Random difficulty during testing?

[Duke The Doomer]

Alright, so every time I test out my maps the enemies are either extremely easy or kill me in one hit. I always play/test them on Ultra Violence but that has no effect on the seemingly randomized difficulty. I was wondering if anyone knows what's up with that and how can I fix it?

[Edward850]

Doom doesn't have damage scales anywhere on that level, the only one that exists is ITYTD which halves all damage received to the player. There's either more going on then what you are describing (are you perhaps modifying game behaviour in some way?), or you're misinterpreting something (hitscan and direct projectile damage has a random multiplier).

Edited February 24, 2023 by Edward850

[Foxpup]

It's also worth noting that nearly all damage randomisation follows a discrete uniform distribution rather than any kind of bell curve distribution, so maximum and minimum damage values are just as likely as average values. The wide range of random damage values is very much an integral part of Doom's gameplay, encouraging evasion and movement tactics rather than expecting the player to just tank hits, since you never know whether that revenant missile will knock off 80 health or not. Be aware that using mods that change or remove damage randomisation will create a very different experience.

[Caffeine]

For more info on Doom's RNG: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

 

Decino mentioned this in a video or two but I am unable to corroborate it with a wiki link: GZDoom, its derivative ports, and potentially a handful of others change the PRNG algorithm but I am not sure if this is relevant in the context of your question.

Spoiler tag: YouTube links.

 

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