Marisa the Magician

My opinion: It's not my cup of tea, it doesn't tickle my pickle, doesn't scratch my itch. I've never been a fan of this whole macho gorefest sort of thing. The Doom Comic was funny, once. It's impressive how this massive mess even runs in the first place. It's annoying that people keep bringing it up over and over again, speaking of which... It's quite concerning that people won't stop asking everyone's opinion on it. We all know what we know, the question doesn't have to be asked again.

I like this. I like the sheep.

I feel the need to contribute to this whole thing. I'll preface this with me stating that I have come to learn from past mistakes, and even if it's a painful learning process, I am still learning. I want to provide some pointers here, though: Regarding the use of gameplay mods: There are some things to take into account here, different approaches, basically. You want to provide feedback for the map authors: Understand that mappers are not responsible for dealing with whatever changes a gameplay mod will bring about (excluding cases where the mod's usage is endorsed, though this is rare). The form of play that the authors intended takes priority. You are explicitly testing a map WITH the mod: If there's some trouble, take this feedback to those responsible for the mod. In most cases we can't ensure that what we make meshes well with everything out there (it would be a most mentally straining ordeal to do so, trust me), but it's important to hear about player experiences to see if we can work something out. (Special case) You are a mod maker testing your own mod: Explain this to the mappers beforehand, understand that they are not entitled to change things FOR you. If something's not working well, you can try to adjust for that, but the easiest choice is simply to let it be, you don't have to cover every ground and account for everything (again, as mentioned in the previous point). Getting emotional: This here is a big problem, and one myself and some other prominent figures are guilty of. Raging / getting salty will only hurt your ability to come up with reasonable feedback. This is VERY bad and nothing good will come out of it. Everyone has different skillsets: If something's simply too hard for you to approach, acknowledge that. Play at a lower difficulty if possible, or simply... don't play it if it's not for you. There's nothing wrong with getting upset, but don't take it out on the mappers like it's their fault, they have their intended audience, and not everything is for everyone. Calm down: THIS is something that needs to get through even the most stubborn among us (damn it, why did I have to write those two words together). Becoming increasingly frustrated by some hard encounter where you're dying over and over again, reloading the save, failing once more... don't "rinse and repeat" there, take a breather instead. You're only going to torture yourself and perform worse otherwise. That's it from me, I guess. I don't expect everyone to agree with what I say, but I felt I needed to say it.

The most important think I could ever ask of a port is scripting. Being raised on Unreal, it's all I live for. The more advanced this scripting is, the better.

Guys, you're getting it wrong. This isn't the same "multicore" guy from before, this is coming from a certain other noxious individual in the community (specifically the Russian side).

Firing this up, I was quite impressed with how far Eternity has gotten, that it can do all this crazy stuff that... I'm pretty sure GZDoom can't? Moving trains??? Anyway, I'm absolutely in love with how this is structured, clever use of portals to give more verticality. Disappointed by the use of the nefarious Catharsi enemy (sorry, just a personal gripe there). MAP01 kicked my ass (in HMP, wow I suck), so I haven't been able to dig deeper, but so far, this is looking like a real gem.

I think people know enough about my own controversial opinions, heheh. Anyway, here's another one: I think teleport closets are lazy. It feels like the mapper didn't want to put in the effort to actually set up a well thought out encounter with strategic monster placements, and instead just said "fuck it" and let RNG flood the room with whatever. On top of that, self-replenishing sniper spots that use teleport closets can eat it. Way to add tedium to 100%'ing a map.

Personally also a big fan of those sounds. Gotta give special mention to the BFG. It sounds A LOT more potent than ol' PC Doom's.

Clearly we're past the age of red and blue. Doom needs a healthy dose of something new and refreshing, perhaps...

From the top of my head, trying to think of stuff I've used... "Floodfilling": The practice of cramming monsters together into a single room until there's no more space left. "Maximum Crime": Any amount of pain elementals in a wide open space. Worse if they're far away. "Bitrate Destroyer": Grainy or flashy textures (e.g.: FIREBLU or the various sand/dirt textures) that make video recording choppier. "House Made of Kitchen Sinks": When a mod has a serious problem with feature creep and tries to do absolutely everything and cover every ground. First said about Project Brutality. "Pixelstairs": The use of (often invisible) really thin stairs to simulate a ladder. "The Waiting Game": An arena where you're locked in for a fixed time, so if you deal with the encounter faster than expected, all that's left for you is to sit down and wait for a door to open or bars to lower. "Making GZDoom/Graf Cry": Excess sector detailing, dense linedefs, causes severe framerate issues with dynamic lights in GZDoom. "Guessing Game": Having to re-explore a map after pressing a switch because it didn't do anything immediately obvious.

Why not play as a non-binary sassy robot with a curvy ass? Just sayin' ;) Honestly, that sorta thing doesn't matter. A good character can be any gender. You're not automatically the most badass because you're a MANLY MAN MAN or anything, and girls aren't icky nor give cooties. We're all way past that phase, aren't we?

