baja blast rd.

Adding whyismayonaise

e2 of https://doomwiki.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Square

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/lunacy

search idgames too

Some unsurprising chaingun choices so far lol

When thinking about ammo balance, it might seem natural to compare the total monster HP to the damage the player can do with the ammo provided -- but in most maps I find that a limited way of thinking.

There are many reasons, but the biggest one is that weapons have very different power levels and roles. If the threatening parts of the action are tuned around needing to use the power weapons (this is usually any of the RL, PR, or BFG, but it also can be SSG), and the player has lower-dps weapons (like chaingun and shotgun -- but depending on the action, it also can be SSG), you're generally allowed to provide a lot of the lower-tier ammo without really impacting how generous or stingy the map feels when it comes to the real damage dealers. 

So what many maps will do is give extra lower-grade ammo (shells and bullets in a map that is built around RL/PR) as insurance against running completely out of ammo, while the balance still revolves around the player's strongest weapons.

This works the other way too. A RL-centered map with lots of bulky mid-tier enemies that has too few rockets might come off as stingy even if it has practically limitless bullets (especially if it lacks SSG or its monsters are positioned in a way that makes them hard to SSG down). Flip that around and go surprisingly scarce on overall ammo but provide lots more rockets and it might feel generous.

Only skimmed but my favorite gag was classifying the author as a French philosopher just based on his last name.

Pretty sure I tend to prefer a higher amount of 'secretiveness' per level. That doesn't really connect to a number; several secrets that are on the small side, or two secrets that are full-fledged sidequests, might end up being comparable. The number would also have to be adjusted for map size anyway -- 4 secrets might be more for a small map than 6 secrets are for a large map. 

Stupid Bunny's first paragraph is essentially my take on it. I'll never let an excess of secrets bait me into a tiresome "completionism at all costs" hunt for them that sours my playthrough. But a lot of the levels that stick with me and prompt me to replay them in the future have areas I end up missing the first time around, which builds this deep sense of curiosity that can linger long past that first playthrough.

One important idea is that secrets can function in many possible ways. A secret might not have a big gameplay role -- it might just be a cache of resources you don't need -- but its presence might still do a lot to strength the map's sense of place, like giving you a look into something that helps contextualize the map's theme. In one of Nihility's later maps, which is creepy and tension-racked as they all are -- darkness broken up by flickering lights, the ambient thrums of unplaceable machines -- there's a bright secluded secret office that's like an oasis. It's small and had almost no useful resources for me at the time. But the mood change-up was amazing, and it would have been a good secret even if it were totally empty. For reasons like this, I would caution against looking at secrets only through one lens, whichever that is.

12 hours ago, Wahrnehmungskrieg said:

Every single sector in the level should be marked as a secret. You will have to forgo things like damaging floors and flickering lights, but it will be worth it, doing this will encourage high amounts of exploration

Only true in vanilla/limit-removing. Boom and above will let you mark a sector as secret while assigning other effects. 

These reviews have been fantastic. Much appreciated.

Best tree I've seen

From this WIP:

You don't. 

Standard etiquette is: 

If you got a response, you don't try to remove context and stop the responses from being helpful to anyone else. Leave the discussion intact.

If you didn't get a response yet, explain in the thread that you solved your problem and post a brief explanation of what the solution was. 

6 minutes ago, JackDBS said:

Just tried this one out for a bit. This is certainly the most TNT WAD to ever TNT.

Let's see if that holds up after you try TNT: Threevilution. 

13 hours ago, acs said:

i haven't seen it here yet (surprisingly) but myhouse.wad

I am not surprised that myhouse.wad hadn't been brought up in a thread that was predominantly active in the year 2020. 

the pistol

This is good work, please keep at it.

About the support textures, separating them is more convenient for use. 

Even with compositions, there's a distinction between the horizontally tiled ones (left to right) and vertically stacked ones. With the horizontal ones, the mapper can split up the lines with vertices and adjust the alignments, which is not very tricky. With the stacked ones, the mapper can run into awkward situations if they want to use it both an upper and lower texture on the same line (you won't be able to control both alignments, so depending on the height of the sector, one texture will be impossible to align correctly). Or if they want to double-stack (like use two 48-tall supports for a 96-high barrier). A midtex will use the full height of the texture, too, so the full stack will be less convenient that way. That all would limit flexibility a lot more (and force drawing extra sectors sometimes). So those vertical stacks tend to make sense more if the "full" texture is meant to be used as a normal wall texture, which doesn't seem like the case here. 

Sold Soul (2021) 

and for Hexen, there's Veil of Darkness (2023)

20 minutes ago, Darman Macray said:

(Received a shoutout, but I'm not sure if that counts.)

I would definitely count it. 

For more recommendations, this thread is a good one.

Aurelius got it. That's a teleport closet setup and the blocking object keeps the closet from being unnecessarily spacious when many monsters were removed. 

