Gameplay Mod [1/31/2024] Doom Delta v3.0.1! (new weapon... AND MORE!)

[Craneo]

Py please make the concept art Revenant I beg 😭

[GermanPeter]

21 hours ago, DrPyspy said:

Thanks for the feedback! I do have some responses and questions.

• Do you have decals disabled? If so, this could be the reason you don't see the Blobs. Doom Delta already suppresses most other sources of decals (though some may have leaked through) to retain the vanilla-ish vibe, so I very much recommend enabling decals when playing Doom Delta.
• I'll have to deep-dive into the rad suit issue. The Doom Delta replacement is pretty much 1:1 to GZDoom's default (with the exception of a tag being added for pickup message purposes) so I suspect either a weird shield damage override issue, or something related to the playerclasses' damage override code. If you can supply which character and map you have experienced this issue on, let me know!

These are still responses and questions, however I'm adding the break here to match up with the original post lol

• An option for the hitsounds can be added!
• The Dark Claw and the Unmaker have been very tricky to balance. At some point, the Dark Claw only used one soul per shot, which is crazy! I'd like to avoid leaving the soul drops up to chance, since a lot of Doom Delta is designed around the new content spawning consistently. I can look into some other things, though, like rebalancing the ammo usage. I've also considered moving away from GZDoom's ripper projectile logic and homebrewing my own, since it can be very unpredictable with damage and larger monsters, but we'll see!
• Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that can be done about the helmet HUD blocking things, aside from lowering the mouthpiece in the settings. There used to be a feature that raised the weapon in the helmet HUD specifically, but it ended up looking super weird. I personally don't mind it too much, but I'll keep it in mind.
• I'm currently experimenting with conditionally overriding the text screens in Doom 64: Unseen Evil, and the system seems to work decently so far, but I'm not sure if I'd bring such a thing over to Doom Delta yet. Could be nifty!
• I'd be interested in adding some powerup icons to the HUD! The screen blends are a bit trickier. I find the screen blends to be a bit overwhelming even in vanilla Doom, especially if you've got a lot of powerups at once, but I haven't yet found a solution I like that still fits the vanilla-ish vibe.
• After doing some testing with the light goggles, it seems the effect is oddly diminished in extremely dark sectors, which didn't happen in my initial implementation 🤔 I'll look into making sure it is properly effective in super dark sectors, and potentially look into an optional setting to restore the behavior to the vanilla behavior.

I might have decals disabled, yes. But I assumed you used the +FLATSPRITE flag for the Blobs, which I think would fix this issue.

 

What could work in regards to powerups would be adding them to the HUD itself. I only have the helmet in mind, but there's a few places where you could put an icon to indicate a powerup is being used.

 

And if you want to balance the Dark Claw, a gimmicky way of going about it would be that souls only drop from gibbed enemies. Would keep it consistent, but would mean the player can't get more souls back just by using the Claw. Would also buff the explosive weapons and Berserk.

 

Also, I think the only weapon I truly don't like so far is the minigun/chaingun. It's super powerful, but the wind-up makes it VERY hard to justify using more than once in a while. It's balanced this way, but I feel it goes against Doom's fast-paced nature too much.
There's a few ways I think you could address this, the simplest would be allowing the player to rev it up without firing by holding M2, maybe even slowing them down while doing so. This isn't very "vanilla" though and I can understand if you wouldn't want to do that, as not even id did.

The way I'd go about it would be completely foregoing the revving mechanic and treating it more like Wolf3D's chaingun, with the caveat that there's a delay after firing, similar to the Plasma Rifle (so a wind-down, essentially). I think that's how id would have done it too, in my opinion. If you want to reduce its effectiveness, you could make the spread even larger than it is now, more like the SSG's. People will already be tempted not to overuse it because it chews through ammo and prefer the SMG instead, much like in Wolfenstein.

Alternatively, you could give the powerhouse Dimitri the ability to reduce the wind-up or combine it with my suggestion to make the spread tighter again. Up to you!

 

By the way, could you make melee weapons silent? In the Doom Bible, they were hinting at a sort-of stealth mechanic, that you could backstab certain enemies. You don't have to do that of course (that'd be awful lol), but I think it'd be in spirit with the original concept to use melee to not give away your position at least.

 

But yeah, a pretty amazing mod so far! When are you adding Buddy Dacote though? 🥺

 

P.S.: your Doom 64 stuff is mindblowing too, your skills really are a gift for the Doom community!

Edited March 26 by GermanPeter

[DrPyspy]

On 3/25/2024 at 6:05 PM, Craneo said:

Py please make the concept art Revenant I beg 😭

 

I was actually working on an interpretation of the concept art Revenant back in 2019 for a different project! It used the Doom 64 Revenant as a base, but I wasn't 100% happy with how it was turning out. I'll probably return to him someday!

 

 

11 hours ago, GermanPeter said:

I might have decals disabled, yes. But I assumed you used the +FLATSPRITE flag for the Blobs, which I think would fix this issue.

 

What could work in regards to powerups would be adding them to the HUD itself. I only have the helmet in mind, but there's a few places where you could put an icon to indicate a powerup is being used.

 

And if you want to balance the Dark Claw, a gimmicky way of going about it would be that souls only drop from gibbed enemies. Would keep it consistent, but would mean the player can't get more souls back just by using the Claw. Would also buff the explosive weapons and Berserk.

