What small tweaks to Doom's gameplay would you have suggested to id?

[TheMightyWhoosh]

Increased usage of Fireblu.

[zokum]

Support for more players in Doom 2, ala Hexen. Player 5 could be blue. The others could be another color range (dark grey?) or green, red and 'indigo' but with recolored boots. With different colored boots you could probably scale it up to more than 8 players. On a modern 100mbit switched network (back then), the ineffecient protocol in use should still work 'ok'. They could also write a slightly better protocol with a server player and the rest as client players.

[chomorkuz]

On 4/17/2024 at 4:54 PM, chomorkuz said:

- make it so that respawned enemies on nightmare dont count towards the kill count

- make the red tint when you take damage a bit more subtle so that it doesnt completely block your vision off when you take a lot of damage

- give the cyberdemon bigger ass cheeks

oh and also:
- allow hell knights and barons of hell to infight like in doom 64
^{(and also i forgot nightmare wasn't a thing until version 1.2, oops)}

[Logamuffin]

Here are some balance changes I would suggest for Doom 2:

- Give lost souls only 30-50hp

- Make the pistol fully accurate and (maybe) increase its firerate/make it tapfire-able

- Remove chaingun first shot accuracy but in return give it a slightly faster fire rate. The intention behind this and the above change would be to increase weapon diversity by making the pistol the definitive “long range” option instead of having the chaingun just be a better version of it. Also the increased firerate would make it more appealing to use in situations where the SSG would dominate previously.

- REMOVE BFG TRACERS. Or keep them, but make them spawn out of the ball instead of the player because it’s just really stupid the way it is now.

-  Make barons do something cool. They’re just Hell Knights with more health now. Make them shoot 3 projectiles like in Brutal Doom or something..

- Tighten the RNG spreads for certain things. Like 20-200 for a berserk punch is just dumb. Make it like 50-150 or something. And make revanant missiles like 20-60 instead of 10-80.

- The chainsaw sucks when compared to berserk, so either make the berserk affect the chainsaw or completely rework it.

[DecoyZulu]

Probably just ask Sandy Petersen to see an optometrist because the texture misalignment is atrocious across his body of work.

[Andromeda]

11 hours ago, DecoyZulu said:

Probably just ask Sandy Petersen to see an optometrist because the texture misalignment is atrocious across his body of work.

It's funny but I never really noticed the misalignments in the base games. That changed after playing both DTWIDs and rolling my eyes at how blatant the misalignments were in those wads - surely id themselves wouldn't be that sloppy! How wrong I was :P

[DecoyZulu]

4 hours ago, Andromeda said:

It's funny but I never really noticed the misalignments in the base games. That changed after playing both DTWIDs and rolling my eyes at how blatant the misalignments were in those wads - surely id themselves wouldn't be that sloppy! How wrong I was :P

I didn't pay much attention to it the first bazillion times I played the games, but after a few years of toying around in Doombuilder it began to annoy me how sloppy the alignment is in a lot of official levels. Petersen is a creative genius and he comes up with some great material but this is such a minor thing to get right that he flubbed a lot.

[Rykzeon]

Add anything map features Build Engine can do into Doom

[oneselfSelf]

A very off the walls one but I would suggest having something like QuakeC but for DOOM just so modding wouldn't be such a hassle back in the day. Although if that actually existed it'd probably be like a more trimmed down DECORATE.

[zokum]

Texture alignment was a lot of work to do in DoomED. You can't compare judge it with today's toolstack. Back then you had to manually enter in two numbers, firstcol and firstrow in order to align.

What they could/should have done was add a -devparm parameter to align textures in-game and save the changes to a file. That way they could have visually fixed it and loaded it into the editor. Doomed didn't use wad files directly, it worked on text files. It wouldn't have been too hard to have a senior designer make the map and a junior designer to go through and improve texture alignments.

[plynthus]

Take the first damage from hurt floors always after certain amount of time spent on it (same amount you have between each time you take damage on a hurt floor). Instead of depending on current tic of the game.
So you could cross smaller hurt floor sectors consistently without taking damage.

