Rez

And a few of the 'missing' are chunked install files, eg. Strain. Oh, wait a minute, you said that. :) Considering the size of the archive, tho, that's bloody few bad or dupes.

That works!

And look at the quality! have you ever seen such a thought? :D

Me too! Mee toooo! I finally just tried it (yeah I live in a cave), and found a bug within 30 seconds, probably because I use an odd keybinding: I use the WinKey for strafe. Which works fine til suddenly it doesn't work and I find myself with the Windows menu instead, and have to manually switch back to the PRB screen. (I don't think this is a Win-bug, because the same keybinding in other games that allow it doesn't have this problem.) It might depend on a previous keypress, perhaps of a key that's NOT bound in PRB+, but I haven't got it nailed down yet. PRB+ has also twice decided to go from filling the screen above the taskbar to filling the *entire* screen, which right now I can't pursue as I'm hampered by a flaky monitor (soon to be replaced, I hope... it won't tolerate changes of resolution anymore). I should perhaps remind folks of my fearsome repute as "the beta tester who can break anything". :D OTOH -- took a quick look at 2.5.1.4, and many thanks for adding jumping. I normally use a DOS port with jumping and it's all sorts of fun, so was glad to see this.

Can /newstuff have subdirectories? Oh, and here's a never-ending bottle of your fave beer for all the years of effort, without which the archive may not have survived. [Not at all looking forward to cleaning up my own mirror, which does absolutely nothing automagically... eeep!!]

If you're not just looking to be lol'd, the overwhelming volume of junk reviews make the whole thing not worth the trouble. After considerable thought, I've concluded Reviews really need to be from logged-in users. Or that logged-in might count more heavily in the total stars, or even make anon not count-stars at all. Cuz right now there's way too much garbage and too many bogus ratings, The reviews are their own little mini-forum; would you tolerate that much trash here in the main forum? then why tolerate it in Reviews?

Well, here's a thought: let people download whenever they can (limited to say a week total so it doesn't straggle on forever), but make them log in to download the WAD, log the download, and from the time the download finishes they have a certain amount of time (however much you normally allow) til they must upload their LMP, also via login. That way the playing timeframe is the same for all but no one is locked out by a bad schedule. (I have no idea how much work that would be to do, tho)

I live in a cave, I had no idea this project was going on... really a neat idea! Who knows what lost gems remain to be unearthed. Is there any master index for who did what demos and where they can be viewed?

Quick and dirty way to select some decent examples is to peel 'em out of the WADPAK collections.

That's a fun idea. Go for it. There are some forgotten gems back there.

I think someone had a good idea about a more-general Themes category called Trollwads -- that could include /Terrywads and /other as needed, thus none of the obviously =intentional= crapola need be dumped on honest players.

I always do the 'episode' of 11 maps. (Only time I make just one map is to test a new setting.) For some reason the later maps in 30-map sets tend to not be as good (and in the 11 map episode, map09 and sometimes map10 are nearly always the best ones). Slige was the same way! Might be that after a certain number of iterations, the randomness is no longer so random. But I don't think that should matter, rather that it should just do batches using the current settings. It would sure be more handy. :) Oh, I finally got a big spider again! first time for this build out of over 150 maps. I was starting to think they were extinct. :) For a while I was getting lots of multiple doors -- up to three doors per key and sometimes two doors per switch. Haven't seen that in a while either. I think 7.3 made more of 'em.

