doomguy can shrug off a Chaingun to the face :p.

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ElMagnifico said:

And sorry, I didn't mean to come across as if I was blaming people.

I didn't mean to say that you did, either. It was supposed to be a "rhetorical statement". Badly and needlessly put, as I can see now, so I'm sorry for it.

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My advice is look at Counter Strike for a good recoil system. I read somewhere it would take a lot of code to create an identical system but take notes from it rather than just copy it.

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@scifista42: That's okay. :)

@SavageCorona: Thanks for the tip. Could you tell me a bit more about what you'd like to see added/changed about the recoil? My code implements viewkick properly, there's not many ways it can be done after all. I could add gunkick to the weapons, but since they'd be no animation it'd be just like adding a spread factor to the weapons fire :p. Of course changing the recoil constants for each weapon is trivial, if that would do.

BTW, I based the recoil system of the information in this video. That's how I handle viewkick, but I don't do gunkick atm.

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Randomised spray isn't very good, fun or skill-based. Every gun in CS has a specific recoil pattern which adds a layer of skill to managing them while firing. This is a generally preferable style because it's something you learn to do which makes it less frustrating to use since you're determining how the gun is firing by yourself so if you miss it's entirely your fault. Plus the fact you don't aim down sights in CS making it more relatable to Doom.

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Just an update. I have tried removing weapon aiming, reducing recoil, and increasing player mobility across the board. After making these changes guns like the shotgun and chaingun have become way too OP. Using them you can clear rooms with the greatest of ease. Clearly this isn't balanced. If anyone's interested I can send you a copy to show you what I mean. Anyway, I haven't had a lot of time to work on the mod recently, and I don't know how to improve it further. Feedback welcome.

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Too hard to me! I can't be shot by two Zombiemans or I'm already dead! Much harder than anything I've ever seen in my life, even The World's Hardest Game Ever!

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ElMagnifico said:

You may have to elaborate I'm afraid. After not being hurt for a few seconds the player will regenerate their health back up to not being wounded (30%). Thus it would only "screw over finishing levels" if you both have to move quickly and tank fire at the same time. With the increased damage monsters deal tanking fire just isn't an option anyway. Does this help?


Lower movement speed keeps you from running across to a platform requiring to jump over to with a higher speed.

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