The Flange Peddler

I don't see why you have to do any redesign work at all, except for changing a few W1 lines. At the moment you have the 6 subsections for each key, and at the very start of each subsection the player walks over a W1 line that closes off the teleporter from the main room. Just put that W1 line some where else, after the switch/walkover lines that the player has to activate to lower each key. Anyway, it's a nice mapset, not without it's problems that have been gone over before. The better maps are certainly towards the end. Edit: And do voodoo really not work in co-op? I always assumed they did.

From my experience, pressing 'r' takes you to a command prompt where you can probably do some stuff if you know what you're doing. If you just let the install CD continue on, you should get the option to install a new version of windows, or repair an existing one. I don't think the repair utility has ever worked for me though, and I've always ended up having to do a reformat. As a last resort you could try booting from a live linux CD or something before reformating. That way you might be able to get access to any files you need.

Having used large texture resource wads before, this might be quite useful. Deepsea can actually do this automatically for you too. Go to the F7 menu, and then 'PWAD lump arranging and more', and there should be a 'texture deletion' button. You can either list all the textures and flats not used, or list and then delete them. However, from experience it does tend to crash very often when you try to do this, and even when it works you sometimes have to do a little bit of additional cleaning up afterwards. If someone could make a standalone program to automatically delete unused graphics (or if this functionality was added to another editor), then I think a lot of people would find it really useful.

I finished playing through everything except the lost episode, and I’d consider it more of a KDIZDified TNT than anything else. I think it’s a pretty good overall, though I’d agree with Kristus about the general map design, with too many corridors, square rooms and a general lack of interconnectivity. TNT2 in particular drags on a bit. I still think one of your best map designs I’ve seen is your map for CC3. I’m also not keen on the voice acting, to me it seems like it’s trying too hard to emulate Duke3d, and I don’t see the point in all the new enemies. I don’t see why you need all the KDIZD sprites just because they exist. Plus stuff form Heretic. And Hexen. And Duke3d. And whatever other game I didn’t notice. To me all the different styles just clash together horribly (just like in KDIZD). In particular those brown gun-tooting demons that leave mines on the last level look pretty bad in comparison to everything else, and I’ve never liked those annoying things with shields. Not to mention that baron/lost soul monstrosity. Those altered Revenant sprites on the last map are pretty cool though. I think fewer would have been better, and would have given an overall more polished feel to the project. I did like the last map quite a lot. Technically it’s just a linear walk up a mountain, but I think that sort of design works very well for a final boss encounter. It was challenging, with times where I just had to leg it for cover. I did groan when I saw yet more ripped sprites for the end bosses, but the final boss battle itself I think was very well conceived and executed. A fair challenge but quite doable, I can imagine it being quite a bit more difficult if you don’t have enough ammo to knock out the spawning bosses at a fairly fast rate. Much better than the KDIZD end boss battle. There has obviously been a look of work put into this, and I think overall it’s good. I really do think less (resources) would equal more for your wads in the future though.

Geo, get over it. Your hero was a great wrestler in his time but ultimately also a killer. For whatever reasons he had, it is clear Benoit killed his wife, his kid and then himself. Fact. Stop trying to find non-existant holes in the police story. Having been interested in wrestling myself for a number of years as a kid, and having previously read all the stories of all these crazy beefcakes I knew as a child reaching untimely deaths, I've been following the (extremely screwed up) story of Benoit's death closely myself. Every news outlet I have seen, both in the US and the UK, have been reporting the same thing. Benoit killed his wife first, and then his kid, and then himself. Not once have I seen this supposed screw-up in the timeline of events that you mention. The precise timings may have changed (Friday, Saturday or Sunday?), but I haven't seen anywhere report that the kid was killed before the mother. Benoit may have achieved something in his lifetime in wrestling, but you cannot get away from the truth of what happened here. Even the WWE, who amongst their lame sleazy story lines always treat real wrestler deaths with some degree of dignity, have been quick to remove any sign of tribute to Benoit that they previously showed in their 3-hour Benoit-special, which was aired before the full truth of what happened had transpired. I do think the whole story is a real tragedy, but it is obvious that Benoit did something really wrong in the last hours of his life. There is no point in trying to deny it, irrespective of what apparent expertise you may have gained through watching a couple of hours of Law and Order on primetime TV.

I have one waiting too. I was wondering what was going on with it.

I would have said the lack of infighting makes the monsters stupider than before. They still don't really distinguish between friend and foe, and will glady fire at each other as long as they're generally looking towards the player. They still end up easily shooting (and to a lesser extent killing) each other, it's just now those stray attacks don't have any consequences in how the monsters behave. The way I see it, infighting is an (integral) aspect of doom gameplay that needs to be taken into account by anybody making any kind of custom content. If you have to resort to turning it completely off, I think it says more about the imbalance, or overuse, of new monsters, or at least that the level designers didn't spend as much time as perhaps they could have done in ensuring that extreme infighting doesn't happen, by carefully thinking about monster placement a bit more. One point in particular where I thought infighting would have been good is at the second to last battle. I think it would have been nice to see the two new bruiserdemons slaughter the two barons, as a kind of take on how useless the old bosses of E1 actually are.

