Jan

I’m hereby announcing my latest project: No Sleep For The Dead. This will be a small map set for Doom 1 with as much maps I can realistically come up with, but probably not a complete episode replacement. Currently 4 maps are in development, in various stages of completion. Inspiration will be drawn from Dawn Of The Dead, the episode replacement which started my Doom mapping career back in 1996. This means that you can expect to see lots of E1 influences with some E2 and E4 influences near the end, all of this in my own mapping style of course and with some nods to the original dodead levels here and there. You could see this map set as the spiritual successor to Dawn Of The Dead although I won’t call it Dawn Of The Dead 2 because it’s not a complete episode replacement. Possible level titles that I have in mind: E1M1: Phobos Spaceport E1M2: Marines’ Last Stand E1M3: Fusion Reactor E1M4: The Overrun Complex That said, I am still looking for one or two people who are willing to test and provide feedback on the architecture and game play of the levels. Preferably someone who has experience in this matter, it would also be a plus if you played and loved Dawn Of The Dead back when it was released. If you’re interested, and you feel that you’re qualified, just send me a pm here. Edit 2016-03-22: v1.0 has been released and can be downloaded from the idgames archive: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/m-o/nos4dead

Glad to hear you're enjoying it :) And yeah, that bonus level is quite punishing in the beginning, but for sure the difficulty is not representative for the actual episode.

May I humbly suggest my No Sleep For The Dead episode?

You know I only ever played that map once, right after we released E2. I couldn't bear to look at it afterwards because it feels so weird and disjointed to me with all these different parts of my levels frankensteined together. It had to be done though, because I was completely burned out on DE2 editing during those final months, and there's no way I could have dragged any of those maps to the finish on my own. Incidentally, that burn out is also why I started the classic series. Going back to the basic roots of Doom made level editing fun again for me. Looking back on both Darkening projects as a whole though, I am still quite proud of what we achieved and the impact it made when we unleashed it on an unsuspecting Doom community. Of course, with +20 years of hindsight, I see the flaws too and a lot of the criticisms that have been brought forward in this thread are valid. But then as @ukiro said, you have to take the zeitgeist into consideration. Most of this was made at a time when vanilla Doom was the gold standard, megawads with a completely new textureset were unheard of, Doom ports didn't even exist yet, let alone big projects making use of said ports, and most of us were using computers that were probably less powerful than your first smartphone. For instance, I made most of it on a Pentium 100Mhz using a 14" CRT screen.

Oh I remember why I did that! WinDEU 5.24 doesn't have full Doom 2 support. It doesn't know about some Doom 2 specific "things", like tall tech lamps and some hanging corpses, so those can't be inserted. If such objects are already in the map they can be copied though. So what I did was, I inserted the objects into the map with another editor (DCK probably), and then cloned the objects in WinDEU whenever I wanted to use them. I must have forgotten to take them out when we released the episode.

The sound does exist in the Ultimate Doom iwad, but it doesn't get played by vanilla Doom. Ports generally do play it.

That's great :)

Just use a separate config file for Retribution, configure the soundfont there and launch gzdoom with the -config flag.

Don't add reverb to the levels that didn't have them originally. Personally, I'm not a big fan of reverb to begin with. First time I encountered it in PSX Doom TC, I thought something was wrong with my sound settings.

That's correct... I had forgotten about that.

But if people don't like auto-switch, they can already toggle "neverswitchonpickup" to "true" in their gzdoom setup. Forcing the chainsaw not to auto-switch changes expected default behavior of both Doom64 and Doom to a personal preference. I don't like this, because a) it surprises me and b) I think the reveal part of picking up a new weapon is important too: "You now have a chainsaw, cool!" and seeing it right in front of you as you pick it up, instead of it just making that "ca-chunk" sound like when you run over any random item you already have. Hm, in my Doom64 EX setup, the behavior is exactly the same as in the original Doom: if I have a chainsaw, pressing the weapon 1 key always gives me the chainsaw first. Again, expected default behavior. In console Doom64, the chainsaw has its own slot so to speak, because with the limited controls, weapon switching has to be done sequentially. I don't think the sequence order should be construed as an order of preference though. In any Doom game, the chainsaw is clearly intended to be an upgrade over the fist, so if you press the 1 key for the melee weapon, you should get the upgraded one first. Maybe a clear choice should be made between either a full console setup, where each weapon gets its own slot from 0-9, and where fist comes after chainsaw, or a more traditional Doom setup, where the melee weapons and shotgun/super-shotgun are overloaded under the same key and the behavior is the same as in PC Doom, i.e. chainsaw gets preference over the fist. Console setup: weapon 1: chainsaw weapon 2: fist weapon 3: pistol weapon 4: shotgun weapon 5: super shotgun weapon 6: chaingun weapon 7: rocket launcher weapon 8: plasma gun weapon 9: bfg weapon 0: unmaker vs. Traditional Doom setup: weapon 1: fist/chainsaw weapon 2: pistol weapon 3: shotgun/super shotgun weapon 4: chaingun weapon 5: rocket launcher weapon 6: plasma gun weapon 7: bfg/unmaker Since we're playing it on a PC, my preference would be the traditional Doom setup, but perhaps this could be made a toggle in the Doom64 features menu?

