SaladBadger

Danarchy said:

I remember watching one of the early video game shows back in the mid-90s, and they were showing off some kind of mouse that was supposed to revolutionize FPS gaming. It had a kind of joystick on it meant for mouselooking and they were showing it off using Duke Nukem 3D. I thought the thing looked clunky and awkward, and I guess the rest of the gaming community agreed with me.

Sounds like the Logitech Cyberman. Incidentally, the Cyberman is the reason that Doom always says "Wrong mouse driver - no SWIFT support" on startup - the Cyberman used a modified mouse driver to provide the extra inputs.

The Cyberman was supposed to be a 6DoF controller, like the Wiimote. A while back I was looking into how the Cyberman API worked (there is code for it in the Descent and Heretic sources), with a view to creating a DOSbox patch to allow you to play DOS games with Cyberman support (like Doom and Descent) using a Wiimote or similar.

That seems similar, but I'm not sure if that's what it was. IIRC this show was in like 1997-1998 and it was being touted as something new. It could be it was an updated version of that, though. I also remember the joystick part being round, but I could be wrong.

myk said:

the forward-equals-up mode is more expected from a mnemonic or rationalized starting point.

Indeed. I wouldn't argue that "normal" mouselook allows for more proficient play than "inverted", or vice versa, but I would agree that "normal" mouselook is the more "rationalized" choice, which is why a logical fellow like me might express surprise when confronted with "inverted" mouselook's popularity. I don't agree that "inverted" mouselook has a parallel in desktop computing, however. Consider that a forward movement with the mouse already "equals up" for the movement of cursors in GUIs. If "inverted" mode was analogous to "dragging a window*", then while playing an FPS a user of this mode would move the mouse to the right to look left. Perhaps such input would also have a physically intuitive basis? After all, when one looks left, he has rotated his body to the right, beneath him. :P


* I think you may have switched your analogies? They make more sense to me when transposed, but I quoted yours anyway.

Seems a little strange to advertise DW content to DW, but I dunno maybe I'm missing something here. In any case I do like it a bit more than getting those stupid GirlsX Battle ads while I'm in the middle of a public space.

Wait, what?

Linguica wants to get paid for what he does -- fair enough. So he begins to allow ads on the site -- understandable. The ads are for his own site -- WHAT??

The idea, as I understand it, is that it shows a bunch of internal links alongside a couple of sponsored ad links, to FOOL people into looking at them / maybe clicking them.

Printz: end of the year. I'm still one of those lame high-school students though. I'm graduating next year

40oz: Maybe a techbase. I like techbases.

This is a couple hours overdue, but it's done. And it's good!

Happy Birthday InsanityBringer!

40oz said:

map

And it was a fun map. Thanks.

Oh jesus then, if MAP19 is on the lite end of the spectrum, I honestly have no clue what to expect with real slaughtermaps.

This is going to be a fun adventure.

The lost soul cap is something that should stay in the 90's with concerns about Doom's performance on old DOS machines. Nowadays that cap does nothing but break large maps. Always keep it off.

Lost soul cap can potentially render some situations unwinnable due to low ammo, keep that in mind.

"trying to arm up"

I see what you did there...

Espi did a remake of Slough of Despair in the first Flashback release: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/d-f/fbdemo

Oh, cool, I didn't know that existed. Thank you! I liked Espi's other work, so I'll give it a go soon.

Oh ok, no problem, but I still don't understand what you mean by unbalanced... Ever since people told me that calling HMP "the most balanced skill" is not very appropriate, I lost its definition :(

IMO, if the super shotgun was ported into doom 1, it'd be unbalanced due to the limited monster pool. However, the new monsters added in doom 2 were built to be balanced around the SSG. Otherwise it'd take what, 12 shots to kill a baron, 4 to kill a revenant, who knows how many to kill a mancubus, all with the normal shotgun!

@Phade102 The baron is a doom staple, it has not been introduced in Doom II, it was always there. Also, the normal shotgun fires 7 "pellets" per shell, whereas the SSG fires 10 pellets per shell for a total of 20 per shot, which means the SSG is a lot more ammo efficient on anything that takes 2 SSG shots or more. This also means you can't simply multiply the shots you'd need to score with the SSG by 2 in order to determine how many shotgun rounds you need single barreled, because the math doesn't work that way.

Cacos for instance take like 5-6 shotgun hits for the most part, whereas the SSG will deflate most of them with 2 well placed bursts.