I've discovered a feature I want: The ability to just set Obhack working and make a bunch of WADs without having to enter a new seed and set it going for each and every WAD it makes (which means it needs my attention every 4 minutes or so). So if I were to enter a seed, say 0001, it would build a WAD named 0001.wad, then automagically increment the seed and build however many WADs I want at a time. That way when I want another 30 or 40 WADs (yes, I make that many at a time!) I could set it working overnight rather than having to babysit it. It says a lot for the playability of the output that I use it that much. :D

BTW I've gotten a few maps that were not linear, in that there was more than one route to the same place, without jumping off any balconies. And now it's quite good about having multiple paths from the same area, one or two to quests and one the route toward the exit. Recently I had one quest where after a HUGE battle across half the map, over 400 kills enroute and barely surviving the crossfire from above, I found myself rewarded by... an empty room! This is so perfectly DOOM, I laughed and laughed. :D

There's nothing quite like finding SIX, yes, count them, SIX archviles in a darkened room! :D I'm getting a good number of cybes now (I swear they are placed by an evil genius), but I haven't had a big spider in quite a long time...??? tho I've had some of the big open rooms that they need.

"Higher" light setting was just what my old eyes wanted! Made me a fresh batch of maps.. first ones I looked at are quite nice. PS. It has the smallest of bugs: it still reports its version as 0.0.7.2

I don't know what the issue was with my first attempt at a "gigantic" episode (and I forgot to save the logfile, but the seed was 0000 and otherwise same settings as below). I've tried it again for single and episode and those all built without problems. I did find another that failed, here's the info from the log: ========= ammo = normal enclosure = false game = doom2 hallways = random health = normal iweapon = hardcore keytype = both length = single lighting = bright maxsize = huge mode = sp mons = swarms outdoors = lots port = nolimit questlength = normal roomsize = random seed = 0102 size = huge steep = random switches = both traps = more Could not find place for SWITCH: SWITCH_FLOOR3_BEAM 2x1 Trying harder...Failed. FATAL ERROR...Could NOT find place for switch!...Map Unplayable!!! Problem occurred while making level: ...mes\DOOM\Obhack\Obhack-win-007.3/scripts/builder.lua:7514: Could not find place for switch! ========= First time I've seen that! I'm presently playing one that's "gigantic" and "infested" -- looks like Infested hits a sweet spot, with more smallfry and fewer tough monsters, but more viles and cybes. Good setting for lots of wild fights. :) (More, you ask? got a map with 30 Viles -- EEEEK!!!) Not too thrilled with the new switched doors, some don't have a good visual correspondence and they tend to blend into the walls. Preferred the previous look there. Anyway, back to death and destruction, and thanks for adding a brighter setting!

Hey again... just fetched 007.3 to play with and made a couple mapsets. Some good new options, with the gigantic maps and Infested as a midpoint between Swarms and Insane. I did run into a problem, tho. This is on a lowly P4-1.8GHz/1.3GB RAM, WinXP-SP3. I was watching it with Task Mangler, just curious, and here's what I saw: I set it to make an 11-map set of Gigantic, Swarms, and otherwise mostly Random settings. Obhack cranked away through the mapbuilding process all right, but when it switched to nodebuilding it got hung up. It had pegged the CPU at 100% all along (kinda to be expected) but when the nodebuilder started it also cranked "kernel times" up to around 75%, which I've never seen before. And there it stayed, until after 10 minutes or so I got bored and aborted it; it was still joggling the CPU but memory use had not changed in a bit so I think it was hung. I can't tell for sure if it built the nodes or not, but it did write a WADfile, of about 15mb (not unusual for size). BSP built (or rebuilt) nodes with no problems, so at least the mapstuff must be good. (DeeP thought it was okay too, but DeeP isn't real accurate about such stuff. They do look like they'll be fun to play, tho!!) [I tried again with merely "Huge" and that built 100% no problems.] ANYWAY... this gave me an idea for a setting that would be useful on machines that for whatever reason can't cope with the switch to the nodebuilder for Gigantic maps -- simply add a "BUILD NODES: YES/NO" option, which would fit conveniently up in the top section, defaulted to "YES". Maybe name the resulting file "whatever.bsp" (instead of "whatever.wad") so the user is cued that "hey stupid, you still gotta build the nodes yourself", if they forget. The other thing I'd *really* like to have is an option for more light. The current "Room Lighting: High" is still quite dark on my monitor, to the point that I have to use a Brightness WAD to see perhaps half the areas (otherwise, it hurts my eyes). I know other folks have remarked on this too. A setting about halfway between the current "High" and the DOOM maximum would probably be about right, or maybe two such settings, Bright and Brighter. Now I've got to go kill some hellspawn... I've been deprived for four months and I'm starting to have the most hideous withdrawal symptoms. I think I'm growing horns, hooves, claws, and spikes, and my palms are glowing. :D