Playing through it again some of the levels that can take ages to work out the first time through (like map 3), are a bit more enjoyable to play-through when you know roughly what to do. Finding all the secrets is still by no means easy though. Is it just the new decorate monsters that cannot infight, or is it turned completely off for all monsters? I don't recall seeing any infighting anywhere. The lack of infighting does seem to take away a certain element of what makes doom what it is.

Sentences of this type generally require a subject in English, be that either a noun phrase such as 'gut rot', or a pronoun such as 'it'. English sentences generally do need a subject, hence your dissapproval of 'Sucks', irrespective of the context within which they are produced. For example, a sentence such as 'It is raining' requires a subject, even though 'it' here has no meaning and has a purely structural role in the sentence. So you are right in saying that English speakers very rarely produce sentences without subjects, in either spoken or written language. Though there are some marginal exceptions, such as 'back in five minutes' for 'I'll be back in five minutes'. Perhaps Myk is more likely to accept 'Sucks' as an ok sentence because he also speaks a null subject language (or dialect of English) where subject pronoun dropping is perfectly normal? But that's not to say certain elements can't be omitted from English sentences. For example, why you may not like Myk's sentence 'AndrewB posted five times; myk, but four', how about 'AndrewB posted five times and Myk four'? (As opposed to 'AndrewB posted five times and Myk posted four times') Or if you don't like that, you yourself produced the not entirely different sentence 'Read any news article from a reputable paper, or any research paper, or any government letter...', where you omitted the verb 'read' in your 'or' clauses. You don't have to say 'Read this, read that, and read the other', as it's perfectly fine to omit the superfluous verbs by simply saying 'Read this, that and the other'. Ellipsis is a perfectly normal part of language, irrespective of the context within which a sentence is said or written, assuming certain grammatical criteria are met.

So did no one ever playtest the last level without having the rifle? I thought it was fairly standard to playtest maps without finding all the secrets? Especially one as important as a new hugely powerful gun. That seems like a really quite blindingly obvious mistake. It'd be interesting to see what the ammo to monster hit point ratio is in map 8. But I can't see the Doom Things Analyser working with .pk3 files.

I think I've seen someone else make similar comments about the final battles, so that seems like a bit of a peculiar design decision. Is the rifle a secret in Map 7, as I obviously completely missed it? I was thinking I would get the rifle in the last level somewhere, perhaps right before the end battles, but I only found that grenade launcher, which I already had but never used (which I thought, wrongly, was useless). I didn't realise until it was too late that the grenade launcher does almost twice as much damage per rocket as the rocket launcher. I guess if I had used the grenade launcher more often I may have had more ammo left for the bosses. I still think there could have been more ammo in the final sections. Especially when you teleport back for the second to last battle. A soulsphere spawns to replenish health, and I found it really surprising that the same didn't happen with ammo. Some ammo could have been hidden behind those walls that lower for example, just incase people didn't have huge reserves before going until the final series of showdowns.

Where do you find the new rifle weapon? I remember picking up cartridges for it, but never the actual gun. And through cheating I see that it's pretty powerful. Maybe that explains my complete lack of ammo in the final battles. I really don't see how you can kill off the bosses with the ammo that's just laying about nearby (which is none in the case of the second to last battle).

It needed more unskippable long cutscenes.

I've made my way through to the last level on UV. Generally the difficulty is ok, but the item placement has been uneven. There's odd shortages followed by too much. Maybe I missed something, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough ammo on the last level, and particularly in the last battles. I've found myself chainsawing loads of enemies, and I still only have 35 shells for the second to last battle, which is no where near enough. Admittadly I never seemed to pick up that most powerful new weapon, and maybe I could have got to the end bosses with more reserves. But considering there's no turning back at one point, there doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough ammo laying about in the final battles to complete them without having huge reserves to begin with.

After all that id intelectual property nonsense I find it quite funny that there's loads of sounds just ripped from various other games with no credit given. So far I'm up to the fourth map and I think it's pretty much what I expected. I think it's generally quite good, but as has already been said it feels quite inconsistent. Especially map 1 seemed to me to be a complete mash-up of bits done by different authors. The following levels seem a bit more consistent. Some of it looks very nice, but there are other places where the texturing/'detailing' looks pretty bad, and sometimes gets in the way (all those columns just dumped in the end room of map 1 for example). Most of the 'new' monsters are completely pointless. Agent Spork did well not to whore decorate in Simplicity, and I think the authors of KDIZD would have done well to take note of that. All the tanked up demons and other monsters that only have melee attacks and loads of hit points are not hard, just boring. I don't like the shielded monsters either. Shooting an enemy, waiting 5 seconds for it to drop it's sheild, shoting it again and waiting again gets very old quickly. It works well in the melee-based fighting of Hexen, but not doom. And most of the sprite rotations look complete arse to me. But other than that I am finding it quite enjoyable, and I think there's as much original material in the maps, plus homages to the original areas, as I had hoped for.