tmorrow

Just for the record I'll list my favorite 10 maps over the entire wad. map29: Crushing 14 cybies is always fun, great use of height, enemies sniping from all over map32: Epic map with caverns, open areas, marble buildings and dangerous ravine finale map17: Large city map with 6 keys to track down and a large bag of secrets to net map10: The shopping mall area is great and there's a surprise cybie appearance in the west gardens map15: A wormhole map, you first clear the current day submap map then the harder overrun submap map23: A trek through caverns, lava rivers and blood lakes to the enemies dangerous cyberdemon factory map16: A tech base with water channels. Love the way the environment changes in the center as you progress. map14: Doomguy beats up a military base (a new theme, never been done before in doom) map31: Wormhole map. In this one you crisscross between current and overrun Doom & Doom2 references map13: A mansion with some heavy encounters and a twin cybie ending That's 0 from episode 1 (map07 comes 11th), 6 from episode 2, 2 from episode 3 and both secret maps. As I've said before, I tend to like the grander, larger and more epic maps so it's no surprise that episode 1 missed out since they are typically smaller. I really like the secret code concept that is used in the earlier maps in episode 1. Episode 2 is definitely my favorite. All the maps in this wad are well worth playing, even the maps I liked the least are fun in parts.

Nice! I found that secret but it was just a tiny room with the soulsphere and return teleporter. I didn't realise you can lower the wall and get back to the center and then reenter the water channels again. Thanks.

For episode 1, my favorite maps are: map10: Enjoyed the city part the most. map31: Love the Episode 1 of Doom references. Also uses the wormhole new and old idea. map07: Very oppressive map. I was afraid of entering almost every room. I love the secret code idea on map01 that you also needed for map02 and map04 of the episode.

For episode 2, my favorite maps are: map17: I'm a sucker for a downtown map. map15: I never get tired of wormhole maps. map16: Love the way the environment changes in the center as you progress. Wish the water channels could be revisited, sometimes monsters get stuck there. I tend to like longer and more epic maps like these.

Sure they are uvmaxable. But both are quite difficult, a bit beyond my skill level. If I bang my head against them several times I might pull them off but I'll wait to see if anyone has better strategies than I've come up with.

I took a look at map28 and map29 and managed to uvmax both despite some of map28's defunct teleporters in the lava. I really enjoyed map29, an epic map. It's a good thing you can crush 14 of the 17 cybies on the map early on or it would really hard. A great wad! So that's 30/32 maps uvmaxed with the tough map27 and map30 to ponder.

It seems to work fine in zdoom 2.8.1. The script errors are all from the ZMAPINFO lump and only with the TITLE and AUTHOR lines for each map. Map titles, title patches, music and which maps have secrets exits all seem to work correctly.

I've played through most of 30YEARS. It has some excellent maps and is a real adventure. I'm a slow, cautious player and some of the maps took me up to an hour to beat, map17 and map23 for example. Cleaning up the floating enemies in the 4 cybie room of map23 took over 20 minutes. I didn't want to start up the crushers until everything else was dead. The maps do get progressively harder and I was able to uvmax every map up to map27 where I finally gave up. There's a big jump in difficulty on map27. The rng is particularly mean with some of the fights. The chances are "the wheels are going to fall off" on one of the many fights in any uvmax attempt. I did get past the secret vile room twice by collecting the blue key and running without firing for the blue door and then funneling the viles from outside. Many of the viles don't even wake up and you have to go back for them but then they all wake up together with a vengeance. I still managed to fail the vile cleanup after that though in both runs - I should have practiced the section more. I gave up due to it requiring too many attempts to get that far each time. I suspect I got close to a decent chance to finish the map since there is a soulsphere and megaarmor on pillars at the end of that secret to set you up for the nasty final part of the map. The rng of the teleporting viles or the cybie + 2 viles fights or even the teleporting spider mastermind fight at the end offer many opportunities for doomguy to go down for the count. I took a sneak peak at MAP30 and found it to be quite difficult too so I'm assuming maps28-29 are the same. I've parked the wad for now and will keep an eye out for any map27+ demos in the future to get some further ideas/strategies. Congratulations on the release of the wad! More people need to try out this wad, it's got some great maps. The final maps are extremely challenging though so consider using saves on those maps.

