[Mod] Doom 3 subtle improvements

[snapshot]

A series of quality of life improvements to the original Doom 3 game and it's expansions Resurrection of Evil and The Lost Mission that attempt to enhance the game without deviating from the source material. Looking to play through vanilla Doom 3 and other mods and custom levels but don't want to mess too much with the core of the game? this is a good way to start.

What's included:

• An updated menu, with more widescreen options and customization settings.
• Slight tweaks to ammo balancing, some monsters AI and the difficulty settings of the game to incentivize making use of all weapons.
• Plenty of fixes to lots of oversights.

• Cleaned up sound effects.

• and more!

Download here - Instructions included in readme file

Edited June 4, 2021 by sluggard

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I added a separate version to the archive, it restores the old reload rate and old reload animation for those who don't like the new reloading.

[snapshot]

Uploaded more fixes, one important fix is for the materials of the Imp. simple glow effect so their eyes glow in the dark to make fighting them in dark areas less frustrating. look for the eyes!

Edited January 26, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

[Doommarine_maxi]

Thanks for all these improves, maybe it's time to replay the Doom 3 campaign soon

[whirledtsar]

These sound quite nice. It would be convenient if there was a package that included every one of your fixes.

[snapshot]

Thank you, I will do that next.

[Marlamir]

Thanks man, going to check them soon they sound quite interesting

[OliveTree]

Interesting. Somebody reply at some point ever so I remember this exists

[snapshot]

It ain't much, but honest work.

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Mod DB posted about my little mod, and also featured it in their Homepage. Thank you Mod DB.

 

.

Edited January 30, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

[Lila Feuer]

This is such a simple set of mods but they really do help improve some of the jank of the action. Definitely going to keep these loaded from now on, along with Reznor's sounds and the alpha shotgun.

[Li'l devil]

Hi, dmguydz64 :)

I'll check out your mod some time soon. I myself actually tried to do some tweaks to Doom 3 recently to make things slightly better and more logical, but I'm not good at this...

Anyway, I'm curious, what spread did you set for the shotgun? :) I personally found that if you set it to 11 degrees, which is how it is in multiplayer, it becomes much more satisfying to use.

Also, are you open for suggestions?

[snapshot]

Ey it's been a while. Sure I'm all ears. Just don't ask for something very complicated. I'm not very good at this.

 

I don't remember what was the spread value I set tbh, I just kept changing it until I found one that I thought worked best for mid range.

Edited February 11, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

[Li'l devil]

Basically, the kind of edits I was making for Doom 3 were to make some things a bit more logical:

1) If you look closer to the rocket launcher and its ammo, you'll notice that the clips actually contain 4 rockets instead of 5 (and the large ones 8 instead of 10). The maximum ammo capacity of rocket launcher is 96, which also suggests that it should have 4 rockets in the clip, not 5. So, it'd be more logical to change the clip size to 4 (and the amount of ammo the pickups give, respectively), and balance it out somehow (maybe by increasing the blast radius). The same should also be done to grenades, as the pickup clearly suggests it's 4 grenades, not 5. :)

2) I also changed machine gun and plasma gun clips to 30 and 25 respectively, because those weapons are usually overused, and this made them more challenging to use. The chain gun, however, retained its capacity, but the spread should probably be increased to make it less useful at long range.

3) There's also the thing that small and large machine gun clips give 30 and 45 rounds respectively, which is illogical, because the large clip is basically a doubled small clip, so it should give 60. The large shotgun shell box also should give 24 instead of 16, because it's a bit too large to hold only 16 rounds, heh.
I know these are too nitpicky things, but they bother me. :)

Also, I think the game has an abundance of ammo pickups in general. I'd of course just edit the maps to remove some of the pickups, but that's not really an option, is it... So, maybe make some of the monsters tougher and more dangerous, so that the player would have to spend more ammo on them? Well, there's only so much you can do without editing the maps...

Edit: also, have you considered adding splash damage for the plasma gun blasts? I think it'd be a cool addition.

Edited February 11, 2019 by Li'l devil

[snapshot]

Oh, to be honest I mostly made these changes to fix some minor issues and make the gunplay less crappy, not logical lol (except for the Shotgun).

 

I already tried reducing the amount of ammunition received from Rockets and Cells in v0.5 but that made later parts of the game almost impossible so I reverted this change, I did however reduce the amount received for shells and large shell boxes and also for MG clips and this made Plasma gun, Rocket Launcher, Grenades and even Pistol more useful, especially in the later half of the game.

 

As for the Chaingun spread, I think it's already underused and increasing it's spread would make it even less useful so I'll keep it as it is. I could however try adding splash damage for Plasma projectiles, see it how it plays.

Edited February 11, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

[Li'l devil]

Hmm, I wonder if it's possible to remove some ammo pickups (or replace them) using the scripts instead of editing the maps (rather than change the amount the pickups give).

 

Also, on second though, I hate to say that, but I think all the weapons are actually perfectly balanced for the game, despite some being kinda crappy. I watched your shotgun video, and your mod clearly made it overpowered, to the point that it looks like you can beat the game using only it. I guess the spread makes that much of a difference...

