Viggles

It's that time of year again. Brigandine is a standalone singleplayer map for limit-removing ports. (-complevel 2 if you swing that way.) Download: http://doom.washboardabs.net/brigandine/brigandine-latest.zip (RC2, updated 2017-05-13) Textfile: http://doom.washboardabs.net/brigandine/brigandine.txt Screenshots: (Taken in GZDoom 2.3.2 with ambient occlusion) This began life as a quickie while I was wrapping up Breach and needed a break from techbase. Then it crashed on my couch for 2 years and ate all my food and drank all my beer and didn't pay a god damn cent for electricity. It's time for us to move on with our lives; don't let the door hit it on the ass on the way out. Music kindly provided by Conelrad, who wanted to do an old-school Doom track and knocked it out of the park.

Hello all! First-time poster, long-time listener here. Breach is a large Doom2 singleplayer techbase map for limit-removing ports (ZDoom, PrBoom+, Eternity etc.) I figure it's far enough along to slap a beta sticker on it and get some proper playtesting feedback. The final version has now been released on idgames! Download here: doomworld | idgames | mirror (updated 2017-12-29) Textfile here: http://washboardabs.net/doom/breach/breach.txt Screenshots: (click to embiggen) Tasting notes: - I set out to build something intricate and thoroughly modern using only the stock Doom 2 textures (though I cheated a bit there) and line/sector specials. It's heavily inspired by Essel's stuff, No Rest for the Living, and Metroid Prime. - The map is fairly linear and has a lot of setpiece encounters (so maybe a little too modern!) It's also kinda cramped in places, because I only got a good handle on scale once it was too late to really let out the seams. - This is the first level of an eventual two-parter; I split it in half for pacing reasons and because I ran up against the seg limit. (It's no KDiZD though, don't worry.) Playtime is about 45 minutes if you're sightseeing. So! Detailed, critical, nitpicky feedback would be much appreciated. A bunch of particular questions: - How is ammo balance? How do the difficulty levels feel? - Are any areas too dark? Not dark enough? - Are any areas too cramped for the encounters in them? - Are the surreal hell sequences 'readable'? Do they feel like they relate to the real-world parts? - Doomsday can take minutes to load the level, which smells like its GLnode-builder is choking on something. Is this common with complex geometry? How would I go about fixing that? - I disabled jumping in ZDoom to prevent a couple of sequence-breaks; is that a dealbreaker for many players? - Are demo lumps still a thing? If so, how do you deal with incompatibilities between ports/versions? - How important is it these days to have custom music and a custom TITLEPIC? (The wad has neither yet.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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?

@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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

Thanks for the demo, that was a lot of fun to watch! Looks like my encounter changes worked well, though I was vexed that you managed to avoid triggering the red key pickup encounter. (It fired later anyway when you used the red key, and I figure players will only manage what you did if they're consciously trying to break it.)

Nice to hear! :) Could you maybe describe which spots, and which weapons you had at the time? Also, were you playing the beta2 I posted today, or the previous version?

Thanks heaps for the praise and the detailed feedback, SteveD! Beta2 addresses this to some extent - there's a little less health on UV, and I rejigged several fights to catch players who try to run away and snipe. On the whole though, I'd prefer that the item balance would encourage players to get rowdy and reckless and dive into the fray without worrying too much. (That's why there's generous health crumbs in the berserk cave for instance: so you can run around Tysoning it up instead of finding a corner and shotgunning everyone. Because who doesn't love punching imps to pieces?) Part of this is the freedom to withdraw and reengage a fight from a different vantage point; I find it hard to enable that without also enabling players to simply run away, or camp in a doorway and snipe. But if a player wants to play that way, well, that's on them. I'd rather that people play aggressively because it's fun than because they keep getting locked in.

❤️ Happy valentine's day! ❤️ Breach has been updated to beta2: http://doom.washboardabs.net/brigandine/brigandine-latest.zip Textfile and changelog here: http://doom.washboardabs.net/brigandine/brigandine.txt This version fixes broken traps in PrBoom+ on complevel 2, reworks many of the fights (especially the milquetoast final encounter) to make them more interesting and harder to run from, fixes some visual and gameplay bugs, rebalances health and weapon pickups, and makes a few switches more obvious. There's also a couple new things to find. If you'd previously played through beta1 on complevel 2 (tourniquet and Wilou did at least), please give this beta a go: the level was pretty busted before, and the fixes and changes make the second half much more interesting to play. For everyone else, there's enough new here that if you were thinking of another playthrough then wait no longer! I'd really appreciate feedback on the encounter changes. Short any new bugs or difficulty problems, this will be the version that gets submitted to idgames I think.

Gez: That's a good summary, though it's not precisely what's going on in this case. It's certainly one version of the problem that can come up. In this case the original AB animation doesn't jitter vertically at all; Sprite Fix is overriding one of the frames to fix some pixels and make the two match better horizontally, but it doesn't alter the vertical offset of either frame. Those remain consistent with vanilla doom(2)'s. GZDoom wants to override the Y offset of both the impaled human animation frames (POL6A0 and POL6B0) from 62 to 65, presumably to play nicer with OpenGL's sprite clipping. But because one of the frames is replaced in the PWAD, its Y offset is left alone, so it's now inconsistent with the other frame that receives the offset override. GZDoom's offset overrides could be altered to be consistent with Sprite Fix's in each case; but that only fixes it in this particular instance, for this particular version of Sprite Fix, and it ignores the decisions that went into GZDoom's offset choices. (Indeed, in this case I imagine Sprite Fix would actually want to use GZDoom's raised offsets - if it didn't mean breaking idgames regs by shipping an unmodified original sprite solely to apply a better offset.) Moreover I can see this edge case - PWAD replaces part of a sprite animation, keeping the offsets the same as vanilla - coming up for a lot more than just Sprite Fix. As a contrived example, imagine a PWAD that made the zombieman's muzzle flash blue but didn't touch the other frames. I think Revenant100's proposal - that GZDoom ought to treat sprite animations as a group, and not override any offsets for that group if any sprite in that group has been replaced - would be the safest way to solve this kind of issue.

I'm guessing that GZDoom may have hardcoded clipping offsets for certain sprite frames, which it doesn't apply if that frame is replaced in a PWAD. When only one frame of an animated sprite is replaced, it may be applying the clip value for the unmodified frame(s) but not the replaced frame(s), leading to the animation jitter. If this is the case, then GZDoom isn't really doing anything wrong here; it would just be lacking sufficient context for what the PWAD is trying to do. The jitter does go away if every frame of the animation is replaced in the PWAD, so that could be one way to keep GZDoom happy.

This thread was quite an eye-opener; until now, I assumed almost everyone in the doomworld community played on UV. I'm not particularly skilled and I play on a trackpad, so I usually run through community maps on HMP or else savescum UV. In the couple of maps I've released, I tuned HMP to be consistently completable for me, tuned UV to kick my ass, and just whittled off enemies for HNTR without testing on the assumption noone would even try it. Sounds like I ought to pay more attention to the HNTR experience.

Fantastic work, as NightFright said this project is a great contribution! I noticed the fixed "Twitching Impaled Human" animation in 1.8 bounces up and down in GZDoom 2.3.2 when using the default sprite clipping settings; this seems to be a recent GZDoom bug, and not a bug in the sprite fixing project itself. I've filed a GZDoom tracker issue about it here: https://mantis.zdoom.org/view.php?id=241.