Counterattack - Now on /idgames!

[joe-ilya]

Streaming more of this : https://www.twitch.tv/joe_ilya

[ShadowWraith]

Playing through this with some friends on UV (only cleared through to map 5 so far), some thoughts on the coop side of things:

The additional bonus items are handy, though with our 4 player group there's always one person left out. That said, we're all fairly competent and it means we have an overdose of armor items at the end of each fight. Not much to do there though.

We didn't find the additional enemy spawns overly challenging. It felt balanced without being unfair.

I'm not a huge fan of the "shoot hidden trigger, shoot more hidden triggers, open mundane secret" approach to secrets though. The BFG+3 Cell Pack+Megasphere secret on Map 2 took us a while to track down.

Additionally, one of the secrets that is required to access 2 others on Map 2 was entirely too well hidden, such that I had to break out Doom Builder after 20 minutes of fruitless hunting for it. That one is incredibly cruel. Map 3 had a similar 'hunt the very difficult to locate shootable trigger' secret that we ended up resorting to Doom Builder for. Aside from that, the secrets didn't seem too unfair.

I'll update this post once we finish the WAD. It's pretty fun so far though.

[joe-ilya]

joe-ilya said:

Streaming more of this : https://www.twitch.tv/joe_ilya

[StormCatcher.77]

It was a memorable adventure! Aggilus and Desiderium are the coolest maps in this project. It is a pity that player can not get on the MAP30 without cheats. I ran along and across all maps in the editor to find a secret exit. It's good that the forum was scrapped ... This work is clearly not for one passage. Sooner or later I will return again to these intricacies of industrial bases and the vastness of the infernal arenas. Super!

My Rating: (5 \ 5)

[Mechadon]

Hey thanks a lot for the kind words StormCatcher! It's great to hear you enjoyed the maps :)

If it were possible in Boom, I probably would have had a secret exit in MAP01 which exited to MAP31. Maybe I could have done that for ZDoom-only players, but I never looked into it. Oh well, its probably not a huge deal :P

ketsuzoku said:

Playing through this with some friends on UV (only cleared through to map 5 so far), some thoughts on the coop side of things:

The additional bonus items are handy, though with our 4 player group there's always one person left out. That said, we're all fairly competent and it means we have an overdose of armor items at the end of each fight. Not much to do there though.

We didn't find the additional enemy spawns overly challenging. It felt balanced without being unfair.

I'm not a huge fan of the "shoot hidden trigger, shoot more hidden triggers, open mundane secret" approach to secrets though. The BFG+3 Cell Pack+Megasphere secret on Map 2 took us a while to track down.

Additionally, one of the secrets that is required to access 2 others on Map 2 was entirely too well hidden, such that I had to break out Doom Builder after 20 minutes of fruitless hunting for it. That one is incredibly cruel. Map 3 had a similar 'hunt the very difficult to locate shootable trigger' secret that we ended up resorting to Doom Builder for. Aside from that, the secrets didn't seem too unfair.

I'll update this post once we finish the WAD. It's pretty fun so far though.

Thanks for the COOP feedback ketsuzoku! It was never heavily tested outside of my solo-net runs. So at best I was confident that those additions were broken; balacing was mostly guesswork. I'm glad to hear that it was a mostly smooth experience.

That secret in MAP02 you brought up is meant to be a super secret easter egg thing. That's why the triggers for them are so obscure. The other you mentioned are probably going to be hit or miss depending on the player. I didn't get too much feedback about them being too obscure from other players (and I tweaked the ones that did get brought up).

[Not Jabba]

Mechadon said:

If it were possible in Boom, I probably would have had a secret exit in MAP01 which exited to MAP31. Maybe I could have done that for ZDoom-only players, but I never looked into it. Oh well, its probably not a huge deal :P

After map 01, huh? I was thinking the end text of map 05 referred to the base in map 31 and that me warping to the secret level after playing through the main set was a continuation of the story. Or is that ending story a setup for Vela Pax?

Anyway, these are all great levels. I'd love to make something this intricate someday. How on earth did you get this whole set done in just a few months?

[Mechadon]

Yea, the ending of MAP05 is describing the start of Vela Pax.  MAP31 is mostly just a side-map thing.  I guess the idea could have been that the player stumbled on a secret teleporter that leads to MAP31, and from there that map would have exited to MAP02.  MAP31 was mostly added as an after-thought anyways (its an old texture test map from Supplice, if you can believe that :P).  I cleaned it up and tossed it into this as a little extra, and as a way to hide an exit to the super secret MAP32.

Anyways, thanks :).  I am pretty proud that I finished this in 5-6 months, and I mostly attribute that to pushing myself to get back to work on Supplice.

[The Bandit]

Nice wad dude.  A little long for my taste, but a superb wad nonetheless.

[grahf]

Hey @Mechadon what sector lighting style did you intend this to be played with in gzDoom?  I usually use 'Doom' but for this WAD that seems really dark...  Just wondering your preference?

[Mechadon]

45 minutes ago, grahf said:

Hey @Mechadon what sector lighting style did you intend this to be played with in gzDoom?  I usually use 'Doom' but for this WAD that seems really dark...  Just wondering your preference?

Hmm, well I don't know that I really had one in mind to be honest (most of my testing was done in software rendering).  Maybe whichever looks closest to software?  If that's too dark though, honestly I would just say use whichever works best for you.  There are some pretty dark areas in the maps that might look a lot darker using certain light modes, and I imagine that could cause some gameplay headaches.

 

I guess while I'm posting here, I was wondering if I could get some feedback on releasing a small update.  It would include the following:

• Fixed texture misalignments (in MAP02, MAP03, and MAP31).
• A fixed clusterdef for the MAP31 secret exit in ZDoom (I believe it displays the secret exit text when you use the normal exit).
• Fixed stuck monster in MAP01 (I think it was either a COOP stuck monster or one that appears in the easier difficulties).