Well played! B.P.R.D's Nuts series being joke wads, the first 2 were never balanced for max kills. There's no difference in monster count between ITYTD and UV but the double ammo of ITYTD gives you enough ammo as you've nicely demonstrated. When I played this on UV years ago I left 208 cybies behind after infighting, didn't even try to kill any, just ran on to the next room. Not sure what best results would look like on UV, I'm guessing around 100 cybies remaining with good play but I'm curious if anyone has tried and how well they did. It's too bad that all the ammo in the next room can't be used on the left over cybies since the wall closes behind. Have you seen Zero Master's TAS uvmax for Nuts with the non human collection of 70,000 revenant homing rockets and using the ball of fiery death to kill the cybies? Same trick could be used here of course for a TAS uvmax.

I felt that 5303 demons is just the right number of demons for a map! I installed the game immediately!

I think map29 remains the only one not tyson'ed. I can only imagine the horror of the locked in astral caco cave with only fists unless a trick can be found, not to mention the end with a couple of very angry cyberdemons and friends. Incredible effort to pull off map32 tyson. That map took me a several attempts to uvmax using all weapons.

Apologies, I meant map04. In your d2all, you managed to obtain the secret by cleverly forcing doomguy through between the left wall and the tree. I haven't been able to duplicate this in gzdoom yet. I think you are using a prboom+/dsdadoom which may have different behavior. I'll play around with it a bit more while watching your d2all in full and drinking much needed coffee! Edit: The soulsphere secret works fine on dsdadoom but not gzdoom, even using some of its doom, doom strict settings. Bad gzdoom, failing the compatibility test yet again! Still watching your d2all. Speedy!

Congratulations on the release of your second war on xmas wad and thanks for making it. Sadly, it seems evil santa cannot be rehabilitated and is up no good yet again. I had a blast playing it through on UV. Fortunately evil santa and his clones and elf sidekicks didn't beat up doomguy too badly. I managed uvmaxes for all maps except for map04 where I've heard on the grapevine that the secret soulsphere cannot be reached without cheats. I was lucky enough to find 3 of the "hidden woofers", not sure if there are any others. Additionally I can claim the following 4 honorific titles: christmas veteran - uv completion a bag of tricks - map23 may be a small map but it's packed full of secrets too dense for this - it was fun working out the keyless route on map11, not too hard once you know the map progression and the map secrets snow dog - woof, woof! My favorite maps are: map11 - evil santas workshop/warehouse map13 - listening to evil santas getting crushed makes me chuckle map22 - with over 1000 evil santas, it's not easy to pacify them all, especially with evil archviles resurrecting the buggers

Major spoiler.

Emergency! This is not a drill! 144 babyastralcaco's have invaded the Eviternity II credits map. Here's one eye witness account. "So there I was, reading all of the mapper boards, when out of nowhere some pillars start lowering. Returning to the teleport hub, out of nowhere, 144 very upset and ravenously hungry astralcacodemons attack with no mercy. I had no chance ..." Astralbabycacos are extremely cunning. They have hacked the doom code so they are not classed as enemies and therefore do not appear on the monster count. But they could be hiding, anywhere, on any map! Ready to pounce without mercy! Be warned! It took me way too long to work out how to make the astralbabycacos appear.

I'm wondering how much further you can go with these outrageously difficult eviternity tysons. Dsda archive indicates there's only 7 holes left: maps 18, 20, 23, 29-32. I'm amazed at what you've managed to pull off so far.

Whew! I spent 15 minutes there flicking switches at random before finally working out how to properly solve the 3x3 version. I remember playing with the hand held 4x4 sliding puzzle when I was a child and solving it. A lot of kids in school had one (before the rubik's cube came along). Guess I've gotten dumber with old age. The other 2 puzzles to earn the other 2 keys were a blast too. I lost a lot of barrels learning to get the timing and movement right for the 2nd one. As for the 3rd puzzle, I managed to fluke it before learning it properly, so I wouldn't say I've really "solved it" yet. Great map, as are all the others I've looked at so far. Halfway through the wad.

Yet another tricky TNT2 secret. The secret sequence starts in the room to the north within a semicircular corridor.

