ETTiNGRiNDER

I don't know that I'd use as drastic a word as "ruined", since I'd still be willing to go back and enjoy the earlier maps, but I remember the last few maps of Scythe having a definite shift away from the style that the WAD had up to that point and souring the experience for me.

Chaingunners. Pistol zombies and shotgun sergeants are tolerable hitscan bullshit, yeah a sarge who manages to hit you at close range can ruin your day, but they die so easily if you get the drop on them before they can fire that it balances out. The chaingunner has 70 HP though, putting it at 10 more than the imp and more than twice as much as sarge, where a pump-action shotgun blast doesn't kill them reliably but the SSG/heavy weapons are overkill. If they had 50 HP instead, or even 60 to be equal with the imp, they'd probably be less obnoxious and still have a good 20 or 30 HP more than the sergeant. Revenants are a good enemy, damn it. Arch-viles can be annoying but at least you can (usually, unless the map designer is evil) break their attack pattern without taking any damage, and the revival power can be interesting for making them a high priority target. Pain Elementals / Lost Souls are just meh, the fact that the PE has no melee bite means it's actually really weak unless it's placed where you can't close to melee range. The Spider Mastermind is usually less annoying than the chaingunner since it's treated as a boss and you can usually BFG it or otherwise unload the heavy stuff on it without it being a waste (and it's less prone to being used in trollish ways). SS and Keen are easter eggs and not "real" enemies so I don't count them. I guess the Icon of Sin sucks pretty hard too but is rare outside of the tendency to reuse it in megawad final levels. Everyone else is fine.

I stopped giving a damn about getting max scores for the most part. I put in some effort to find as many of the secrets as I can but I don't really care that much about max kills and even less about max items (especially when missing max items is often a matter of not having run over that one stupid +1 health potion in a corner somewhere).

Do you know what broke exactly? Was the mod doing something weird?

I mean, niche ports with non-ZDoom modding features have been a thing, they're just a niche thing. For instance, the Hexen Mage Tower guys have been off puttering around with Doomsday modding for years now despite that what glory days that port had (let alone modding for it) seem to be long past for the most part. It's been a long while since I took a deep look into what all DDF does but if I'm recalling right it's sort of partway between a super-DeHackEd and a more DECORATE-like thing.

The biggest issues (IMO) were that they messed with the balance of the weapons/enemies in ways that don't make a lot of sense (it comes across as that they were experimenting with changes/placeholder data that were meant to be temporary, then rushed it out), and the new features added meant a bunch of new bugs added as well. Ken Kelly. No. Although as Ken Kelly was Frazetta's student it may have been meant to be the same character or reminiscent of.

Not clear on if you're trying to say you want to run them from DOSBox or what but assuming that's the case, the DOS way to run wads is as follows: Unzup and put PWADs in your game folder, then run DOOM.EXE -file <somemap.wad> or DOOM2.EXE -file <somemap.wad> where <somemap.wad> is the filename of the WAD file you want to use. If you're trying to run some frontend program that came with the shovelware compilation, sometimes they don't work right in DOSBox I've found. A workaround is to get a copy of 4DOS, mount all your DOSBox stuff (you won't be able to mount while 4DOS is running), then run 4DOS before you run the frontend. If you're actually trying to just run WADs on a port then they usually understand drag-and-drop of the file though outside of (G)ZDoom you may have to unzip them first.

The dash in the D-30 makes me a bit uncomfortable, it looks a bit too much like a Roman numeral but IIII would properly be IV in that case. Maybe the outer corners should use the right-angle symbols instead of the middle line ones?

I was just reminded that Freaks! exists, and while I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it on these forums before, it doesn't appear to have been in this thread, so have it again. Weird proto-FPS that's very akin to Catacomb Abyss/Armageddon/Apocalypse in the vibe it has, but in VGA, you have a gun instead of fireballs (excuse me, Magick Missiles), and the engine has a weird quirk where, although you have free movement instead of being tile-locked like in a Dungeon Master style game, you can only rotate at 90-degree angles. I suspect the devs just couldn't figure out how to program the renderer to handle arbitrary player angles, threw their hands up and said "good enough". Would I call it a good game? Probably not, even the Catacomb A* games might be better and those are primitive and rough in and of themselves, but I would say it's kind of interesting and if Catacomb turns you on it might be something of a something-similar fix for you. It's also free now. https://triptico.com/software/freaks.html

Have you ever actually tried to play through the entire base game, let alone any PWADs, on Nightmare? I feel like if you had, you wouldn't be asking this.

Was that comparison done with or without taking the VGA mode vertical stretching into account though? I think one of the problems some of the model packs have had is they make the creatures too squat due to modeling them after sprite rips viewed at a square pixel aspect ratio when the original game resolution had somewhat tall pixels.

I'm reminded of the bit in one interview where Michael Raymond-Judy talked about how he didn't author every map but he did touch and finalize every map; they did tennis-style mapping on Heretic (or at least on the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion), sending the maps back and forth between authors to do edits and corrections, and that sure sometimes it bruised your ego to have someone go "this kinda sucks, what if we put this here instead" but it resulted in better maps. This being the "unpopular Doom opinions" thread, I'll let that lead into a two-for-one: - Heretic's level design is better than Doom's. - That's in part because they followed consistent rules about how particular textures and elements were meant to be used, so if you saw a particular type of door or liquid you didn't have to puzzle over how it was supposed to work. All the arguments on which Doom flats should hurt and how much are moot for Heretic, for instance, because the rules of damage floors are all there in a perusal of the IWAD, with very few deviations (and the phoenix in E4M7 is the only curveball that's clearly deliberate, the few other inconsistencies can be fairly readily chalked up as mapping errors). Unfortunately it's eroded somewhat by third-party mappers, then and now, tending to gleefully disregard all of it, if they took the time to notice in the first place.