My main concern is mucking up demo compatibility.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only thing that would mess with that is fixing the stuck monster, right?  So would this be a bad idea at this point?

 

Also if anyone else has spotted any other bugs, let me know.  If I do a fixed version, I'll see about getting them addressed.

Edited February 15, 2018 by Mechadon

[Mechadon]

Heeeeey, sorry for the bump.  I wanted to post an update regarding the bugfix release idea.  I have a changelog on fixes/tweaks I've done:

 

• MAP01
  • Fixed some stuck monsters (Demon and Cacodemon) that showed up on the Medium difficulty.  Monsters in question were located in the south-western~ish area of the map, just past the red skull door.
• MAP02
  • Fixed a misalignment in the SSG/nukage area on the backside of a pipe.
• MAP03
  • Fixed a horrible misalignment in the red key area (the marble w/ blood trim wall that you see just as the trap floor lowers leading into the room).
  • Fixed the switch-once lift that leads to the BFG+Invuln secret (it had three lines and thus allowed three uses if you pressed in the correct spot, that's probably why I missed it).
• MAP04
  • Fixed an untagged light transfer on the lava in the double crusher room.
• MAP31
  • Fixed a minor texture misalignment (its likely I'm the only one who noticed it).
• MISC
  • Fixed the clusterdef for MAP32.  It was erroneously applied to MAP31, so the secret text would show up when you exited that map normally, instead of appearing at the beginning of MAP32 after finding the secret exit in MAP31.  Also the clusterdef was using 'exittext' when it should have been using 'entertext'.
  • Changed the background for the ending text to MFLR8_2 so that its easier to read (only for ZDoom).
  • Added ZMAPINFO lump.  Also added the 'compat_boomscroll' option in the hopes that it would fix the timing with the RK crusher trap, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to help.

So I guess my concern at this point is ruining demo compatibility.  The MAP01 fix and the broken lift switch in MAP03 could be ones that would mess with that, correct?  Is this a case where I shouldn't bother with an update?

 

Also I thought I could fix the MAP01 crusher issue in GZDoom ports with the compat_boomscroll option.  But unfortunately that didn't seem to help.  So now I'm not sure if that's a bug related to GZDoom or if I misunderstood how that compatibility option works.

 

Anyways, let me know what you guys think.

Edited August 12, 2018 by Mechadon

[Bdubzzz]

I think Map 01 fix would only desync demos on medium and most people only care about UV so should be fine there. Also would this be a re release to idgames? Don't know if it's worth it as the bugs/miss aligned textures seem to be minor issues.

[dew]

Yeah, the map01 fix should be alright. I'd be more worried about the map04 fix involving a node rebuild, which would definitely screw demos up. The most annoying but proper route would be to import just the updated THINGS or LINEDEFS lumps, or whatever is it you're fixing, into the old wad in SLADE, and then test if the uv-max demos still play in sync.

 

You only have to make a hard decision if they don't. :)

[Mechadon]

22 hours ago, Bdubzzz said:

Also would this be a re release to idgames? Don't know if it's worth it as the bugs/miss aligned textures seem to be minor issues.

I figured the proper way to go about it would be to just update the /idgames release instead of making a new whole page for it.  If I do it that way, I'll try to make sure there's a note of the update in the readme along with the changelog.

 

The stuck monsters in MAP01 and the borked MAP31 clusterdef were the major bugs that prompted me to consider a bugfix release.  After that I found out about the S1 secret lift bug for MAP03 on the wiki page (btw, thanks to the people who wrote that!).  So those three bugs seemed bad enough to warrant a fixed release.  The misalignment fixes are just extras that I decided to fix since they were easy to do.

 

2 hours ago, dew said:

Yeah, the map01 fix should be alright. I'd be more worried about the map04 fix involving a node rebuild, which would definitely screw demos up. The most annoying but proper route would be to import just the updated THINGS or LINEDEFS lumps, or whatever is it you're fixing, into the old wad in SLADE, and then test if the uv-max demos still play in sync.

 

You only have to make a hard decision if they don't. :)

Thanks for the info dew!  I didn't think fixing an untagged sector would break a demo.  I'll try that out and see what happens.

[Pixel Fiend]

Nice looking maps, particularly Dolor and Aggilus. This is the first time I actually heard AIWS, while playing the first level. I love all their records. I guess you couldn't actually include Maeror Tri as soundtrack. But it's great to stumble on references to such obscure things I love. Good wad to play with retro graphics, although I doubt I'll ever finish those massive levels.

[Caleb13]

Ohhh yessss, this was fun! How the hell I kept missing this thread for 3 years? Maps 01-04 and 31 are simply awesome, although rather easy by today's standards (I played on UV). Even with pistol starts, I was practically drowning in ammo in all of them except MAP01 and rarely used melee weapons. Nevertheless, they were a welcome change from the never-ending archvile grind these days. Compared to them, MAP05 and MAP32 felt almost like a disappointment, particularly with the new custom monsters. Oh well.

 

And here are a few problems I encountered in GZdoom 4.4.2, although I know it's too late to fix them:

 

MAP01: the blue keycard is too hard to find, it took me 10 minutes even though I had the computer map and then used IDDT cheat. Making it and the door leading to it more visible would help.

 

MAP02: several misaligned brick textures around sectors 593 and also 2540, 2541 etc. And... the skull/baron BFG secret is so hard to find it's practically irrelevant. In fact, it was rather hard to figure out even when I looked in editor.

 

MAP03: player can become stuck on the way to the BFG secret if he misses the lift and the walls close behind him. It can happen because linedefs 21450 etc. are S1, not SR.