Chocolate-NoRanDoom

[TwinBeast]

Last night I decided to make a little experiment on how Doom would be without the random damage. I also made some other minor changes like armor pickups are additive, and only 1 type (40%). Enemy missiles are spawned from more correct locations: no more cyberdemon shooting rockets from their crotch, etc.

So if you ever feel like the pseudo random god is always against you...

Downloads:
Game: http://koti.mbnet.fi/jeejeeje/doom/chocolate-norandoom-1.7.0-win32.zip
Source: http://koti.mbnet.fi/jeejeeje/doom/chocolate-norandoom-1.7.0.zip

It may be just this one version or maybe I update it later if there is need to do that.

[duh]

[Maes]

XCOPY said:

Bitter-doom? :P

Or prBoom.exe -complevel 2? ;-)

[entryway]

prboom-complevel2.exe

[duh]

[Jayextee]

Feature request: pistol shots at double damage, if it's possible. In the name of balance.

[TwinBeast]

Also I don't really understand about the rendering code (I only know how to change the gameplay stuff). This was/is just a simple experiment.

Maybe it makes the game easy sometimes, with single enemies it's easy to know how much health they have left. Also it's easier to think when to pick up armor.

But then sometimes it might be difficult, because player couldn't just luck his way out of a difficult situation by only getting minimal damage hits. Of course they couldn't get those nasty max damage hits either...

Maybe there could be some amount of random, but then NoRanDoom wouldn't be exactly accurate naming...


edit: about the pistol/chaingun.. The pistol does slightly more damage and is slightly more accurate than the chaingun. I considered having them always accurate, since everyone always does the tap firing, but that might have been a bit too effective.


Also it seems there is some issue with barrels sometimes disappearing by going into NULL painstate...

I'll release some update sometime soon with possibly some other changes. Meanwhile try to ignore that bug...

[printz]

Congratulations for starting programming!

[Jayextee]

Jimi said:

edit: about the pistol/chaingun.. The pistol does slightly more damage and is slightly more accurate than the chaingun. I considered having them always accurate, since everyone always does the tap firing, but that might have been a bit too effective.

If you could make the pistol and chaingun genuinely different (so there's still a reason to use the former in some situations, even when the latter is collected), that would be awesome.

[Phml]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't this a really complicated way to do things when you have the option to use, say, ZDoom's DECORATE? I mean, when you start to implement changes like the armor pickup one, it doesn't seem like pinpoint accuracy to the default engine should be much of a concern.

Edit: ah, ok. Thanks for the clarification.

[Maes]

Phml said:

Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't this a really complicated way to do things when you have the option to use, say, ZDoom's DECORATE? I mean, when you start to implement changes like the armor pickup one, it doesn't seem like pinpoint accuracy to the default engine should be much of a concern.

Strangely, no: if you have a nice compileable "out of the box" source in front of you with all setup problems already been taken care of, making such hardcoded changes/hacks here and there might actually be simpler and more flexible than learning DECORATE or DEHACKED from the ground up.

[Gez]

If it's "no random", then shouldn't the chaingun (and pistol, etc.) be accurate all the time? Also, no spread on the shotguns. (Turns them into kickass sniper weapons, but lousy for crowd control.)

:p

[Maes]

Either that, or fixed-spread.

[TwinBeast]

I think the shotguns should have the spread. I could try fixed spread on them sometime though.

I could also try how it works if the weapon bob location affects where hitscans or projectiles are shot. And also have the weapon continue to bob during shooting actions. Then there would be inaccuracy, but you would see it from the weapon, so it wouldn't be random.

Also I have done this kind of programming stuff before, so yea, it was simpler than trying to do this with DECORATE.

[scifista42]

Do you think it would be somehow possible to "unrandomize" the reaction time of monsters? I mean, make the time (or number of steps) between their attacks fixed. Or at least prevent the random numbers from giving low numbers, so monsters would never act like with fast monsters on when I play UV, just because of bad luck on random numbers.

Random numbers participates also on other places, for example all sprite animations are slightly randomized at the start of the level, then light blinking effects etc. I know they don't affect actual gameplay that much, but do you consider dealing with them too?

[Maes]

scifista42 said:

all sprite animations are slightly randomized at the start of the level

Uhmm...no they are not. Not in vanilla Doom at least.

scifista42 said:

, then light blinking effects etc.

Some blinking effects are indeed randomized, and actually depend on the "good" RNG (P_Random), and not the side-effect-free one (M_Random).

[TwinBeast]

I could make the difficulty level affect the movecount between attacks... So easier difficulties would have more delay.

I've also wondered if I should do something to the Invisibility and the enemy Hitscan attacks? Like should player be able to dodge them with some logic/skill even if there's no pillars to hide behind?

I was thinking something like them tracking the position of their target, but there would be some little delay with the tracking. But then they wouldn't hit a moving target? So maybe some prediction too? Then player could dodge them by some zig zag movement.

Maybe the projectile attacks could use prediction too.. Maybe Invisibility would make them lose the prediction ability, and hitscanners would then fire randomly. So the Invisibility would make the enemies behave like they behave in Doom without the Invisibility. Maybe also remove Tracer tracking ability against Invisible player/monsters? Maybe also some effect to Arch-Vile attack?

I'll check what I can do with the blinking lights, but the more gameplay affecting things have higher priority.

[abyrvalg]

Fun thing. Reminds me of how i replaced all values in the RNG table with a single value in prboom-plus.exe. It made cg and sg aim perfectly and also all weapons (including enemies') always did maximum dmg. Pretty fun to play, but becomes boring quick. You're also able to oneshot cybs with bfg there.

[Maes]

If you rig the RNG table to always give maxed-out damage, you actually can get damage way beyond what's normally attainable. E.g. under normal circumstances, there's no way to obtain a legal traversal of the RNG table that one-shots cybers with the BFG, or one-shots Revenants with the SSG (300 HP) or Arachnotrons with a single rocket (I'm not sure about the last one though....it might be possible if you use TAS and shoot at just the right moment at just the right spot, as you only need a couple of successive RNG values, rather than hundreds, in the case of SSG and BFG).