ZDCMP2: Happy Doomsday Edition (RC2)

So here we go. I thought it was high time ZDCMP2 got a new public beta. After all, the download link for the last public beta is dead. :P Also for people who like symbolic dates and stuff, we now have the twentieth year of Doom so we had to do something, right? So here is release candidate 2.

What's New Since Last Beta?

• New menu with ZDCMP2-specific options, made possible by new features recently added to ZDoom.
  
• By request: scripted autosave points! You can turn them off in the above menu.
  
• Want to make sure you've found all secrets before you start the final boss fight? ZDCMP2 now supports the "secret" console command.
  
• A couple voxel models have been cleverly hidden. Will you find them?
  
• Several areas have been tweaked, redesigned, or even added! Even less linear than before!
  
• An overall more generous distribution of ammo.
  
• If you just want to look at the scenery, it is now completable in nomonsters mode. Though you'll still get the bossfight...
  
• More secrets and Easter eggs.

Are there still bugs?
Yep, though not that many. A few known issues:

• Coop still might desync, especially when using the keypad. Of course, you don't need to go there in the first place.
  
• You need a development build of ZDoom or GZDoom. Otherwise, some things will not work.
  
• Some rendering glitches are unavoidable in areas with heavy use of 3D floors. Those are engine-side issues.

If you find any other, feel free to post them on our bugtracker!

Features

• A happy potpourri with some of the communities' finest modders
  
• Non-linear gameplay with an objective-/log-system
  
• One huge map that keeps you busy for some hours
  
• New monsters (no repository-mayhem!)
  
• New weapons (perfectly blending with the original armory)
  
• New textures
  
• New items/powerups
  
• New music
  
• New fonts
  
• New graphics
  
• New sounds (yes, I just say this to make the list longer)
  
• New erm... did I miss something?
  
• Countless surprises that I am not going to spoil :P
  
• Playing it twice is nice!

Screenshots
To not spoil anything, you will only get a few screenshots of the early passages of the map. We just want to make sure some surprises are still left for you to discover ;)



Credits
The Core Team

• Apothem - Scripting
  
• Blue Shadow - Testing, Support
  
• CaptainToenail - Mapping, Coding
  
• Chronoseth - Mapping
  
• Deathknight - Testing, Quality Control
  
• dj-jo - Music
  
• DTDSphere - Mapping
  
• Dusk- Mapping, Coding, Textures
  
• Gez - Mapping, Quality Control, Textures
  
• Ghastly - Coding, Quality Control
  
• gothic - Mapping
  
• Grymmoire - Mapping
  
• Icytux - Music
  
• Infirnex - Mapping
  
• Jimmy - Mapping, Music
  
• Lupinx-Kassman - Mapping
  
• Malinku - Mapping
  
• Phobus - Mapping, Quality Control
  
• Pyroscourge - Mapping
  
• Shadesmaster - Mapping
  
• TheDarkArchon - Mapping, Coding
  
• Tormentor667 - Project Lead, Mapping, Graphics, Textures
  
• Vader - Mapping, Graphics
  
• Xaser - Mapping, Coding, Quality Control, Music
  
• Zrrion the Insect - Mapping

Additional Credits

• Textures - NiGHTMARE, DrDoctor, Cage, Enjay, Blox
  
• Monsters - Scalliano, NMN, Eriance, Melvinflynt
  
• Sourceport - Randy Heit, Graf Zahl, et al.
  
• id Software - for the greatest game of all time

Less talking, more linking! Where's the download?
[2013/12/09] ZDCMP2 Release Candidate 2

Ran into a small problem with the download - "404 - Article #1487 not found"

Very first screenshot features a stack of crates in the middle of a room = maximum excitement!

Can't download...

404

+1 on the 404. :(

The 404 thing should be fixed. Turns out the page was not published, so it was only visible to people logged in with editor status on the website...

Memfis said:

Very first screenshot features a stack of crates in the middle of a room = maximum excitement!

