Viggles
Members-
Content count
50 -
Joined
-
Last visited
About Viggles
-
Rank
Mini-Member
Recent Profile Visitors
The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.
-
Woah, sorry for leaving your questions unanswered for so long @Agony! I don’t think I ever sketched the layout, I just had a jumble of scenes and vistas and visual ideas in my head - a flickering reactor, a dam, a piston jumping puzzle, a central hub, a tram station, so forth - and would sketch views of those to get a feel for the volumes in 3D. Beyond that there was no planning, just a mad cramming in of ideas where they’d fit. Each idea was considered mostly in isolation and I think that’s evident in the final layout - it’s a bunch of self-contained encounter areas with a single point of connection between each. Breach was mostly built in DoomBuilder 2 within a windows VM (I use a macbook). I used Slade for putting together the WAD itself but never really tried its level editor.
-
Cacowards 2018 Mentionation Thread (don't toot your own horn ffs)
Viggles replied to Scuba Steve's topic in WAD Discussion
See also Xaserian release cycles 😅 I'm gratified that people are rediscovering it now, but Breach was released in 2015 (and reviewed on Doom WAD station in 2016!) and I just held off on calling it done out of fear of letting go. -
Breach has now been updated to 1.0 and is released on idgames. This version adds a titlepic and a new soundtrack by Conelrad (who also did the music for Brigandine); tidies some architecture; cleans up the automap; and makes about 6 trillion anal-retentive texture realignments. It does not add any extra levels or change the existing gameplay in any way. I realise it has been 2 years since the last version. I may circle back and make part 2 at some point, but for now - barring any egregious errors I've introduced in this update - this should be considered the final release.
-
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
So, yes. I gave up on Doomsday after Breach, when it became clear that infuriating load times and sub-10fps rendering were a simple consequence of level detail and not an indicator that the level itself was broken. I really should have noted this in Brigandine’s readme, but felt awkward saying “ayo don’t use Doomsday” in case it stopped being true in some future version. But in the three years since Breach I’ve only seen Doomsday’s performance get worse, not better, and I don’t have any faith that it’ll improve. Heres the thing: every other modern port can load levels like Breach and Brigandine in seconds and play them at perfectly decent frame rates. Modern GZDoom even has post-process effects like ambient occlusion and bloom that are purty and have a modest constant FPS cost. TL;DR: play detailed levels in something other than Doomsday. -
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
Awwwwwww yiss 😎 This year's Cacoward was a great xmas present, and I'm glad Brigandine found a place in such fine company! For sure, I've been sluggishly working on final releases of Brigandine and Breach to put up on idgames. Brigandine's will add a new difficulty level that'll need some betatesting first, so it'll probably land in the new year. -
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
Those are the only two I've released in the last 20 years; I made a few lousy deathmatch levels back in the mid-90s, that are only of archaeological interest by now. Hey thanks for the demo, that was a lot of fun to watch! It was interesting to see how missing the RL secret impacted the gameplay and ammo balance later on. -
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
@SP_FACE1 Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you liked it so much and I'm really pleased to hear it played well in coop - I never even tested multiplayer (you might be the first person who has??), let alone balanced it. How many players were you, and did you find any scripting oddities or balance issues while playing? -
what are you working on? I wanna see your wads.
Viggles replied to everennui's topic in WAD Discussion
@Jaska Nice, several of those building textures were ones I made many years ago for Thief 2 - fun to see them show up in a Doom WAD! Did you grab them from thief.washboardabs.net or are they floating around in a pack somewhere? -
Wow, this was awesome! Excellent work! I played on UV and got my ass handed to me a lot early on - it was great fun to figure out how to survive the madness at the start. I missed the invuln secret until I cheated, and three chaingunners were a no-show, but 100%ed it otherwise. Some remarks: - The aesthetic and the general nastiness reminded me a lot of E4M2, one of my favorite episode 4 levels. - I love love love the open-air connections between everything. The layout is really inspiring, and I'd be keen to hear what your design process was! - I associate those blue/red WOODMET switches with the corresponding skull keys, so was surprised when they were just regular buttons. - After triggering the switch just beyond the yellow door, the fight that followed seemed kinda weak. I just camped in a corner and shot the popcorn enemies as they teleported in one by one, then dealt with the revenants after. Perhaps take (some of) the revenants off ambush, so that they'll come out and harry the player? - The chaingunners on the ledge right after those revenants are hard to spot, and feel like they'd be a cheap death for players who had scraped through the earlier encounter. There's not a lot of health there, so maybe drop a couple stimpacks inside the room which players could run for to survive the chaingunners?
