Guns, Demons, Recap of All Ideas

[deadnail]

This is just a recap of all the ideas I've had/picked up here. Maybe we should collect these ideas and send an email to ID.

Weapons
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We all agree that the original weapons should stay, but be upgradeable. How the super shotgun took over the shotgun and the chainsaw took over the fist, perhaps there should be three or four levels for every weapon.

The weapons should also have original secondary firing modes as well. The pistol should NOT have a 'gangsta style' sideways shot, because that's just for hip mtv rappers. Maybe secondary fire of the pistol would be raising it up to the crosshair level, so you aim down the sights. An upgrade to the pistol would be a small scope, so that when you raise it up there's a little magnified view through the scope to aim with.

I'm also hoping for shells to be ejected from the correct port of the weapons. I'm so God damned sick of seeing shotgun shells fly out of the barrel.

Another thing to look forward to is concussion. Blasting a zombie at point blank with a double barrelled shotgun should rip a fairly large hole in him, not just gib him, and flip his ass back quite a few feet. Taking a heavy blast in the armor should also shove your character back a bit, making precarious levels very challenging.

As for weapon ideas:
- Fist, Knife, Pipe/Sword, Chainsaw
- Pistol, Akimbo, Pistol w/Scope, SMG
- Shotgun, Single Load DB (Doom 2), Sixteen load DB (Quake 2), Street Sweeper
- High Caliber rifle (zombie's gun; not fast but will work), High Caliber machine gun, Minigun, ..?
- Single Load RPG (Half-Life), Four Load RPG w/sight
- throw grenades by hand, single load m-79 type, quake 2 type
- Pulse Pistol, Plasma Rifle, Laser gun from Doom 64, Rail Gun?
- BFG, Shockwave cannon (think Disc of Repulsion from Heretic)

This is just expanding on what Doom offered. I'm sure that Doom 3 will have more types of weapons as well.

I'll recap my idea of the grenade launcher. It is the future, so perhaps the grenades will look like they do in Quake 2 but be a little more advanced. Fire mode 1 makes them 'on contact', so they go off as soon as they touch ANYTHING. Fire mode 2 gives them a 3 second timer, just long enough to bounce around or knock some poor bastard on his ass before they go off. Having them bounce off scenery but go off on an enemy is fake.

I would also enjoy realistic area damage, such as angled bullet tears or directional explosion scorches. Perhaps also crushed bullets falling off of a steel wall and rolling around.

Another arguing point is the explosion style. Since it's impossible to do realistic explosions with a polygon model, I'll hope for surreal explosions like in Sin or Soldier of Fortune. It's better than some damn animation like Q3 or UT.

Player
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Doom 3 should come with a custom model maker. You choose sex, eye color, hair color, skin tone, height, weight, torso type, leg type, and from then you can load your custom .gif files as logos or tattoos, and save it as a .dm3 or whatever and use it in deathmatch.

I haven't heard much talk about a grappling hook or personal teleporter ala UT. If it does come with a hook, I'd like to see it like Bionic Commando, where your status bar is also on a gauntlet on your left arm that's fires a hook. This would be great to make really long jumps. Of course, if you fly into a wall at twenty miles an hour it should hurt like hell.

Some people want interaction with other marines. I'm certainly for this. But what about the people on Earth, why did they all disappear? If that marine came around me he'd probably find me beating the shit out of an Imp with a rusty pipe. In a small cut scene, he'd hand me his pistol and a few clips, in reward, I tell him where the power plant he needs to get to his. Your character hops in a car and hotwires it, bing next level, you see a dozen marines fighting a Cyberdemon and they all die leaving you to finish it off (someone else's brilliant idea).

One of my ideas would be the single model idea, so that your character is only one model, and your view of his weapons and everything else is that the camera is placed right in front of his eyes. This way people viewing from the third person would see all the reload animations, and from the first person you'll see your character actually press switches, operate ropes, etc.

Gravity should affect all meshes, so that they can collapse down staircases and be effected by other outside influeces, ie, lack of gravity. Such as you blast a zombie in zero g's... the force of your bullets fling him into a pipe, and he wraps around it as he dies (again). I can only imagine the globlets of blood that careen around the room in zero gravity. Blood should pool and trickle down staircases too. I have no idea if this is even possible (in a game) but it would be incredible.