Corvus has entered the chat

I am pretty sure similar concerns of rippers vs. chunky hitbox is why Raven Software gave the Iron Liches a resistance to the tomed Dragon Claw in Heretic.

I believe Zrrion the Insect did the arch-with-books initially. I'd have to double check if the grey brick version of it was one of my variants or from his initial set.

Hiren's Boot CD/USB is my usual go-to for getting into an unbootable PC to fix/retrieve stuff, but I'm by no means an expert. In my limited experience sometimes just the boot sector is damaged, not even necessarily by hardware failure, but definitely don't run the system more than you need to until you've managed to retrieve what's retrievable, copying any visible files to an external storage should be priority #1, then you can see about doing other checkup/fix on the system itself if you want to.

There are a lot of things in ports that I would probably categorize as "things that piss me off but I can deal with / work around them given sufficient incentive" so the main thing that would make me not even consider using a port is there not being any worthwhile mods that obligate it. (You could possibly slot easier-to-set-up multiplayer in there somewhere on the rare instances when I care about multiplayer, most of the time I don't.)

Yeah, some of the MEDIVLTX / Baker's Legacy recolors were rather... not good. It looks like @Not Jabba has been putting the earlier-posted palette research to good use in getting better results.

Locust Swarms remind me of spells that were in the old Raven games Black Crypt and Shadowcaster so I lean a bit towards that, but they all sound pretty cool.

E6M1 is a "my office" level of the Raven building. It could be meant for deathmatch, or it could have just been made for funsies like a lot of blueprint-of-familiar-place maps from the early years; IIRC it's pretty easy to just leave without bothering to clear stuff. E6M2 is probably one of the elusive cut campaign levels. The design isn't very conducive to what would be considered a good deathmatch nowadays, though I suppose standards could have been different back then. Someone probably liked it a little too much to let it be thrown away outright despite not making the cut for the official episodes. E6M3 (formerly E4M1 prior to v1.3) is a conversion of American McGee's IDMAP01.WAD so that one definitely is a deathmatch map (albeit with monster placements). I still feel like calling these "bonus levels" or "super secret levels" or something would be more accurate than the common moniker of it being a "deathmatch episode". M2 is definitely the most interesting one if you're looking from the perspective of "clean it up and put it in a single player episode".

I should probably get this out there instead of sitting around waiting to do more analysis on it myself, because I've got higher priority things (like my Hexen project) but this should be known about by people who might use/preserve it. A while back I was doing some deep digging and found something pretty interesting regarding MageSlayer that seems to have been completely forgotten by the visible Internet in the intervening years: Raven software released editing tools and even source code for the tools (albeit without any approved FLOSS license or anything). The only reason I downgraded this from "exciting" to "interesting" is that it seems like there might be a few hitches in actually getting a working level running. - As interviews have suggested, there's a level export plugin for 3DS Max, not that this is likely to be very useful to anyone now. - But the example level shows that the export is to a text format that gets further compiling, similarly to how Quake did it (though the exact format appears to be different) so it's theoretically possible to type in a level definition in a text editor, just like it's theoretically possible to do the same with Quake, even though it would be a pain to do so. The map compilers are there (at least for the most part). - However, just putting a level file in a game data folder doesn't work, if you try to load game data from a folder instead of a VPK, then it seems like MageSlayer wants the entire game data to be there with no packed file fallback and I didn't get around to trying to explode the whole VPK into a folder and try again. - Judging by available info there might be a tool missing and I'm not clear on if it was for a QuakeC analogue (sad to lose but missable) or an ACS analogue (potentially more problematic not to have for level making) There's also some third party stuff by Bil Simser, like the beginnings of a WinTex/SLADE style program, but the talked-about dedicated level editor seems to be lost/never released (Bil Simser seems to still be around but my cursory attempt at getting in touch never got a response, maybe someone who's better at that sort of thing wants to try, I've often suspected but never been able to definitively confirm that email servers might discriminate against Tutanota addresses so I can't be sure my mail was ever even seen). Here is the relevant site on Wayback: MageSlayin' For the curious who might want to apply similar archaeology techniques, finding this was practically a fluke, I noticed that Blue's News is astonishingly still a living site with a news archive that goes back all the way to 1996, so searched around for games I was interested in to poke any links into Wayback. As an additional little something (that I think I found off a link from an archived version of the Raven Software site, I forget), here's an interview with one of the devs, further corroborating that they wanted the game to be moddable (maybe the Activision buyout killed those aspirations, and possibly the game itself given that there are still some serious bugs that never got patched out). The Gaming Nexus MageSlayer Interview (Dan Freed) Enjoy. Some of these files are possibly relevant to Take No Prisoners also, by the by, since that was also built on the Vampire engine.

For as much as my opinion matters on it, please make it HTML pages. I'm so utterly sick and tired of every bit of useful information only being posted as bloated video streams these days.

I wouldn't put it past the realm of possibility that it was just made up as a fantasy name without the realization that it's an actual place.

Seems kind of familiar, but I'm mostly ending up drawn back to E5M6 Colonnade, which doesn't 100% match but maybe it's a distorted recollection? None of the PWADs I shuffled through thus far seem like as good a match, but I looked mainly at singletons and not necessarily all levels in multi-level sets.

Vanilla Hexen actually lets you specify custom colormaps in MAPINFO, it's just that the fog one is the only alternate that comes in the IWAD. So other fade colors are possible but how good they'll look depends on the availability of relevant colors in the palette. Not sure if I still have it on an old disc somewhere or not but at one point I had made a tan fade for a desert sandstorm map, but the desert stuff didn't make the cut when I reorganized the current project.