cycloid

Thanks for those will check them out. First bash together of a couple of areas of my wad are in place and the HL/valve textures are exactly what i was after, will post a screenie in the next day or three in wads n mods.

Planning a map that is in a dockland theme slightly inspired by the fact that i recently played half life 2 for the first time (what can i say, i take my time with things) Has anyone set about either ripping the HL1 texture set (specifically shipping containers) or are there any texture wads/sources that anyone can point me at? or do i need to pop down to the docks and snap some myself (i only live about 12 miles from felixstowe now)

cool will give that a play before i embark on my project. Plus i'd somehow forgotten that afterglow even existed, how dumb am I!?

dont mind me i'm just bitter that 3 years ago i released Scimitar about 20 mins before the cacowards by pure coencidence of timing and it got totally overlooked both that and the following year despite being the greatest wad evAR!!!

Here's hoping they remember some wads from near the start of this year, all those months ago. COUGHCongestion384COUGH excuse me.

re: SSG Seargent IIRC what i did was stacked a bunch of normal SG frames with duration zero as suggested above (i think it was 3 in a row) and then added a new sound that was a re recording of the SSG sound the player makes (something twisted and convoluted like that was needed because each of the stacked firing frames would produce the same sound, making a very lound distorted SSG sound, so i think had to redo it at a lower volume to account for the wave addition!) then synced the timing of the frames, firing rate and animation of the monster with the length of the sound effect. Was very pleased when i got it all to sync just right and the ~2 second reloading delay of the monster helps balance out the strength of the blast. My GFX skills on the other hand suck, so the SSG guy looks like your basic zombie man but with a brigt green jacket on, sure someone else could do it better. I stole my extra frames for this from the PE (although the PE was itself also rebuilt as the replacement no clip dropping zombieman btw) and some other places. I didnt use the Lost soul either so those frames were up for grabs too. I think i also squeezed in a Mancubus variation with different colored eyes who's three firing frames were all straight (instead of one straight and two slightly off).

I made quite a lot of adjustments in Scimitar, some of which are: Added new SSG-Seargent that drops an SSG (The normal zombie no longer drops a clip, however!) Swapped out the Cyberdemon and Spiderdemon for Rocket firing and Chaingun wielding Arachnotron flavours Swapped the key cards for orbs Swapped the Fists for a Knife Swapped the Chainsaw for a Scimitar Created a 100% health pack (but if you pick this up your health will switch to 100% even if you have more, i got around this by not allowing health or armour to go above 100%) and probably some other stuff too

Cyberdemon level is quite easy if you're not bothered about killing it...

(Self flagilation:) A bit dissapointed with my Congestion 384 review, it basically boils down to: "This has some good maps, but it's basically a 1024 type gimmick wad and i'm a bit sick of those". It's absolutely a Gimmick, though partially a mapping challenge to myself but I've heard nothing else but glowing reviews about it and would have preferred a review that let the 20 maps stand on their own, gimmick aside.

Sheesh, stop arguing the technicallities of 2008/2009 - i'd love PL2 to be classed as 2008 so that C384 gets more of a spotlight :-) ... but we all know that in doom, er, world, a year runs from Cacoward to Cacoward...

Just to clarify that with my own experience. If you try to run DB1 on a system without DirectX it wont run - even though only the 3d mode uses it. It would be nice to be able to run DB without needing it - though this could probably be done with a forked DB rather than built into DB2 as i expect DB2 wouldnt run on a system that didnt run DX (e.g. a shitty old laptop used only for doom and win95 games)

I do this extensively in my Scimitar megawad, generally they're timed tho, so in MAP01 there's a switch which, when clicked, lowers to the ground, and only when it has reached the ground does the door it targets open. This is done by having the switch lower a floor inside the secret voodoo scrolling room and having the trigger 12 units in front of the lowering floor - so the (center of the) voodoo doll only has to travel 4 units to triger it For locked switches it's a similar setup but with the partially opened locked door allowing the voodoo doll to move jsut enough to start the switch-lowering sequence, where it has to wait again. Once you've got the hang of it there's alsorts you can do. In cyc-b.wad "React" i use a teleport at the end of a scrolling hall to get a voodoo doll to repeatedly switch a bunch of lights on and off for a strobed tunnel :-)

In the true spirit of 1024.wad and 64.wad in being cramped, hard, good clean fun and being a-number-ending-in-4 everyone's favourite somnabulistic doomer presents: Congestion 384! http://cyclomedia.co.uk/doom/wads/cyc-384.txt http://cyclomedia.co.uk/doom/wads/cyc-384.zip This is a beta release, pending feedback it'll be up in /newstuff in the next couple of days, but it should all be in and working.

