DBP38: Chronicles of Ghost Town

[MattFright]

 

Chronicles of Ghost Town is a short episode episode of respectable size for Doom 2 designed for limit removing source ports made by various members of Doomer Boards. This month's project lead is 40oz. 

 

Download

 

Screenshots:

 

MAPLIST
MAP01: Libris Noctis - matador
MAP02: Damned Keep Rampage - MattFright
MAP03: Cleft - kvsari
MAP04: Phantom Manor - 40oz
MAP05: Parichmakher - silverminer
MAP06: Chaos Crypt - A2Rob
MAP07: Bog Standard - joeilya
MAP08: The Other Side - jadingTsunami
MAP09: Dripping Tears - Chainie
MAP10: Sacrificial Grounds - Fryuko
MAP11: Ghastly Domain - 40oz
MAP12: Gideon's Creek - 40oz
MAP13: Valley of Stone - nxGangrel
MAP14: Apply Some Pressure - lunchlunch
MAP15: Whispers of the Dead - deathbear
MAP16: Vile Excision - dmdr
MAP17: Chronicles of Ghost Town - 40oz

 

Previous projects:

Spoiler

2018:

Spoiler

-Monuments of Mars
-Circle of Caina
-Forest Swords
-Xenomorph Base
-Coffin Curse
-Vicarious Reality

 

2019:

Spoiler

-The Merry Christmassy Doom Project
-MINDBLOOD GENESIS
-Legend of The Hidden Tech
-Earth Ends
-Lillywhite Lilith
-Into The Storm
-Alien Bastards!
-After The Fall
-Fuck Global Warming... This is Hell
-Cyb's Freaky Colonoscopy
-Alone
-Umbral Platinum
-A Doomer Boards Christmas Carol

 

2020:

Spoiler

-Dungeons and Demons
-Occult Secrets of the Third Reich on Mars
-Biotech is Godzilla
-Evil Egypt
-Spaceballs: The Sequel: The Quest For More DBP Maps
-Dead But Dreaming
-The City of Damned Children
-10 Day Vacation
-Fear and Loathing
-Morbid Autumn
-The Magnificent Five
-Santa's Outback Bender

 

2021:
-Tomatomania!
-Rainy Days In Casablanca
-Luminous Gloom
-Stroggman's Tundra

-Aquatic Wonder

-AUGER;ZENITH

Sidequests:
-Fall of Society

 

For (slightly) more DBP info, please check the Doom Wiki article!

 

Edited August 3, 2021 by MattFright

[grrfield]

currently hosting this on zandronum

 

[Salt-Man Z]

Damn that looks pretty.

[TJG1289]

Damn, another nice-sized DBP! Screenshots look great per usual. Gotta finish Perpetual Powers then, so I can play this.

[Shepardus]

Congrats on another release! I haven't even finished playing DBP37... or DBP36, or most of the other ones...

[Firedust]

Screenshots look nice as usual! I always look forward to a new DPB release every month :)

[Lobo]

Already?

These are coming out faster than I can play them!

Keep up the good work folks.

[EffinghamHuffnagel]

Zmapinfo has all maps set at 'Cluster = 10', which by default is Doom2 MAP32. That entry is missing from MAP07 so before you enter MAP08, you get the 'super secret level, better blaze through this one' text.
 

MAP03 has one missing DBRAIN1 texture on Line #16, but to see it you have to go off the lava falls, which means you'll die anyway as there's no way out.

 

Fun so far.

[GarrettChan]

Pretty fun and short vanilla looking (sorta) mapset. Kind of sad that Map05 has a very nice visual setup that I would like, but gameplay is not as good as expected (still decent)

 

Not a fan of Map13 because how some of the later fights are setup, and some later maps open you with no SSG but quite a mess, so it's not very fun to start like that.

Edited August 10, 2021 by GarrettChan

[brightentayle]

Big Hexen textures with even bigger Hexen vibes here! Will play through all of it as soon as I'm done with the DOOM vacation WADs.

