The All-Ghosts Forest [RC2] - A Vanilla Compatible horror map

[Danlex]

                    

 

"Warning: Not for the faint of heart"

 

The All-Ghosts Forest is a vanilla compatible horror map inspired by the Ghoul's Forest serie and other popular spooky wads.

Your mission is to find three keys and escape from the forest before the ghosts get you.

You will only have a rifle and a flashlight to help you, so make sure to look for ammo and battery while you walk around.

 

Killing the ghosts is not mandatory to beat the map, but everytime you grab a key a new ghost will appear, so keep that in mind.

The position of the keys and the order of appearance of the ghosts gets randomized everytime you start a new game.

 

... and no, this map doesn't actually use the All-Ghosts effect.

 

Screenshots

Spoiler

 

Information

IWAD: Doom 2

Maps: MAP01-02

Difficulty settings: yes

Coop support: yes (not tested)

Deathmatch: no

Tested with: check the spoiler below

 

Tested ports

Spoiler

This wad was tested and is confirmed to work properly with:
- chocolate doom 3.0.0
- chocorenderlimits (1.5.0.0)
- crispy doom 6.0.0
- prboom-plus 2.5.1.4
- dsda-doom 0.25.6
- eternity engine 4.02.00
* skulltag 0.98d (there's some minor bugs with this port but it works mostly fine)

 

This wad does NOT WORK with:
- zdoom 2.8.1
- zandronum 3.1
- gzdoom 4.11.0
- probably other ports that were not tested yet

 

Credits

Spoiler

Textures:
OTEX by Ola Björling (Ukiro)
COMTEX by Foxhead
cc4-tex by many people
PUSS XXII: The Chilling Winds of Dis' resource pack by the PUSS team
Makkon's Quake texture pack

 

Graphics:
Status Bar made using a texture by Makkon
"Nightmare!" text font by eevee
ENDOOM made using the ENDEDIT tool made by jval

 

Sprites:
Trees by elend (edited by me)
Bolt Rifle by No More Room in Hell, Joblez
Flashlight by Alando1, osjclatchford, Eriance (edited by me)
Vegetation by Pistachio (edited by me)

 

Music:
"Tulku" from Hexen II: Portal of Praevus by Kevin Schilder
"Privateer's Hold theme" from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
MIDI rendition of "Moonlight Shadow" from MapleStory

Special thanks to myolden and OverflowingMocha (aka LGmaire) for playtesting and also to plums for helping me with some technical difficulties that I had during development.

 

Please read the "README.txt" text file included in the zip before playing

DOWNLOAD:

The All-Ghosts Forest [RC2]

 

Happy Halloween!

Edited November 14, 2023 by Danlex

[OverflowingMocha]

Was fun to playtest this, very unique and interesting! Congrats on the RC1 Release!

[Vermil]

Gave this a quick run in the ancient Doomsday 1.8.6 and everything seemed to work ok.

 

Just the bars on the outside sides of the graves were misaligned, and Dday's default particle generator's (easily disabled via the control panel though) interfered with the visuals of the weapons (which otherwise, seemed to work fine).

Edited October 8, 2023 by Vermil

[Aeddes666]

Smooth run on GZDoom 4.11.0

[SleepyVelvet]

This is great so far.  Here's a DNF softlock FDA, but hopefully it showcases my expressions. 

noisy_agforest.zip

 

Got stuck in a wedge... a comfy, safe wedge admittedly.  Killed 1/3 ghosts

Edited October 8, 2023 by NoisyVelvet

[Noiser]

Oh, this seems perfect for that spooky 320x200 resolution! I love the palette btw, congrats on the release

Edited October 8, 2023 by Noiser

[BluePineapple72]

Super interesting wad! Fascinating how this is all vanilla compat!

 

Here's a video of my playthrough.

Spoiler

 

 

As always Danlex, super job on the release!

[OpenRift]

Tried to run this in vanilla, but it seems to work rather inconsistently.

 

Sometimes I'll get a venetian blind crash and sometimes I'll get this really strange color artifacting that somehow affects the status bar and text if I reload the map:

 

Both seem to happen after firing my weapon.

 

I tried rebuilding them with different nodebuilders but no luck so far. I'll let you know if I find any solutions.

[Ar_e_en]

I am intrigued and this seems like a quick experience. I'll check it out! 

[OpenRift]

Haven't found anything that will fix that issue, so I've been playing in Chocolate Doom. 

 

There does seem to be a VPO near the truck, so be wary of that, I suppose.

[Luisinho]

Congratulations on the release, excellent work as always! Fantastic map with a great concept, a very well executed one. The unpredictability and darkness adds a lot to the level's atmosphere, along with its impressive design and creative ideas (like how the flashlight works).

Haven't felt that scared in a horror game for a while, jumpscare hitted so hard that even my mother got jumpscared, LMAO. You totally nailed it with the whole horror thing going on!

[eev]

Tested with DOOM RETRO and the gun and flashlight cause a crash, just a heads up.

