Immersive Armaments for Doom 3

[Lippeth]

 

If you're thinking that this seems oddly similar to another mod of mine called Weapons of Mars Destruction, you're exactly right. The main difference is that instead of outright replacing sounds, this re-balances the existing vanilla sounds and is generally closer to my idea of the classic Doom 3 Experience. It's not simply a port of WoMD with the sounds stripped out, I've created this mod from scratch (using many of the same resources), and I happen to have a bias toward the same general decisions.

 

WEAPONS

-All weapons dryfire when Auto Weapon Reload is set to no in options menu
-Zoom button allows you to aim weapons to reduce projectile spread, punch faster, spin chaingun barrel, rapid fire rockets, fire single shots with double barrel, etc.
-Balanced sound effect volume
-Gunshot sound tail to increase atmosphere for ballistic weapons
-Ammo pickup values and max ammo values reduced to a reasonable degree
-Weapons with gui screens show ammo count on normal hud screen
-Fancy particle effects

ARMOR

-Absorbs 40% damage instead of 20%
-Security armor gives 25 points instead of 50
-Armor shard gives 1 point of armor instead of 5
-Armor model reflects Resurrection of Evil marine
-Max armor is 100 instead of 125
MONSTERS
-Imp has chance to do double fireball attack from Phobos
-Wraith doesn't stop moving during teleport in

-Eyes glow in the dark for Imp and Trite
-Archvile has 50% chance do do either flamewall or incinerate attacks

 

Includes compatibility patches for Cstdoom3

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/immersive-armaments

 

If you find any issues or want compatibility with another mod, let me know!

Edited March 31 by Lippeth

[Lila Feuer]

This sounds cool! I don't have D3 installed rn but I'm bookmarking this.

[Lippeth]

Here's a demonstration of some of the features:

 

Edited November 6, 2023 by Lippeth

[Lippeth]

So the only feedback I'm getting on this mod so far is from the above video on Youtube, and it's solely focused on how unrealistic it is to increase accuracy and reduce spread while holding the zoom key, and that being unrealistic makes it bad. That combined with the near radio silence here makes me wonder if I should just take it down and enjoy this mod in private. I could sit here and explain my reason for each mechanic (it usually isn't realism) but at this point it seems like a waste of energy. I appreciate that some may dislike or want me to change certain mechanics so feedback like that is fine, but it's been largely sardonic and unhelpful which makes me feel like I've committed some obvious faux pas without realizing it.

 

Is zoom accuracy so obviously bad or offensive and I'm just not getting it? Is it the way I've implemented it or is it the thought of it existing at all? It's such a minor part of why I made the mod in the first place and isn't even viable in most gameplay situations, but it's all anyone seems to focus on.

 

So to anyone reading this who has any opinion or thought on the existence of this mod (whether you think it looks bad, unrealistic, uninteresting, or whatever), I want to hear why.

[Gzegzolka]

Do stuff as You like. It is bit sad that there is no feedback. I am sure there are people who like to download new stuff but have no need to share opinions. 

[Lippeth]

23 minutes ago, Gzegzolka said:

Do stuff as You like. It is bit sad that there is no feedback. I am sure there are people who like to download new stuff but have no need to share opinions. 

 

I am and there is feedback and I'm appreciative, it's just been hyper-focused on one aspect to the point I'm now inviting those who would normally not say anything to avoid sounding rude to share their thoughts in hopefully (but not necessarily) a less mocking tone. Sorry to sound rude myself, but do you have any thoughts on this topic or have you simply come to tell me that sometimes people don't share their opinions?

[Rudolph]

I am unfortunately unable to install and play Doom 3 right now, but I do appreciate the showcase video above and I already like some of the changes, namely the more realistic grenade physics, the shotgun's single-shell reloading and the Wraith's new behavior.

 

I have never been a fan of Doom 3's Chaingun, since 60 rounds seems ridiculous low for that kind of weapon. I am not sure what would be the better amount, however; part of me wishes the weapon would not require reloading at all, but I am not sure how it would affect the overall game balance.

Edited November 8, 2023 by Rudolph

[Lippeth]

1 minute ago, Rudolph said:

I have never been a fan of Doom 3's Chaingun, since 60 rounds seems ridiculous low for that kind of weapon. I am not sure what would be the better amount, however; part of me wishes the weapon would not require reloading at all, but I am not sure how it would affect the overall game balance.