Oh, right, I've decided to record a buncha rolling demos since I'm irked half of DBPs don't have their own. You're welcome.

DPB38_rolling_demos.7z

[IvanDobrovski]

Huge tone shift from previous DBP I see. Seems like a mash of Plutonia and a bit of Quake. Will give it a shot later.

 

EDIT: This felt a little uninspired to me, not sure. After having played DBP37 this feels very boring to be quite honest here. The last map as well was especially easy and I didn't expect it to end like that at all. Looking forward to your next hit I guess.

Edited August 12, 2021 by IvanDobrovski

[EffinghamHuffnagel]

Notes. Not many.

Spoiler

MAP12 - Both tag 2 escape teleports are inside caves behind SFALLx. Falls textures missing from the backsides of cave entrances. SFALLx are invisible from the inside.

 

MAP13 - Blue Armor secret area tagged as three secrets. Two of the three tag 38 rising ShotgunGuy sectors are also tagged.

 

MAP15 - Two possible softlocks. 1) Behind the building with the tag 67 switch. Got up on the edge of the building, walked behind it to look for secrets, and fell off. Got stuck between the building and the outside wall. 2) You can SR into the first tag 26 Revenant pit before it's raised. Assuming you kill the Revenant, softlock.

 

I liked it, but the maps didn't all feel thematically consistent. Maybe that's just different interpretations of 'ghost town'. Some maps felt like 'town full of agitated dead things'; others like 'abandoned place bad guys with guns found to hide in'. I was expecting more empty, atmospheric and creepy. Still had fun, though. Good, high-quality maps.

 

Now to go play the last one. Hoping for a 'Blade Runner' kind of feel.

[LuciferSam86]

I just started Map 07 with High Noon Drifter, and I'm having a ton of fun. I really like it, and the wad seems made specifically for High Noon.

[Jayextee]

I enjoyed this. As noted, it's definitely channelling small amounts of both Quake and Plutonia with some mild slaughter thrown in, and it's not bad at all.

Auger-Zenith was always going to be a tough act to follow (even if I preferred DBP26: City of Damned Children to it in many ways, it's still astounding nonetheless) so I went in with that in mind, but otherwise open expectations. Not bad at all. :)

 

Edited August 14, 2021 by Jayextee

[Blip]

Just finished playing this wad today. It feels like classic doom wads with modern mapping standards, which is pretty cool. 

The only map I didn't really enjoy was map16 due to its secret heavy-ish nature

Spoiler

It felt really anticlimactic doing the last fight of the wad with a plasmagun because I didn't manage to find the secret bfg :(

I really had a blast, it was a pretty good follow up to zenith.

 

I'm really looking forward to the next DBP iteration!

[Thrustpeak]

Big tone shift from AUGER;ZENITH, but I dig it. I'm not sure if the theme was meant to be literal ghost towns—map 01 and a few others had this feel—or just maps inspired by plutonia's ghost town (map 13's chaingunner squads definitely had to take inspiration from that), but I enjoyed the mix of maps offered. Only minor gripe is with map 13 and how I was a bit unsure of what switches did a few times. Also, I wasn't a fan of how it's hitscanner deathsquads made me approach some of the rooms or encounters. Overall though, great stuff, and I look forward to the next DBP release!

 

Playlist of my continuous playthrough: 

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited August 15, 2021 by Thrustpeak

[dew]

Quote

Tested By               : 40oz, matador, vigilantdoomer, mrzzul, jadingtsunami, lunchlunch, francist218, peccatummihamiz

Ha, an unlikely statement. I doubt any of these people tested map13 at all.