@Fraggle I too am a programmer by profession, hence to me 384 is a nice round number, unlike say, 400!

I'd go with winxp (and therefore the latest 2.x openoffice) - infact i did this exact thing on a laptop i resurrected a few weeks ago, it's screen bezel and hinges had exploded so now it's held together with gaffer/duct tape, works a treat, but you have to lean it on something to keep the screen up, i put doombuilder on it and finished congestion 384 on it. anyway it's a 900MHz AMD Duron + 128MB RAM + ")GB hard disk. unfortunately even xubuntu "likes" 256MB RAM and fluxbuntu is still stuck at a 6.x relase (i may be full of shit on that point). And wanting the wife to be able to use it for web surfing from the sofa meant the freakier linux distros were out of question. nLite came to my rescue it allows you to build an unattended XP install CD plus it will integrate any hotfixes and service packs (i had an original XP SP2 CD and SP3 installer + 3 hotfixes, for example). The best part is you can choose to not install a whole load of crap, like the search indexer so that when opening task manager you dont see 100 svchost processes running. It runs opera, open office and doombuilder fine, but only one or two of those at once :-) oh and the network card is via usb 1.0 and that seems to be software driven so it's very slow on transferring files, but it's Fit-For-Purpose and cost £0, :-) Finally there was space on the cd image and it's easy to create a folder to dump your freshly downloaded drivers and favourite installers too (e.g. web browser, ftp client, notepad replacement etc) Slipstreaming XP like this requires a chunk of technical knowledge, tho so if that's too scary i'd go for one of the freakier linux distros like puppy, it's worth noting that with linux the older your hardware the MORE likely it is to be supported out of the box.

I seem to have issues with this though, chocolate doom works best when it's "start in" directory is its own root, supplying a .cfg only seems to get half the job done and i've jsut realised mid sentence that this is because i only told it where to find the doom2 config and not told it where to also find the extended chocolate-doom.cfg too, i'll shut up now.

128 * 3 = 384, smartass, and the "ending in 4" bit is just a coencidence i made a joke out of. I decided 256 was too small and 512 not constricting *enough*!

MAP 10 ... I started out doing skill levels but (like the detailing) didnt get time to impliment it properly, i recommend UV all the way :-) MAP 11 ... if that's the second switch of the sequence that's supposed to be obscured by a door, shh! MAP 12 ... will look into this, as not sure what you mean MAP 13 ... yup, heh

to beat the end boss there are two switches you need to switch, though they may be hard to reach... uploaded a new version, same url, should have addressed the HOM issues. glad you all like it :-)

[Jaw drops] I love you codeimp! [shuffles away embarrassed....]

Another bug in 1.2.1, this time with sound, apologies if this is a known one. I have the sound set down real low , like the 2nd notch, but every so often the first zillisecond of gunfire or an explosion will blast out full volume before continuing at the correct setting. It's almost like the call goes out to play the sound in one frame and the volume of it is limited in the next and if there's a delay due to my very slow laptop it'll play loudly in that duration.

Request: Flats view in 2D I asked for this before but it wasnt possible in vb6 db. if you've seen Duke Nukem's automap you'll know what i mean, a view where you can see the flats and/or lighting (lighting without flats could be grey-shades?) in the 2d-editor. a simple set of toolbar toggles would be nice: No Flats - Cieling - Floor No Lighting - Lighting I also seem to remember requesting a three way toggle for auto-stitch No Stitch - Stitch in (configged) Range - Stitch exact so you can set it to stitch-exact when zoomed right in doing something at 2-units but then quickly switch to (e.g.) 4 unit stitch when zoomed back out. Also i'm not a fan of all the bevelled edges on everything esp the vertices, i currently run DB on a 900MHz/128MB laptop and can imagine DB2 slooooowwinggg it down chronicly! God i don't half sound like i'm moaning, sorry about that, (shuffles away...)

For "classic" doom engines the pickup gives the player ammo/health etc depending on the name of the sprite (it's a Switch statment in the code) but what the monsters drop is done on item ID. To change these around with dehacked you'd have your own transparent sprite assigned to the original clip,shotgun,chaingun item ID's and create new pickups from spare decorations (e.g. stumpy tree) by changing it's flags and assigning it one of the sprites. I did this in my Scimitar 20-level wad along with some wild sprite swapping to create a Former Human that dropped nothing (which used to be a Pain Elemental) and a Super-Shotgun Seargent that dropped the SSG instead (which used to be the Former Human and Clip, respectively). Then you can create your own Doom Builder game config to switch the item id's back around so that when editing it all looks normal. A fair amount of work and with very limited options, but interesting possibilities too.

;-)