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Super Mighty G

Den of the Arch-Lord (New screens)

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Note to readers: Possible spoilers in this post!

Snapshots of misaligned textures in the blood maze:





I got trapped with no possible means of death or escape without cheating. It happend in the red brick lava room, after clearing out all the hell knights, barons, cacos, archviles, and arachnotrons. A path opened to a wooden door, and when I approached the wooden bars came down and surrounded me. Snapshots and Eternity's automap coordinates for this location follow:

X: 4740
Y: 2448
Z: -48





Sectors 865, 867, 869, and 868 are triggered by the southward facing linedefs 4879, 4874, 4882, and 4877 respectively. I do not understand what your intention is with these wooden bars, but I think there needs to be more distance between the triggers and the bars (ie 32 units was not enough space to prevent me getting stuck when the bars came down).

Why are you using four seperate linedefs to trigger the wooden bars? You can use a single linedef to trigger and give all four sectors the same tag as that linedef. (Alternatively, you could just use DB1's join sectors function to make all eight wooden bars into a single sector.) I'm really not sure what you intended to happen here, but I don't think you want players getting inescapably stuck.

I am a bit concerned about the difficulty. I have been playing skill 1 and still have not manage to complete the map. I consider myself a moderately experienced player and normally play skill 3 or 4. IMHO archviles should almost never appear on skill 1. Even if you intend the map to be more challenging than average, IMHO it would be better to replace some of the hard monsters with weaker ones for the lower skill levels.

To be even more specific:

Spoiler

After I finally clear out the third room (imps-on-pillars) including hell knights and barons I push the switch to open the door. A horde of demons flood the room, and I start picking them off with my super shotgun, but they are quickly followed by an archvile. I manage to peg the archvile twice with my SSG before he starts resurrecting barons and hell knights. Now I am screwed because while I was shooting the archvile and baron the demons have cornered me and are tearing my armor off while the hell knights are splattering me with hot green plasma. This is a fantastically fun setup, but it is not a skill 1 scenario.

When I start the map I get the error message, unknown thing type 30112 at (832,7072). It is in sector 79, facing south, and has flags value 7. I don't know what this is supposed to be because DB1 just tells me unknown. The error occurs in the following ports:
  • Eternity Engine 3.35.92
  • PrBoom 2.5.0
  • PrBoom-Plus 2.5.0.3
  • Chocolate-Doom 1.2.1 reports Error: P_SpawnMapThing: Unknown type 30112 at (832, 7072)

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Yeah I got stuck in that room too. I just idclip'ed my way out of it though, since there was no obvious escape. Most of the arch-viles aren't an issue in skill 1 but that room with six of them, trap or not, is overkill. Arch-viles move too fast and are too destructive. The gameplay balance needs work for skill 1 IMHUO.

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There are lifts in those pillars you go across on the flanking doors. They're even facing inward to the big fight square. Admittedly I kinda influenced him in choosing SUPPORT3 for the lift textures, but still ...

EDIT: also the inner lift shields for the arena can be jumped over with just a good running start.

EDIT2: @ epona: the blue key trap is instant-kill on any skill, so if you want it nerfed he's going to have to make it survivable on UV, which would be kinda meh imo. It's easy enough to figure out, just getting back there from the beginning is annoying, but I usually save on maps that take longer than 10 minutes.

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Eponasoft said:

Most of the arch-viles aren't an issue in skill 1 but that room with six of them, trap or not, is overkill.


I walked in there with 200 health, 200 armor, a plasma gun and 600 cell units. They toasted me in three hits. Without an invulnerability sphere that room is impossible to beat. What's worse is that if you manage to run back out the door the bastards follow you and start resurrecting imps and such.

Granted, a small few are in places where they can't resurrect anything. But most of them are used in devious death traps. I still say they should be extremely rare on skill 1.

The entire Doom II IWAD only contains 8 archviles on skill 1, and they are spread over 32 maps. I have already found 12 on this single map for skill 1, and I haven't even finished the thing yet!

