Jan

On 5/4/2020 at 9:57 PM, MatthewPhillips said:

UPDATE! I am on LEVEL 6 of No Sleep For The Dead now!

After replaying LEVEL 1 and trying better use of ammo, I managed to press on and I'm not having any issues now.

And I am quite enjoying your levels!

Realllllly like how you tend to show the secrets that people missed close to the level exits. That often encouraged me to backtrack and try for them.

Now one tiny thing I didn't realize is that I needed to use the JUMP key. I just figured that out in LEVEL 6

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when I jumped on a blue circular platform and it took me to a secret.


After Level 5 the "classic Doom" thing seems to kind go by the wayside but I hope to finish off the final 9th LEVEL tonight.
  

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?

On 12/24/2017 at 5:39 AM, ukiro said:

• The 3-way collaboration map, 09, was pretty much cobbled together from scraps because nobody had the inspiration to finish their maps.

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.

On 12/4/2017 at 9:04 PM, Capellan said:

MAP05

...

Viewing the map in DB2, there are some random decorations out in the void. Not sure what's going on with that.

 

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.

8 hours ago, Gez said:

In PC Doom, the conditions for that sound to play are:

void A_PlayerScream (mobj_t* mo)
{
    // Default death sound.
    int		sound = sfx_pldeth;
	
    if ( (gamemode == commercial)
	&& 	(mo->health < -50))
    {
	// IF THE PLAYER DIES
	// LESS THAN -50% WITHOUT GIBBING
	sound = sfx_pdiehi;
    }
    
    S_StartSound (mo, sound);
}

So, if you want to hear it, you need to play in Doom II (that sound doesn't exist in Doom 1) and you need to have your health taken to between -51 and -100. Between -1 and -50, you get normal player death sound; -101 or even less and you instead get gibbed.

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

On 4/28/2017 at 2:58 AM, Nevander said:

Well fortunately you can turn them off since I decided to add a CVAR to control their activation.

That's great :)

4 hours ago, Blastfrog said:

It's also cumbersome and awkward to configure just to get music sounding right in one mod

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

17 hours ago, Nevander said:

So guys I am thinking of adding the reverb effects for 1.3 and just finished going through the originals in Doom Builder 64 to see what sectors get what type of reverb. I discovered that several maps don't even use the echo sounds effects at all, some being MAP01, 02, 04, 05, etc.

 

Should I add reverbs to these or keep it the way it was in the original and only make reverbs happen on the levels where it was in the original?

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.

28 minutes ago, Salt-Man Z said:

In fact, according to the wiki, the original Doom didn't even allow you to switch to fists if you had a chainsaw (barring a beserk pack); that ability was added in source ports.

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

10 hours ago, Nevander said:

I personally hate auto-switch, so the Chainsaw has been coded to not auto switch to it.

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.

10 hours ago, Nevander said:

In the original game or at least in EX, the fist is always after the Chainsaw instead of before. So normal Doom 2 weapon order is Fist > Chainsaw > Pistol but Doom 64 EX is Chainsaw > Fist > Pistol. The order for my mod was changed to reflect Doom 64's order which is a better order IMO. I hate that the Chainsaw is between the Pistol and Fist.

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'.

30 minutes ago, jdagenet said:

No need to break out the dictionary,

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.

44 minutes ago, jdagenet said:

The Playstation Doom TC is an actual TC. There are no enhancements put into the maps, weapons, etc. It is an exact copy of its console counter part.

 

Calling Retribution a TC is crazy inaccurate. This is not a recreation of the classic, but as I previously said, just another enhancement mod.

 

I wish Nevander would refrain from getting so aggressive just because I'm pointing out some things that don't make sense in the mod's description and what's actually in the mod itself.

Acting like a child and threatning to pull the plug on his own mod just shows he can't take criticism, and in the modding scene this is a serious issue.

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.

1 minute ago, jdagenet said:

If I wanted to play original Doom 64 on my PC, I'd load up Doom 64 EX since that works on my Windows 10 system (not sure what the issue is with Nevander's system). If I wanted to play an enhanced version with lots of eye candy features and visual updates, then I'd play the Absolution or Brutal Doom 64.

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.

44 minutes ago, Gifty said:

Finding projects you're not interested in and then devoting paragraphs to just how completely they fail to impress you, the almighty consumer, is not a really great use of anyone's time.

Maybe Nevander should just give him his money back :D

On 3/30/2017 at 8:12 AM, Nevander said:

Gotta say, playing it for a while in the default resolution of 640x480 felt pretty damn good. It as if I had my N64 hooked up to my monitor and somehow was able to play Doom 64 with 60 FPS. I highly recommend trying that out when you get to play it, sort of a "nintendo" mode. Set all the graphics settings to the look that would resemble the N64's graphics, and maybe even set resolution to 320x240 like the original. I think you can only set it that low through the INI though.

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

4 hours ago, Danfun64 said:

I have a "gzdoom directory" in Linux. Then again I self compiled for that result. Basically, it all depends on how you set the game up.

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.

2 hours ago, Nevander said:

What was that tinkering if I may ask? I can add that information to the instructions as a "if you are on Linux, you may have to do this" type of section.

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.

On 3/23/2017 at 2:45 AM, 40oz said:

cacodemons that "climb" up tall structures and with their infinitely tall wisdom, bite you from 10 stories above and roast you with super fast vertical fireballs. Then when you get close enough to them, they descend, but never enough to touch the ground, and just high enough for that sniping arachnatron across the valley to incinerate you without hitting all those cacodemons in your face.

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.

15 hours ago, Pavera said:

I like the "details" in a doom level to be defined more by the level's architecture and texture usage, rather than fine-tooth kind of stuff like sector furniture or sector blood puddles underneath a dead player sprite or bumpy floors/ceilings/walls. This kind of detailing almost always makes a scene look too busy and can detract from the big picture. A simple but elegant bone structure that flows naturally between areas coupled with meaningful texture choices is what really inspires me.

This aligns with my vision as well. Things I value in a level are clean lines, interesting shapes, height variations, good proportions, deliberate contrasts to draw attention to things, interesting texture combinations, good lighting choices,... Not every object has to be fringed to the N-th degree to be interesting, and more often than not I find that superfluous detail detracts from a level rather than it adds. 

I think in the end for me it's more about attention to detail than about the granularity of the vertices and sectors.