[MFG38]

An appropriately tense experience for the season. Couple minor critiques:

• I feel like the flashlight drains its battery a tiny bit too quickly. It's hard to say how much slower the drain could be without completely destroying the intended atmosphere, but doubling the frame durations would admittedly seem a little excessive as well.
• While I understand why most of the automap is hidden, it doesn't need to be quite as hidden as it currently is. At the very least, navigability would benefit greatly from having the exit marked somehow. Not necessarily in the automap, but possibly with "breadcrumbs" of sorts to signal when you're near it.

Other than that, awesome work and impressive for vanilla! I especially like the idea of randomizing the key/ghost spawn locations - I can only imagine how tedious that was to set up.

[Ar_e_en]

I beat the map!

It was quite fun and the tricks that were used to make this Vanilla compatible were very impressive.

Spoiler

A good strategy that I used was to find all the keys first (without picking them up), remember their locations, plan out a route and leg it! It doesn't work all the time, because one of the skulls could spawn in the well, but dealing with one ghost isn't the hardest thing.

One downside to the way that you implemented the random key spawns is that there seem to only be 4 permutations on how the keys spawn. Once you've memorized the 4 permutations and you find one of the keys - you could probably remember where the other 2 are, but I guess there really isn't any other way that this could be done in a Vanilla setting, at least without adding more complexity. 

Edited October 9, 2023 by Ar_e_en

[OpenRift]

I just wanna say, aside from the minor technical issues I encountered, I am thoroughly impressed with this WAD. I'd been pondering for a while about the viability of a horror experience within vanilla Doom limitations, and this is genuinely really impressive stuff.

[Catpho]

Neat level. Will echo MFG's comment on the battery draining a bit too quickly. Maybe the initial battery should be slightly higher? Something else of note is that there is a viable strategy where I can just stick to the borders of the forest and eventually come across all possible key spawn points. I think it would've been scarier if I was forced to go to the middle of the forest to find keys and lose that safety tether.

[Danlex]

Hi! I just uploaded a new Release Candidate for this map. Link is in the OP.

Changelog:

- Fixed a softlock found by NoisyVelvet.

- Added more battery pickups on all skill levels (keep in mind that lower skills give you even more battery and ammo).

- Fixed some Drawseg Overflows in the campfire area that I didn't notice before.

- Now the automap is not completely hidden anymore. The forest itself is still hidden, but now all the "important areas" (exit and possible key locations) get revealed once they're found.

- Updated "README.txt" file with a few additional notes.

 

Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to fix the issues reported by OpenRift and dusk-iv

 

I'll also use this post to answer to a few comments made before.

Spoiler

On 10/8/2023 at 1:01 PM, Vermil said:

Just the bars on the outside sides of the graves were misaligned

I'm assuming that this is a Doomsday's bug and not a problem with the map, because the textures seem fine in all the other ports that were tested.

I could try to fix it but I'm afraid of messing around with the texture offsets just to make the map compatible with a very old barely-used sourceport if this changes can negatively affect the ports that I do care about.

 

On 10/9/2023 at 3:54 PM, Ar_e_en said:

One downside to the way that you implemented the random key spawns is that there seem to only be 4 permutations on how the keys spawn.

My original plan was to have more permutations and I tried to do that but unfortunately the setup wasn't working properly so that's why I ended up with only 4. A shame, I know.

 

On 10/18/2023 at 10:16 AM, Catpho said:

Something else of note is that there is a viable strategy where I can just stick to the borders of the forest and eventually come across all possible key spawn points. I think it would've been scarier if I was forced to go to the middle of the forest to find keys and lose that safety tether.

This is actually a very good point that I didn't consider before. I didn't want to put the keys close to the middle because then the player would find them too quickly after starting the map, and I wanted to avoid that. Of course this also has the negative side effect that you mentioned.

I had the idea of placing the three switches in the starting area instead of having them next to the exit, this way the player is forced to go to the middle before leaving, but I couldn't put them there because that area is already extremely close to reaching a drawseg overflow.

Maybe I can figure out something else in the future.

 

Thanks to everyone for playing and giving feedback!

[Yukes von Faust]

When's more maps and more ghouls, lad? 1 map ain't spooky enough for all of us.

[OpenRift]

1 hour ago, Danlex said:

Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to fix the issues reported by OpenRift and dusk-iv

I don't know exactly what it was you did, but it doesn't seem to cause that venetian blind crash anymore, instead I get an error that says either:

"R_ProjectSprite: invalid sprite frame (random numbers each time)"
or

"R_ProjectSprite: invalid sprite number (random number each time)"

 

Again, only seems to happen in vanilla and not in chocolate. But hey, it's a different error this time, so that's progress I think ;)

[Danlex]

25 minutes ago, OpenRift said:

I don't know exactly what it was you did, but it doesn't seem to cause that venetian blind crash anymore, instead I get an error that says either:

"R_ProjectSprite: invalid sprite frame (random numbers each time)"
or

"R_ProjectSprite: invalid sprite number (random number each time)"

 

Again, only seems to happen in vanilla and not in chocolate. But hey, it's a different error this time, so that's progress I think ;)

o_O

That's very weird, I don't know what's going on or what I did to switch from one error to another.