I'd say make monsterless secrets an option, but definitely NOT the default. The fact that I often get seriously ambushed inside a secret -- I like that, and it's a good old DOOM tradition. And that I often have to ration and scrounge supplies at the end, so I don't go naked into the next map -- I like that old tradition too; otherwise I might as well turn on infinite ammo, or use the IDFA cheat at the start of each map. The reason SLIGE had a "no monsters in secrets" option was because the secrets were such a pain to tromp back and forth and find 'em all, and it could be a day's hike from one end of a big map to the other. So getting 100% kills could be tedious. Not so with Obhack maps.

I've played hundreds of Obhack maps, and not once have I seen it make this mistake.

Secrets no more than two rooms? NOOOOO! I *like* the fact that some of them are very involved, almost a whole mini-map. Which makes more opportunity for one of my favourite features, where a secret twists around and has balconies or overlooks intersecting with the main map. If secrets maxed at only two rooms, you couldn't have that. In fact I think there should sometimes be secrets in the secrets, an old DOOM tradition. :) Sometimes a secret or a quest winds up with little or no reward (once in a while a quest has NOTHING in it!) but I think that's okay, as another of the original DOOM traditions is "You fought your way to the bowels of hell, and THIS is your fat reward??" just like the end text says.

I like the "Infested" idea -- more than "Swarms" but not as heavy-duty as "Insane". Sometimes a person just wants to mow 'em down. <g> I have sometimes wished for just a couple more Cybes and big spiders in the really big maps, but not to the level of "Insane" (fun occasionally but not what I want for everyday). I tellya tho, it sure does a good job of putting cybes and viles where they can best surprise you!!

Same with the raised cages -- occasionally I come across a baby spider that's stuck (can't turn around or fire), because he's in a cage that's too small.

Actually there IS scaling of monster progression, but it's not real obvious. I check every set with WadWhat, so I'm going by the actual monster count. The impression given by ingame assaults can be quite different, tho -- such as the start of an otherwise-easy outdoor map where 20 cacos come over the walls all at once. And sometimes chance of where the walls and windows wind up can lock the initial troopers away from you, while a dozen barons firebomb you from a ledge near the exit -- just outside your first window! Usually a cybe wins a fight with a big spider, but if I remember right, this was two cybes, one spider, and a bunch of smallfry, and the spider wound up the sole survivor. Meanwhile I jumped out a window and ran for my life. :) "if GAME.cell_size == 8 then GAME.cell_min_size = 6" Replace the 6 with 7. What does this actually do? Just wondering why it caused the assertion error (whatever that is!) I suspect the invalid page fault is failure to properly close the logfile, failure to release that file handle, or something like that (guessing by how it's sometimes delayed, and the fact that when it does this, it doesn't write a new logfile). WinXP will mask that kind of problem so you'll never see it. On Win98, it will cause a page fault. (Yes, my DOOMin' box is Win98 and DOS. Get off my lawn! :) Just for the record, my first foray into 007.1 didn't do it, tho 007.0 usually does (not always). The new monster releases work quite well, per the first few I've seen. BOO! Eeep!! I don't think it's a problem that they face in random directions... just makes 'em less predictable, as the ones that are facing the wall bump around then come out as a second wave. Looking forward to the new door/switch combos. I've had some really complex ones too, especially in the really huge maps. I do like how there can be 2 or 3 doors for one key or switch. Also there are sometimes two different blue switches, which makes me think I'm seeing things. :D Anyway it's coming along great, and I love having new maps every day!

Yeah, that works as a simple solution. Tho when you make ginormous maps, it's pretty rare that there are no viles. Maybe one map out of 20.