I.H.N.I. Episode 1 - The Jittery Update v1.04

[klaymeb]

5 minutes ago, Kraja said:

Wait, what?

That's one hell of a bug - how did that happen?

I gotta fix that ASAP

No idea. I hit the final "Exit" switch, and the cutscene started. It obviously went directly to Phase 2, and when I got back control the Cyberdemon instantly despawned.

 

EDIT: For reference, I am using GZDoom 4.4.2 and was playing I.H.N.I. build 6.pk3

Edited November 24, 2020 by klaymeb

[Kraja]

@klaymeb

Ok - two questions:

What difficulty are you playing on, and on what version of the mod?

There was a bug in 1.0 that prevented easier versions of the cybie from spawning on lower difficulties, and since the hardest version was locked for UV then i think i know what happened:

After triggering that fight the cybie health tracking script saw that his hp was below 50% (cause it was 0 since there was no cybie there at all), triggered the phase 2 cutscene, then compared that health value again, went all "aw crap! his health is at 0! that means you must've killed him!" and just went nuclear.

But hey - it *should* work now in the current 1.01 version.

[klaymeb]

I was playing on HMP, so it sounds reasonable. I'll redownload and take another shot at it!

 

The reveal of the boss fight is pretty damned cool! I want to see the rest for myself :D

 

@Kraja: there we go - I got the latest version, and it works on HMP :) Thanks!

Edited November 24, 2020 by klaymeb

[lakersforce]

IMO the final boss is way too much of a bullet sponge. I am bored to death, before even halfway through the encounter. The two phases are good, but I would take away at least half its health.

[AL-97]

I am one of those people who played the original release and I think you're being hard on yourself. It was a solid offer with some memorable setpieces. As a further example of that, playing this remaster I realised that three years later and I still remember the map layouts. Having said that, the desire to improve is commendable. And the end result is definitely worth it. The changes, when compared to original, are jaw-dropping. I only wish the performance in some parts of the third map was better.

 

 

 

[Bryan T]

I just watched Al's video. Seriously impressive maps, mate. It's surreal to have played the original and then to see what they became.

[klaymeb]

So, I finally had the time to sit down and play MAP03 to completion.

 

I really like the cut-scene and the design of the boss. It looks really good and menacing! There are two things that I would really wish for with this final battle: Lowering the number of hit points on the Boss; and letting it run around the arena with you. 

 

Both of these combined make the final fight somewhat boring - he takes far far too much to bring down, and combined with the static nature, the fight is just an overlong circle strafe. You'd do your hard work on the WAD more justice if fighting the boss was more involved.

 

I love the aesthetics, the layout of the maps and the atmosphere. The final fight is just a bit of a let-down after such a cool experience!

Edited November 25, 2020 by klaymeb

[Kraja]

1 minute ago, klaymeb said:

Both of these combined make the final fight somewhat boring - he takes far far too much to bring down, and combined with the static nature, the fight is just an overlong circle strafe. You'd do your hard work on the WAD more justice if fighting the boss was more involved.

Ok, i'll admit his HP might be a bit too high.

But the thing with that boss is that... he's faster, attacks more often and uses patterns that prevent you from circlestrafing on UV. 

I guess i'll have to tweak the one on HMP to match the UV experience more closely. 

Try it on UV now and you will see what i mean :)

[klaymeb]

1 hour ago, Kraja said:

But the thing with that boss is that... he's faster, attacks more often and uses patterns that prevent you from circlestrafing on UV. 

I did notice that he was leading his shots, which admittedly got me the first time ;)

[DitheredOutput]

Just wanted to say this mod is brilliant! I'm having a blast! I will return with some feedback when I've got through them all. 

 

I did find that the menu select arrows didn't align correctly with the menu entries so who knows what difficulty I'm on. 

 

Edit: that's with GZdoom 4.5, which, I've noticed, is doing some sort of scaling with the main menus in other mods too. 