 

I maintain a similar mod to this for Doom 3 called Weapons of Mars Destruction where the chaingun "magazine" holds 120 rounds, but it fires twice as fast and does half damage so the DPS and ammo depletion rate is the same as vanilla anyway. Removing the reload mechanic for the chaingun is interesting as well and worth looking into for sure, thanks for that!

[Rudolph]

I remember trying it myself years ago, but I did not know how to edit the GUI to make only the total ammo count appear.

[Lila Feuer]

I was doing something with my chaingun once with a capacity of 99 but significantly reduced backup capacity. It's a support weapon, not a main arm.

 

E: Also reducing capacity of shotgun to 4 shots but keeping reload time the same despite loading one shell at time. Ain't no way in hell that tube supports eight.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Lila Feuer

[OliveTree]

i havent left a comment because i want to play this but im gonna have to prepare myself for the rabbit hole that is reconciling the very very cool changes in this mod with my already existing mod for personal use which cannot coexist with this one and im not emotionally ready to do that. that said i felt it necessary to say SOMETHING, so ill say this:

 

this looks very cool :> i think the changes made are very sensible seeming and i appreciate that they dont seem to come from a place of "doom 3 sux but with mods we can make it better" so much as "here are a few quality of life improvements to doom 3's guns !"

[Lila Feuer]

Absolutely. I respect mods that know what D3 is, the moment you're speeding everything up because muh Doom 1-2 it's no longer D3 to me. Yeah, you look real cool flying through the narrow spaces at top speed killing the 30 or so monsters on that level in a little under a minute. What?

 

[Rudolph]

6 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

I was doing something with my chaingun once with a capacity of 99 but significantly reduced backup capacity. It's a support weapon, not a main arm.

 

E: Also reducing capacity of shotgun to 4 shots but keeping reload time the same despite loading one shell at time. Ain't no way in hell that tube supports eight.

I remember raising the Machine Gun's clip capacity to 99 as a homage to Aliens. I managed to change the values of the small and large clips to 33 and 66 respectively, but I could not figure out how to apply that change to the backpack.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Rudolph

[Lila Feuer]

Yeah I was also increasing the capacity to 99 while slowing the rate of fire down and increasing the power so it was closer to an assault rifle. Ngl it's nice when everything's in English as I like to put it, I was surprised how moddable D3 was out of the box with the abundance of plain text documents explaining what did what.

[Lippeth]

Thanks for the kind words y'all. No one owes me anything but I appreciate you chiming in with your thoughts. I know this mod isn't anything life-changing and most mod enjoyers are happy enough with their HD texture packs, Reznor sounds and Sikkmods, it's just that getting dog-piled on Youtube with comments like "....CoD mod in a nutshell" and "i like videogames because they think that if you look at a gun really hard it aims better" (which is totally welcome mind you, it's not my first day on Youtube lol) and the lack of any other kind of feedback prompted me bump this in order to ask.

 

I realize that "text file tweak" mods like this are often unbalanced, trivial, or overly concerned with "realism" without taking the rest of the game into consideration. It's far too easy to boot up the game, say "oh I don't like this, this isn't what I wanted going in," in the first hour or so and then start changing values or downloading mods without giving it full consideration. After playing multiple hundreds of hours of Doom 3 and virtually every mod released for it, it's clear to me that I (a) already love the game for what it is, and (b) know what has the potential to make me enjoy playing even more.

 

There are three main things that jump out at me every time I play:

1. the lack of dryfire feedback (and other things that feel like general oversights or errors like the chaingun reload gui bug and plasmagun sound doubling)
2. weapon volume mixing (though sometimes I like it for nostalgia's sake)
3. the way armor functions combined with the general overabundance of resources

 

The first two are easy enough; Doom 3 already includes the assets and code for dryfiring, and sound balancing is, while subjective, straightforward if nothing else because I'm a mixing engineer by trade. With armor I've made the mistake in the past to simply make it absorb more damage, but that fundamentally changes the difficulty and makes the game far too easy. So what I've done is make it feel like Spiderman vanilla Doom 3 but in a more immersive™ way. Security armor absorbs twice the damage as usual but is worth half the amount when you pick it up so that unless you're Neo from the Matrix, it will be common to have no armor at all after a few monster encounters which simultaneously balances difficulty and ensures that you'll always be able to pick up armor and none of it will ever go to waste when you do. As far as general ammo abundance goes, it's already become quite stingy but I'm about to play though the whole game while avoiding hidden areas and without opening a single storage cabinet to see how close I can ride the line between action and survival horror. It might bother some players to see 8 shells and only pick up 6, but the BFG Edition has already thrown that logic out the window in the opposite direction, and issues like that don't usually bother me either so long as the mechanic functions well.