Looks really cool! but it hurts my eyes 

What format was the colormap lump in?

Other than that, it certainly looks way too bright. Although if playing with a resolution similar to a GBA, it wouldn't be that noticeable, would it?

the colormap format was the exact same format as the classic doom colormap. Mostly. The invuln and unused entries weren't there, and there's a bunch of extra levels I haven't found the use for, but its just a standard 256x32 byte table.

I have found some leads to the maps. I think. I've found a table with 34 128-bit entries, which appears to contain three pointers (three 32-bit variables that increase as you get further in the table) and one size variable (it doesn't get larger as you go through the table. It gets larger when its in the index of a larger Doom II map). 34 is the amount of maps in GBA Doom II (since chasm and industrial zone are split), and the table is shorter in Duke Nukem Advance, a game using the same engine with less maps than Doom II. I have found what block of data the size corresponds to, but I can't make any sense of it. I have found what might be vertex positions: This is only a hunch, I'm assuming so because there's a pretty consistent pattern of a (generally increasing, so its stored in a really odd manner...) first byte and then a second byte that remains fairly low (since most Doom maps don't extend too far), but they definitely aren't vertex pairs. Instead it seemed to be just a bunch of potential coordinates. At least, that's what I thought, but overwriting this data did absolutely nothing visible to the map, no matter how much I corrupted. I don't know if I'm hitting the wrong map data or something, or have just misread it entirely, but I'm stumped.

I can't make any sense of the rest of the data either, and I fear it might be compressed, which would go beyond what little I know how to do. Fuck. I'll keep on poking at this until I can get something to happen.

Ah, simple enough, but it makes sense. Cool. I guess for actually linking profiles then the about me information is sufficient enough.

Maybe one day I will add linked accounts to people's profile pages, but I figured the fact that the "about" page has a rich-text field was good enough for now

Plus I didn't want to just add them since people might want to use a social media account to log in here but not have that account be public knowledge.

I've been doing some calorie counting, but I should probably do it more rigorously. Seeing the numbers add up would definitely discourage further snacking, for sure. Thank you for the app recommendation, it looks like a pretty nice one, and I believe my sister is using it or a similar one to great effect.

Actually, you just did make a Blog post. Blogs may not exist anymore as a forum, but the Blogs threads were moved over to the status section.

right now i'm in the process of starving myself.

Not the best option?

When I tested the first two (or three maybe) maps, same skill as you but continuous, at some point in the second map I run out of rockets, shells and bullets, and to be honest I wasn't wasting my ammo with unnecessary minorities, but yeah I'm sure that's part of the idea of the wad, to think of strategies to make the most of your limited available arsenal. No idea how much harder would be on UV. 

I tried to use IDDQD to get through first 6 maps to see the difference. Honestly, except for the SSG trap on Map01, most changes are kind of subtle. Sometimes they remove like 1~2 monsters, or sometimes they change Chaingunner into a Shotgunner. Then, on the supplies side, there's 1 extra Plasma gun (none in UV) and 1 extra Soulsphere (1 in UV inside a secret) on Map04. There's a Megasphere (none in UV, but there are a Megaarmor and a Soulsphere in 2 different secrets) on Map06. Judging only from this, I guess they just think what if you don't want to look for a secret.

Besides this, whether doing single segment may have heavy influence to this. The difficulty level doesn't reach the point you can't even solve the problem by scumbag saving/loading. By the way, sometimes doing pistol start may be easier because players like me has some "must save ammo for next level / must have 100 health to exit" BS OCD to deal with. If you make good use of the supplies in the level, it should be fine. Can't say for the later long levels though.

Well... the wrong propositions of "in UV" bug me a lot... but I can't fix it. Sorry for this stupid post.

side effect: the way they were mucking around with my nerves while doing this has a ~5% chance of causing one half of your tongue to taste like metal for a bit. I was one of those lucky folk. I hope it goes away quickly.

Ah, so from your previous post, I take it they replaced that bone with a piece of metal? I have hearing problems myself, though I doubt from the same issue as yours. Glad it worked out though!

I'm glad it worked out, and goodluck with your recovery! :)

D_STALKS > D_RUNNIN

D_STALKS makes me pretty nostalgic for some reason. You're fine.

I really like all the music in doom 2. 

Romero's got memory like an elephant, y'all.

Willits always seemed fake af so this is no surprise. He should lie low and let Marty do the talking from here on out.