[Death Bear]

Hey, Dan! This is really cool so far! Will have to give it another go but wanted to report this. Hope this helps.
 

Spoiler

I was playing in DSDA, and when our friend here charged at me, I had used the flashlight on it. Then I got this error. Not sure if this is related to what was reported above or not.

 

[Cutman]

Wow, this is actually really cool. I love seeing vanilla de-makes of wads and didn't expect someone to try it with Ghoul's Forest 3. But who am I kidding, this has way more effort put into it than I did with the original, calling it this de-make is almost doing it a disservice.

 

Spoiler

I loved how the ghosts are as accurate as they can be to the original ghoul squad using the vanilla engine. Using the archvile fire to mimic The Creeper's pop up jump scare? *chef's kiss*. The sprites are pretty creepy too all things considered, the warped out looking cacodemon actually scared me first time.

 

I'll have to share this around, good stuff.

[Catpho]

@Danlex Reasonable concerns. Just to clarify: I meant there to be a mix of keys in the central area and the border areas, so the player would not be able to predict where keys might be on a blind playthrough.

[ShallowB]

Really impressive stuff, and a lot of fun! I love that you can choose to just run from the ghouls and collect the keys.  It makes fighting them feel like much more of an act of desperation and makes the low ammo feel a lot more fair. 

 

I played in Eternity, and the only issue I ran into is a crash while saving. I get an "unknown tclass in savegame" error.  Not sure how urgent a fix that is, though. The map can, and probably should, be completed in a single segment anyway.

[natashanightmare]

@Danlex I love this wad, extremely good :)

Spoiler

i have been chased by a scary looking caco and a scary looking last soul, is there a third monster i've missed? :)

 

[Danlex]

3 hours ago, natashanightmare said:

is there a third monster i've missed?

Yes, there's one more. The third one is a bit slow and very hard to see so just keep looking or use "iddt"x2 to spot him.

If he doesn't appear at all it's probably because he got killed by another ghost before you even had the chance to face him, which is something that happens every once in a while.

Ghosts infighting each other is a very annoying problem that I wish I could fix but I don't think it's possible.

[ChopBlock223]

Cool seeing a demake of Ghoul's Forest (itself based on The Forbidden Forest), and it's always nice when someone puts some elbow grease into recreating some ZDoom thing to a remarkable extent with just Vanilla DeHacked. You can't do everything with Vanilla, but damn if you can't do a lot more than many people think.

The graphics and presentation here is very nice too, I love the textures and colors.

 

On 11/11/2023 at 2:27 PM, Danlex said:

Ghosts infighting each other is a very annoying problem that I wish I could fix but I don't think it's possible. 

I'm hardly well versed in DeHacked, but I asume you've considered the Arch-Vile's special where no monster can target them? Perhaps that would be 'locked' to just that one monster's 'slot'.

Otherwise, can any of the threshold values for infighting behavior be altered in any helpful ways? Maxing, minimizing, overflowing?

 

[Danlex]

3 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

I'm hardly well versed in DeHacked, but I asume you've considered the Arch-Vile's special where no monster can target them? Perhaps that would be 'locked' to just that one monster's 'slot'.

Otherwise, can any of the threshold values for infighting behavior be altered in any helpful ways? Maxing, minimizing, overflowing?

I don't think the arch-vile's infighting behavior can be "applied" to other monsters, and I also don't think there's infighting values that can be altered like you say.

 

The main problem in this case is how the CacoGhost™ works: that ghost attacks by using the "Explode" action everytime it moves; this means that this ghost literally behaves like a walking explosion, dealing splash damage to anything that gets close.

So the problem is that the CacoGhost™ can kill other ghosts even if they're not actually infighting.

 

There's only 2 monsters in the game that are immune to splash damage, and there's 3 ghosts here, so that's why I couldn't make the third one immune to it.

[ChopBlock223]

6 hours ago, Danlex said:

I don't think the arch-vile's infighting behavior can be "applied" to other monsters,

Yeah, I assume that those special behaviors are just hard coded for the given monsters you're transforming, and you couldn't just add that to any other ones, just like splash damage immunity.

 

6 hours ago, Danlex said:

and I also don't think there's infighting values that can be altered like you say. 

Uh, not strictly a value for infighting, and I don't know if it's one that can be edited or if there's any real point to do so if you can, but best I recall it (and my memory is fuzzy here), there's a 'timer' for each given monster which has to run down before they will decide to start retaliating against another monster which hurt them, or before they will go back to targetting a player while busy infighting. The Archie's 'timer' is always zero, which is why they will always switch their attention very quickly and easily, as opposed to other monsters where they can be pretty busy with their given target and not switch even after taking multiple hits.

 

6 hours ago, Danlex said:

this means that this ghost literally behaves like a walking explosion

Ah, there's not much working around that then.

It's impressive that this all works as well as it does anyway under these constraints (while I tear my hair out over Decorate and MBF21's DeHacked, lol).

 

[Vermil]

Could you not make the other two ghosts immune to splash damage (i.e use the Cyber and Spider ID's)? The players weapons don't cause splash damage, so they wouldn't notice/be affected?