-
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
The only way I know of to teleport an unalerted monster in a vanilla-ish map is by pushing them with the explosion from a crushed barrel. I used this for the mancs that appear after the red door soulsphere, though not for any good reason. Crushers aren't an option for the SSG trap though, without needlessly complicating the linework even further. Honestly, being able to avoid the SSG trap if you never shoot is the sort of thing I don't see any point in fixing or in designing defensively against. A player is never going to run into this situation inadvertently, only if they're actively trying to break the scripting of the level; in which case you're welcome to whatever exploits you can find. -
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
Awesome vids, Dragonfly! Nice midair duck on the rocket jump as well I guess? I had thought that (G)ZDoom prevented explosion physics from letting you cross linedefs you couldn't otherwise reach by jumping, but I guess not. Deadwing, the actiony track was a deliberate choice: I was coming off the back of Doom 2016, and wanted something that would set a similarly muscular rhythm for the level and keep the player fighting-fighting-fighting, rather than encouraging them to slow down and play cautiously. Not harder, but better behaved; the final encounter in beta2 turns out to be easy to rush and the monsters tend to clump up in a state where it's not much fun to fight, and the player is encouraged to just cheese them or avoid them rather than dropping down and wading into the fray. I've fired off a new version to those who offered to test, so check your PMs. -
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
Bauul, glad you liked it! Did you find the early rocket launcher, or just the one at the end? And how did the final battle work out for you? I'm making a couple of the secrets easier to spot (and one of them less switch-y) for the next version, though I'm making the BFG one less obvious as most demo players found that straight away. I have a hard time judging the difficulty of switch secrets; I'm so used to working in this level of detail that anything out-of-place looks obvious to me. I'm currently preparing a version with some significant revisions to the final encounter, and I'd like to ask for private testers for it before I do another public release. Both people who have played a previous beta and people who have never played it before. Is this a good place to ask for that kind of thing, or is there a better channel? -
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
Speaking of sequence-breaks, the RL secret makes it theoretically possible to vilejump your way up to the yellow key balcony. This takes patience, health and no small amount of herding, so it's probably not a time-saver for speedruns. -
Doom 2 Minor Sprite Fixing Project - v2.0 Release (updated 11/28/22)
Viggles replied to Revenant100's topic in Mods & Resources
Looks like there's a fix for the partially-replaced-sprite-offset issue in GZDoom dev builds now: https://github.com/coelckers/gzdoom/commit/a6156297ce3602dce73f1caa0805a23294b4799e (I haven't tested it myself though.) -
Brigandine [RC2, updated 2017-05-13]
Viggles replied to Viggles's topic in WAD Releases & Development
dew: Wow, great demo, thanks! Riiiiight up until the final battle, and yeah that sucked. The rev/caco fight on the balcony worked out as I hoped, but clearly you just can't fight the lower enemies properly from up there when you can't aim down and they clump up under the ledges. If the player gets down onto the lower level or drops into the water, then the fight works okay I think; but the clumping discourages the player from trying to drop down in the first place because you can't see what you're dropping into. Back to the drawing board. (The intent was that the pinkies would remain in the exit area until you were out in front of it, to stop the player rushing the exit. They're set to ambush, but evidently the sightlines on the balcony are tripping them early. I'll try the manc idea you suggested instead to fix that.) Re the 1047 pillar switch - were you trying to flip it from ground level just to see if it was exploitable, or did you actually think that was the intended progression? Assuming it's the former, I'm tempted to leave it how it is. It's a soft sequence break, not bypassing a key or anything, and if a speedrunner can get through the HK meatwall quick enough to save any time there, then more power to them I think. (Slipping through the red bars definitely needs to be fixed though.) Re the berserk secret - you were looking straight at the switch at least once, so it must be blending in too much. I like the design of it otherwise so I'll look at restyling it or lighting it better. I may redesign the backpack secret to something more obvious, and not just another tiny switch; it's a minor reward that's better to get early, and it's disappointing to end up hunting for it once you've already cleared the map. beta2 is fully compatible with complevel 2 now, so I guess that's a good basis for demo recording. I'll make a note in the textfile for the next release.