Sunlust [on /idgames]

[Demonologist]

Cacovasion is probably the most relaxed part of that map, anyway. It's not that far from shooting gallery as it is, thanks to loads of rockets and lots of space (which, in itself, is quite uncommon for post-Anathema Ribbiks, heh).

[Veinen]

Yeah I agree with Demonologist, there doesn't seem to be much incentive to cheese the encounter in the first place so it's perhaps not necessary to block that area off.

Anyways, I've been dragging my corpse through the mapset these past few days on UV and pistol starts (and saves because I anticipated that my meager skills would get me nowhere but to an early grave after the first few intro maps) and, while I still have maps 29 & 30 to go, I can pretty safely say that this is a really freaking fantastic wad. Visuals and architecture are absolutely jaw-dropping and gameplay is top-notch quality. It is HARD, which considering the authors is not unexpected to say the least, but not unfair type of hard at all. After map20ish many of the bigger encounters follow the same pattern for me: get absolutely raped on the first attempt, reload and after a few more tries I work out a good strategy and then it's just a matter of executing it. The grindiest spots for me have probably been the aforementioned RK building in Inverti in Darkness where the BFG trap was a "bit" tricky with 0% armor and then probably the really clever left-right AV fight in Blood Geometry (?) where my tactics failed me attempt after attempt and pretty much only by luck I managed to get through in the end. There's hasn't really been a single map that I would not have enjoyed though so great job both of you. Thus far the best-looking maps in this all-around amazing looking wad have been these few green-themed ones; the first one, Proxyon, had crazy cool light effects and Emerald Spire had just ridiculously gorgeous architecture.

tl,dr loving it, thank you guys and excellent work.

[Gez]

In MAP04: Sol, there's a health bonus in an unreachable area near the yellow skull. (Well I suppose it might be reachable by luring an arch-vile over there. But then you can't escape it either so it'd be pretty much pointless.)

[Memfis]

Yeah, that's Ribbiks trolling boring people. :)

[mouldy]

TheNerdTurtle2 said:

http://i.imgur.com/VdvOI79l.png

In MAP05 after I killed all the monsters I spent a good 15 minutes looking for the last helmet. I walked past this door like eight times and never noticed it. I might be stupid but I think making it a little more noticeable would help

I just did exactly the same thing even after jazzy lights were put around it, think the fact that there are no doors in the map except that one, plus that its not a texture I associate with doors, plus the fact that there are no more monsters left to kill, made me think the exit mechanism was broken somehow.

Cool map by the way. I'm playing through on HMP continuous like a bloody coward, because I'm scared of how hardcore it might get later. I will play UV eventually though, I'm just enjoying the scenery for now.

[Keyboard_Doomer]

In map20 it's possible to jump to the area near start with 2 Arch-viles (sector 1295). A player who genuinely thinks it's how you access a secret can get stuck this way.

[Memfis]

Another coop suggestion. So you give many spheres which is nice, sometimes too nice (Map09 megaspheres), but what about backpacks? Now that's really what every player should get! For example, on Map16 I think there is only one, would be nice to have more in multiplayer. Also spotted some glitch on that map - http://i.imgur.com/97o7xTH.png
And I think this is a misalignment on Map18 - http://i.imgur.com/60k2GNN.png

[ArmouredBlood]

Didn't feel like bumping the doom streams thread, but here's my playthrough of maps 20-28. I get destroyed frequently, and a couple times just escape the map. One particular map I just use speed strats and cheese a fight.
http://www.twitch.tv/armouredblood/v/6249230

[mouldy]

I managed to fall down a hole in map13 and get stuck


tempted by an enticing ledge. Really loving this so far, seeing a mastermind drowning in a sea of imps was heartwarmng.

[NinjaLiquidator]

First - thanks for making it lighter. Its better now. I enjoy it even through this WAD becomes an archvile-filled trapfest in later levels. I have to save a lot. But whatever - it was obviosly supposed to be that hardcore. Some places had nice gameplay through - Map18 slaughter beginning was nice and not even that hard. Some had nice ideas (shotgun in Map07 which teleports out of you :D ). Some looked cool (Map17 even through its one of the over-archviled ones). Nice music selection - you have a lot of fast songs (Map02, Map12, Map29, a lot more). With soundtrack like that, it plays itself. If it wasnt that hard. Things I want to say:

1) In open maps there are a lot of 10-20 damage pits, which are in most of cases equal to instant death traps. Thats not much player-friendly. Maybe change it to 5-10 or 2-5? It kills you before finding teleport out (Map05 for example).
2) Fuck, is Map29 even pistol-start possible?