The Demon & Imp Labor Union was very strict on this point. They refuse to invade UAC bases that do not meet a very stringent quota of crates per room ratio.

Ehh, the whole "You need a development build" puts me off right away.

If you want to know, the blood tunnels in Hell won't be swimmable with the last official build, because they rely on a new sector property instead of using the old system of plopping down waterzone actors in each sector. It can still be played through, though. On the top of my head, that's the only reason it needs a dev build; the rest of the features used should work fine in 2.7.1.

Gave this a play last night, took somewhere around 2.5 hours (on UV) all told. Got about 80% secrets, and found a ton of different weapons (each number key seemed to have one alternate in it), so I think I experienced most of what it had to offer. Mostly ran pretty well, although I was getting some quite noticeable framerate hits outside of 'Bellagio Gate' (ZDooM/software rendering), and the various visual glitches mentioned in the OP are indeed pretty noticeable, although I suppose there's not a lot to be done about them. The huge final caverns ran pretty smoothly, surprisingly. Overall I'd say it has a lot of the same virtues and a lot of the same faults as the original ZDCMP, so I guess you could say it's certainly faithful to the feel of its predecessor.

The pre-Hell stages of the map were its strongest point, I think. The different aesthetic/construction styles of the various authors meshed fairly well, and the non-linear task/objective progression style made for some legitimately interesting route differences early in the game, mostly a consequence of different ammo counts/weapon loadouts. Hell, on the other hand, didn't seem nearly as cohesive, more like a lot of compartmentalized E3 vignettes sort of smashed together in no particular order. The interconnectivity between different areas remains high, but because the setting is no longer representational in theme and the texture schemes of the different sections differ much more starkly, it seems a lot more artificial/patchwork, somehow. Additionally, by the time you reach Hell you've got most of the weapons (except for that optional alternate BFG thingamabob), and the feeling of sidequest-bound weapon progression was a lot of what made the earlier parts interesting. The boss/finale sequence were at least several steps up from the somewhat anticlimactic ending of the original ZDCMP.

To continue the comparisons to the original, though it's been years since I've played it, I remember that the ammo in that one just sort of dried up about 3/4 of the way in, making the proceedings something of a miserly trek up until the ending. Not so here, there was generally more than enough ammo throughout, probably even too much where the really high-end stuff (read: cells and souls) is concerned--I got the impression that it was assumed the player would just spam the hell out of the Dark Claw to get through the endgame. Really went overboard with the frag grenades as well, they were far more useful against groups of fodder earlier on, but they keep being handed out like candy all the way through to the end. Oddly, it was probably bullets of all things that I was most often low on. New weapons seemed mostly reasonable; I wish the grenades could've been thrown in an arc more effectively, and I didn't make much use of the nailgun (although it was good against those evil Pacman things), but I quite liked both the rifle and the flamethrower. The soul weapons, eh, take or leave. Dark Claw seemed a mite overpowered given its homing capabilities, honestly, at least considering the glut of ammo available for it later on.

Main areas of complaint: Being able to get the computer area map so relatively early on, even if it is only in a secret, feels flat-out wrong somehow. A lot of the appeal of this map is in not knowing what's coming next, and being able to see the whole layout (including 'Hell' being contiguously connected with everything else) spoils a lot, and almost feels more like a punishment than a reward. The cyberdemon junction seems terribly empty given its size....so empty that I had initially feared that some kind of obscure issue in the ZDooM SVN I used was causing a teleportation script or something to malfunction. The low point of the whole thing has got to be the assault on 'Fort Hellpit.' Seems like somebody thought it would be cute to try to create a setpiece aping the gameplay of cover-based military shooters in Doom......it's not. The weird Wolfenstein-esque enemies on the ramparts have a goodly amount of HP, and the height of the ramparts in reference to their hitboxes makes it fairly difficult to get clean hits on them with anything but hitscan weapons, slowing the overall pace of the map to a stultifying crawl. Not cool, not cool at all. Finally, I would recommend putting most of the choice ammo in the big boss battle around the edge of the arena--where it sits currently, it is very easy to pick a lot of it up by accident, especially if enemy AI dictates that you end up needing to use the columns of the Hell Generator to block connection with the boss's BFG 10K-esque attack a lot.

