Dash

Gez said:

To get past the cutscene, go to options, then customize controls, then scroll to the very bottom and take a good look at what's displayed.

For the status bar, go in fullscreen mode. The mod features its own ACS-fueled status bar.

That guy's suit is funky, but the rest is okay.

Yeah thanks, but NOW an annoying message tells me to switch "screenblocks" to 11 and it'll go away! Grrrr...as far as I know screenblocks are the size of the screen, and it only goes up to 9 or 10, at least on my machine.

Xtroose said:

Here you can find some info about various lumps. To work with them, you will need a lump editor. The most popular are XWE and SLumpEd.

It is very hard to write a good DECORATE tutorial, because there are just so many things you can do with it. HotWax once posted a detailed DECORATE tutorial on the ZDoom forums. In that post he explained how to create a new monster. Once you are familiar with that, you will be able to understand the basics of DECORATE coding. From then on, I recommend you look at the Realm667 Beastiary and study the custom monsters. You can find more about DECORATE here, on the ZDoom Wiki.

ACS scripting is very well explained on the ZDoom Wiki. You can find a list of tutorials here. When you are familiar with the basics, you should take a look at some of your favourite PWADs and study their scripts. This way you will learn a lot.

Here are some useful ZDoom tutorials. Most of these are a bit outdated, but they still work.

If you have a problem and you didn't find an answer on the Zdoom Wiki, or the ZDoom forums search didn't find anything, ask about it on the ZDoom forums, where you are most likely to get a quick reply.

Have fun and remember the ZDoom Wiki is your friend.

Thanks a bunch, I will look at those. I also want to make it so when you kill a monster it spawns gibs that fly off in all directions (think Rise of the Triad's "ludicrous gibs") and I'm sure that's possible.

But on the subject of CIF3, here is a screenshot of what's going on...the colors are bad and I can't get past this cutscene...

Just look at what happened to the Doomguy's face! It's much, MUCH worse when you use The Ultimate DOOM (DOOM.WAD) as the IWAD...ALL the colors are screwed-up.

scalliano said:

Another wad with multi-sprite enemies is CIF3. It's a jokewad, but it's class.

This looks quite epic...but when I play it the colors are all messed up and weird-looking. In case it means something I'm using ZDoom 2.4.0 but I'm not sure that should be a problem.

Also, on the first cutscene the text where you're talking to "some guy" is possibly half-invisible (as if it's cut off somewhat) and I find that no button or key at all will make it progress, despite there being a "more" arrow at the bottom of the text box.

Creaphis said:

Those are the health indicators for his various body parts. You can see in the distance that the boss is clearly assembled properly.

Wow, I feel stupid. Sorry about that.

Well anyways, I've beaten the Harbringer and look forward to playing more multi-sprite DOOM mods. I just wish Chibi Rebellion worked. Perhaps the same MAP02 trick will work?

I can tell that making enemies out of multiple sprites, let alone anything worthwhile, is gonna take a helluva lot of practice with DECORATE and the like. Do any of you guys know of some good tutorials for DECORATE, lumps and all that ACS jazz? I'd really appreciate it ^_^

Thanks a bunch for that. I see the Harbringer and wow, he's tough! The only problem is, his sprites also appear to be "blitted" over the top half of the screen, as if they're just floating there...however, he still functions just fine, even if he is nigh-impossible to beat.

I just wonder what's up with those weird sprite glitches...here, look:

Enjay said:

warp to map02.

How do I warp? Also, I've beaten level 01 (MAP01?) and gotten manually to map02. Seems just like on the normal DOOM game *sigh*

Only did so on DOOM.WAD not on DOOM2.WAD, but I presume the results are the same, and that this "warping" you speak of is the proper way to get there.

Creaphis said:

Then load doom2.wad as your iwad instead of doom.wad.

FFFFFFFUUUUUUU-

Same problem

Enjay said:

Download this file and load it in Zdoom then warp to map02.

It conatains some minor DECORATE errors and I don't think it was ever properly finished but no-one can deny the true awesomeness of the Harbringer by LilWhiteMouse.

http://files.drdteam.org/index.php/files/get/f4tyDZkwjs/harbringer.zip

Gee, I did so but it's just showing me the normal level, and all I'm getting is just DOOM 1. A little help?

EDIT: I tried downloading Chibi Rebellion, but I gt a bnch of small WADs instead of one big one, and they all just take me to DOOM 1. Help!

myk said:

One thing that might work is the equivalent of patches for sprites. For example, you could add weapon and item patches to a base player sprite, showing the current weapon, backpack, armor type, power-ups, and so on, without having to make a whole new sprite set for each change.

Hmm...interesting

But please explain more, I'm sort of confused

fraggle said:

Not really, no.

You might be able to spawn multiple objects, each with a different sprite, and control each of those objects with an ACS script so that they move together.