 

The reason I wanted to release this at all is because it does a few things that I don't ever see as a focus in other mods, and while it's great if people just want to play this as it is, I mostly want it to be a collection of ideas to implement in your own mods, because that's a big part of what makes Doom 3 fun for me as well: finding a cool mod that isn't 100% your thing but has something cool you want to tweak and make your own version of.

Edited January 9 by Lippeth

[Lila Feuer]

Yeah I hope no one ever feels disrespected when I entertain the idea of modding mods and using them as a base for additional modification, it's just when you know how things work and you know it can be altered easily it's hard to go back and take things as what they are lol. Ever since I figured out how to change stuff in DECORATE back in 2010 no one's mod has been safe since hahaha. Ofc I wouldn't re-release someone else's work without the author's express permission if I didn't just want it to be for personal entertainment only.

[Chopper]

On 11/8/2023 at 10:15 AM, Lippeth said:

So the only feedback I'm getting on this mod so far is from the above video on Youtube, and it's solely focused on how unrealistic it is to increase accuracy and reduce spread while holding the zoom key, and that being unrealistic makes it bad. That combined with the near radio silence here makes me wonder if I should just take it down and enjoy this mod in private. I could sit here and explain my reason for each mechanic (it usually isn't realism) but at this point it seems like a waste of energy. I appreciate that some may dislike or want me to change certain mechanics so feedback like that is fine, but it's been largely sardonic and unhelpful which makes me feel like I've committed some obvious faux pas without realizing it.

 

Is zoom accuracy so obviously bad or offensive and I'm just not getting it? Is it the way I've implemented it or is it the thought of it existing at all? It's such a minor part of why I made the mod in the first place and isn't even viable in most gameplay situations, but it's all anyone seems to focus on.

 

So to anyone reading this who has any opinion or thought on the existence of this mod (whether you think it looks bad, unrealistic, uninteresting, or whatever), I want to hear why.

Sometimes I feel exactly this way, but now I just release stuff so that I don't lose it to a corrupt drive, or an accident. I remember making a mod for ROE that had brand new enemies I made myself, and new weapons with new mechanics and whatnot, but the drive I had went corrupt, and I lost all my work.

So even if you feel like keeping a neat mod and project to yourself, you should still release it, just in case you have an incident like mine's. Because of that, I lost all energy to make the mod, and I haven't touched ROE since.

I suggest that even if you get feedback, you should still release the mod, because even though I know nobody likes the mod I have released, I still have it around so I can play it whenever I want. If you don't want to release the mod for others, at least release it for yourself.

[Lippeth]

5 hours ago, Chopper said:

Sometimes I feel exactly this way, but now I just release stuff so that I don't lose it to a corrupt drive, or an accident. I remember making a mod for ROE that had brand new enemies I made myself, and new weapons with new mechanics and whatnot, but the drive I had went corrupt, and I lost all my work.

So even if you feel like keeping a neat mod and project to yourself, you should still release it, just in case you have an incident like mine's. Because of that, I lost all energy to make the mod, and I haven't touched ROE since.

I suggest that even if you get feedback, you should still release the mod, because even though I know nobody likes the mod I have released, I still have it around so I can play it whenever I want. If you don't want to release the mod for others, at least release it for yourself.

 

Damn, that's the worst. I'm sorry you lost all that work; hopefully you can recreate it in some capacity if the vibe ever strikes you.

