REKKR - V1.16

[Shadow Hog]

For my part, that program I wanted to write to remove redundant control change, program change and pitch wheel change events finally came together after about two solid days of working on it (and some misadventures involving that pesky "running status" feature of the MIDI specification that led to corrupted output for a while). Running the more-or-less-finished program on REKKR's MIDIs - all of them, not just the broken ones - it appears to have fixed the offending MIDIs when run through vanilla doom.exe in DOSBox (pre-patched with rekkr.deh and with rekkr.wad loaded, of course), and otherwise shrunk ‪1,574,067‬ bytes (1.501 MiB) worth of music down to 891,724 bytes (‪0.85 MiB‬), or about 56.651% the size. OPL output still sounds kinda weird, but my concern was more with it working at all, not with it sounding amazing.

 

Here's all of the touched-up MIDIs in one PWAD. As far as I can tell it doesn't alter the sound of the music whatsoever, though if I missed something, do tell me.

[HexenMapper]

9 hours ago, Shadow Hog said:

Running the more-or-less-finished program on REKKR's MIDIs - all of them, not just the broken ones - it appears to have fixed the offending MIDIs

 

Great work! thanks for your time / diligence :)

 

I listened to a few of the tracks and they seem fine - no noticeable changes (and there shouldn't be if you're just removing redundant controller messages)

[HexenMapper]

Also while we're on the topic of music, someone released an HD version of the REKKR score on ModDB last year... Not sure if it has been posted here or not (searching DW for it seemed to find 0 results)

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/rekkr/addons/rekkr-hd-music/#7288709

Edited April 3, 2019 by HexenMapper

[Revae]

Hey awesome! Looks like I'll be releasing one more final final final version of REKKR here soon. Now 100% vanilla compatible. Thanks!

I had no idea about the chainsaw trick either so I'll definitely plop that in there and do some testing to be sure.

Thanks for doing some bonus polish work for my game, guys. I'll be sure to update the credits and maybe see if I can think of some other things to patch up while I'm at it. Go through some threads and messages and see if anything's been reported to me...

 

I noticed the HD music, but it didn't loop for me. Otherwise sounds p good. The wasn't sure if I wanted to include it in the doomword/zdoom forums op. Might as well I suppose.

 

[Salt-Man Z]

Are any of the soundtrack pieces titled, that you know of?

[Revae]

48 minutes ago, Salt-Man Z said:

Are any of the soundtrack pieces titled, that you know of?

Titles are on hexenmappers YouTube playlist.

[Noiser]

On 9/23/2016 at 1:49 AM, Revae said:

LupinXKassman made a standalone iwad version you can get here: https://tinyurl.com/ya9jvcn3

Run it from a shortcut like this:

chocolate-doom.exe -iwad REKKRSA.wad -deh REKKR.wad

 

Hey Revae, your shortcut is showing "REKKR.wad" instead of "REKKR.deh"
If someone copypaste it, Chocolate Doom will crash

Edited April 3, 2019 by Noiser

[Revae]

whoops.

[NightFright]

LupinXKassman's standalone iwad still throws a few warnings when launching it in GZDoom:

 

 

 