More generally, it's a good idea to pay attention to how (removed) monsters interact with your geometry. Like, if you have those SWTW-style "dormant monster" closet setups with a fake wall tightly surrounding a group of enemies, unflag enemies from the back (or middle) rather than the front (or borders) so the invisible wall now isn't suddenly strange. 

Guess why and you'll learn something.

edit: adding a hint 

@DoomGappy 

There's been times, including recently, where I wanted to take a group of sectors that are lit to many different values and raise their lighting in the course of playing the map by a set amount like 32 or 48 while preserving any existing differences, like gradient lighting. Those setups are sometimes not practical or possible with the existing lighting actions. 

"Increase/Decrease Lighting As Sector Changes Height" would make that very convenient to do -- and is conceptually similar to the scrolling actions, so wouldn't require any new skills from the mapper.

Imagined example of setup: That action with a tag on a control sector. The player (or a voodoo doll) raises the height of the control sector by let's say 32. Then the sectors with that tag get their lighting increased by 32. 

The "As Sector Changes Height" model would also open up possibilities for manually scripted lighting effects. The length of the control linedef is still free to do something sensible if you want, but that isn't necessary. 

11 hours ago, EduardoAndFriends said:

Oof aaagh eee. Map 3 is… so mean. I must have been doing a whole lot of things wrong cos OUCH. Not entirely sure what a valid strat of that one would be, because I was drowning big time, lol. 🥲 I think the only time I felt safe was at the exit! Grim, ball-busting stuff to play blind for sure.

 

I hope I don't sound too forlorn or frustrated in the recording but it was hard to look on the bright side when I got turned inside out so often, lel

8 hours ago, DreadWanderer said:

The secret fight rocked my socks off as I hinted at in an earlier post. It's kinda hard to say what the optimal strat is, someone else in the thread said to focus on the imps for space which is 100% logical, the problem is that you get swarmed really fast and still take blast damage due to how cramped the room is. And there are revs too. The pillars are a double edged sword that provide you with cover but really screw your rocketing. I think that it's a fight that would be super fun (and easier) with a plasma gun instead of a RL. The reward and the difficulty can be fine tuned with something like supercharge instead of mega to balance out the plasma gun, and/or providing no more than 100 cells let's say. I don't know, these ideas are just something I thought about as I am writing this.

The berserk is one of the best weapons in there. I would start by doing what you can with rockets and then switching to berserk and then finishing off with rockets (when enemies stop teleporting in).

There's also this amusing (but inefficient) approach. 

Following up on the subject, I enjoy most forms of RNG for reasons Kinetic said ('read and react' gameplay is fun) and also because good strategy involves hedging against RNG.

I'm using this example (again) simply because I have a convenient clip of it, but SWTW map02 has this encounter where 70%+ of the time, the turret cyber will fire for you and an infight-centered strategy will go as planned. (Everything here is about casual play rather than a maxrun.) Sometimes, though, the cyber refuses to fire for seconds on end and you'll get killed by the incoming mob of hell knights. A lot of people might consider this a badly designed RNG fight because of that, because their "good strategy" gets screwed -- but hovering around and hoping for the cyber to fire isn't really all that good of a strategy here. Instead what you can do to hedge against RNG is melee-bait the HKs into a loop, which keeps them in place and gives you pretty much as long as you want to get the cyb to fire. 

10x10 and Heartland are a couple of my favorite wads, but as usual, too busy to participate in these. 

So I'll drop some occasional comments. 

Heartland map04: Routine Flaring and Flailing

I love the opening part of this map. It's one of those freewheeling incidental combat setups that would be cool to pull off in a regular map, but managing it with the restrictions of portals (meaning you can't easily change architecture based on testing) must have been quite fortuitous. It's notable how there are almost no "dangerous" roaming enemies in the lower section; save for a few chaingunners and rocket zombies, the heavy hitters among the roaming monsters are sergeants and revenants (which there's a lot of cover from), and there's plenty of healing. It would have been so easy to plop down a PE or vile or anything like that, so the monster choice seems deliberately pacified, and it seems like an intentional cooldown.

The DWMC encourages people to put individual maps under the microscope, but it's good to think of how maps fit together as a seamless experience. Right after map03's climactic drop-down fight and right before the back-to-back long maps of map05+, having a more laidback downbeat of a map, understated with both gameplay and concept, is a fair call. (Laidback gameplay is relative -- it's not the easiest map in the wad but kind of a breather for its positioning in the wad.)

A little tactical note is that despite cybruisers being splash-immune, if you have the ammo to spare, the rocket launcher is a good choice against them anyway. The rocket launcher has good range, has respectable DPS even with splash immunity (higher than the SSG's), and the splash damage against other targets that wander by will add up in a hurry.  

On 2/12/2024 at 11:25 PM, plums said:

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Supercharge yet

Well, you were the first post of page two, which is pretty early.