 

I think it was just the series of remarks about aiming mechanics coming at me one after the next for several hours on Youtube that got into my head that day and I did the thing I usually try to avoid at all cost: vent my feelings on the internet. I release mods and creative works all the time with little to no fanfare and it doesn't bother me because I love making them and genuinely believe that it enriches the general pool of resources for the overall community, and to me that's enough. Doomworld is usually the quietest place for my stuff anyway when compared to places like Mod DB, Nexus Mods and even Youtube, but feedback here is usually more thoughtful and objective, so I try to share at least most of the Doom related things here. I'm still curious to know what folks here think about the aiming mechanics in this mod. Does it potentially help immersion to hold zoom to increase accuracy at longer ranges, or does it detract from the experience?

 

Thanks for the encouragement Chopper, and I hope you've invested in a proper backup method!

 

[BGreener]

My thoughts are similar from when I've played the similar mod awhile ago, a mod which is basically my ideal way to play Doom 3 now. Enemy changes fun, weapons feel nice, and I love the ammo rebalance - still all great.

 

Re 'the zoom': The weapon zooming transitions smoothly, doesn't feel 'sticky', and the weapon angles seem improved. How it compliments the shotgun is still my favorite standout; I've always enjoyed it even in vanilla D3 and now it functions more like FEAR's, still awesome.

[Tetzlaff]

Looks like some subtle, well-thought-out tweaks and improvements. Some of your changes I did in a similar vein in personal mods, but without those sophisticated extras you realised. The ironsight functionality seems interesting, might work great with Doom 3's slower paced combat. Unfortunately I can't check your mod out at the moment becuase I'm currently stuck with my work notebook, no Doom 3 installed...

 

Don't let stupid Youtube comments disencourage you, you always release quality stuff!

[XenoRad]

Just stumbled across this mod after getting back into Doom 3 and RoE, and playing with some of my own modifications, mainly more health and damage for certain enemies, lower ammo, armor, health and damage (with exceptions) for the player. I'm trying to push Doom 3 more into the survival horror territory by making it a bit more challenging to manage resources and approach enemy encounters.

@LippethAfter giving this mod a spin, I find that I'm linking plenty and am combining it into my personal modifications. I really like the BFG cell dimming out when the gun is empty, the dry fire sounds, the alt fire for some weapons, mainly the chainsaw, chaingun and double-barrel shotgun. I also like the new smoke and muzzle effects for the guns. They're subtle but effective. All in all a definitive quality improvement and some really good ideas, with some caveats (didn't like the new footstep sounds as they don't sound like boots on metal, but boots of soil and the new flashlight texture is a bit too diffuse for my liking; i liked that for the original you can see imperfections and dirt from the glass).

Regarding the zoom-in weapon accuracy changes - I would agree with the others that if you make it so it makes some guns more accurate or effective without drawbacks it unbalances the whole thing.

 

There needs to be a trade-off. How about making the weapons fire slower and/or turning down the mouse sensitivity? That way it won't be a clear winner, players will need to judge based on the current situation whether they'd like more accuracy or more damage output/maneuverability.

Alternatively, you could give the zoom/alt fire a unique ability. I'm not sure whether it's possible via weapon scripts, but for example: the alt-fire on the plasma gun would fire larger, more powerful plasma bolts that obliterate enemies while consuming 25 ammo each.

 

Some more suggestions:

 

Alt fire on the rocket launcher - fires 3 rockets quickly (fewer rockets if there aren't 3 available in the magazine, but the gun will always try to fire that many making the alt fire waste ammo on smaller enemies)

 

Alt fire on the BFG - similar to the rocket launcher above, pressing fire while holding down the alt will make the BFG fire a full charge safely (players will use this as a safety so they don't blow themselves up, but the BFG will consume the whole cell)

 

Alt fire on the flashlight - instead of bringing it up and center it disperses the light, making it cover a larger area while making it dimmer (useful when trying to quickly scan a room just to get a bearing for where everything is, but not so much when trying to light up specific objects)

 

Alt fire on the shotgun - a choke that changes the pellet spread from vertical biased to horizontal biased (the player will chose one or the other depending on the size and shape of the enemy or enemies they're facing; RoE has something like this for the double-barrel)

 

Again, not sure whether any of the above is possible, but to me this would be the type of trade-off that I'd play with, while still keeping in line withe the original Doom 3 feeling: the alt-modes don't vary too much from the primary, but instead offer options in various combat scenarios.

 

 

 

 

 

[Lippeth]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions, @XenoRad!