Locational damage should be there, naturally, as well as a random variation of hit points. Let's say that an Imp can vary anywhere between 30 and 100 hit points. You can never really be sure just what will take care of what this way... unless, of course, you blow it's head clean off with a well placed shotgun blast. If you blow a leg off it should tumble to the ground, then drag itself towards you ala Turok 2 zombies. Those big bull demons should remain ungibabble... they should rush at you with every ounce of vigor they can muster until they collapse and die, like in the original doom. Maybe they should even lean forward and leap like a dog (I refrain but must mention the dogs in the movie 'Ghostbusters').

Enemies
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With the Tank Girl model for Quake 3, the skin decides whether or not she has the huge rocket titties. With this sort of ingenuity, ID could create a single zombie model with a dozen skins... each one using a different detail that another one doesn't. One zombie might seem more decayed than another, with part of his rib cage visible. Another zombie might be missing an arm by the time you get your turn on him.

Zombies are just bullet fodder. They are stupid and easily dispatched. Sometimes they'll fight each other, try to eat each other, or get too busy feeding on a corpse to notice you.
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Standard Civilian Zombie - Just bites or maybe has a crude weapon
Cop Zombie - Has a pistol and light armor
Marine Zombie - Has a rifle and medium armor
Marine Seargent Zombie - Has a shotgun and medium armor
HWD - Has a minigun and heavy armor
Decayed - Rotted, drags intestines behind, will claw you
Revenant - Rotted, claws, fireball launcher

Imps are the front line for Hell's army. They can take all the falls, and won't stop until either all of them are dead or all of the enemy are dead. Not very smart, but they will dodge slow moving projectiles and are simply persistent in their attack. Their horns make them dangerous to walk over or jump on and can even block some of your bullets.
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Imp - brown, shoots fireballs
Nightmare Imp - blue, transparent, shoots faster fireballs
Skull Imp - zombified, much faster (no flesh to slow it down), cannot generate fireballs because of lack of 'fire gland' :)
Death Imp - black, very transparent, will climb walls, almost silent

Bull demons are the hound dogs of Satan. On the scent of fresh blood they will hunt, and will not stop until death. You can fire a double barrelled shotgun right down the throat of one of these bastards and it still might crawl towards you.
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Demon - large, medium speed
Spectre - large, almost completely clear
Nightmare Demon - very large (10 feet tall), fast, may stomp on you
Nightmare Spectre - very large, very fast, transparent, will bitchslap a Cyberdemon if it gets in its way

Magicant demons are very dangerous. They somehow defy the laws of gravity as they float around, emitting dangerous chemicals and gasses as they breathe fire at you.
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Lost Soul - small, fast, pops like a grenade when killed
Cacodemon - medium sized, slow, bigass fireballs, rots
Pain Elemental - medium sized, spawns Lost Souls, explodes
Plague Demon - medium size, transparent, heaves a yellowed mist that kills anything quickly, bursts into flames when killed

Royal demons will kill you and anything you hold dear. If you want to stop the devil, you must stop these scum first.
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Hell Knight - Large, strong, dies easy
Hell Baron - Large, strong, takes forever to kill
Arch-Vile - Medium sized, medium strength, revives the dead

Biomech demons are the crowning achievement in evil technology. They are scraps of flesh held together with machine, and have no purpose but to destroy anything they come across.
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Mancubus - large, slow, two fireball launchers for arms
Arachnotron - small, fast, shoots a plasmarifle
Slaughter - a remade bull demon, faster, jumps really high, takes forever to kill
CyberDemon - large, slow, a plasmarifle for one arm and a rocket launcher for the other, unless ID makes a real final boss then this will be the strongest enemy in the game
Spider Mastermind - large, slow, shoots a full sized gattling gun


Any ideas I missed?
Post them on this thread. Nothing about music, please. If it's true that NIN has been signed than bitching about it won't get you anywhere. Who said they were, anyways?

