POWERGUN.WAD (Now with SuperPowerGuns.wad!)

[Doomkid]

POWERGUN - Make Slaughtermaps Great Again

 

Spoiler

the title is just a moronic joke dont read too deep into it

 

POWERGUN.WAD is a mod I whipped up about a month ago with these goals in mind:

 

• Make every weapon roughly 2-3 times more powerful
• Add some cool effects while keeping them feeling "authentically Doomy"
• Compatibility with ZDoom, ZDaemon and Zandronum

 

My reason for creating this weapon pack is to give a wide range of Doomers a chance to enjoy the experience of playing a slaughterwad. Although I personally have always had a soft spot for slaughtermaps, many people whine find them either too grindy, too difficult or both. This wad allows you to cut through the hoardes efficiently while still keeping the core gameplay elements and overall challenge in-tact. These guns are powerful, but they're not total overkill - you will still have to work for your victory! Monsters are not modified in any way. People who already enjoy slaughtermaps may find this puts a fresh fun spin on old classics.

 

With all that said, you don't have to use it with slaughtermaps, load this baby up with any WAD of your choosing and blast through it with extreme power!

 

So what does it actually do?

 

• The pistol is now a machine gun. Same rate of fire and damage as the vanilla chaingun but you don't have to fire 2 bullets each time you pull the trigger.
• The fist is replaced by the gauntlets from Heretic. On it's own it's a bit more powerful than the vanilla chainsaw, with berserk this turns you into a veritable God.
• The chainsaw has been replaced with a railgun which has a reasonably quick rate of fire. (For the 3 of you who don't know, this is basically a plasma sniper rifle.)
• The shotgun is now automatic. It's about 3 times faster than the vanilla shotgun - I can't emphasize enough how fun it is to take down a crowd of imps with this thing..
• The super shotgun now has a faster reload very similar to the vanilla SG. That POW sound is satisfying as hell. Puts Archies to sleep in seconds!
• The chaingun fires twice as fast. hey look im not the most original person on the planet ok give me a break ugh jeez
• The rocket launcher also fires twice as fast, but it's damn effective in wide open maps with huge groups. Make 'em into mince meat quick!
• The plasma projectiles have been sped up from 25 to 29, the rate of fire doubled and the cool-down animation removed. This thing is a real hallway filler!
• The BFG now shoots a giant ball of fire! The ball now sends out two sets of tracers rather than 1 (!) meaning twice the pain is felt by groups of enemies. The giant yellow ball deals an absolutely whopping damage range: between 300 and 2400 damage points are dealt with a direct hit. That's gonna leave a mark!
• You now begin with 150 health to help with hot starts.
• You can now carry 100 shells/rockets and 400 cells/bullets by default. Grabbing a backpack doubles your capacity as always.

 

I've recorded a video to give you an idea of how these work:

 

(the mapset shown is chillax.wad for anyone curious)

 

>> DOWNLOAD POWERGUN.WAD HERE <<

 

As with any release, I would love to hear feedback. What did I do right and what did I do wrong - I'm open to making a V2 so please let me know what you think.

 

EDIT: If that still isn't enough power, try the SUPER PowerGuns!! - https://doomshack.org/uploads/superpowerguns.wad

 

Enjoy!

Edited February 7, 2021 by Doomkid

[paymentplan]

Hey this doesn't do anything I thought it would do. Have I been pranked?

[Doomkid]

What port did you use? This should work fine in ZDoom, GZDoom, Zandronum and ZDaemon (doesn't work with PrBoom or Odamex sadly)

[Grain of Salt]

9 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

slaughtermaps [...] doesn't work with PrBoom

 

>:0

[Doomkid]

It's the railgun - You have an excellent point though, a PrBoom compat variant is definitely going to be needed!

[paymentplan]

Ok never mind I had to change the load order in GZDoom. At first I thought I was getting pranked ComfyDoom style cause everything felt slower, not faster! Now that I've got it working I'll give it another try.

[Grain of Salt]

I'm 99% sure you could do a fake railgun in deh by firing like 20 bullets in the same spot. The remaining 1% is because I remember it being confusing to get the multiple bullets on the same spot thing to work.

 

This is me thinking aloud, not a feature request or anything :0)

[42PercentHealth]

2 minutes ago, Grain of Salt said:

I'm 99% sure you could do a fake railgun in deh by firing like 20 bullets in the same spot.