[Helm]

minor tweaks only is going to be a good exercise 

Fixing infinite tall actors is not a minor tweak it changes everything for how the game plays, so it stays I guess. But that'd be my one major tweak. That would also come with Things over Things and a host of other positive potentials but it's a different game now. Focusing on what wouldn't make it a different game, just a more polished one:

1. faster weapon switching
2. lost souls less health but more aggressive
3. faster chaingun
4. fix blockmap bug, perhaps nerf chaingunner slightly for this new, blockmap-less world
5. (m)arks on the map should not all be (c)leared at once, and the save file should remember marks. (f) to hover over a mark and press c to clear it.
6. when marking the map allow for optional verbose notes when you hover over the mark, a la Ultima Underworld.
7. OR show keys and other major items, once line-of-sighted in the map if John Romero says 'Doom isn't about reading and writing verbose notes, nerd'. Generally the map needed more work.
8. green armor and blue armor do the same thing in terms of damage reduction, their ammo amounts would need some balancing though. 50 and 150? 50 and 100? 200 200 should only be possible via megasphere?
9. health potions and armor shards are 2%-3%
10. I love the idea that the barons just straight up one-shot you up close, stealing it. Unbalanced in the best of ways. Pretty sure the dev team would throw this suggestion out immediately tho.
11. linedef that triggers more linedefs, or at least 'spawn these enemies at these locations' for less time wasted on monster closets and exact spawns / no sleepy stragglers. I imagine the most hacky way to do this would be to place monsters in blank voidspace (outside of map), turn off all AI checks and tag them to go to a teleport destination directly on trigger and have a 'alarmed to player / still sleeping' flag upon teleport in.
12. the pistol needs some fixing but I don't know what would be best. I love the Supercharge pistol but messing around with clips in vanilla would be a no no.
13. Icon of Sin hinging on lack of mouse aim is a sublimely idiotic climactic encounter for Doom II. That would be my comment in the studio, but I have nothing to offer as to how to make a better ending to the game with just minor tweaks.
14. add 'reacts as if -fast' flag per enemy

 

[vyruss]

Make the weird hole on the back of the cacodemon clench when it enters pain state.

Also add like 4 more frames to FIREBLU.

[blueyosh43]

30 minutes ago, Helm said:

10. I love the idea that the barons just straight up one-shot you up close, stealing it. Unbalanced in the best of ways. Pretty sure the dev team would throw this suggestion out immediately tho.

 

13. Icon of Sin hinging on lack of mouse aim is a sublimely idiotic climactic encounter for Doom II. That would be my comment in the studio, but I have nothing to offer as to how to make a better ending to the game with just minor tweaks.

 

 

One shot barons could easily be balanced just by how you place them and the other enemies around them. Would make them alot more interesting.  They're slow so it's not unreasonable to be punished severely for having them get up close.

 

 

 

How are you supposed to know to shoot rockets into the icon of sin? Is it just me or is it dumb? My first time playing I already had more context than a completely blind player from the 90s, I knew you had to shoot the brain. But I was chucking BFG balls inside because why wouldn't I? It's the big fucking gun. The ultimate weapon. 

 

 

 

Edited May 1 by blueyosh43

[Andromeda]

5 hours ago, blueyosh43 said:

How are you supposed to know to shoot rockets into the icon of sin? Is it just me or is it dumb?

There's 10 stacked boxes of rockets on the platform you use to fire at the Icon of Sin.

[Amaruψ]

On 4/15/2024 at 8:19 PM, yakfak said:

barons autokill you in melee

 

As compared to barons manualkill you in melee.

[Vermil]

Barron's already do up to 80 damage in melee, which means it can kill a 100% marine in a couple of attacks, if the RNG goes that way.

[Noiser]

200% of health for Lost Souls
Weaker pistol
100% of damage for revenant missiles
Arrow sectors on all levels

[DecoyZulu]

On 4/27/2024 at 12:22 PM, zokum said:

Texture alignment was a lot of work to do in DoomED. You can't compare judge it with today's toolstack. Back then you had to manually enter in two numbers, firstcol and firstrow in order to align.

What they could/should have done was add a -devparm parameter to align textures in-game and save the changes to a file. That way they could have visually fixed it and loaded it into the editor. Doomed didn't use wad files directly, it worked on text files. It wouldn't have been too hard to have a senior designer make the map and a junior designer to go through and improve texture alignments.

The problem with that assertion is that I am not judging it by today's toolstack. I can judge it by the same toolstack the other map designers were using. There are always going to be mistakes, but it's not even close how many misalignments populate Petersen's maps compared to the others. Clearly it was not an issue for the others to clean up their textures.

[DecoyZulu]

4 hours ago, Noiser said:

200% of health for Lost Souls
Weaker pistol
100% of damage for revenant missiles
Arrow sectors on all levels

This one right here, padre. That's the demon right there.

[Lucius Wooding]

3 hours ago, DecoyZulu said:

The problem with that assertion is that I am not judging it by today's toolstack. I can judge it by the same toolstack the other map designers were using. There are always going to be mistakes, but it's not even close how many misalignments populate Petersen's maps compared to the others. Clearly it was not an issue for the others to clean up their textures.