Texture SW1BRCOM is left without any patches
Texture SW1BRN1 is left without any patches
Texture SW1BRN2 is left without any patches
Texture SW1BRNGN is left without any patches
Texture SW1BROWN is left without any patches
Texture SW1COMM is left without any patches
Texture SW1COMP is left without any patches
Texture SW1DIRT is left without any patches
Texture SW1EXIT is left without any patches
Texture SW1GRAY is left without any patches
Texture SW1GRAY1 is left without any patches
Texture SW1METAL is left without any patches
Texture SW1PIPE is left without any patches
Texture SW1SLAD is left without any patches
Texture SW1STARG is left without any patches
Texture SW1STON1 is left without any patches
Texture SW1STON2 is left without any patches
Texture SW1STONE is left without any patches
Texture SW1STRTN is left without any patches
Texture SW2BRCOM is left without any patches
Texture SW2BRN1 is left without any patches
Texture SW2BRN2 is left without any patches
Texture SW2BRNGN is left without any patches
Texture SW2BROWN is left without any patches
Texture SW2COMM is left without any patches
Texture SW2COMP is left without any patches
Texture SW2DIRT is left without any patches
Texture SW2EXIT is left without any patches
Texture SW2GRAY is left without any patches
Texture SW2GRAY1 is left without any patches
Texture SW2METAL is left without any patches
Texture SW2PIPE is left without any patches
Texture SW2SLAD is left without any patches
Texture SW2STARG is left without any patches
Texture SW2STON1 is left without any patches
Texture SW2STON2 is left without any patches
Texture SW2STONE is left without any patches
Texture SW2STRTN is left without any patches
Texture SW2LION is left without any patches
Texture SW2SATYR is left without any patches
Texture SW2SKIN is left without any patches
Texture SW2VINE is left without any patches
Texture SW2WOOD is left without any patches
Texture SW1GSTON is left without any patches
Texture SW1HOT is left without any patches
Texture SW1LION is left without any patches
Texture SW1SATYR is left without any patches
Texture SW1SKIN is left without any patches
Texture SW1VINE is left without any patches
 

 

 

I took the liberty of fixing these by editing the TEXTURES1 and TEXTURES2 lumps to remove replace empty textures. This shouldn't have any impact on playability or contents, it's just to get rid of those warnings.

 

For GZDoom users, I have added an IWADINFO file which will fix the iwad name during startup. It will only work if you rename the file ending from .wad to .iwad, though. GAMEINFO provided in standalone wads are ignored in general, so the included one wouldn't work.

 

REKKR v1.15 Standalone FIXED (ZIP, 12.2 MB)

 

Changelog:

- TEXTURES1/TEXTURES2 lumps edited to fix GZDoom warnings

- IWADINFO added (requires .iwad file ending)

 

 

 

Edited April 9, 2019 by NightFright

[Gez]

3 hours ago, NightFright said:

I took the liberty of fixing these by editing the TEXTURES1, TEXTURES2 and PNAMES lumps to remove empty textures. This shouldn't have any impact on playability or contents, it's just to get rid of those warnings. 

Removing switch definitions entirely will cause vanilla and conservative ports to crash on startup. The solution to make everyone happy is to keep the switch definitions and give them a patch.

[NightFright]

It doesn't matter which patches then, I guess (since they are unused)?

 

EDIT:
File updated. Please download from same link again if you got it before this notification.

Basically I have just filled the empty textures with the first patch from the index instead of deleting the entries. IWADINFO still included.

Edited April 9, 2019 by NightFright

[DenisNinja]

Wonderful !!! Thanks friend :)

[NightFright]

Did LupinXKassman actually share which changes he exactly applied to the pwad to turn it into an iwad? Would be good to know when we really see that final final Rekkr update. (To me, it looks like the only difference is just the TEXTURES1, TEXTURES2 and PNAMES lumps.)

Edited April 10, 2019 by NightFright

[Revae]

22 hours ago, NightFright said:

Did LupinXKassman actually share which changes he exactly applied to the pwad to turn it into an iwad? Would be good to know when we really see that final final Rekkr update. (To me, it looks like the only difference is just the TEXTURES1, TEXTURES2 and PNAMES lumps.)

I don't recall. I'd have to search my PMs.

 

Considering some other quality-of-life changes. Maybe increasing the fire speed on the holy relic (plasma rifle replacement), and perhaps clipping half of E1M3 off (it originally was two maps), and pasting it into E4M9 maybe, which atm is just used for the intro demo. Just thinking out loud (in text) and seeing what sticks I guess.

[galileo31dos01]

2 hours ago, Revae said:

and perhaps clipping half of E1M3 off (it originally was two maps)

 

Funny to read this because that was my thoughts exactly last night. I personally support the idea, though I liked the map at the end. 

 

But I came to report a possible thingy about map in E1M9, on skill 4, somehow missed some kills and idclipped to find them but only saw this?, not sure honestly. This played on Crispy Doom btw. Also, wrong texture here in E1M3, section with secret SSG.

[Revae]

5 hours ago, galileo31dos01 said:

but only saw this?

That's not a monster (sorta), and shouldn't count as a kill. Probably some rabbits escaped the teleporter maybe?

