antares031

If a mapset is like a main dish, a gameplay mod is like a sauce. I wouldn't pour a buldak sauce on a frosty chocolate milkshake.

Ancient Aliens MAP18. Bonus point for the rotating pyramidion hologram.

MyHouse.pk3 has 164,452 linedefs, with 298,798 sidedefs. It's no wonder why it takes so long to load that cute little simple house.

A couple of texture issues to point out. The second one appears, when the blinking light goes dark in software mode. Check the coordinates on the top-left of each screenshot. It feels like lots of places were designed as secret areas, especially the one with a plasma magnum. Kinda strange that all of those areas are not tagged as secrets, and just worked as optional areas. Regardless, it was a pretty good survival horror wad, with a couple of surprising moments.

It's actually an intended short-cut to reach the level's super secret spot (the one with 100 health bonuses and more). Grabbing a BFG from the another secret area is a bonus reward, if you couldn't find the secret teleporter around the yellow skull key before.

The only one complain I have about this wad is that the default HUD numbers are difficult to read, since their color makes them blended with the HUD panel. Probably giving more contrast to the HUD numbers would be nice. This a really interesting mapset with Doomcute™ grade thing decorations and effects, thanks for making this one!

ദ്ദി(˶0 x 0˶ ദ്ദി)

UniDoom3 MAP04, sector + midtex combined. Ghoul's Forest 3, sloped sectors + midtex vines. Going Down MAP25, a sector art.

James Webb Space Telescope, the best desktop wallpaper creator in the universe.

Well, looks like we already have one cacoward winner this year. The screenshots look so adorable and beautiful. Kudos for making the sequel MBF-compatible.

Temeraire was planned as a sequel to Frimaire from the start, so it was intentional to have some simiarilities between those two levels. I'm quoting my own writing from the last month's DWMC for more explanations:

Just having a good time with my bone buddy.

Here's an example of a doom level with more than 1 billion kill count. You should be able to beat this level within around one hour, while your kill count should be able to exceed one billion. Complevel 11, DSDADoom or Eternity Engine recommended. Doesn't work with GZDoom yet. May not work properly with other source ports, such as Helion. DO NOT RUN THE LEVEL on either medium or easy difficulty. Download the WAD: tea_time.zip