Spoilerific question: Is there some secret way to get that big scary-looking thing under glass in the 'Tech Lab' section, or is it just for show?

Not bad. It's a bit laggy, but it's still fun nonetheless. I do have two things that are kinda nitpicky though:

1. Is there a way to turn off the ejecting bullet casings and shells?
2. Will you guys get a new rifle shot sound? The current one sounds kinda wimpy.

Aside from that stuff, I'm liking this.

Demon of the Well said:

found a ton of different weapons (each number key seemed to have one alternate in it)

Yep, slots 1 and 3 were already doubled in vanilla; slots 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are doubled in ZDCMP2. There's even two slotless weapons! (Though one cannot be used in combat and is only a weapon by the slimmest of technicalities...)

Demon of the Well said:

To continue the comparisons to the original, though it's been years since I've played it, I remember that the ammo in that one just sort of dried up about 3/4 of the way in, making the proceedings something of a miserly trek up until the ending. Not so here, there was generally more than enough ammo throughout, probably even too much where the really high-end stuff (read: cells and souls) is concerned--I got the impression that it was assumed the player would just spam the hell out of the Dark Claw to get through the endgame. Really went overboard with the frag grenades as well, they were far more useful against groups of fodder earlier on, but they keep being handed out like candy all the way through to the end. Oddly, it was probably bullets of all things that I was most often low on. New weapons seemed mostly reasonable; I wish the grenades could've been thrown in an arc more effectively, and I didn't make much use of the nailgun (although it was good against those evil Pacman things), but I quite liked both the rifle and the flamethrower. The soul weapons, eh, take or leave. Dark Claw seemed a mite overpowered given its homing capabilities, honestly, at least considering the glut of ammo available for it later on.

Balancing ammo is kinda hard because of different playstyles. I tend to run out of grenades quite often because I love to use them, I'm generally full on bullets but looking for shells and nails, etc.

Demon of the Well said:

The cyberdemon junction seems terribly empty given its size...

True, and it's also underutilized. I think the original idea of that section's creator would be that it would be a section that you'd often come back to (as it was supposed to be a central junction) but the level developed in other directions and it ended up being just a one-time-only area. The only moment you revisit it is at the very end, where it would be rather cheap to have it repopulated with monsters.

Demon of the Well said:

Seems like somebody thought it would be cute to try to create a setpiece aping the gameplay of cover-based military shooters in Doom......it's not.

The actual idea was kinda "Dead Simple reversed" where you start outside and get inside after; also "have fun storming the castle" and patrolling enemies (this part was dropped).

The main problem I think is that the sentinels on the walls have too many hit points, making taking them down last longer than it should. You can get good line of sight to them if you climb up the crates and rocks instead of hiding behind them. The invisibility sphere allows not to have to dodge too much.

Demon of the Well said:

Spoilerific question: Is there some secret way to get that big scary-looking thing under glass in the 'Tech Lab' section, or is it just for show?

Just for show. Like the missile racks that can be found in a few places, these weapons are too big even for Doomguy.

Wow it's been a long time since I last looked at this. I've been playing meticulously to make sure I find everything I can on UV and just got up to where I'm about to burn through the vines to access the Eastern complex.

I've found one real problem so far, which is that looking out to the watchtower (and it's secret) from where you fight the first Angel of Death shows some pretty bad portal failures in ZDoom's latest unofficial beta from DRDTeam (literally downloaded a couple of hours ago). Otherwise there seems to be a minor issue of saves taking quite a while (particularly noticeable with the autosaves coming out of nowhere, although they are otherwise appreciated) and for some reason ZDoom is occasionally acting like I'm going to drop through solid floors (walking into the security station area through the big double doors seems to do it). If I had to guess, the latter is down to nodes, which is understandable given the 3D floor usage and sheer size of the map. I'm imagining the saves being slow is also down to the size of the map.