 

Peterson carried the mapmaking during the crunch for Doom 1. He was hired 10 weeks before release and had to make or finish 20/27 maps. If you want to shit on his body of work that's fine, but keep in mind he probably didn't care as much about the minutiae of texture alignment as he did shipping a functional game (which would have been a desperate concern at that point). 

 

Plus, the majority of levels made by Romero were done months in advance of the launch. He had all kinds of time to playtest and polish them before Peterson ever got hired. It's also clear that he had more of an emphasis on aesthetics and showing off engine features than the other mappers. And he was working early enough in development that he was able to add features to the game as he went. Peterson basically showed up too late in development to make those kinds of changes, he just had to build or clean up 2 full episodes of maps using the editing tools and engine they had. Imagine how wonderful his maps might have been if he had another 6 months or so to test and refine them, or if there was still time to bully Carmack into making adjustments to the underlying game/editor! 

 

Sandy is a living miracle for putting out a finished game in that time. 30 years of scrutiny might make his texture alignment seem sloppy, but his levels were far from a mess. 3D level design itself was in its infancy, and any commercial game is going to have little mistakes like that. Plus, he's famously pointed out that Doom is only a portion of his resume and didn't nearly define his career the same way as most of the other ID developers.

 

Finally, if the other developers were really on point with their texture alignments, why didn't any of them make changes to Sandy's maps in later releases, particularly Ultimate Doom? A few tweaks here and there could have been easily included in a patch or later edition. I suspect that none of the other devs found the issues glaring, or even noticed them at the time. The obviousness of those anomalies would be lessened in 320x200 resolution compared to modern source ports. Particularly since many PCs in 1993 would have needed to use an even smaller screen size to get a playable framerate. 

 

[8088mph]

On 4/23/2024 at 9:50 AM, Rykzeon said:

Add anything map features Build Engine can do into Doom

this would break so many kid's hearts, google's idea of a high spec pc from 1993 couldn't even run duke nukem 3d.

[DecoyZulu]

19 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

 

Peterson carried the mapmaking during the crunch for Doom 1. He was hired 10 weeks before release and had to make or finish 20/27 maps. If you want to shit on his body of work that's fine, but keep in mind he probably didn't care as much about the minutiae of texture alignment as he did shipping a functional game (which would have been a desperate concern at that point). 

 

Plus, the majority of levels made by Romero were done months in advance of the launch. He had all kinds of time to playtest and polish them before Peterson ever got hired. It's also clear that he had more of an emphasis on aesthetics and showing off engine features than the other mappers. And he was working early enough in development that he was able to add features to the game as he went. Peterson basically showed up too late in development to make those kinds of changes, he just had to build or clean up 2 full episodes of maps using the editing tools and engine they had. Imagine how wonderful his maps might have been if he had another 6 months or so to test and refine them, or if there was still time to bully Carmack into making adjustments to the underlying game/editor! 

 

Sandy is a living miracle for putting out a finished game in that time. 30 years of scrutiny might make his texture alignment seem sloppy, but his levels were far from a mess. 3D level design itself was in its infancy, and any commercial game is going to have little mistakes like that. Plus, he's famously pointed out that Doom is only a portion of his resume and didn't nearly define his career the same way as most of the other ID developers.

 

Finally, if the other developers were really on point with their texture alignments, why didn't any of them make changes to Sandy's maps in later releases, particularly Ultimate Doom? A few tweaks here and there could have been easily included in a patch or later edition. I suspect that none of the other devs found the issues glaring, or even noticed them at the time. The obviousness of those anomalies would be lessened in 320x200 resolution compared to modern source ports. Particularly since many PCs in 1993 would have needed to use an even smaller screen size to get a playable framerate. 

 

If you had taken the time to read what I said, you would notice the phrase "Petersen is a creative genius and he comes up with some great material" was in my first response to a reply to my comment. This was not merely a comment on his work for id which, as noted, is only part of his wider career; I am quite a fan of the Call Of Cthulhu TTRPG that he created, for example.

 

Notice I said the texture misalignment was a nuisance I thought would have been a simple matter to get right. Nowhere did I say it made his levels bad or made him bad as a creative force for the game or in general. I did not know about the time crunch although it doesn't surprise me to learn and it certainly explains why he would not consider the texture alignment as a critical priority. You can calm down now and rest assured that my simple criticism of textures does not constitute an attack on Petersen as the titan he is. He has even stated himself that he is not an artist so the visual aesthetic of his work is less of a concern, I merely noted that in action.