To me, Doom is undoubtedly the best video game ever created. But this doesn't mean that Doom is the only video game I play. There are many video games with different styles and different genres, and some of them are even way better than Doom in some aspects. One of video games I really enjoyed is "Hollow Knight" by Team Cherry. It's my all-time #3 favorite, and the best indie game I've ever played. There are so many features that makes HK so interesting and so memorable, but one thing that HK inspired me with Doom modding is the design of boss battles. If you played MAP24 and found every secret area, you may noticed that one of secret areas provided an opportunity to eliminate a group of veilimps and an arch-vile, waiting to bring more chaos to the blue skull key fight. This part was inspired by HK's Watcher Knights boss fight; If you find a secret near the boss arena, you can knock out one of six Watcher Knights before the actual fight begins, making the boss fight slightly easier than usual. Among the 47 bosses, Nightmare King Grimm is my favorite boss fight in Hollow Knight. NKG is extremely-fast and deadly, teleporting around the entire arena with various attack patterns, and it's really difficult to beat him during the blind playthrough. But once you learn how to deal with his attack patterns, the boss is surprisingly easy to defeat next time, while it's still really fun to fight against him. His attack patterns are fast, but they're quite fair. Each pattern gives you a brief moment to recongnize his next movement, so you can dodge his patterns with proper movement. The boss fight is so fun and engaging that I even made my personal challenge by removing the protagonist's appearance, and it's still possible to defeat the boss without getting hit. While I was making the final boss of Struggle, I spent almost every available code pointer frames with various custom monsters (remember, you can only apply code pointers to designated frames in vanilla dehacked) when I reached MAP30. Not just code pointer frames, I was running out of normal frames as well. So it's inevitable to design a final boss with a cheap spammy attack pattern, which usually requires less frames, rather than a fair & sophisticated pattern. In retrospect, it would've been much better to design the final level as a giant climactic slaughtermap, like MAP30 of Scythe 2, instead of trying to make a final boss with severely limited resources. The final boss of Eviternity had way more resources to play with, but I think I made a same mistake by adding another unstoppable spammy attack pattern during the 2nd phase. Sure, it's cost-effective in dehacked's perspective; just put one projectile attack code pointer frame, and give it A_xxxReFire with another frame. But it made the final boss quite unfair, making the boss fight weak and annoying. After I grabbed MBF21, I decided not to design a final boss with the same mistake. The premise of the final boss was inspired by NKG; multiple attack patterns, but not annoying to deal with. And I decided to give the final boss three phases. The first phase was designed as an introduction to let the player know about the new final boss; it has multiple attack patterns, and it shoots various projectile attacks with different gimmicks. Each fireball has a common gimmick, derived from Astral Mancubus' purple fireball; bounce one time to track the target. Red fireball has a small blast damage effect, like a mini rocket, and you can recognize it with its explosion sound effect. Green fireball is basically a buffed version with faster speed and higher damage, which is an ideal projectile to counter the player, hidden behind a solid pillar, while they're trying to hide from arch-vile's flame attack. Blue fireball is a tricky one. It bounces not just once, but three times. So in close range, strafing just once wouldn't enough to dodge those blue fireballs. The blue energy bolt attack pattern is nothing special, and it's just a buffed version of Astral Arachnotron's attack pattern. The first phase was designed in August 2023, with a simple concept level of MAP30. As a placeholder, I quoted the sprites I made for the final boss of Antaresian Legacy (not to confuse with the megawad Struggle. this was a boom-compatible mapset, and eventually cancelled). Soon after the first phase, the second phase was designed. For the second phase, I tried something a little bit different than a projectile attack pattern. By combining dehacked's A_LineEffect and a voodoo doll script, I could let the final boss change the geometry and effect of the arena during the fight. I thought that putting pitfalls with damaging floor for a brief moment would be a nice addition to the final boss, giving a dynamic change to the arena's geometry. To make the pattern less annoying, I gave a visual indication with two-stages-drop method, and set a pretty short duration to the pitfall. I also put sound effects for the pitfall pattern and the arch-vile attack pattern, to help the player with auditory indications. Lastly, I decided to release some astral cacodemons after the first phase, and nightmare cacodemons after the second phase, working as intermissions between the phases. For the final phase, I decided to put some special features to surprise the players. I let the final boss teleport around the arena like a veilimp, inspired by NKG's movement pattern. After I put some buffed patterns from the previous phases, I decided to add an attack pattern with a BFG shot, since I asked myself "What about let the monster fire the BFG, instead of the player?". The pattern is actually not that lethal, if you know how BFG works. But it's good enough to surprise the player with loud and familiar BFG sound from the monster. And for the last pattern, I decided to put an unique pattern with Afriest Turrets from Struggle, as a small reference to the final boss from the past. It may look like that it's conflicting with the rule I set earlier; no cheap spammy pattern. But I tried to make it doesn't feel like spammy, by keeping the duration short enough. With the completion of the final phase, the concept level of MAP30 was finished, and ready for the actual final level of Eviternity 2. After this, I moved on to finish MAP24. Meanwhile, for the actual MAP30, Dragonfly constructed the boss arena, based on the designs from the concept level. There's one major change with the arena, though. Instead of advancing to the next arena for the next phase, the whole boss fight would occur in one playground. After Dragonfly applied the changing skybox, I added some visual effects to decorate the later phases, like adding waterfalls with corruption, infecting nearby walls, and a weather effect with falling sparkling static chips, also infecting pillars in the arena. I also designed every custom texture for MAP30 to polish the level visually. Some of them were designed to mark the cardinal directions with unique symbols (they're actually highly distorted korean words of North, South, East, and West), which didn't work really well. But I decided to leave it for decorations. For the sprite images, just like Archangelus from Eviternity, Clay once again did an amazing job with creating the 3D model of the final boss. And then created all the necessary 2D sprites with that model. The sprites with colored-eyes are really good addition to the final boss. Like Astral Mancubus and Overlord, it gave a visual indication of the boss' attack patterns. After all the necessary sprites are finished, I decided to put one last feature to the final boss. Instead of using A_Mushroom code pointer, I used a bunch of custom projectiles with different A_SpawnObject code pointer to simulate "spiral explosion" effect. And then I quoted the explosion effect from MAP24, edited it out as a golden variant. For the background music, Tristan wrote yet another epic boss fight music, and recorded it as OGG format. Just in case, but for those who inspected dehacked code or decorate code of the final boss, I picked the word "Eviternatus" as a development codename, with my own phonetic codes of A, B, C. Eviternity also used various development codenames, like "Chaos Demon", "Super Bruiser", and "Captain Chaingunner". And they still exist inside of the dehacked code. It was really fun to design the final boss of Eviternity 2, with the brand-new powerful MBF21. Not just the final boss, but it was really interesting to create various MBF21 actors, like falling leaves and custom monsters. If I'm going to make the next personal project, I'll definitely use MBF21 to create more custom elements with my preferences. And maybe even a bunch of custom bosses, and a boss rush as the final level. Thanks for playing Eviternity 2, and I hope you guys enjoyed this sequel.