The point I am trying to make with the archviles applies to revenants too. There are a ton of them, and I am not about to count them all.

I don't want to imply that those monsters can not be used. I just think that some of them should be replaced with easier monsters for skill 1. There is plenty of fun stuff to do on this map without throwing a bunch of the harder monsters into it.

U.O.D., I got trapped in the red-brick-and-lava room again. Looking at it in DB1 I should be able to raise the bars with linedefs 4819, 4825, 4827, and 4833. Unfortunately they use a one time only action, and I triggered them before lowering the bars. If those lindefs are the only way out then I think they should be repeatable.

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U.O.D. said:

Unless I can write in MAPINFO that Eternity recognizes, please use ZDoom if you can.


That's why I linked you to the Eternity wiki. Sorry, but I don't have any experience editing MAPINFO, otherwise I'd gladly try to help. Unfortunately I can not use ZDoom because I can't get it to compile successfully even though I have the dependencies.

You shouldn't be able to press the switches before the bars close. And the bars should only close once. How did that work out?


I just did it again, and this time I recorded a demo for you. The demo is recorded in PrBoom 2.5.0, and you should use the same to play it back. I did not use any complevel parameter.

archlord_sparerib1968_prboom_skill1_nocomp.zip (10.99 KB)

I really hope you can fix this because I do like this map.

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Sorry I can't help test this ZDoom only wad, because ZDoom just won't compile for me.

I did encounter one more very annoying bug in the previous version. In the room with 6 archviles and the blue key it is possible to run straight out the window. The only way back in is noclipping. Hopefully you caught that and fixed it.

The endgame of the previous version did not work at all. I ended up noclipping through two or three walls to finish. I assume this is all because of the ZDoom specific stuff you included.

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Played it all the way to the monster spawner, but for some reason gzdoom and zdoom aren't recognizing the thing 30012, or mistaking it for something else, which says thing remove in DB2, which breaks the final fight. I was using gzdoom 1.2.1.309 and zdoom 2.3.1.1480 had the same problem, if it makes a difference.

I like most of the changes you made, but throughout it was a little low on ammo in UV, and I bet you need the bfg trick to beat the cyberdemon reliably. Not to mention I couldn't really get through the spidermastermind fight without it, those two torches on the sides snagged me for the arachnos a lot and I needed the room that instantly removing the spidermastermind bought.

I was also kind of annoyed you buckled down to pressure and made the blue key trap easier to notice :P

Anyway, fix the final fight and it looks pretty good to me.

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Ok cool, it's a nice fast-paced fight but those monster spawners are completely overshadowed by the boss, and if the player still has quite a few cells left (which is easily possible if they do the bfg trick on the cyberdemon) it ends pretty quickly. I'm not sure how exactly you could fix this, but it's something to keep in mind I guess. Can't really add more than what I said in the last post to the rest of the map, looks pretty solid.

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ArmouredBlood said:

Ok cool, it's a nice fast-paced fight but those monster spawners are completely overshadowed by the boss, and if the player still has quite a few cells left (which is easily possible if they do the bfg trick on the cyberdemon) it ends pretty quickly. I'm not sure how exactly you could fix this, but it's something to keep in mind I guess. Can't really add more than what I said in the last post to the rest of the map, looks pretty solid.


That's the idea really. The spawner is just there as back-up since fighting the boss by itself is relatively easy. Also I couldn't decide on what monsters to have as back-up, so I made it random. :P The spawner stops when the boss dies.

I'm not familiar with the BFG trick. I assume you don't mean the one that silences the firing sound.

Thanks for all your comments by the way. They really helped.

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The 2 shotting cyber and 1shotting spidermastermind one, speedrunners make extensive use of it. You've probably seen it before somewhere if you watch demos for gggmork's and Insane_gazebo's maps. I can pull it off on the spidermastermind in the arachno arena pretty reliably, but is kind of hard to do against cybers (at least for me).

On the boss fight, it works then. And you're welcome for the comments, it gives me something to do in my spare time ;)

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