 

Regarding the footsteps, I opted for a gritty concrete surface, and as most floor surfaces in the game are neither metal or dirt I found it more of a universal average for every surface than the clean heel-toe clopping, but also did my own mix of the default sounds to reflect walking/sprinting/crouching without the sound addon patch. At one point I had a different sound set for every surface material but ran into several issues which ultimately discouraged me, so I opted for a middle-of-the-road gritty floor footstep that "feels" appropriate on an average of surfaces. "Feel" will be a particularly strong theme combined with ability/skill/motivation limitations with how I went about most everything for this mod, but I do want to consider your ideas, so I'll do my best to explain my thought process in order to more clearly compare and contrast when considering ideas for future updates.

 

Flashlight: I don't really have a good reason for using the Left 4 Dead spill texture other than I personally like how it looks, so preferring the original is perfectly reasonable. The altfire zooming in while moving the light toward the center of the screen just feels nice to me as well, allowing for clear visibility at what you're pointing at while respecting the claustrophobic atmosphere with a narrower field of view.

 

Aiming weapons to increase accuracy: So in a vacuum I would almost agree with the sentiment that higher accuracy is better than lower accuracy and that if all I have to do to maximize accuracy is aim then there is no incentive not to aim all the time. But you'll notice in this mod that the difference in accuracy goes from moderately tight at any realistic range to slightly wider than it is in the vanilla game. At close and medium range, aiming puts the player at a disadvantage due to the narrower field of view, and you're more likely to miss if you go even slightly out of the hitbox, where as a slightly wider pattern has a higher chance to hit at least a quarter of the time.

Doing things like restricting fire rate and movement sounds very tedious for what I wanted to achieve. My original inspiration was that I disliked how laser accurate some of the weapons are and wanted something more reasonable but still be able to have the original spread pattern for longer ranges, so I actually wanted lower accuracy to a degree, at least something comparable to classic Doom. I also actually used to have the plasmagun's altfire charge up and shoot a blast of five plasmaballs like a shotgun but ended up finding the classic accuracy change more fluid and more useful in-game. Side note, but I would love to implement something similar to the Resident Evil remakes: the longer you aim, the more accurate your shot will be. It would require a drastic UI overhaul for the crosshair and I'll probably never get that far but it's a cool idea in passing.

 

Rocket launcher: Pressing a button once to fire three consecutive shots feels like it takes away control away from simply holding down the button until three shots have fired. In most use cases I'll hold it down long enough to fire two rockets for fear of wasting more rockets due to missing or in case the monster dies from two shots, and if not then I'll fire one more.

 

BFG: I like the headspace your idea puts me into. I'm more likely to make the main fire automatically shoot a single shot that consumes one charge for minimal damage and no risk to player health, and holding altfire will charge the weapon like normal. Not dissimilar to the way I did it in the Weapons of Saturn mod for ZDoom.

 

Shotgun vertical and horizontal spread: I've messed around with similar functions based on this mechanic, and learned that it would need to either be restricted to RoE or I would need to add that code to a dll for Doom 3 to use, and that's outside the scope of this mod because I want it to be compatible with everything without extra complications.

 

After all is said and done, if this whole mod even had one idea you liked and wanted to add to your own then it was a success, and if you improve that idea and someone else adds it to their mod and improves it, then I'm just happy to be a part of the community.

[XenoRad]

Thank you for the comeback and by sharing a bit more on your thought process. Indeed there would be no ideal modifications, we all like different things at different times.

 

Sometimes we'd like to give Doom 3 a bit more of a "modern" game-play, other times we'd like to give it more of that old school feel.

 

I will be keeping more than one thing from your pack (just for personal use for the long foreseeable future, but should I ever feel the need to release a mod I'll give credit where credit is due).

 

I'm keeping the following as I consider them very good ideas/implementations:

 

- dry fire for all the weapons (really should have been there from the start - it works well for Doom 3 but for RoE it's a bit problematic with the double barrel needing manual reload);

- chaingun alt fire that pre-spins the barrels;

- chainsaw alt fire that is the sideways swipe;

- BFG cell dimming as it gets empty (BTW, for me the cell remains at the same light level until it's empty, then it dims - not sure whether this is expected or just the way I spliced together the code);

- flashlight on/off with the reload button (maybe I'll keep the repositioning but my beam position is already close to center so not really a good need);

- Wraith/Arch-ville behaviour;

- smoke/particle effects for the guns.