Okay thanks. Not quite sure what ACS is but I think I'll hold off until I get more experienced.

Hi, I've been curious about this for ages now. I am wondering if it is possible to create a monster or enemy that uses more than one sprite synced together so it moves fluidly. I understand much programming would be involved, and perhaps the "monster" might actually have to be several monsters synced to move in unison.

Multi-sprite bosses were very common in the days of SNES and Sega Genesis, as shown rather stunningly here, in the game Gunstar Heroes.

myk said:

Perhaps your WAD editing utility is not cleaning the PWAD after each edit, keeping "dead" information that's not listed in the WAD's directory and is not usable or useful.

Not usable or useful? I use XWE, and as far as I know that's pretty useful. But thanks for the advice. Also, since it's used so often is there any commonly-used techniques for cleaning the PWAD in XWE?

Hey there,

I've noticed that my patch wads I create retain the large filesize of the actual DOOM2 IWAD, if not become even more bloated (with some things I've been up to 20 megabytes, which is HUGE for a game like DOOM.)

This even still seems to happen when I delete all the DOOM2 components I will not be modding. Okay, well the filesize is sometimes smaller than the original IWAD but STILL, considering how little data is in it, something seems very wrong. Or I could just be remembering wrong.

So tell me, is there any good way to optimize PWADs?

I use ZDOOM for all my wads, but WHACKED seems to work fine with ZDOOM.

Also, what if you're creating a totally new monster, and want it to have 8 full directions? Oh wait, that's what you were saying, right?

I am wondering if you can change the speed of the sprite animations (DOOM's default is painfully slow for the mod I'm making.) From what I can recall I thought the DOOM 3 weapons mod has sped up the frames of the weapons.

Also, when creating a new monster, can you use more frames than the original monsters to give smoother movement? I really hope you can.

regards,
-Dash

I'm afraid I don't know how to help you with the first two, but I can say, if you happen to be new to modding it is probably a bad idea to rename a map unless you know exactly what you're doing. In that case I think you just go to where the maps are listed, then right-click on the map you want to rename, go to "rename" and rename it whatever you like.

As for the third question, just go through the list of songs used in the WAD until you hear the two you are looking for, then look at their names.

I know of one way to do it, but it may not be what you are looking for. What I would do is take your MIDI file into a music sequencer/editor that supports MIDI (I use FL Studio demo version...it's free to download here,) and check what drum set your MIDI file is using (room, power, acoustic, etc.) Change the drum set to one that you like, then save the MIDI file again and import it back into whatever WAD editor you're using.

I'm afraid you can't do this with MUS files, but if you have a MIDI to MUS converter then you will be good to go. I hope this helped...PM me if you have any questions, k?

Thanks, I will try it out as soon as I get the chance :)

I feel I'm hogging the questions too much...is there any way I can help out other posters as well? I want to contribute to the forums too...

Thanks so much for all this, and I apologize for being such a n00b.

One last question is how does the code within DECORATE interact with the WAD correctly? I copied into Slumped the code for a "seeker missile" I found at the Zdoom wiki and seemingly nothing happened...I assumed the seekers would replace your normal rockets but they did not...I am confused.

EarthQuake said:

Alternatively, you can just insert the dehacked patch into the wad itself using XWE or something, and be sure to name it "DEHACKED". This is probably the better method as far as recent source ports go (most of the popular ones allow embedded dehacked patches).

So that's officially how the "pro" modders get their WADs to have custom strings, enemies, weapons, projectiles, events etc? Seems a bit convoluted to me. Well, I just tried it. Seems to work fine...thanks for the advice :)

I am learning to use WhackEd just today, and have already created several BEX files...however I have no idea how to get my WADs to recognize it. So far the only way I know works is to drag the BEX file onto Zdoom, but that only affects the original DOOM2 IWAD my copy of Zdoom runs on. I want to know how to include my BEX into my WAD so it makes the appropriate changes.

Thank you, I will move on to my next stage...one last question is, how do you get the WAD to know to execute that DECORATE text? I mean, it's one thing to put it in the huge list of entries, it's another thing to actually get the WAD to realize it's there and to actually use it for the purpose it was intended to do.

Graf Zahl said:

DECORATE is just a text-based format. There is no official tool to edit it. Use any text editor you want for it.

Oh so it's like a mini-programming language? Cool! In that case it's more along the lines of where to find tutorials on how to write and script it using DECORATE?

One more question and sorry to linger, but how does one integrate DECORATE into XWE/WhackEd/DeHacked/etc?

I looked at the article for it on ZDOOM Wiki but cannot find Decorate to download anywhere...this is really frustrating. I have WhackEd and looked in all its directories in case DECORATE is in there, but no it isn't.

Please help, I have no idea where it is and want to create my own weapons, monsters, obituary messages and more!