[snapshot]

Yea it kinda does, which is why I reduced it's damage and the amount of ammunition you get for it to better balance it's usage. I haven't touched any of the other guns damage or spread, only the Shotgun. most of the other changes are purely visual.

(Side note the video in the OP is outdated and shows the shotgun before I reduced the ammo and damage value)

Edited February 11, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

[Li'l devil]

I see. Well, looking forward for what else you may improve. :)

Also, two more things I kinda want to be improved: 1) I think zombies/Z-secs have a way too low gib threshold; when you fire at them with MG in continuous spread, they gib almost as soon as they die, which is kinda wrong. I tried fixing that myself, but couldn't find where... 2) Then there's also the enemies' mass issue... You shoot the pinky demon with a rocket launcher and it goes flying across the corridor, because it, and all the other enemies, have low mass... Don't know whether to fix this or not, because it's quite hilarious when the enemies just go flying after you shoot them. :)

Edited February 11, 2019 by Li'l devil

[snapshot]

Ah yes I think these are easy to fix, I'll try to fix them for the next version once I get back to this, also I already fixed some of the gibbing issues :) Pistol, MG and Fists damage no longer gib enemies.

[snapshot]

Updated. I modified the Archvile script so that he can use his classic "Incinerate" action slightly more often, by defining a new SPECIAL_ATTACK as ATTACK_INCINERATE and a new num_attacks float variable that is increased each time the archvile does an incinerate attack. each time this variable reaches 2 Archvile now does his new ATTACK_FIREWALL and resets the variable back to 0 so that he can continue using classic incinerate action again. I wonder why they made this action very rare, you barely get to see it in the delta labs levels.

 

Might also restore his old resurrection behavior later, just need to figure out how to get entity location, how to spawn entity at body location and how to make the archvile react to it.

[Li'l devil]

Wow, I didn't know arch-vile has two attacks, I've only seen the firewall one.

[snapshot]

Yup apparently there's another one that you barely get to see in one of the Delta Labs levels, It's very similar to his classic attack though easier to avoid.

[Li'l devil]

Wow, it's tied to a certain level? Now that's unique. I should check it out sometime...

[Lila Feuer]

I didn't know the Archvile had a second attack either, that's cool!

[snapshot]

A quick update, this time for Resurrection of evil:

• Disabled smoke for grabbed projectiles for Resurrection of Evil's grabber, to help view your target better. I always thought all the smoke and particles spawned in front of you made using the grabber annoying and aiming at enemies harder for no reason, eventhough it's such a powerful weapon. this (like every other change) is also optional and all you have to do is remove the "d3xp_projs" file to not load it.

Edited February 18, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

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I recently made another change but forgot to post about it here:

• Made Wraiths not stop moving while turning visible / invisible.

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Turns out there's an unused type of footstep sound called dirt. I'm trying to get it to work with specific materials yet despite adding it to "player.def" "player.sndshd" and making one of the materials use it it does nothing, game just keeps using default footstep sounds, there doesn't seem to be dirt footstep sound effects in the game files so I had to find some Royality Free dirt footstep sounds and convert them to 16 bit oggs at 22050MHz. and I'm sure they're placed in the right folder "sound\player\footsteps" They work fine when I replace default sounds line with player_footstep_dirt but otherwise I can't get them to work.

//def/player.def
"snd_footstep_dirt"                        "player_footstep_dirt" //snd_footstep_surftype

//sound/player.sndshd
player_footstep_dirt { //player_footstep_surftype
    minDistance    1
    maxDistance    30
    volume        0
    no_dups
    
    sound/player/footsteps/dirt_01.wav
    sound/player/footsteps/dirt_02.wav
    sound/player/footsteps/dirt_03.wav
    sound/player/footsteps/dirt_04.wav
    sound/player/footsteps/dirt_05.wav
}

//materials/caves.mtr
textures/caves/cavgrate1 //yes it's not a dirt material, just want to test and see if it works first
{
    dirt //surftype, for footsteps, particles...etc
    qer_editorimage   textures/caves/cavgrate1.tga
    diffusemap          textures/caves/cavgrate1.tga    
    specularmap          textures/caves/cavgrate1_s.tga         
    bumpmap           textures/caves/cavgrate1_bmp.tga
}

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20100522175509/http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=73778#73778

Edited October 19, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

[Xyz]

Hi

 

I have not yet messed with footsteps but I have messed with particle impacts for surftypes. Doom 3 allows for 15 surface types they need to be defined in the material. Only 9 or 10 are defined in Doom 3 yet they did not add step sounds for those. (metal, flesh, glass, plastic, wood, liquid, cardboard, ricochet & stone) the rest need to be defined (they are surftype10 --> 15 ) 

So by default dirst won't work since it is not defined as a material. I have defined the rest of the surftypes as (concrete, sand, dirt , bone, lava slime) . 

 

You should add a `dirt / soil whatever ` parameter ot the materials of the corresponding textures. Then add the sound in def file.

[snapshot]

Thanks, I wonder if there's anyway I can rename these surftypexx to something else each (eg: dirt for surftype10) using surftype10 works fine and I can now apply it to materials. dirt gives me an "unknown material parameter" error.

Edited October 20, 2019 by tempdecal.wad

[Xyz]

I think that's coded into the dll , you'd need to edit the SDK for that .