 

Cheers!

 

 

[Robo_Cola]

I initially was gonna play just a bit of this mod, but naturally when you boot up Doom 3 it's impossible not to do a full playthrough.  I played this on Dhewm 1.5.2 with the D3HDP pack (if that makes a difference).

So my initial thoughts are:

-This mod seems harder overall than both base Doom 3 and your "Weapons of Mars Destruction" mod.  Whether that's just me being rusty I'm not sure.
-The ammo restriction is really great and plays to Doom 3's survival horror strengths.  One of my favorite parts about this mod.
-Wraiths felt noticeably more dangerous, and left me much more on edge when they were present, I quite liked it.
-^Same with imps and Arch-Viles
-Shotgun felt solid without being too overpowered with the alt fire, WOMD in comparison sorta made it overpowered in some versions.
-After using your WOMD Chaingun for my last several playthroughs, it felt weird going back to the vanilla Chaingun.  The spinning alt fire was a decent addition, but the zoom in also made me lose sight of my surroundings a few times.  Possibly omitting the zoom may be worth considering, especially with the pistol and machine gun already being the destined long range weapons.
-I normally allows turn on automatic reloading, but to test out the dry fire SFX I left it off.  Pleasantly surprised!  Never knew running out of ammo could feel and sound so satisfying.
-Flashlight on/off, most alt-fires, dimming BFG cells, really should have been in the base game to start with.

The only major gripe I have is the Plasma Rifle itself.  This actually isn't really your fault, as it's a design choice from id themselves.  Everything the Plasma Rifle does seems to be done equal-to-if-not-better by the Chaingun, and this is further proliferated by the Plasma Rifle (seemingly) getting the most ammo restriction of all the weapons I used in my playthrough.  While I think cell ammo being the most restricted is actually a great idea, I think you should compensate by making the Plasma Rifle the "Jack of all trades, master of mostly all" of weapons that you only get to use on occasion.  The best solution to this that I can immediately think of is to make the projectiles faster in velocity (at least in alt-fire), this way you can be sure you hit faster-moving enemies like Revenants and lost souls at mid range with confidence.

Overall I really like this mod, and it's probably now one of my go-tos for playing a tuned-up Doom 3.

Edited April 4 by Robo_Cola

[Lippeth]

1 hour ago, Robo_Cola said:

naturally when you boot up Doom 3 it's impossible not to do a full playthrough

That's too real 😭

 

Great feedback, it confirms several of my own thoughts as well as feedback it's gotten on moddb, most notably with the plasmagun. I did a few tests for dps and you're right, the chaingun outclasses the plasmagun in almost every scenario and I never noticed or really compared them to each other. I don't want to do anything too drastic but it makes sense that it should have just a little more oomph considering it is higher up on the number keys and most importantly, should be satisfying to use.

 

I had set the chaingun to keep the default fov right before releasing and then reverted it last minute because I didn't care that much one way or the other, but next time I should just stick to my gut because it does feel better to spin the barrel without zooming in. The only potential issue is that if you were to play at any fov other than the default it'll still zoom in or out to 90.

 

One aspect that may have made WoMD easier is that you can fire or change weapons more quickly after reloading. The shotgun fire rate is also a bit faster, the pistol can fire nearly as fast as the mouse button can be clicked, and the bfg has no (or next to no) splash damage and won't kill you if holding the fire button too long if you've already fired a shot. Small things that can add up after a while, but I wanted to keep I.A. much closer to a vanilla+ type experience.

[OliveTree]

lippeth, i have to ask, when u say it has "rebalanced audio", does this include the audio logs? ive always found them to be insanely quiet in vanilla doom 3 relative to the env. sounds

[Lippeth]

On 5/15/2024 at 3:41 AM, OliveTree said:

lippeth, i have to ask, when u say it has "rebalanced audio", does this include the audio logs? ive always found them to be insanely quiet in vanilla doom 3 relative to the env. sounds

It doesn't currently include audio logs, though thank you for the reminder! I remember unsuccessfully messing with that a few years ago after reading it being an issue for many, though now that I feel more comfortable it might be worth looking into again.