Things are getting interesting. Despite Romero, Carmack, and American stepping up to refute his claims, he's now claiming that he actually dug up evidence of these supposed map stubs

Buuut... Romero's right on the money when he mentions that multiplayer only maps are not an idea came up with during the Quake era. In addition to the numerous examples he mentioned in his post (including our own community making plenty of them before Quake), I can add that Descent shipped with a pretty barebones set of deathmatch maps. You can't even load them in singleplayer out of the box, they were intended for nothing but DM. Romero's been a bit wrong on a bunch of things over the years, but I feel three people countering the claim from that era is enough to cast plenty of doubt on this.

Just wait until it ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chainguns you ;-)

The chaingun cha-cha is not a very pleasant dance, but sometimes you just can't avoid it.

That notification feature comes in handy and it helps greatly when you're gone or something. 

Mister Doomguy's Maid Elemental?

Oh...

This is pretty cool.

interesting....

It looks very interesting. I rarely see earth's moon appearing in Doom wads,only in Echelon megawad. 

Lunatic, Valiant, and Nova 3 all have moon texture sets, so you might check through any of those if you haven't already. I agree that the current ground texture is kinda rough, but I'm sure the map will look nice overall, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with it.

What is EE? Eternity something?

EE is the Eternity Engine

Same. It's fine that, say, GZDoom and 3DGE don't have legacy demo playback; even if I wish the latter had its own demo format (it doesn't currently) -- these are feature-led ports and thus it's not as high a priority.

prBoom+ and its successors though, I believe it is incredibly important to retain legacy demo playback; it's part of why this particular branch has endured for so long and is the de-facto standard for many runners.

Personally, I've never begrudged *ZDoom for not supporting vanilla demo playback. For me, as a source port author, it's an entirely understandable decision to have taken.

There's a fundamental decision you have to take when developing a source port, because Doom has a big pile of subtle bugs (see Doom Wiki's list or the Doom Movement Bible), and either you fix them or leave them in place. But demo playback depends on the old buggy behavior, so really the options are:

• Leave the old, buggy behavior in place
• Fix the bugs and break demo compatibility
• Fix the bugs and maintain demo compatibility by keeping both the buggy and fixed versions of the code in place (turns the codebase into a mess)

So: compatibility; correctness; maintainability. Pick two. Chocolate Doom, *ZDoom and PrBoom+ represent the three different outcomes.

Given *ZDoom's overall design direction, fixing the bugs and abandoning demo compatibility seems like the most reasonable decision to have made. There's a lot to be said for having a source port that's easy for beginners to pick up and that just fixes all this stuff. But really it highlights that we're better off overall having multiple source ports with different objectives rather than a single uber-port that tries to do absolutely everything.

I mean, I probably can't, its too far gone and shit, but it'd be interesting. Thinking on this a little more, I kind of wonder if I can even get away with N5 at this point, while I like the style it definitely was overplayed and fuck man, its pretty obvious I was simply trying to emulate kdizd. I'd really love to try to turn it into a nicer aesthetic that has a lot less cruft over the years from kdizd emulators (and frankly kdizd itself)

I do things like this sometimes (go back and tinker with old maps), it is a fun exercise and can surprise you with the results, I recommend doing it just to see the outcome as even slight texture differences can completely change a map.

The lagom test images are excellent for a simple calibration. Do the black level and white saturation tests, then do the gamma calibration, and go back and forth until it seems about as good as you can get it. 

Hmm, I'll give those a try, looking at them and based on what I know they do seem to make sense. The contrast one was throwing me off so much since it goes against almost everything I know about computer monitors, I'm wondering if they're intended for monitors that can actually go to a gamma of 1.0 or something.

Games like HL2 actually tend to be easier for me overall. You just have to try to stay away from the enemy line of sight as much as possible. I mean, you obviously have to get out from cover to shoot them, but you get the point.

if doom aint for you try garrys mod

The main reason arch viles can take a while to kill is due to what they can do. If they're dropped into a room of dead enemies and are given time to revive them, you have to plow through those enemies again to get to the arch vile. Killing them quickly is definitely the best choice.

Now it's a routine to kill archies. Before, anyone had been scared the first time that saw the archvile and his attacks and insane speed. Now, you know that's the first priority to kill before any monster.

After playing with more devices, the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 is the closest I've gotten so far, but it's not 100% right, it seems to be wanting linear memory organization but Doom is using planar memory.

You can do it man. Having stock textures shouldn't be a problem, it's all creativity...