[Virgil]

"Nightmare Spectre - very large, very fast, transparent, will bitchslap a Cyberdemon if it gets in its way"

A giant "Pinky"!! Personally I think this idea is too cool to make it transparent!! (that is to say, it being transparent might now allow you to see it well, and that would be such a shame!) If this is not in the game (and it probably won't be) then somebody's gonna have to make one in a user mod! I suppose I'll do it...I'm a terrible modeler but you'd just have to scale the model, make some minor changes, and change the textures a little bit :)

[Guest PUNISHER]

you've got some good ideas there man let's keep all the good ideas in this thread and email all the ideas to id
And I see you like my idea about fellow marines fighting a cyberdemon and they alled get fried leaving you to fight him.

[deadnail]

Well, it's eight in the morning and I just got off of work. I was doing some really boring crap so I managed to jot down some notes of things that should be added here (God, it's nine now. I spent an HOUR typing this piece of crap?!):

Doom: from mars to phobos/diermos to hell to earth
Doom 2: hell on earth
Doom 3: hell in space??? the big mission WAS to get your species on a spaceship...




Leaning around corners, just like SOF. Has to be there, it just adds too much to gameplay. Also, when killed while leaning your body should collapse backwards AND sideways, not just straight down. Directional gibs while I'm on a topic here. You hit an imp in the front with a rocket and the shattered pieces of remaining flesh should be thrown backwards, not up and all over.

A continuing point of my single model theory would need some severe clipping control, such as meshes are not allowed to pass through level structures. They would lean into them only so much before you stopped. This would be necessary so you can go next to a wall without the barrel of your gun clipping it; play ANY 3rd person game nowadays. If anyone can do it ID can! You also should not be allowed to fire a gun when the barrel is held against a wall; unless you WANT to blow your hand off. This sort of clipping control would also aid the gravity; so that a collapsing body on a staircase would not clip into it.

Glass does NOT break with a single bullet. One of the few things I liked about Blood 2. It should show a few holes before it gives way, unless you kick it. Also, falling pieces of glass/structural debris should be DANGEROUS. I never understood Half-Life in this way... how many Goddamn cinderblocks can bounce off of my little unprotected head???

A USE BUTTON FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GIVE US A USE BUTTON FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FIVE YEARS. I'm sick of switches and buttons getting pressed and flipped when you just come within two feet of them!!!

KICKING. The quick kick from Duke Nukem should make it's way into the Doom games, but be called the 'quick strike' and vary with your equipment. Sometimes a kick would be nice, but you have to stop moving to do it right. Of course, if your character just flipped the rifle around and butt slammed or maybe pistol whipped he could keep moving. Saves ammo when hammering crates or windows. VERY CONVENIENT when configged as a double click of the use button...

While I'm thinking of it, fire1 of the fist should obviously be punch and fire2 should be a kick. Hafta stop moving, though, but you can send your foe's ass careening off of a ledge that way. Ha, die on the ground you little sucker. It's not the fall that kills you it's the sudden stop.

Hmm, for the knife... fire1 should be stab, fire2 should be change position for a pseudo block or change fire1 into a slice instead. Hold fire2 and press fire1 to throw the knife. Don't know what good that's gonna do against a 300 lb demon but hey, what the hell. All you can do is die trying!

RELOADING for God's sake. You can't just pump a shotgun forever and expect a shell to load every damn time! It only holds between six and ten shells! And as for the double barrelled single load shotgun making it's way back, the normal fire should be one shell while the secondary fire should be both barrels. However, with most db shotguns nowadays when you crack them open only the spent shell flips out. If you've only fired one shell and hit reload the right one should only urk out a little while the left one goes flying.

Speaking of secondary firing patterns, I've come up with an idea. First zombie you kill you can take his high caliber rifle that holds between 12 and 24 rounds a clip. Fire1 would be a single, dead perfect aim shot while fire2 would burst out 3 rounds in a tight cluster. The next weapon should be a larger rifle with an over under autoloading shotgun underneath it. Fire1 would be full auto high caliber rounds, still on clips, and fire2 would kick out a single shotgun blast with a wide spread due to the short barrel. Hitting reload will change clips (giving the military +1 standard), and waiting for it to finish before pressing fire again will also have your character stuff in shotgun shells. When you fire the shotgun while firing the hc rounds the fire will cease momentarily while your character pulls the weapon back down. Boy, EVERYONE would use this all the time!