[NightFright]

Reported earlier, maybe possible to address in 1.16 (?):

- E4M3 texture issue

- DEHACKED: In ep.3 ending text, put a space after the end of once sentence: "[...] behind you.The invasion [...]"

 

It's kinda nitpicking, though.

 

On a side note:
Is there a specific reason why some of the brightmaps in GLDEFS refer to a REKKR31.wad? As far as I know, only iwad and/or thiswad are allowed as keywords. If you want the brightmaps definitions only to apply to sprites within rekkr(sa).wad, I would choose thiswad - or just completely remove all REKKR31.wad entries.

 

From the wiki:

Quote

The thiswad keyword acts as the iwad keyword, but only for sprites contained in the same file as the definitions. It can be used if you expect your mod to have its custom graphics overridden by another mod; making it mostly useful for autoloaded sprite packs. If both iwad and thiswad are given to the same definition, it will be applied if the sprite is either from the iwad or from the wad.

 

Edited April 11, 2019 by NightFright

[Revae]

3 hours ago, NightFright said:

It's kinda nitpicking, though.

Nitpicking is fine. Might as well knock everything out at once.

REKKR31 was just and internal wad name that apparently I missed to change. Fixed with your suggestion.

[galileo31dos01]

16 hours ago, Revae said:

That's not a monster (sorta), and shouldn't count as a kill. Probably some rabbits escaped the teleporter maybe?

 

IDDTx2 didn't help much, though. I also missed two kills in E1M6 (105/100+7 because resurrections) but didn't see any red triangles in the automap, so I thought the two hitscan statues counted as enemies. Then checked back and this closet never opened to me. Also, it seems you can get softlocked here in E1M7 near the final area. 

 

Other questions: do eyeballs count as kills? because I noticed in some maps I got more kills than the initial monster count. I'm assuming eyeballs spawned from dead spiders raise the enemy count, right?

 

Also, do enemies have names? I want to know what the polite floating meatball is called, it says hi everytime.   

[Gez]

20 minutes ago, galileo31dos01 said:

Also, do enemies have names?

Yeah. The simplest is to look at the ZDoom-compatible obituary strings in the wad's LANGUAGE lump. At first I looked at the dehacked patch because it does contain the new names of the various things, but it's full of other non-monster actors such as projectiles and decoration.

OB_UNDEADHIT = "%o was clawed by a mean imp.";
OB_IMPHIT = "%o was slashed by an imp.";
OB_CACOHIT = "%o got too close to a Sorrow.";
OB_DEMONHIT = "%o was slashed by a Husk.";
OB_SPECTREHIT = "%o was beaten by a mean husk.";
OB_BARONHIT = "%o was ripped open by a Treebeast.";
OB_KNIGHTHIT = "%o was gutted by a skelly belly.";
OB_ZOMBIE = "%o was killed by a former human.";
OB_SHOTGUY = "%o was killed by a jackalope... somehow.";
OB_VILE = "%o was blasted by a turret.";
OB_UNDEAD = "%o couldn't evade a mean imp's fireball.";
OB_FATSO = "%o was squashed by a former duke.";
OB_CHAINGUY = "%o was destroyed by a former king.";
OB_SKULL = "%o was spooked by a eyeball.";
OB_IMP = "%o was burned by an imp.";
OB_CACO = "%o was killed by a Sorrow.";
OB_BARON = "%o was buried by a Treebeast.";
OB_KNIGHT = "%o was killed by a skelly belly.";
OB_SPIDER = "%o stood in awe of the spider demon.";
OB_BABY = "%o let a mean jackalope get %h.";
OB_CYBORG = "%o was led by fate.";
OB_WOLFSS = "%o met a Grotesque.";
OB_DOG = "%o was mauled by a dog.";

So just play with ZDoom and let a monster kill you to identify it!

[Revae]

1 hour ago, galileo31dos01 said:

Then checked back and this closet never opened to me. Also, it seems you can get softlocked here in E1M7 near the final area.

Other questions: do eyeballs count as kills? because I noticed in some maps I got more kills than the initial monster count. I'm assuming eyeballs spawned from dead spiders raise the enemy count, right?