Looking at DotW's feedback, I have to agree on the Cyber Junction - it's just crying out for a couple of waves of enemies before the mini-boss, or something. Ammo seems very plentiful to me, but within my first hour I've already got something like 16 secrets, so that'll be helping considerably. Can't say I've warmed to the grenades - the very large lethal radius makes them vary between unusable and extremely powerful, depending on bounce and other things. The visual for the explosion matching the area-of-effect might help on that front, so you can at least see when you've killed yourself. They're very useful on that horde of axe zombies just before the VR section when you know to throw one though - always loved the fountain of giblets that produces!

Have to say the minor improvements I've seen in the already sublime tech section are great - the logs, signs, objectives and sheer quantity of secrets, plus the additions and alterations of thing placement are all a noticeable improvement on a year or so ago. Shame you can't page through the logs, but otherwise the system seems robust enough! I'm looking forwards to seeing what you've done to make that sprawling, bare hell layout I saddled you all with worthy of being in the finished product; particularly Disneyland castle! Sorry I haven't been around to help out with this releasing process (or even do any more of that quality control I'm credited for) - Real Life is the ultimate excuse, but truth be told I've been largely off Doom the last year or two. ZDCMP2 is definitely worth coming back for in it's current state though! I'll let you know if I find anything else and try to get screenshots so you don't need such lengthy descriptions for where I'm seeing things.

And I'm done with the first play through! I have to say I'm pretty pleased that a lot of the gimmicks I suggested and put in for Hell stayed and the place was recognisably what I put in. I'm even more happy that you kept the "Disney Castle" name in that great credits sequence! As the credits went into Hell I was thinking "They're not going to scroll through all of that, are they? It's basically all me plus whoever detailed each bit!" - fortunately whoever scripted that was wiser than I feared :P The little quotes made me smirk too - out of context half of them are really funny :)

Couldn't find my vanity cacoball fountains though, so that was a minor disappointment. Couldn't find Hitler Cube either :(

I'll give New Game+ a go tomorrow. As I've got Xaser's secret I'm imagining the battle will be pretty interesting :) I'm looking forwards to seeing my silly idea for the ending sequence appear at the end of NG+, after having checked the development forum :P


As for general feedback - Hell seems a little sparse and I had tons of ammo, but given that most of the opposition was pretty lethal and the area is huge, I'd say getting through it quickly is a bonus. Particularly as it is a glorified key hunt! The final boss is as great as ever and the last two objectives are worth a laugh :P

As for my opinion about grenades, they are powerful, but they lack range. Perhaps, make grenades fly farther when player picks berserk pack? (If it is possible.)

CorSair said:

As for my opinion about grenades, they are powerful, but they lack range.

That's what the rocket launcher is for. ;)

Having a serious framerate issue at the big outside area in front of the Dig Site/Fort. Anyway to fix this so it runs smoother??

Are you using ZDoom or GZDoom, and what version?

Phobus said:

Couldn't find my vanity cacoball fountains though, so that was a minor disappointment. Couldn't find Hitler Cube either :(

It was supposed to be moved elsewhere IIRC.

Phobus said:

I'll give New Game+ a go tomorrow. As I've got Xaser's secret I'm imagining the battle will be pretty interesting :) I'm looking forwards to seeing my silly idea for the ending sequence appear at the end of NG+, after having checked the development forum :P

Sorry about that, the twist ending is currently disabled because it didn't look right with the voxel VTOL.

Gez said:

Sorry about that, the twist ending is currently disabled because it didn't look right with the voxel VTOL.

Urgh, this is what I was afraid of -- the VTOL looks nice but botches the joke. I thought the plan was to sub in the helicopter for the alt. ending?

I've been playing through this over the last couple of days and finished it earlier - fantastic map! Really enjoyed it throughout.