Here's another thought: EXCHANGABLE AMMUNITION. Lemme give you the lowdown. Say you've got your standard old school shotgun up and ready, but you've played this level before and you know there's a badass coming up. So, you hold down the 'A' button and a menu pops up ala UT bot commands or Half-Life weapon selection, but it's just your ammo. Choose between standard double 00 buckshot, slugs, or explosive black cased shells. Your character will have to unload then reload his weapon. There could also be incindiary rockets with huge but much less damaging spread fire, or High Velocity rifle rounds that kick like a bitch and can be hard to aim, but will tear holes through a bull demon like piss through snow. THINK OF ALL THE STRATEGY THIS COULD ADD TO DEATHMATCH. Plus, slugs will not pierce body armor but might slam someone off a cliff or rip off a limb. There are so many possible combinations you will never get bored of this!

Hmm, also had Ultra High Charge Cells. Only in this way should the BFG be as powerful as it always has been. I FUCKING HATE INSTANT KILLS.

Doom just had a backpack. Quake 2 also added a bandolier and some other ammo helpers. Doom 3 should have it all, plus night vision goggles/scopes, perhaps a force field that takes ALL damage until it runs out (quickly hopefully!), and my idea for a CELL CHARGER. Once it's found, it will recharge spent cells, only up to 40 or however many needed for a BFG blast. You play right and you'll always have something to fall back on... or will this rape all the challenge away...?

What BFG style will it have, anyways? Doom beta fireball storm? Quake 2 laser aiming blast? Quake 3 idiot's joy? I've got an idea on how to revamp the Doom and Doom 2 BFG... it charges and fires the green ball like normal... but when the ball goes off, a lightning bolt connects the blast to your BFG electrocuting any poor bastard caught between. You can't switch weapons until it goes off, a little punishment for it's users, because if the lightning bolt hits the gun while you're not holding the handles you'd get fried too. Is this cool or gay? I'd like some feedback 'cuz I think it's cool and I hope I'm not gay.

Ladders and ropes. Plus, areas you can scale like the underground sticks in the wall like Turok 2. Maybe rapelling down a cliff too. Hand over hand across pipes would also be a challenge. Your guy IS a marine, right? He can handle it.

Demons feigning death then coming after you again? Wait, they did that in Duke 3D... dammit. It's not like a demon to think anyways... heheh. :)

Doom always had strewn corpes lying around... getting a tan... how about every now and then when you walk by one it suddenly SCREAMS like a motherfucker and attacks? I can only think of how many people would piss themselves... heheheheheh.

Taunting? Lots of it. Pelvic thrusts, flip offs, kisses blown, hell throw a bunch in. It's skeletal animations, right? How hard can it be? If ID does this right... someone could flip you off and you could shoot off his middle finger!

A voice generator, perhaps? So everything you type gets said? Then again, it might end up sounding like Kraftwerk...

PARTICLE GIBBING AND ANIMATING SCENERY GORE. HELL YEAH. You blow a chunk off of an imp with a slug, it splatters agianst the wall sickly and sloshes to the floor, the blood on the wall trickles and runs down to pool on the floor. Some walls are made of complex flesh and organs, pumping away that pump faster when damaged or can get ripped open and leak some nasty shit all over the place... perhaps a half digested person could flip out... dammit, now I'm getting hungry.

Doors do NOT open when they get shot, at least not the last time I checked. Of course, if you blow out the hinges the door should fall to the ground too, or rather swing and tumble inwards after a good swift kick to the handle.

The best explosions ever were in Duke Nukem 64. Don't fuck with me I know what I'm talking about!! At least take the hint and put a circular could of smoke around the explosion, pixel or mesh! PLEASE! EXPLOSIONS ARE NOT CLEAN AND THEY ARE NOT FUN TO BE AROUND, PUT THE DAMN SMOKE THERE!

Speaking of which, howabout cigarettes/cigars like Sarge? Of course I think you can kill Sarge with a railgun blast to his cigar. Seeing the smoke roll up as you gun down a crowd of zombies, pulling a pack of marlboros from their dead pocket. "Spoils of war brother." Heheh. Hell, I'm on my third one right now for typing this thing. :)

Now that it hit me, in SOF you could disarm someone by blowing their gun from their hand. Do it to a zombie and I'll bet they'd rush you, trying to gnaw on your neck. I also think the horns on an Imp should be somewhat bulletproof, and I'll state again that you cannot just stroll across or hop on a dead imp covered in foot long horns WITHOUT IT HURTING. Eesh.