The concept of Necromenace started pretty simple, Dragonfly gave me the idea about "a projectile that resurrects corpses it collides with.". I looked at the document about MBF21's new code pointers, and A_HealChase got my attention. It's basically a customizable A_VileChase, reviving a dead monster near the actor. I thought "summoning minions that resurrect dead monsters" concept would be interesting to implement. So I quoted Heresiarch sprites and Wraith sprites from Hexen for the new monster and its minions, and coded the minion's behavior as "resurrect a dead monster through sacrifice". Each minion has 120 hit points, and it frequently emits tiny blast damage. Not only it decays a minion's health, but also it can give a small amount of damage to the player. I let the new monster to summon a couple of minions, along with a powerful & straightforward projectile attack pattern. And then I added new sound effects, quoted from Hexen and Wolfenstein 2009. Its original name "Necromancer" was slightly adjusted as "Necromenace", and received 1200 HP as a high-tier monster. But shortly after it was promoted to a boss-tier monster, with buffed 2800 HP, immunity to splash damage, and full-volume alert/death sounds. As I mentioned, their sprites were added as placeholders, waiting for the new fancy sprites to replace them. But it never happened somehow. The concept of Nightmare Cacodemon also started pretty simple. We were having a discussion about "bring back the pre-nerf version of Astral Cacodemon", which had more firepower than the current Astral Cacodemon. And then we just decide to create a nightmare version of Astral Cacodemon, rather than adjusting the existing one, since Xaser suggested us to use DEHEXTRA to gain extra frames and actor slots. We thought the new monster would be an excellent addition to UV+ playthrough for extra challenge; only available to either -solo-net or multiplayer mode. Tristan provided the sprites of teal-version of Astral Cacodemon, and it was such an appearnace to behold. A nightmare fuel indeed. It actually took a while to put this new monster to the megawad, since the full sprite set wasn't ready until September 2021. Through that time, we migrated to MBF21 and I re-wrote the entire dehacked code with decohack, rather than using WhackEd4. I was also having an experiment with MBF21's brand-new A_SeekTracer to design a new type of projectile. This proto-type design below never reached the quality of a finished product, but it still exists inside the megawad as a cut content. With this new gimmick, I thought it would work really well with our new nightmare fuel. Instead of following the target indefinitely, I thought that just letting them "bounce" for once would be enough. I also gave them a slight vertical pitch, in order to make them strike the player from above like a cobra. After the first concept monster was created, Xaser suggested to put a visual effect, when the projectile is bounced from mid-air. So I quoted more sprites from Hexen, and also quoted the sound effects of Korax for the nightmare version of Astral Cacodemon. These purple bouncing projectiles were also implemented to Astral Mancubus, 6 days after the Nightmare Cacodemon was added to the megawad. The new cacodemons were decided to stay with the rest of the monsters, rather than just UV+ exclusive. I made the central projectile more powerful later, to make them even more intimidating. I also thought that the concept of "bouncing" projectile was successful, and I was looking forward to use this gimmick for the one last custom monster.