Edited December 1, 2020 by DitheredOutput
Clarify Gzdoom version for menu issue

[Kraja]

6 minutes ago, DitheredOutput said:

I did find that the menu select arrows didn't align correctly with the menu entries so who knows what difficulty I'm on. 

Yup - apparently it's the new menu scaling option in gzdoom 4.5 - that's why i recommended 4.4 earlier.

I've heard it broke some other mods too.

[Gez]

3 hours ago, DitheredOutput said:

Edit: that's with GZdoom 4.5, which, I've noticed, is doing some sort of scaling with the main menus in other mods too. 

Doom's main menu, just like the rest of the game, was originally meant to be displayed in 320x200 stretched to a 4:3 ratio. This is the source of all the problems.

 

The first problem was that if you put in support for higher resolutions, such as 800x600 or 1024x768, the menu ended up too small. So you had to scale it up. But you can't easily do a 5:6 scaling that looks good at these higher-but-still-low-by-today's-standard resolutions because there's no room to scale things uniformly while correcting for aspect ratio -- the minimum resolution you need for that is 1600x1200. So either you do uneven scaling and it looks bad because, in effect, only some parts of the font characters will be stretched, or you don't correct for aspect ratio at all. This is what ZDoom chose back then, resulting in a menu that's a bit squashed vertically compared to what it should have been. It used something that was called "clean scaling" which consists in simply looking for what is the largest scaling factor that still fits horizontally and vertically.

 

In GZDoom 4.5, the menu scaling was redone so it scales things correctly, including aspect ratio correction for the menu items. But for mods that added stuff to the main menu, the extra vertical stretching can result in things going out of the screen. So you can still turn on clean scaling to get the older scaling system back.

 

There is, however, a silver lining to the new system: besides being more accurate to the original look, you're now guaranteed to get a consistent proportion between menu and screen. The old clean scaling approach gives you different menu sizes depending on resolution. Here's an illustration:

 

Three screenshots. They've all been resized in GIMP to 640x480, but can you guess what the original resolution for each was?

Spoiler

Top to bottom: 1024x768, 800x600, 640x480

So a menu that looked just right with the old scaling method looked just right on your screen, with your own settings and you had no guarantee that it worked just right on somebody else's settings.

[DitheredOutput]

Thanks for that Gez, I guess it needed addressing sooner or later. I've found the setting and it looks as it should now. 

 

@Kraja

 

I loved playing through these levels they had great attention to detail, atmosphere and enjoyable level design. I particularly liked the use of ambient/point sounds and there are many visual effects that are particularly well done that I haven't really seen done before. It makes good use of Gzdoom being able to cast realtime shadows on certain geometry - and looks spectacular with it. 

 

The entire episode is full of memorable set pieces and challenging encounters that make good use of Dooms enemy rosta. 

 

My subjective cristisim:

 

The weapons actually feel great to use but, nit-pickingly, could maybe benefit from a bit of tweaking in the animation to make them feel a little more impactful, particularly the shotgun. 

 

[Kraja]

@DitheredOutput

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

And about those guns... Yeah - i get that a lot. This was my first time making my own weapons and there's so much i could do with no prior experience.

But - i do plan on re-making all of them later down the line. Someday... Eventually...

[NuMetalManiak]

I too thought the guns could use some tweaking, since they were quite weird (particularly the rocket launcher). Levels are awesomely made despite framedrops, and much of the close-quarters combat was fun. Story was also neato.

[thelazyqdude]

10/10; won't even bother with the normal feedback listing I do because everything in this is just superb. Very well done and congratulations on finishing something as incredible as this!

[Austinado]

An amazing job...it has my CACOWARDS21 vote.

Congrats!

[elderdragonbrasil]

I will stream this wad tomorrow :D

[elderdragonbrasil]

Hi, people!