GUNSMOKE. Smoke DOES come out of the barrel when you shoot it. It also comes out of the ejection port

AT LEAST ONE LEVEL WITH **NO** ENEMIES! Make it challenging by puzzle, ledges, and traps! Probably at most one level too, for fear of driving away the kill-happy youngin's.

Certain weapon replacement in my multi weapon system described. Why keep the pistol when you find another one with a scope? Why hang onto the slower hical rifle when you find a better one? Your doomguy cannot be running around with two hundred pounds of ammunition and a dozen full sized rifles! I always wondered howcum he never ditched that damn single barrel...

The plasma rifle should take cells like clips. Otherwise how does it draw the energy from them? Another thought, perhaps fire2 of the pr (HA! Public Relations weapon! :) rifle should be a charge that releases a very WIDE and hard to dodge projectile without much more damage (ie crowd control without making it a second bfg)?

Enemies should be smarter, especially the ones with huge brains like the arachnotrons. On both sides of their plasma rifle there should be two smaller legs, like the fang cleaners on a real spider, that can block some of your projectiles. Boy, that'd make those little suckers a pain in the ass! Am I the only one that thinks those little bastards should of figured out how to rig in a BFG by now?????

Fire1 for the sword/pipe would be slash, fire2 would be block. Imagine a deathmatch where the rules force everyone to have a sword/pipe and nothing else! Blocking and skillful aiming would be everything! Think of the bullshit pr contests to win a free controller from freegaydeathmatch.com... wait, stupid contests are a bad thing... anyways I got this idea from a deathmatch in Heretic 2, which was a REALLY underrated game. It's only flaw is that it's short. Go out and buy it now, it's only ten bucks! Search the bargain bins!

There absolutely, positively MUST be a Doom 1.9 conversion program included with the level editor, which should ALSO be included! There must also be, from a 3rd party no doubt, a program to convert duke3d, quake1-3, halflife, whatever levels into doom3 levels, if only to promote longevity for the game.

User files should support .mid .mus .rmi .mod .s3m .xm .wav .voc .mp3 .avi .pcx .bmp .gif .png .jpg to ease the use for newcomers into 3d editing.

A HUGE DISCLAIMER every time you start the game so perhaps ID won't get sued when some mentally derranged fool takes a shitload of drugs and shoots his classmates.

I guess that's all I thought of. Hey, cut me some slack, I just make 1128 dishwasher pipes for Whirlpool!



BTW, thanx 'SaviorMike', I just might do that yet. First, though, I'd build a page and have it hosted here at DoomWorld that completely shows and explains my reasoning without sounding like some derranged fan. ^_^ Any DoomWorld employees reading this??? Think you'll give me about ten megs for all of my sketches??? Any of you Doom freaks out there ready to hunt the web for ideas and add them to the appropriate section with credit given where credit is due??? Anyone even bother to check out my page that's completely unrelated to Doom???

[Guest IdMarine]

Anyone here ever play Chasm? There were a helluva lot of good ideas in there. Like having a high-level zombie with a sting-missile launcher. Scary shit. Or what if the environment was interactive in the way that Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain was? If you press the 'use' (probably spacebar) key, you could pull certain things from the scenery such as pipes, use stones/rubble, just about anything lying around...within reason. And what of borrowing a bit from the Resident Evil series while we're at it? If you should shoot a limb off of any beast it would most likely crawl after you and at the least, attempt to bite you...and with zombies, one could shoot off their weapon arm, and they'd be reduced to using physical attacks (though I don't recall zombies being intelligent enough to use weaponry and the such...). And lastly, why not have a Doppelganger/posessed Marine friend? Something that is basically you...? Just some more ideas. And yes! Do send this to Id...open their jaded eyes and minds!