 

From pistol start it is absurdly difficult at first, particularly ammo balance is out of whack in the face of so many close combat ambushes, a huge outlier compared to the other maps. Then it settles down into a solid groove and becomes one of the more interesting maps of the set, but it's obvious the author worked in a rush and with zdoom in mind. The map shows 9 secrets, but it's actually just 5, because one secret is split in 3 and another one in 2. The fountain chaingunners in the cybie yard are too large for their alotted space and therefore are stuck in non-zdoom ports. The entire outro section doesn't feel like a cinematic outro but an unfinished, unpopulated area. The secret in the RK room is one-time only, because once the platform rises, it cannot be reached again. But most importantly the door in that secret, linedef 2410, is a switch door with tag 0. That means it opens to a glorious wall of HOM, but also "opens" every other tag 0 sector in the map, completely and utterly breaking it in the process. At least on complevel 2 this mapset claims to be targetting, -1 with a zdoom-compatibility setting will probably work.

Edited September 6, 2021 by dew
spelink

[Caleb13]

Ah, another worthy addition, but I noticed some bugs in GZdoom 4.6.1:

 

MAP12: misaligned textures on pillars behind the 2-baron trap (on catwalk leading to the exit).

 

MAP13: several sectors around the blue armor shouldn't be secret.

 

MAP15: I encountered low framerates in this map (particularly near start) even though I have rather powerful PC (Threadripper 1950X).

 

MAP17: unclosed sector 6 (I think), it's visible up on linedef 4852.

[BerserkerNoir]

On 9/19/2021 at 8:20 AM, Caleb13 said:

Ah, another worthy addition, but I noticed some bugs in GZdoom 4.6.1:

 

MAP12: misaligned textures on pillars behind the 2-baron trap (on catwalk leading to the exit).

 

MAP13: several sectors around the blue armor shouldn't be secret.

 

MAP15: I encountered low framerates in this map (particularly near start) even though I have rather powerful PC (Threadripper 1950X).

 

MAP17: unclosed sector 6 (I think), it's visible up on linedef 4852.

GZDOOM is to blame, lots of linedefs in sight always destroy framerate, regardless of how powerful your processor and GPU are.
This also happens in Ancient Aliens and some maps with ample spaces.

[Firedust]

I apologise for the bump, been playing through the DBP's I've missed. So far the maps have been lovely, but why is the intermission text for map 7 from Doom 2 Grosse?

[brightentayle]

On 9/4/2022 at 12:26 PM, Firedust said:

I apologise for the bump, been playing through the DBP's I've missed. So far the maps have been lovely, but why is the intermission text for map 7 from Doom 2 Grosse?

Apparently, it's something with your port if it shows the MAP32 thing (I know Crispy Doom can inexplicably get weird sometimes), as intermission screen texts have not been changed AFAIK.

[brightentayle]

Decided to rerecord my DBP38 demos, this time on Crispy, because last time, I was on the wrong complevel.

 

Whoops.

 

If you feel like inserting those into the main release months later, go ahead.

DBP38_DEMO.zip

Edited September 17, 2022 by brightentayle

[DreadWanderer]

Hey everyone, back with another UV max playthrough. Playlist:

 

 
A very good time in general, and this was actually the first ever DBP I played! But we really have to talk about MAP13 because it stands out like a sore thumb. It's very broken and excruciating to play. I thank dew for pointing out that the red door HOM problem lowers a shitload of other sectors and breaks the map completely. I fiddled in UDB and actually got to fix it with a simple change of an action from whatever it was to action 33 (D1 - Door Red Open Stay), thus making it maxable in conservative ports like DSDA. Probably works with something similar like action 28 but I haven't tried it. With that out of the way, congrats to the DBP crew for another very fine wad.

Edited March 3 by DreadWanderer

[Moai]

On 3/4/2024 at 7:14 AM, DreadWanderer said:

A very good time in general, and this was actually the first ever DBP I played!

 

Hey, this was my first DBP as well! A very fun map set, I like how it's tight on ammo but ample on health. And, unlike everyone else I think, I actually loved map 13. Really liked how the map kept changing and adapting, reminded me a bit of TNT map 4. Also decently challenging, took me some 10 tries to pistol start it on uv-max.

 

Already downloaded DBP 1, and it's really good as well. Will be going on them in order. Hopefully they are all short-ish like this!