Total Chaos Open Alpha Released

[Ed]

https://wadaholic.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/open-alpha-release/

I haven't seen a thread on this release yet. Probably the grossest, most beautiful example of GZDoom graphical abuse finally saw a public offering. Wadaholic and all involved deserve some well earned praise if for anything, providing some of the most beautiful screenshots ever generated on this tired old engine. My graphics card is going tits up on my main rig, so I will be trying this on my girlfriend's i5.

Anyone else try this beast?

[Combinebobnt]

worth the weight?

[Agentbromsnor]

I played it for about fifteen minutes. I still have to finish it.

I do think the graphics look nice, though the performance is really struggling to keep up in places. If it weren't for the novelty that it's running on a Doom port, I would probably be less forgiving.

[Ed]

Runs OK on the i5. It's no surprise that I've run games with higher graphical fidelity with much higher framerate on this rig.

Based on the workmanship alone, it is a marvel. The first 30 seconds of casual walking puts your eyes on more work hours than a lot of megawads. The pivoting POV/FOV is very disorienting, but I assume this is a desired effect.

GZDoom's lack of vertex lighting is not doing this mod any favors. The screenshots look good, but seeing an enemy moving through GZDoom's light blobs broke the tense build up and was a stark reminder that it was in fact a Doom mod after all.

[Agentbromsnor]

Combinebobnt said:

worth the weight?

From what I've played so far, it really isn't...

The first part of the game is pretty much like Slender: The Eight Pages, where you have to hunt for five switches while a monster is chasing you around and you are defenseless. It's really boring and more aggravating than scary. Bear in mind that the game doesn't give any real context for these monsters at all: they're just... there.

After that you come to some maze-like part of the level where you're being chased by two generic looking floating monsters. They actually deal quite some damage, and it doesn't help that every part of the area looks alike, so you're bound to run into walls and have one of those assholes take a bite out your ass. It's pretty funny to see their AI get hung up on things though.

I'm not gonna lie: I'm having a hard time encouraging myself to keep playing.

For as slick as the graphics look, the gameplay feels really stale and outdated. I know this is just an alpha-version but for now I don't really think the hype for this mod was justified.

[Officer D]

I'm getting lag spikes with :

-i7 3.4GHz
-MSI GTX 960 GAMING 4G
-GZDoom g2.3pre-292-g747b612

I guess the hardware isn't the issue here. Still needs a lot of optimization. None the less very impressive from a visual aspect.

[Agentbromsnor]

Officer D said:

I guess the hardware isn't the issue here. Still needs a lot of optimization.

I'm not sure how much further they can optimize this. Wad-a-holic mentioned that Total Chaos still includes a lot of the hacks to simulate the shader-stuff, and unless they intend to rewrite the whole thing from scratch to make use of all the latest GZDoom bells and whistles, I don't think the performance is going to improve much beyond what you're seeing right now.

[Officer D]

^Honestly I'm surprised the engine hasn't been modified for it's purposes and just runs off the .pk3 file. Considering how much work has been put into this.

[Chezza]

Looks absolutely amazing for the Doom engine. However I don't like exploration horror games, I like dark themed shooters. I want to see some action, killing and gore.

[Ed]

Chezza said:

Looks absolutely amazing for the Doom engine. However I don't like exploration horror games, I like dark themed shooters. I want to see some action, killing and gore.

It's very far removed from the Doom formula, and that's absolutely not a bad thing. That being said, it's also not my cup of tea. I'm sure there is an audience for it and the quality of the material being presented looks like it won't have a problem finding players.

I feel like it demonstrates GZDoom's greatest strengths and coincidentally shows it's biggest weaknesses. It feels like it's an engine thoroughly out of it's comfort zone. Regardless, I still think it's a great achievement.

[Agentbromsnor]

Officer D said:

^Honestly I'm surprised the engine hasn't been modified for it's purposes and just runs off the .pk3 file. Considering how much work has been put into this.

At the risk of sounding overly negative... I think Wad-a-holic and co are mostly just "winging it", when it comes to the development of Total Chaos. It really shows. If you look at his blog, you can see that they came up with several features that they ended up scrapping later in development (such as crafting and multiplayer). In my opinion, they should write a proper design-document and stick to the plan. A lot of mods and indie games fall victim to the "winging it" mentality and think they can just churn out a complete game with nothing more than some sketches and nice ideas, and they end up not releasing anything that's worth the effort that was put into it.

I've been following Total Chaos pretty much since its inception by Wad-a-holic as a "spooky Doom WAD", and while the graphics do look nice for what it is, I feel that the gameplay should compliment this and this alpha just feels frustrating to me at the moment. I do want them to improve it so it can live up to the "hype". I hope they listen to the criticism and turn it into something other than a tech-demo for GZDoom.

[Officer D]

I never followed the blogs so I'm not sure how high the hopes of the devs where, in making this a successful game. In most cases the recognition is only a nice side effect. But the main motivation is the love to development and gaining experience from your projects and moving on afterwards. The learning and doing basically. I really don't mind if this mod gets abandoned since this is a very common thing in bigger indie projects. Lack of free time, real life events, being overwhelmed, etc. is mostly the reason behind it. Once what you are doing isn't fun anymore, that's probably when you should stop.

If anything, I can imaging the coding of this project will be able to spawn new cool ideas for different projects.

[Agentbromsnor]

Yes and no. I do imagine that the final source-code will look pretty interesting. However, things like bloom which they implemented with a hack have become official features in GZDoom now, so their method is pretty obsolete.

[Old-Doomguy]

Anyone tried it recently?

 

I watched a video and it looks great but it doesn't seem like something I would enjoy playing  b