[Virgil]

deadnail said:

"...a program to convert duke3d...(maps)"

I'd just to like to point out that sadly, I don't think that'd work out...Duke's "wall" and "sector" objects, which define the level, carry with them special properties concerning texture shading (on a per wall basis) to achieve "fake" lighting. And without lighting it would look terrible. Leaving this information out in map->map conversions as extraneous will give you an unlight (and therefore probably fullbright map) and you'd have to rework all the lighting yourself for the level :( There are two possible options:
1) Textures in the DOOM3 MIGHT be able to emit dynamic light, because the mappers at id have been asking for this since Quake (well, I know American Magee wanted to do it...) But if they don't there's no way around it except replacing Quake's DLL (if the functions for that are even in the source released DLL, that is) EXCEPT
2) If the level is lit in an *even* and *realistic* manner, you might be able to calculate the "pseudo" light values from surronding the shading constants and drop a light entity somewhere at some distance figured out mathmatically to evenly light the "zone" in sort of the same manner it was lit by BUILD. For simplicity, the sampling for each zone would be only on the walls, floors, and ceilings of the sector it was in, which would created sector-in-sector problems, and we'd have to change the rules of our little program, probably making it very processor intensive (not "vis" level, but ugly, depending on the accuracy of the light sampling)...Most likely the math would be based heavily on statistical calculus, which I suck at (thats why I didn't do it :)

By the way, I was tired of never getting to play Duke with over TCP/IP (client/server) so I figured I'd just convert Duke3d to the Quake Engine (they released the full Quake Source) but I gave it up because Quake probably couldn't handle Duke's large open areas, incessently drawing that "leak grey" :(

I'd bet any amount of money that no one read this far! :)

[Guest orion]

Now here's a person that knows what he's talking about. I absolutly loved every idea, and I really really hope that DooM3 will be like this.

[Espi]

deadnail said:

I always wondered howcum he never ditched that damn single barrel...

Because I love the single barrel! The lame super shotgun is boring. And no one can load a shotgun that fast all the time!

[Guest IdMarine]

Virgil said:

Virgil, perhaps the good folks at 3D Realms will throw away their old Duke engine and revamp it or even scrap it for something original. Thusly, it may not be true that deadnail's idea wouldn't work. You do have a point, but it could potentially be invalid. Any questions or comments?

[Virgil]

First I'd like to say I'm amazed someone read that :)

And secondly, it's not their engine, it's Ken Silverman's, and he released the source code just a little while ago :) But that doesn't help because the map format has lighting information that cannot be "ported" to a new engine that doesn't light the same way it does. The existing maps have static light information in "shade" tag (not light "objects" like true 3d games have (point-light sources), they're part of the walls themselves) and those are ones we'd all like to see. It IS a very good idea, btw, I just wanted to post that lest someone get their hopes up and be disappointed (I liked Duke3d and its maps, and I'd like to play them again too!) but that might change because no one knows about lighting effects in DOOM3 that might provide a way, but what would make every polygon emit light...lag? :( The whole thing WAS a bit of "nit-picking" on my part (sorry deadnail) but during the original posting I actually thought of the light sampling idea in better detail to explain it so some good came of it :) I've been thinking about it this morning, and I'm beginning to think their might be a way to do light sampling a little better, with less math, in less time, so it might be possible, although the levels will never look exactly the same. Because 3d Realms won't help (they can't) and Ken Silverman was kind enough to release the code as it is, so naturally no one can expect him to either (and he won't anyway :) it will have the be 3rd party...All it takes is someone bored
enough...I think I meet that qualification

[Guest Reptile]

deadnail said:

Ok, firstly there is an above average amount of good ideas in the above post. There's only a few things I don't see happening though. The insane amount of realistic gore (I'm CERTAINLY NOT against it, I just don't want the game banned in my country) and a few other things. Stepping on a fallen imp and taking damage is just a little silly. Even if the imp stayed there for the entire level it would slow down anyones's computer to a stop. Thats why games with polygon enemies don't have fallen creatures remain for very long. Different ammo types is a VERY nice idea. Just not TOO many, so that you can't tell the difference between them. Every single thing in DOOM 3 should be very different to everything else! I can write than a million times if anyone wants me to! DOOM 1 and 2 had every weapon and enemy totally different. You had to use/fight each one differently, and apply different skills to any given situation. If the game was loaded with thousands of items and weapons/weapon-modifications, all the simplicity that made DOOM will be gone.
Little realistic engine enhancements like targeting enemie weapons and body parts should be in ANY single-player game. Quake 3 didn't have hit locations, but it's ok because it was Multiplayer only. Lets try to reward players with excelent accuracy (hehe) in a single player game.