Ho ho ho! (H2H-Xmas demopack - completed)

[Grazza]

Here's a little taster of my current personal demo recording project (five first exits). You can probably guess what my intended completion date is. :)

xmas1sts.zip

[Vile]

I was listening to Weird Al's The Night Santa Went Crazy while watching these. :)

Good stuff, and fitting given the coming holidays and the damn frozen winds that have appeared out of nowhere in my area.

[Grazza]

I've done a few more. The current first-exits zip is here (edit: not any more - see later post). The quality varies quite a lot.

[Searcher]

Great runs.

The whole concept of doom in the xmas snow is just a scream. I laugh out loud when I watch those. Picking up egg nog, hiding behind xmas trees, getting candy canes. Every christmas it is certanly worth dragging that set out.

This is one of the very few conversions that I care for.

[Grazza]

Thanks.

It is quite a cool wad, and I tend to play it each year too. I remember there also being some sprite replacement wads: cacodemon becomes a bauble (with a cacodemon design), several of the monsters get Christmas hats. However, I recall it didn't work too well. I think it was this one - the sprites are there, in SPRITES.WAD, but it doesn't work (directly at least) with ports as far as I can tell.

BTW, I've just nailed down map31, which was looking like a problem not just because maxkills is a tricky task, but also because of a nasty bug that causes the map to break down under certain conditions (sure enough, these conditions are liable to be triggered by the routes I wanted to use...).

[Kristian Ronge]

Hmm.. Is this the WAD with the annoying "Open!" sound every time you press the use-key at, say, a wall?

[Grazza]

I believe Santa is saying "Won't open!". Anyway, why shouldn't there be a slightly annoying sound when you try to use something that can't be used? Actually, I find this more amusing than irritating though.

You'll only hear it in these demos if I screw up, of course.

[Kristian Ronge]

Yeah yeah.. whatever he says, I found it extremely annoying when I played that WAD through. But I did like the maps and the general idea, the theme was very entertaining. I ended up playing with the sound turned off! :-D

BTW, I *always* play with the music turned off because I find it disturbing, especially since the music can drown important sounds such as monsters dying, being awakened, and secret doors/lifts opening/closing.

[Grazza]

Kristian Ronge said:

BTW, I *always* play with the music turned off

So you miss out on the cool Xmas midis? :(

And you failed to experience the crowning glory of THISSUXX.WAD? :)

[Kristian Ronge]

Well.. I *did* listen to the, ehm, "music" of "This SUXX!" ... for a couple of seconds. Hehe. Since I recorded those demos on another machine with the default enginge where I incidentally have music turned on. Quite rightly, as the authors stated, I soon found out what that music volume slider does in Doom. ;-D

But, alas, I never heard the music in H2Hs Christmas WAD. :-/

That's the price I have to pay.

[Grazza]

New zip, enlarged and renamed (since they are not all first exits now) here.

The music from THISSUXX.WAD would fit quite nicely in Post Hell, I think. Still, I developed a weird sort of liking for it.

[Grazza]

This forum has been a bit quiet the last 24 hours, so I thought I'd bump this to say that the work-in-progress zip (129k) has been updated again. It now contains 22 demos.

So, if you've watched everything in the latest DSDA update and need a quick fix of action, here you are.

One of the new ones is on map25, which starts outdoors, with snow falling and on the ground. Shame there are a few "holes" in OpenGL mode.

[cycloid]

just got up to 4 so far and thought i'd point out that i love the plasma gun grab. nice.

[Grazza]

Thanks - glad you liked it, but on reflection it is objectively a slight error to use the grab in UV Max. It was helpful when I recorded NM and UV -fast demos because it meant I took less damage than I probably would if I had picked it up the "normal" way.

To be honest, I used the grab purely out of habit, and forgot to question whether it was necessary or efficient in this case. Still, a bit of a second squandered for the sake of a few cool points is probably time well spent. :)

3400th post! w00t or something.

[myk]

The text file notes:
Should also play back with Eternity 3.31 beta 3 and Doom2.exe (mostly untested).

Santa does synch correctly playing the demos back using Doom2, except on the 7 minute level 22 demo.

[Grazza]

Thanks for testing (and watching).

Funny, map22 is one of the ones recorded using "-complevel 0", which is meant to be the correct one for Doom2.exe compatibility in 2.2.4. Fortunately, it is also one that is in need of improving anyway (but unfortunately it's also a map with a nasty 99% kills bug).

Edit: I re-recorded map22 with prboom 2.2.3 (-complevel 1) and got a nice time improvement (6:21 - those teleporting imps didn't wander too far, thankfully), but it desyncs near the start with Doom2.exe (OK with Eternity and Prboom though). Bah, maybe I'll need to record with teh real game if I really want full Doom2.exe compatibility for this whole set.

[ragnew]

Hey Grazza,

Great demos man, decided to do one of my own... I did map17 (chopping mall) UV max in 9:58... Not too shabby. Had a good time with this guy, easy to kill yourself though if your not careful. Anyways, enjoy the demo guys.... Recorded using Prboom 2.2.4 with Complevel 0...

Laters
- Richie

xm17-958.zip

[Grazza]

OK, it's now done. Get it here.

Includes batch files and comments on each map/demo.

It's not as polished as I would have liked, as I kind of ran out of time. Maybe that's just as well though, since I could easily have driven myself mad with some of the maps where you need to rocket your way through dozens or even hundreds of revenants.

Edit: simple web page with a few small screenshots here.

Merry H2H-Xmas!

[Searcher]

Cool and you got it done before christmas as scheduled. I got something to do for a few hours now. Merry Christmas.

[DooMer 4ever]

Hmm, this is kinda late reply, but oh well...

I haven't watched Grazza's demos yet as I don't have prboom and for some reason I couldn't get them to work with doom2.exe. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could beat any of the demos and this far I've done maps 01,02,03,06 and 08. So expect me to upload them and maybe some more too later. I'll watch the grazza's demos too as soon as I can download prboom.

[Grazza]

DooMer 4ever said:

I don't have prboom and for some reason I couldn't get them to work with doom2.exe.

You need to use deusf. Make sure doom2.wad is in the same folder and that doom.wad is not. Then:

deusf -app h2h-xmas.wad

The wad should then work fine with Doom2.exe.

[Erik]

A very nice demopack, I got many new gameplay ideas from the levels.