Ah yes, good times.

So, everyone knows that the map I submitted to Joel's contest was Soundless Mound, right? Well, actually, that wasn't initially the case. At first I wanted to just make some fancy techbase map with a ridiculous amount of keycards (oh boy). I didn't get very far with it, though, and you can tell I had a serious problem with overdetailing. After a while I scraped it entirely and did what I do best: horror. I actually planned on probably finishing it up as a separate project, but I haven't really found the strength to keep going with it (what a shame). This is all that's currently done: https://marisakirisa.me/tmp/jobel_m.pk3

Apologies for the one-month bump but, now that I'm finally pushing myself to play Deathkings for the first time, I'd be more than happy to have this pack in place for it. I'm looking forward to the project's completion. Godspeed, y'all.

If you want "something you don't see every day", there's this one little gem called Lithium. The things I've seen this mod do... it seriously could grow to become a full-on total conversion someday. It does have the potential for that, with its story (wow, story on a gameplay mod? who cares about that, right?) And hey, if others can self-promote, then why the hell not: give SWWM GZ a try too if you like. It borders on "over the top" but barely even comes close to the likes of Pillowblaster's mods since I care a lot about balance (at least to a certain degree). Sure, it'll make the base game fairly easy, but it'll still give you a challenge with harder mapsets without straight-up trivializing everything (I built this thing as an "anti-frustration" counter for slaughtermaps, after all). There's still some small finishing touches left, but it's a fully playable mod nevertheless.

Considering who's behind it, I'm afraid not.

Used to be real huge into UT99, but I eventually left it behind when it was clear I couldn't get anything else out of it. The community has stagnated, it's clear that it's all dying out. I came to Doom because, in all honestly, it's nicer here. A very lively place, lots of creative folk, all sorts of things being made every day... it just never ends.

Actually all splash damage in Doom is square EXCEPT barrels which are circular.

Pain elementals should not be allowed to exist.

I honestly don't know where I stand on this. I simultaneously feel like I'm a nobody and everything I make is trash no one cares about while at the same time knowing quite well that many people know me and care about what I make. It just sucks, really.

My controversial opinion is that slaughtermaps could still work fine even if they didn't have obsessively hyper-detailed sector/linedef art that only serves to decrease performance, not just graphically, but also in terms of gameplay since it'll make sight and sound checks eat up even more cpu time. Textures are a thing, models are a thing. Pretty sure most people who do this sort of detailing build these maps for GZDoom, which is ironic, because then they will complain about it being the port's fault that their maps with over 100k lines and tens of thousands of enemies run slow. I went on a lengthy rant about this a while back, and I can't emphasize this enough: Complaining won't make GZDoom run better, blaming Graf for everything that's wrong with the world won't solve anything, if there were hundreds of ways to optimize the port, wouldn't you think they'd been all done already? There are limits, and we've hit them, hard. At the end of the day, this is still a strict BSP-based engine with world geometry that changes unpredictably. Modern engines don't have these performance problems because they've not only switched to using far more optimal forms of handling map geometry (such as with the use of static meshes for almost everything), but are also highly specialized and and not designed with the enormous modding potential GZDoom has, where practically everything can be extended upon and hooked into. Actors in GZDoom run about 20 times more code than in vanilla each tic, there's a whole lot of new features being handled that simply didn't exist before. Anyway. Slaughtermaps are fun and all, but please, just think for a moment before you reach for your spirograph and flood the map with hi-poly glowing floor patterns.

One thing I'd wonder about this is... if Doom had been skipped over, would Quake still have happened, or Unreal?

Alright, so I decided why not and went and did the okuplok check. PB took a whole long-ass time to load in, pulling a single frame per second. BD seemed a bit better at around 30 fps. Then just to boast I rolled in my own mod (which I'm proud of having optimized the hell out of, and I optimized things even further after posting this), and with all the slaughterwad compat options in order, there's a solid 45 fps (without them, fps start at 10 and then gradually drop down below one, as the heavy lifting of per-tic combat tracking for 23243 shootable actors takes its toll). I should also mention that the entire map is playable from start to finish, and I've actually recorded footage of this. As a control, with no mods loaded I get 50 fps. One thing that bothers me is just how MUCH the mods seem to be doing, judging by the sheer number of VM calls from countless thinkers: There is something VERY WRONG with those numbers for PB. Not to mention the humongous number of thinkers, which almost quadruples that of unmodded gzdoom.

Well this is a quality thread.

Finally transitioning after 8 long years of personal struggles, fear and doubt, probably. In terms of Doom stuff, making my very first fully original gameplay mod that people enjoy and praise, and with it finally opening a big window into my personal lore that for the longest time I wished I could expose my friends to in a nicely entertaining way.