[Lucius Wooding]

11 minutes ago, DecoyZulu said:

If you had taken the time to read what I said

 

The problem with that assertion is that I did read what you said. You spent most of the relevant posts burying Sandy and the one string of words praising him was followed up with "but". Backtracking multiple times when you get pushback doesn't change how the original post comes across, nor are we at fault for not realizing your criticism came from a place of deep and genuine respect, apparently. Although given your insulting tone towards others I doubt it. Quit implying everyone is emotional and foaming at the mouth over this. I just made a rebuttal to your terrible take and was ready to move on with my life. 

 

It's also possible to claim that any mistake made by anyone would have been a simple matter to get right. If only he were as committed to aligning textures properly as you are to being passive aggressive and condescending, perhaps Doom's maps would have been visually flawless.

 

 

[Rykzeon]

20 hours ago, 8088mph said:

this would break so many kid's hearts, google's idea of a high spec pc from 1993 couldn't even run duke nukem 3d.

sad, give them moneh or ask carmack to do his optimization shenanigans. notable features that might change mapping scene are room-over-room and floor sprite that available in build engine. slopes can be faked if the game employs flat colors for floors and no lighting effect

[NiGHTS108]

Now,  I don't exactly feel confident in saying "they DEFINITELY should've changed this" about anything in Doom because frankly even minute changes would greatly change the pace, flow and texture of hundreds of maps, but to be perfectly honest I think I can live with the shotgunner only doing 30 damage at most

[DecoyZulu]

2 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

 

The problem with that assertion is that I did read what you said. You spent most of the relevant posts burying Sandy and the one string of words praising him was followed up with "but". Backtracking multiple times when you get pushback doesn't change how the original post comes across, nor are we at fault for not realizing your criticism came from a place of deep and genuine respect, apparently. Although given your insulting tone towards others I doubt it. Quit implying everyone is emotional and foaming at the mouth over this. I just made a rebuttal to your terrible take and was ready to move on with my life. 

 

It's also possible to claim that any mistake made by anyone would have been a simple matter to get right. If only he were as committed to aligning textures properly as you are to being passive aggressive and condescending, perhaps Doom's maps would have been visually flawless.

 

 

The only posts I made that could be interpreted as belligerent were 1) Correcting someone that I was not judging Petersen by the available tools of the time and 2) Responding to your, to borrow the words, emotional and mouth-foaming post accusing me of trashing Petersen's body of work because an aesthetic mistake was annoying to me. That being said, in the former I was not insulting them and I don't think they were being emotional the way you are, and in the latter, you are the one who walked in jumping to conclusions about what I think and what I meant by very simple words. You didn't rebut anything. You provided a reason why something that annoyed me happened. Thanks for teaching me that, you could achieve that without being insufferable to someone who did nothing to you but suggest someone you like (and I like) made a minor mistake in a 30 year old game.

 

There is no backtracking. I was never "burying" Sandy and I opened another statement calling him a genius because it is precisely his creative brilliance that made me surprised the textures were misaligned that much. You have adequately explained why that would be the case, owing to the time crunch, and I openly stated that it makes sense. What was so terrible about my take? Are the textures not misaligned in a lot of those levels? The thread is about small tweaks, this is very much a small tweak. I'm sorry I didn't like something so minute and voiced that opinion in a thread asking for that.

[UnknownFighter]

-Pistol with a faster fire rate

-Ability to make Baron of Hell and Hell Knights infight

[zokum]

On 5/2/2024 at 12:36 AM, DecoyZulu said:

The problem with that assertion is that I am not judging it by today's toolstack. I can judge it by the same toolstack the other map designers were using. There are always going to be mistakes, but it's not even close how many misalignments populate Petersen's maps compared to the others. Clearly it was not an issue for the others to clean up their textures.

Petersen was responsible for 20 maps in Doom while Romero did 7. With the tools back then and the time constraints, expecting the same level of polish would be unrealistic. Sandy was the designer for 17 Doom 2 maps. He made more maps than all the others combined. Mcgee made 8, Romero 6 and Shawn Green 1.

Given how time-consuming it was to align in DoomEd, it just wasn't realistic to do a better job.

[Gez]

Get rid of the patch table. Just have the patch names in full in the texture definition lumps.

 

Also add some of the stuff Hexen added, like special parameters (but don't restrict them to a single byte), things ID, etc. and MAPINFO.

 

Do like Boom did and export the anims and switch tables to the wad, but go further and also export the actor state table and actor def table.