You've done amazingly well to discover so many of the hidden, non official secrets in TNT2 (map16,21,23,31). I've managed to find ones on map02,13,16,21-23,30. I've just assumed they are intentional. Sometimes there is a clue, like a countable item you've missed so you know there is something to find. However map21, sector 76 for example contains non countable items so there is no way to know you've missed finding a non official cache. Once map26 drops, I might put a list of of all of them in one post so the dev team can tackle them in bulk. Personally I don't feel any of them are necessary to beat the maps although they certainly make it much easier in some cases. map06: You can collect the blue armor (missing the secret) but you have to get into the secret alcove (with the switch) to trigger the secret. map12: This map relies heavily on some confusing triggers to raise and lower sectors. I haven't managed to reproduce this problem. Sector 456 contains the 4 specters that should be wakened after the first shot fired by doomguy. Sector 455 starts raised above the 4 specters, preventing them from teleporting initially. Crossing any of a dozen W1 triggers on the west side of the map will lower sector 455, allowing the monsters to teleport. In your case, the sector 455 is lowered, so there should be nothing preventing those angry specters from teleporting. Do you recall if the specters were asleep? If you can reproduce this problem and explain how, it would help a lot. map20: This sector doesn't look like it should be damaging. I'm assuming it's there to scare off or apply pressure to the player trying to get to the megasphere secret nearby. map25: A fair point. That soulsphere is on a triangular pillar that gets lowered by entering the yellow door area. The triangle remains slightly above the void though after lowering so it isn't all that hard to make sure to stand in the center of the triangle to register the secret. map29: I'm not so sure about this one. I'm guessing the map designer is insisting on the player exhibiting some strafing and platforming skills to earn this secret. Failure just requires some retries to get it right. It's not a "one attempt only" type of secret. BTW, with my mediocre skills, I usually have to reattempt this a few times to get it right. map31: The blue armor is just another of the many non official secrets in TNT2. The unconnected linedef 4408 warning should probably be fixed. It looks wrong to me even if it isn't breaking the map. map33: No. TNT2 is targeted to be as vanilla as possible (final doom compatible, i.e. complevel 4). A couple of maps might end up being limit removing. The map progression is strictly map01-15,31-32,16-30. Any map33+ levels are bonus maps expected to only be playable with advanced srcports supporting wads with extended map names. Depending on the srcport, that is usually achieved by either "-warp 33" command line option, using the IDCLEV cheat in game, or using the "map map33" console command. Thanks for the excellent feedback, I'll leave it to the dev team decide on these items.

I'd suggest only reporting the most egregious slime trails like the one you found on map27. Under vanilla doom engines and nodebuilders it can be hard to remove them, for example removing one can make another appear elsewhere.

This secret is tricky.

I've noticed a map editing issue with this wad (all maps load fine in gzdoom srcport). I'm just bringing editing issue to your attention. The current version of UDB (3.0.0.4032 (6d2a3b6)) has trouble seeing 10 of the 12 UDMF maps in the wad (current idgames release). Using the "GZDoom: Doom 2 (UDMF)" Game Configuration on wad load, only MAP02 and MAP10 show up. Looking at the map sections in SLADE and the reason is apparent. Graphic and music lumps appear before the ENDMAP closing map marker in 10/12 of the UDMF maps. GZDoom is forgiving of this but UDB is not for some reason. Anyway I hand edited my version of the wad to move the ENDMAP markers before the graphic and music lumps in each case and UDB is much happier, now seeing all 12 of these missing UDMF gems now. This could be considered a UDB bug, I'm not sure. I regret to inform that I haven't played this wad in earnest yet, but it IS high on my todo list. The maps look awesome with an incredible number of secrets to track down and some challenging gameplay to boot.

Nothing is guaranteed, but the chances are that since map17 hasn't changed, your current beta4 savegame should load fine in beta5. Try it and see (keep a beta4 around just in case). Keep an eagle eye out for any bugs in beta5, the TNT2 dev team want as many eyes on beta5 as possible.

Beta5 change log. Sorry I can't elaborate further but hope it can target testing. map03: Texture alignment map19: Tarnsman's softlock and monster encounter updates map20: rd's softlock fix and minor updates map30: Performance updates. Detail updates. Addressed a potential softlock map32: floatRand's gameplay update General: Texture updates. WADINFO and CWILV updates

Many thanks. Old age and poor eyesight is catching up to me! The old teleport to a room full of barrels with the icon of sin - an old favorite. This wad is incredible. I can see a huge amount of effort went in to it. I'm amazed you could produce something this epic after only one other map project. Congratulations and thanks.