Doesn't a railgun require the shot to keep traveling through a target though? A cyberdemon will easily stop 20 bullets.

 

I don't know anything about dehacked, but I think what we want is a beefed-up sapphire wand from Hexen -- is that not possible in deh?

[Grain of Salt]

Yeah, it wouldn't have the pass-through effect, it would just be a high damage hitscan with pinpoint accuracy. And I don't think you can do pass-through damage in dehacked.

 

You could make it hundreds of bullets if you really wanna kill a cyber in one shot.

 

Also, this method would sometimes appear to deal pass-through damage, because when a given enemy is dead subsequent bullets will travel through it, even though they're all firing in the same instant from the player's point of view.

 

Sorry to derail Doomkid's thread with dehacked yakking.

[Doomkid]

I welcome it, more ideas is always a good thing. It's a shame only having a version for the ZDoom family

[valkiriforce]

I think I did try this with PrBoom once and for the most part it seemed to work fine aside from the railgun. It really is a nice alternative to playing some WADs that might feel a bit grindy in sections - I've certainly enjoyed playing on the Alien Vendetta server hosted with powergun.wad with a number of other people on occasion, and found myself playing from map 16 all the way to the end and finishing it at 2 AM. It's pretty addictive, to say the least - I'd love to see something like this find its way into an actual WAD maybe with some custom monsters and textures.

 

Also, I was curious about the pistol replacement; does that machine gun graphic come from anywhere? It looks kinda familiar but I've no idea if I've seen it anywhere else.

Edited September 27, 2017 by valkiriforce

[Pegleg]

The BFG reminds me of a souped-up version of either the firebomb or the flamewall (I can't remember which one exactly, it's been a while) from the original Rise of the Triad. That's what I thought of the first time I watched the video. Rather, a souped-up firebomb/flamewall combined with Archvile fire.

[Mondobizarrro]

this seems way more fair, the only time i dont feel guilty with extremely op weapons is on a pwad like chillax since enemy cpunt on some maps is over 5k

[Doomkid]

13 hours ago, valkiriforce said:

 

Also, I was curious about the pistol replacement; does that machine gun graphic come from anywhere? It looks kinda familiar but I've no idea if I've seen it anywhere else.

The graphic is ripped from Alpha Doom 0.5, pretty much completely unedited other than the flame sprite itself

[prfunky]

So DK, is there really supposed to be no sound made when using the gauntlets?

I like the flaming enemies of the BFG but think the graphic for the fireball is cheesy (pixelated).

Can you do the plasma in purple? Green is already used by arachnotrons.

Do you have plans for the gun items graphics before you pick a weapon up?

[Doomkid]

I actually would have preferred a sound for the gauntlets - It can be achieved using the "saw" codepointer rather than the "punch" codepointer, but the two big drawbacks are that berserk won't power it up if it uses the "saw" action and also that ZDaemon doesn't react well to a fast weapon using the "saw" codepointer (kicks players from servers with the message "speed hack detected" unfortunately)

 

I agree that the fireball graphic needs to be done better, will definitely work on that for the next version.

 

Good call on using purple plasma instead, no need for Arachno-confusion.

 

I had planned on leaving the weapon graphics the same when they're on the floor but if I can think of something that looks better I'll certainly implement it.

 

Thanks for the comment prfunky!

[Empyre]

The sound you have in the wad for the gauntlets is in wav format, and that might have something to do with it not playing.

[Doomkid]

Well crap, I didn't even notice that til now - thanks Empyre, I think it works in all the intended ports as they support the wav format, but probably not PrBoom and other ports which may "mostly" run this wad. On the whole, it's looking like a refined build will definitely be necessary.

[valkiriforce]

Purple isn't the most appealing color for plasma imo; I liked the green laser effect, but if it needs to be different then maybe make it red? Or maybe put it to some kind of vote?

[Empyre]

You could leave it green, but use the green plasma balls from the beta BFG so it would look different from the arachnotron plasma.

[Empyre]

I have this on my Zandronum server with my (not slaughter) maps right now.

[dylux]

Many thanks for making this. I will try it out for your intended purpose! :)

[Dark Pulse]

Boy, that MAGA reference is not going to age well at all in the post-Trump era. It's like having a Richard Nixon button on your shirt in 1973.

[Nine Inch Heels]

Nice necromancing guys. ;-)

 

 

 

[Dark Pulse]

Why yes, I am wise from my gwave.