Eyeballs do count as kills, and they resurrect things so that can also boost your kill%. The hitscan dummies don't count as kills, though I also got 98% in E1M9 just now. I know I've gotten 100% in it before, and everything was dead, nothing alive on the automap... Not sure what's causing that.

 

The closet that didn't open requires a convoluted sequence. I'll fix the softlocked area too...

 

helmet bois = former humans

spiky footed no faces = grotesques

floating explodey beige/things = imps/mean imps

red sad meatballs = sorrows

grey spike arms = husk/mean husk

tree beasts = ...treebeasts

skeletons = skelly bellys, also has a mean variant

turrets = turrets

eyeballs = eyeballs

floating skull spider that shoot snakes and are full of eyeballs = skelespiders, i think

E2 boss = former king, and the weaker ones after that are former dukes

final boss doesn't really have a name

[galileo31dos01]

Just finnished the bonus episode. One thing, in E4M7 (the map with the eyeball generator), there's a possibility that the exit door doesn't open. I don't know why it never opened the first time, I flipped the switches in red-blue-green order as I found them, but found the door closed and wandered around clueless. It did the second time, after restarting, same order. Is there a chance that hitting the eyeball shooter somehow affects the door? I read in previous pages that it's not an enemy per se, and that it stops spawning eyeballs upon entering the exit room, but the only difference I could think of between my two tries was that I never shot the thing in the second try. 

 

Anyways, I loved this, beautiful. Great monster types and bosses, my favourite was the sorrow, only monster with good manners lol. The weapon balance was fine and for these I have a few words:

 

Spoiler

 

- Soul crossbow: very useful and efficient at short range, actually satisfying in comparison to Doom's pistol. Souls sometimes could clip through monsters, most notably through eyeballs charging, which happened frequently.

 

- Steelshot launcher: I had no problems using this one, it's like the SSG, not sure if any different, I could kill sorrows in two shots most of the times which was pretty satisfying. My only gripe was that it each ammo pickup gives the double, e.g. a sack gives 40 stones, plus the weapon gives 16, so at least 3 shots go wasted if your current max is 50. I found that generally I had to leave many sacks of stones behind in many maps that rendered unnecessary at the end. E3M8 for example has one SSL + two sacks, equaling 96 stones, but playing the map from "crossbow start" meant that one sack was useless (well, unless the secret I missed had a backpack). It's a weird balance imo, though not a big deal.

 

- Soul launcher: all cool with this one, useful in every scenario that involved close quarters or sniping slow enemies, even satisfying against big dudes.

 

- Rune launcher: very powerful, almost OP considering how much you are given in general. I always left the maps with over 20 runes unused (one case with over 70!) because it rarely felt necessary to spam them, a big part of the combat in general is enemies of varied tiers in small groups or scattered around, which can be sorted out with any other given weapon too, because runes work different to rockets. Runes are great against high-HP things at close range, turrets and the recurrent group of sniper grotesques, but that's not what the overall combat is focused on, so that's why I opted not to spam my surplus of runes everywhere. 

 

- Holy Relic: decent concept, but unreliable usability for the slot it occupies. Basically like a shotgun with continuous fire and a "safety pin" I think, only real good for sniping at long distance or to bar that single sorrow in tight quarters, but not something I personally ever wanted to use, specially with either the SSL or SL in hand. This one would suit better in slot 4, while the soul launcher in slot 6, imho.

 

- Blessing of the Gods: or whatever it's called, it's the only one that I must have used no more than 8 times in the whole game, mainly because of the fact it doesn't shoot a projectile like the BFG, so I didn't have a "visual clue" to guide myself if you know what I mean. I could one-shot a duke once, by experimenting.

 

- Axe: among my favourite weapons, I just loved using it to one-hit former humans. 

 

- Double fists: well I didn't really punched that many enemies but all cool with them.

 

 

 

I also found a couple things that need to be fixed, in regards to visual glitches and a secret that can't be tagged. I don't remember exactly in which maps so tomorrow I'll continue.