[Tango]

gonna start a real playthrough of this today. idclev'd through some of the maps a few days ago and it looks beautiful.

any chance you'd consider renaming the extra_info to something like sunlust_extra_info? I dump all my custom pwads in one folder, so any extra files like that get lost in the mix

[NinjaLiquidator]

Map06 ENDING! This is how 2015 city maps could look like. Imagine open city map with solid black sky and all around put a lot of these skyscrapers (in unplayable area).

[Memfis]

Another possible coop improvement: on map15 seems like players can't get to the weapons after the cave floor lowers? Could add a teleport somewhere.

[scifista42]

Tango said:

any chance you'd consider renaming the extra_info to something like sunlust_extra_info? I dump all my custom pwads in one folder, so any extra files like that get lost in the mix

You can fix this problem yourself by renaming the file as soon as you unzip it to your PWAD folder, or by keeping the file inside the zip, and realize that your habit is generally bad, as some files inside random zips can be purposefully named shortly (not that Sunlust's extra_info is a critical case, I mean generally speaking).

[ArmouredBlood]

Finally beat map 30 on UV, so my playthrough is over. Great stuff, I liked every map except 30 of course. Just ... too grindy. I felt I got transported into a Sunder map that didn't have enough work put into the final arena. Very, very flat, except for the floors moving up and down, and those barely give any shelter from the archies. And the baron fight ... I get the idea, and with hell knights only I would've liked it, but it's just too long with half+ barons. It required near perfect execution of a plan that just wasn't interesting after the first few deaths. I might've just been making things way harder on myself not killing everything before hitting each switch, but that would have been an even more oppressive grind.

Putting aside 30, there were elements of other maps (19's damn corners of that one bit with the archies) that kinda sucked to play through, but the overall theme and gameplay is very solid. I will definitely be stealing ideas, once I mull them over, heheh. Like that awesome archie fight in 29 in the yellow room, with the moving circular wall. Except the imps will probably be cybers. You know me. All the cybers. Doom 4's bfg better be able to 2 shot cybers somehow ...

[Salt-Man Z]

scifista42 said:

You can fix this problem yourself by renaming the file as soon as you unzip it to your PWAD folder, or by keeping the file inside the zip, and realize that your habit is generally bad, as some files inside random zips can be purposefully named shortly (not that Sunlust's extra_info is a critical case, I mean generally speaking).

I use GZDoom as my default port, so I just keep everything (with a couple odd exceptions) zipped and just run them straight from the zip file. I wish other ports could do this too, it's just soooo convenient.

[scifista42]

Most* ports can run PWADs if you simply double-click them (and have .wad suffix associated with said port) or choose "Open with" on the wad file. Even if the file is inside a zip. You simply go into the zip in file explorer, try to open the file inside, and it should work even with non-ZDoom ports. Doesn't it?

*Chocolate Doom, or at least Chocorenderlimits, doesn't support this way of launching wads, I think.

[Salt-Man Z]

scifista42 said:

Even if the file is inside a zip. You simply go into the zip in file explorer, try to open the file inside, and it should work even with non-ZDoom ports. Doesn't it?

Never thought of trying to run the file from within the zip, but I don't know why; it makes perfect sense that that would work.

[Ribbiks]

oh, I already renamed the file that Tango requested, so nbd.

Thanks for the playthrough AB, glad to have some inspiring moments in there. I'll definitely be making a couple balance changes based on your playthrough. Some things I won't though, like the seemingly rage-inducing AV fight in map19, I swear to you there was a much easier to handle it than the strat you were beating your head against (though I imagine playing stuff like this at 4am probably didn't help :p). Lots of bugs and/or minor things to correct as well. Thanks for toughing it out, grats on beating it on UV :D

Not sure how long we'll keep this beta-train rolling, we're not particularly in a hurry and it would still be great to get more comments for the later maps (particularly MP-related, there's seemingly always oversights there). Intuition tells me pretty much everyone who's going to play the wad initially just grabs the first beta they come across and probably doesn't care about subsequent minor fixes, so there's not much use in releasing betaR4, R5, etc. Might do one more after R3 though, because as it stands the snow episode (maps21-24) are going to be heavily revamped, we'll see.

And as always, thanks for all the bug-finding thus far! Things are being systematically noted and corrected.

[ArmouredBlood]

Ribbiks said:

... Some things I won't though, like the seemingly rage-inducing AV fight in map19, I swear to you there was a much easier to handle it than the strat you were beating your head against (though I imagine playing stuff like this at 4am probably didn't help :p).