Another thing I noticed: when you pick up the chainsaw for the first time, you don't automatically switch to it, like with other weapons. Also, when you select weapon 1, it always switches to your fist, even if you already have a chainsaw. You have to press 1 twice to get the chainsaw. Having berserk or not doesn't make a difference.

Ok, so it was intentional. Thanks for clearing that up. I do find the visor helpful myself, makes enemies easier to spot and dark places easier to navigate, but it sure makes a level ugly, even in regular Doom. I'm even less a fan of green night vision though. BTW, according to the doomwiki, map02 is the only place where the visor occurs in all of Doom64, so obviously not a big issue.

Not sure if this is a bug or feature, I never played the real Doom64 so I don't know if it's authentic, but the light amplification visor in map02 only works for 30 seconds instead of 120 seconds as in regular Doom. Edit: just checked with Doom64ex, and the visor works for 120 seconds there. It also works differently, it literally seems to amplify (but not maximize) the brightness levels and maintains colored lighting. You can still see differences in light level between sectors, and that annoying area with the red guiding triangles on the floor stays pitch black (I suppose because 0 multiplied by factor X is still 0). In Retribution, every sector simply gets rendered as fullbright, without color, like in regular PC Doom. Again, I have no idea what behavior is authentic, just pointing out what I'm observing.

For what it's worth, I'm running Arch Linux ARM on my Rpi3. I could compile and install(*) the following Doom ports: chocolate-doom : runs fine without issues in 320x200 scaled up to the native resolution of my screen, 1280x1024. crispy-doom: runs fine in 1280x1024 prboom-plus: runs fine in 640x512 scaled up to 1280x1024 (render_screen_multiply = 2). Gets a bit choppy and gets screen tearing in full 1280x1024 resolution. All these are rendering in software mode in X, I haven't tried any GL based ports. (*) I used the AUR, but had to modify each PKGBUILD manually to add 'armv7h' as a supported architecture, because by default they only list 'i686' and 'x86_64'.

You're the one who started to nitpick, and now that you're obviously wrong it's "no need to break out the dictionary". Laughable.

I see only one person acting like a child in this thread, and it ain't Nevander. Also: do you even know what TC means? It stands for Total Conversion, it does not stand for Historically Accurate To the Last Pixel Conversion of Another Game. It's basically a mod that modifies almost all aspects of the original Doom game into something else, which this mod does.

Doom64ex was a complete pain in the ass to get running on Linux, it also requires that you obtain the rom from shady sites. Other than that, I also share @Nevander's sentiment that it doesn't run all that great. It's not slow, but something about the way frames are painted on the screen is uncomfortably "jittery", not smooth like I'm used to in gzdoom. Mouse sensitivity is awkward too and there's no mouse forward/backward movement, which I heavily rely on when playing any version of Doom. Absolution suffers from similar problems, is binary only and based on an absolutely ancient port of doomsday which is showing its age. For me Retribution is the first Doom64 TC that looks great, feels great, feels authentic and runs without issues on a well supported modern port, and I for one welcome it.

Maybe Nevander should just give him his money back :D

About that ... the Health and Armor graphics don't scale well if you set the resolution to 320x240.

Yeah, you can set it up that way, but it's not how it comes configured by default. The lay of the land on Linux is that binaries go in /usr and user specific configuration goes in ~/.config/<something>/. If you follow the instructions on the zdoom site or install gzdoom through a package manager (I use the AUR package btw), that's how it is configured, so I imagine that's how most users will have it set up.

Well you don't really have a "gzdoom directory" in Linux. The binaries get installed somewhere in the system path, and the ini file is stored as ~/.config/gzdoom/gzdoom.ini I didn't want to change my main ini file to use the doom64 soundfont, because that would suck when I'm playing regular doom, so I created a copy of the ini file, specifically for doom64 (I named it ~/.config/gzdoom/gzdoom_d64.ini), changed that config file to use fluidsynth and the doom64 soundfont and then launched gzdoom with the -config flag pointing to this config file. Obviously the fluidsynth dll file that is included is windows specific too, but my distro's version of gzdoom got compiled with fluidsynth support anyway, so I didn't have to bother with that. As I said, all pretty straightforward :)

This is really cool stuff, feels very polished! Had to do some minor straightforward tinkering to get it working on the Linux version of gzdoom, but it works great. Finally a version of Doom64 that works on a modern, well supported port without requiring its own engine.

If that happens in a level, it's just bad level design in my book

Hitting an imp point blank and right in the middle with a shotgun, yet it survives and claws back at you. Going on a berserk rampage and you're on a roll when suddenly an imp needs two or three punches to die, giving you that irritating pain holler instead of a satisfying *splotch*. Worse if it's a lowly trooper who needs two punches. Totally throws me off my rhythm. A caco who survives two direct rocket hits. That it's sometimes possible to kill a demon or spectre with two shotgun blasts, but not reliably so even if you hit them perfectly. BTW, I have the impression that this was different in early versions of Doom, because for the longest time I had the idea in my mind that "demon = 2 shotgun blasts". Yeah I don't like the Doom engine's RNG, I guess. When you have a pack of monsters and a strategically placed barrel in the middle, you try to snipe the barrel, but the aiming code redirects your fire to surrounding monsters. That bug in the hitscan code where you can sometimes fire straight through a monster. Less annoying when it works in your advantage and that shotgun guy who thought he'd get the drop on you, fires straight through you. Always reminds me of the "divine intervention" scene in Pulp Fiction.