[Revae]

17 hours ago, galileo31dos01 said:

Just finnished the bonus episode. One thing, in E4M7 (the map with the eyeball generator), there's a possibility that the exit door doesn't open. I don't know why it never opened the first time, I flipped the switches in red-blue-green order as I found them, but found the door closed and wandered around clueless. It did the second time, after restarting, same order. Is there a chance that hitting the eyeball shooter somehow affects the door? I read in previous pages that it's not an enemy per se, and that it stops spawning eyeballs upon entering the exit room, but the only difference I could think of between my two tries was that I never shot the thing in the second try.

The eyeball spawner shouldn't make a difference to the sequence. I edited the method that the 2 combination locks in the game use to be more reliable though, because I saw 2 people sorta rapidly throwing switches until the lock worked. Shouldn't be possible to cheese or break them now, really. Though I never had a problem with them breaking before...  Not sure what happened there.

Lemme know what you found and I'll likely fix it.

[galileo31dos01]

6 hours ago, Revae said:

I edited the method that the 2 combination locks in the game use to be more reliable though, because I saw 2 people sorta rapidly throwing switches until the lock worked. Shouldn't be possible to cheese or break them now, really. Though I never had a problem with them breaking before...

 

So, there was a specific combination? Something I forgot to mention from my first try was that I pressed each switch in random order multiple times and yet no results.  

 

6 hours ago, Revae said:

Lemme know what you found and I'll likely fix it.

 

Couple visual glitches in E3M6. First in the area with the secret holy relic. Second in one of the boats, closer to the cave. 

[Revae]

On 4/18/2019 at 8:40 PM, galileo31dos01 said:

So, there was a specific combination?

Couple visual glitches in E3M6.

Yeah. The combination is Red Blue Green (i think), specifically.

I'll fix those glitches if I can. I know I've fixed the boat one at least twice before, and it still keeps cropping up somehow...

[Revae]

@NightFright I looked through my messages and this is how Kassman changed it to an iwad:

Quoting Kassman, "In case you're wondering what the process for iwadifying it was, it consisted of changing the first four bytes of the wad to read "IWAD" in notepad++, adding DMXGUS and GENMIDI lumps to the wad (soundcard stuff), and removing references to the doom patches in the textures lump. Also, e1m4, e1m7, e2m5, e3m4, and e4m7 had some references to doom 1 textures in the map (but they didn't appear in any visible areas). Those were replaced with Rekkr textures."

 

Trying to put everything together today. Busy last couple of months.

[Revae]

Sorry for triple posting.
Updated to 1.16.
E1M3 is half the size (that seemed to confuse people a lot). Holy Relic fires faster, music works in the vanilla exe, the iwad doesn't break GZDoom so long as you change the extension to .iwad, some maps are changed a bit in flow, a few grammar fixes... what else... combination locks are less janky... Never figured out why you can't get 100% kills in E1M9. I imagine it's gotta be due to the number of monsters or something.

Lemme know if I broke anything. It all seemed to work fine on my end.

 

I broke the download link on manbitesshark.com into two links. One is for a little standalone folder zip that contains a copy of chocolate doom and the rekkr iwad in a single folder and a little batch file to run it from. So it's kinda it's own cute little game now.  And the other is the pwad version, which works just as before. I figure if you only want the iwad you can just swipe it out of the standalone folder...

Edited May 16, 2019 by Revae

[NightFright]

Thanks a lot for finally providing an official standalone version! IWADINFO is included, so GZDoom users can fully enjoy it after renaming the file ending as you already mentioned.

Edited May 16, 2019 by NightFright

[z_bill]

REKKR is far and away the best gaming experience I've had this year! And sorta responsible for me getting into Doom/mapping/wads at all, 25 years later! (This & finally discovering Hexen. Imo REKKR is like Hexen, but made perfect!)

 

It's totally mind-blowing, deserves all the praise in the world, and I can't wait to see what's next from revae!

 

I used gzdoom to play, but will try the standalone chocolate version. It should make it easier to recommend to people not already in the mapping scene.

[Jon]

This looks awesome, I can't believe I haven't tried it before. Scanning the thread I haven't been able to answer a question I had, what license terms is this distributed under, if any? It would be awesome if the standalone version of this was licensed under something like creative commons attribution share-alike so that it could be included in things like Debian