I just played it again to find the strat, and of course I now see it at 2pm. I think I found the archvile flames so annoying I just wanted to get rid of them immediately. Perhaps the biggest downside to using them in a fight you want the player to actually be in flames for more than a second or two at a time. Not saying you need to mess with the flames ... but I'm seriously going to find a way to make them translucent or something, for my own experience.

[Tango]

scifista42 said:

You can fix this problem yourself by renaming the file as soon as you unzip it to your PWAD folder, or by keeping the file inside the zip, and realize that your habit is generally bad, as some files inside random zips can be purposefully named shortly (not that Sunlust's extra_info is a critical case, I mean generally speaking).

well, I'm sure others do it but I find it much easier to have everything in one folder rather than make new folders for every wad. regardless of whether you do that or don't though, imo naming extra files in line with the wad itself seems to me to always be a good idea, just as it's a good idea to name the text file the same thing as the wad (not readme.txt)

[scifista42]

Tango said:

well, I'm sure others do it but I find it much easier to have everything in one folder rather than make new folders for every wad.

I put all my wads into the same folder too, obviously I wouldn't make a new folder for every wad. I mean that I don't unpack entire zips into this folder, just the wad files. I keep the zips separately in Downloads folder, and I prefer to view textfiles directly from within the zips without unpacking them.

[Keyboard_Doomer]

In map17 there are no impassable lines that would prevent the player from being blasted by an archvile to sector 121. Since there is no teleporter there neither is it tagged as a damaging floor the player gets stuck this way.

[Demonologist]

A couple more reports coming from skepticist:
- BK cyb in map15 often gets stuck and fails to teleport away;
- this place in map14 is inescapable.

[DeathevokatioN]

So when this gets released onto the idgames mirror I think it's safe to say that it's big enough news to post onto the Doomworld news section. I'm not sure how to do a 'neutral' post of something that's so damn awesome though. :P

[Not Jabba]

DeathevokatioN said:

So when this gets released onto the idgames mirror I think it's safe to say that it's big enough news to post onto the Doomworld news section. I'm not sure how to do a 'neutral' post of something that's so damn awesome though. :P

Hey, you know what else is going to be a big, awesome release someday when it's done? Revelations of Doom :P

Do high-profile megawad releases usually get news posts? I can't remember seeing many, but I'm probably just forgetting.

[Gez]

MAP20: if you take the teleporter in the final area (line 13754, teleport tagged to sector 100) you get stuck because the tower to reach the teleport back to the final area has remained in "top" position.

Possible fix: a walkover linedef lowering it back, or a teleporter pod outside that tower that opens up at some point and that sends you to the middle of sector tagged 79.

[mouldy]

Wow, I finally worked my way through this epic collection of maps. Really stunning visuals throughout, and I had plenty of fun on HMP. Except for problems I had with a couple of maps. Map28 I had to switch to prboom+ because it was way too laggy in zdoom, but no problems with the map itself.

Map30 was really cool, but the final arena also got laggy which made some bits unplayable, and when the pain elementals arrived it just got ridiculous. The whole place was just filled with lost souls, and it became a real chore to get through that final big battle because of them. The lag wasn't helping, but I don't fancy trying that in prboom with the infinite height lost souls. Man though, the scenery in that map is bloody amazing.

This really is a work of art from beginning to end, massive congratulations to the both of you.

[Caleb13]

Here are some things I noticed in my beta R3 playthrough in Zdoom (software renderer):

Map07: I could never "find" the secret in sector 565, even though I did find the right switch (linedef 1932).

Map13: Player can become stuck in the final valley:



Map14: Looks like the entrance to the easter egg room has unclosed sector:



Map20: Medkit (thing 788) was floating on the "stalagmite":



Map23: Not a bug, but maybe sector 100 could lower again after the player wins the final exit fight? It prevents the player from doing secret hunting (or whatever) after he/she completes the map.

Map29: Similar problem to Map23.

[Dime]

Ty for the fantastic doom set Ribbiks + Dannebubinga, I was patiently waiting for this one and it did not disappoint.

Only real complaints is that I felt map 24 was not all that enjoyable, especially the very silly arch-vile encounter and I would extrapolate this to the final Arch-vile attack in map 30 as well. I am still very unsure on what happened with the final room on map 30 but I was strained on ammo to the point where I nearly had to reset the map at this final archie encounter.

Best maps
29
18
27
12

Worst maps
24
2-4