My stream will start soon! Let's enjoy this masterpiece!
(https://twitch.tv/elderdragonbrasil)
twitch.tv/elderdragonbrasil

Commentary in english

 

[elderdragonbrasil]

Hello, fellow doomers! It is now on Elder Dragon's Youtube the complete playthrough of the Wad I.H.N.I, made by Kraja. Watch 2 hours of gameplay on Ultra Violence in this gorgeous masterpiece!

English commentary!

 

 

[Doom OG]

It's really good.  Unfortunately my computer is not up to the task of running it well, but from what I saw, its really cool.

[Hawk of The Crystals]

This mod looks pretty damn good, damn shame my pc's cpu would probably shart it's self if i tried to run it hahaha.

[Rex705]

This looks so good I wish I could play it. Sadly it's very choppy on my PC even with all the recommended settings and GZ 4-4-0.

Edited January 28, 2021 by Rex705

[Rudolph]

I would love it if the weapons and HUD could be released separately; they look really cool and I wish I could use them in other mapsets!

[Kraja]

2 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I would love it if the weapons and HUD could be released separately; they look really cool and I wish I could use them in other mapsets!

 

Eh - most people don't seem to like them all that much (well - maybe besides the pistol) - especially the shotguns

I'm actually thinking about redoing them for one of the future episodes.

[Rudolph]

Well, if you do so, then I would love to be able to use them in other mapsets! :)

[Kraja]

1 minute ago, Rudolph said:

Well, if you do so, then I would love to be able to use them in other mapsets! :)

There's only 5 weapons so far - the pistol, shotgun, SSG, chaingun and the rocket launcher
so that leaves me with 4 (or more *cough* *cough* EP2 spoilers *cough*) weapons to make - fists, chainsaw, plasma and bfg.

But sure - once i finish all of them i'll gladly release them as a separate mod.

Thanks for the idea 👍

[EZSPECIAL]

Finished in 2h02 on UV, secrets took the most time, some of them were impossible for me to find and had to resort to Al's video and UDB to find them (was an interesting first experience with the program, took a while to find out how I could search for secrets). I noticed that most secrets have a telltale sign so it's definitely me being blind lol.

 

Anyway, really liked the maps, new weapons were very good, I'm biased to the shotgun on vanilla Doom/Doom2 so really liked the upgrade on this one. Didn't find the boss spongy, it lasted a good amount of time and required my attention to avoid its attacks. No complaints, definitely left me wanting more.

 

Possible minor issues:

• MAP03 - the duct accessed by the yellow keycard has a fan without collision
• The ending text uses "it's" when it should be "its"
• The ending text uses "raise", I'm not native but I was thinking whether it should be "rise" in that context

Edited February 19, 2021 by EZSPECIAL

[Kraja]

Hello everyone!

It's been a while.

 

So... 👏
First things first - i'm not dead. I'm sorry for the recent radio silence - i've been busy working on episode 2, which is - in fact - coming next year (hopefully).

Thank you for all your feedback. I'm glad you enjoyed episode 1. In terms of negative feedback - rest assured. I'm doing all i can to adress it for the future updates.

And speaking of just that - here's a little sneak peek at what i've been working on lately:

 

Since guns were probably the weakest aspect of episode 1 - i decided to remake all of them from scratch.

New sprites, new sounds, new animations, brightmaps, new effects and all sorts of other stuff - all aimed at making those guns more responsive and more fun to use.

And yes - i will be porting those guns back to episode 1 in the next few weeks

Spoiler

(excluding the hammer - that's for episode 2).

 

And speaking of updating episode 1 - besides remaking those guns, i'm also working on fixing bugs (of which there's... a lot), tweaking some fights (including the bossfight which some of you said was a bit too spongy), and... improving the framerate - with a little bit of help from MechanicalInsanity and Dox778 (thanks again guys 👍).

 

So... yeah - that's about it for now.

Stay tuned for a chonky update for episode 1 coming out in the next few weeks, and after that...

It's episode 2, i guess...

Thank you all again ❤️

[Scuba Steve]

I'll have to check this out. How many episodes in total are you planning? Are you going to do a final release with all of them combined?