I enjoyed using most of the new weapons. It felt like they all had a place rather than just being there for the sake of it, although I felt like I never had enough nailgun ammo to really get much use out of it (I remember feeling this in Quake as well, oddly). As has been mentioned though, the grenades felt a bit awkward to use accurately, and it sometimes felt like I had to be on a different planet to avoid the explosion myself!

Again I liked most of the new monsters and enjoyed the boss fight, although I admit by the end I was very sick of the imp variants. I felt like I spent a lot of time sniping them from afar with the rifle, which got a bit tedious. And as people have already said, I thought the cyberdemon area was surprisingly empty, although it was still a cool fight and area.

The map itself looks great, especially the tech base (I always prefer tech bases - the hell portion looked great too). Some really cool architecture throughout, and I liked the usage of 3D floors/water/etc.

The graphical glitches were there but weren't too disruptive. I did suffer from low framerates in some areas (mainly at the dig site, looking outside through glass in the tech base, the area before the final gate, and especially immediately after killing the boss).

Welp this post turned out longer than expected. Overall, I had fun, great job!

Blue Shadow said:

Are you using ZDoom or GZDoom, and what version?

Gzdoom. version 1.8.2 with latest SVN/git build.

I got some issues with gzdoom182. It crashes just after some minutes in the game. Zdoom (latest) works fine.

HellKnight2012 said:

Gzdoom. version 1.8.2 with latest SVN/git build.

There was an issue in previous builds that caused massive lag in that particular area (something to do with the warp effect on the "demon souls" coming out from the pit) but it was fixed quite a while ago. So if you're using the latest development build, then you should be fine when it comes to that. I, myself, experience a drop in framerate in that area, too (I get a fluctuating framerate between 45 to 70-ish), when the gate/fort and what lies beyond it in my view, so there could be something else that's causing the slowdown, then again, my computer (a laptop, with an average graphics card, I might add) is not a gaming machine, so it could be that the area is just performance-demanding.

xAn said:

I got some issues with gzdoom182. It crashes just after some minutes in the game. Zdoom (latest) works fine.

Try the latest development build and see if it still does so.

Xaser said:

I thought the plan was to sub in the helicopter for the alt. ending?

That was the plan, but obviously nobody implemented it!

WindbagJacket said:

I did suffer from low framerates in some areas (mainly at the dig site, looking outside through glass in the tech base, the area before the final gate, and especially immediately after killing the boss).

I did what I could to alleviate that last part, even delaying some events that before started immediately as the platform sank, and now wait for you to jump down to the pathway.

HellKnight2012 said:

Gzdoom. version 1.8.2 with latest SVN/git build.

Latest GZDoom builds would be based on 1.8.4 actually.
http://forum.drdteam.org/viewforum.php?f=23

Graf doesn't update his site anymore so you have to check the news forum to see the actual latest official number is 1.8.4. Though if you have a recent Git build, then it's newer than 1.8.4 anyway.

I'm having an issue with the "keypad bathroom" that you get teleported to after the red key door by the network hub. For some reason, I can't scroll up or down when using the onscreen numeric keypad. The mouse can only move from side to side in the center of the pad. As a result, there's no way to click any of the other buttons or even exit the screen. This isn't just a mouse problem, I can't do it with the keyboard either. Is there a keybind that makes it so I can fully scroll on this keypad or is it a gzdoom glitch? I'm using the latest development build of GZDoom.

Do you have freelook disabled? Try using keys bound to "look up" and "look down" then.

That did it, Thanks!

Anyways, congrats to the team for winning the cacoward. It's great to replay this, especially since there's a bunch of new secret areas to discover.

Gez said:

Latest GZDoom builds would be based on 1.8.4 actually.
http://forum.drdteam.org/viewforum.php?f=23

Graf doesn't update his site anymore so you have to check the news forum to see the actual latest official number is 1.8.4. Though if you have a recent Git build, then it's newer than 1.8.4 anyway.

Thanks! I didn't see that it was updated. Got it.

Blue Shadow said:

Try the latest development build and see if it still does so.

That did it, thanks.

#edit# Same problems with gzdoom184 here, the latest beta (pre_397) works fine...