 

Also, I think the only weapon I truly don't like so far is the minigun/chaingun. It's super powerful, but the wind-up makes it VERY hard to justify using more than once in a while. It's balanced this way, but I feel it goes against Doom's fast-paced nature too much.
There's a few ways I think you could address this, the simplest would be allowing the player to rev it up without firing by holding M2, maybe even slowing them down while doing so. This isn't very "vanilla" though and I can understand if you wouldn't want to do that, as not even id did.

The way I'd go about it would be completely foregoing the revving mechanic and treating it more like Wolf3D's chaingun, with the caveat that there's a delay after firing, similar to the Plasma Rifle (so a wind-down, essentially). I think that's how id would have done it too, in my opinion. If you want to reduce its effectiveness, you could make the spread even larger than it is now, more like the SSG's. People will already be tempted not to overuse it because it chews through ammo and prefer the SMG instead, much like in Wolfenstein.

Alternatively, you could give the powerhouse Dimitri the ability to reduce the wind-up or combine it with my suggestion to make the spread tighter again. Up to you!

 

By the way, could you make melee weapons silent? In the Doom Bible, they were hinting at a sort-of stealth mechanic, that you could backstab certain enemies. You don't have to do that of course (that'd be awful lol), but I think it'd be in spirit with the original concept to use melee to not give away your position at least.

 

But yeah, a pretty amazing mod so far! When are you adding Buddy Dacote though? 🥺

 

P.S.: your Doom 64 stuff is mindblowing too, your skills really are a gift for the Doom community!

 

Unfortunately, +FLATSPRITE is out of the question for a couple reasons 😔 The main reason is that +FLATSPRITE does not work at all in software rendering, and I'm lookin' to keep support for that.

 

As for the Dark Claw (and the Unmaker by extension), it is already pretty ill-advised to try to use it against enemies that drop souls, due to the heavily reduced damage output. I'm not sure if there needs to be any more mechanics to steer players away from running it all the time, especially in cases where zombies become less common in later parts of the game.

 

The Chaingun is a trickier one. I'm pretty happy with how it is at the moment, as I feel it's a good SSG-style counterpart to the Machine Gun, with its heavy damage output and larger commitment, both in terms of time and ammo. If you choose to fully commit to it during a particular encounter, you trade off a lot of clip ammo for a bit more safety and more stunlocking. It also helps with controlling a small crowd SSG-style, but is highly risky to start up if you're in a particularly cramped fight. I worry that letting the player have a higher level of control with it (i.e. revving it up) would make it too powerful, especially in those close-up fights. Removing that wind-up Wolf 3D-style would have a similar effect. I feel forcing commitment by giving it the Plasma Rifle cooldown would be less fun than letting the player decide if a fight is worth the wind-up and the ammo commitment.

 

I have thought about silent melee weapons, but for the time being I'm sticking with noisy ones, just in case an encounter is designed around waking up enemies without a gun on hand.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

[NeoWorm]

11 hours ago, DrPyspy said:

 

I was actually working on an interpretation of the concept art Revenant back in 2019 for a different project! It used the Doom 64 Revenant as a base, but I wasn't 100% happy with how it was turning out. I'll probably return to him someday!

 

 

There is probably reason why it was reworked, it's way to busy for enemy this small. I kinda like the idea of Revenant that instead of melee attack uses a shotgun to blast player away. It would change the way you fight them a lot.

[Big_Dorbo]

This project is one of the better balanced mods around. Really awesome work here.

[MarcinC]

Great mod! Can You add weapons from Doom Bible: spray rifle, probjectile, homing missiles?

[DrPyspy]

2 hours ago, MarcinC said:

Great mod! Can You add weapons from Doom Bible: spray rifle, probjectile, homing missiles?

 

Thanks! I do have some thoughts on these weapons:

 

• Spray Rifle - The way I interpreted the description in the Doom Bible makes it seem very similar to the SSG, and I'm not super keen on having weapons overlap like that. However, I have also considered adapting it as some sort of auto-shotgun type weapon that uses clip ammo... 🤔 It could be a cool weapon to add to the Rifle slot, and it'd be a great opportunity to use the other Machine Gun design.
• Probjectile - Most of the ideas I've had for this weapon have unintentionally trapped it within 'joke weapon' territory. 😔 It'd be a fun addition if I could get it to feel like a natural addition to the arsenal, but I don't want it to feel like a bloaty addition.
• Homing Missiles - Something I haven't really thought about and don't have any plans for at the moment. If I suddenly think of a cool way to implement them without having them feel too 'extra' as an addition, then perhaps...!

The most likely future addition is either the Spray Rifle or the Probjectile to round out the Rifle slot (or maybe both..!) For now, however, I think the arsenal is in a good spot.

[GermanPeter]

I keep thinking about this mod, I love it so very much.
Would it be possible to add an option to enable alternate weapons, like the 0.5 versions of the rifle and the machine gun? I think that might be kinda neat. Would also be cool if Pinkies had their old death animation where they explode/burn up (?). Maybe as a gib animation?

 

By the way, I'm in love with the Wolfenstein SMG, the fact it's based on the Jaguar sprites but still uses the DOS sounds AND lacks bullet puffs is wonderful. That weapon alone makes the secret levels worth visiting, in my opinion!

 

Also please add an option to replace all textures with "JULES SUCKS" and "TOM IS KING" please thanks

[The Doommer]

I've always liked the concept of a mod bringing back the Alpha/Press Release rifle.

Tho I'm not sure if the BFG is going to act like the OG one (which was frankly terrible) or stay true to the final design

[TMMMS]

as cool as the concept art revenant looks im not sure i want to have to worry running into it

 

the retail revenant can already be a pain in the ass with its fairly high hp and homing missiles so imagine giving it a nondogeable hitscan shotgun attack as well