Since the beginning of my doom mapping history, the number one rule I've been following is "Having fun with doom mapping.". And the easiest way to follow this rule I found was "Making something I want to see & play.". That's why lots of doom levels I've made, such as Penitência and Alpha Scorpii Supercluster, share the similar styles with my preferences; non-linear, adventurous, hectic but managable slaughtermap-like setpieces, and so on. This might make the levels kinda repetitive in terms of gameplay, with just a change of scenery in each level. But as long as I'm satisfied with the result, I can accept that. After all, I had lots of fun with making my doom levels. There's one thing I wanted to try in doom mapping for more than a decade, and that was designing a full-scale battleship. I was into the online game called "NavyFIELD" back then, and that game featured various naval warships, including giant battleships from WW2 era. It wasn't Doom, but I already made a full-scale battleship for Counter-Strike: Source 17 years ago with Hammer Editor. But that was more like a simple playground with only developer textures, since it was designed to be featured in a zombie mode server for fun. There's also a miniature of Iowa-class battleship "USS Illinois" in the MAP17 of Struggle. I still wanted to design a battleship in Doom, but I wasn't confident enough to create a full-scale one, so I decided to put a miniature one instead. When the development of Eviternity 2 started, I wanted to make a sequel to Frimaire, the MAP14 of Eviternity. So I decided to grab a slot from the fifth episode with "Icetech" theme. And why not create a full-scale battleship this time, since it would be really cool to put something really memorable in the sequel to Eviternity. Not to mention that it's finally time to do something I wanted to achieve for a long time with enough confidence, and Eviternity 2 was a perfect opportunity to do this. So the premise of MAP24 was settled; A sequel to Frimaire with some recognizable elements + A winter naval techbase, featuring a full-scale battleship. Throughout the level, you can find the similarities between those two levels. One notable thing is the cavernous area in the southeast, and the other one is the red skull key fight. The appearance of RSK fight arena might be quite different than the previous one, but the concept of the arena is still pretty the same; Monsters are keep spawning in, controlled by the timed voodoo doll script, while central turrets & perimeter turrets are keep giving pressure to the player, and the fight ends with the same reward at the center. The techbase part was originally planned as more like a naval shipyard, but I decided to make a conventional techbase, in order to keep up with the concept of the episode. But I didn't forget to design a giant dock to put a big ship. Choosing the model of the battleship was pretty easy. Among lots of battleships from WW2 era, british battleship's design was ideal for doom mapping. The shape of their boxy superstructure was simpler than the other nations' complex superstructures (notably Iowa-class and Bismarck-class), reducing the amount of required midtextures and workloads. British battleships also had simpler bow & stern designs, so I didn't have to consider about angled bow and curved stern. On top of that, there was one british battleship called "HMS Temeraire", one of Lion-class battleships in the late 1930s. Since the name "Temeraire" rhymed with "Frimaire", it was a perfect name for this level. Two models were chosen as references; "Lion I" from NavyFIELD for the ship's overall design, and "HMS Thunderer" from World of Warships for deck props and details. I also used the line drawing of Lion-class battleship to match the scale, with the premise of "64 map-units is equivalent to 1.5 meters.". And why not give some modernizations, such as missile launchers and CIWS, to this never-built battleship, with the concept of "What if HMS Temeraire served long enough to receive modernizations, like Iowa-class battleships in real life?". The pennant number "36" and the crest at her bridge were originally intended & designed for the actual HMS Temeraire in real life. Of course, the highlight of this level is the giant firework. I started making this ship as just a decoration at the very beginning, like "MS #NIGHTMARE" from Alien Vendetta. But since MBF21 was in my hands, I decided to make this memorable decoration even more memorable. We have massive 16-inch guns, so why not shoot these guns to a bunch of cyberdemons??? Like how you shoot BFG10K in Doom Eternal, and it was such an impressive scene. I designed a small setpiece to surprise the player, featuring tens of custom cyberdemons for this specific sequence. And then I wrote dehacked codes and designed a voodoo script to execute the sequence I was planning. Finally, I quoted explosion effects from Pyromania! Pro by VCE, a well-known source materials for various explosion effects from the mid 90s. It took me a little bit more than a month to finish the ship and the sequence, and it was totally worthy. Here's the video of the work-in-progress version of the sequence. From the numerous twitch livestreams and youtube playthrough videos, many people pointed out that the final setpiece was way too unkind to blind run players. While it was my intention to shock the player with such an unexpected surprise, I agree that it's still too cruel to the blind run players. So I decided to change the design of the final setpiece for the upcoming RC6, making it more blind-run friendly, by giving a moment to inspect the entire arena, before the player decides to call down the thunder. Not only the cyberdemons are facing the opposite direction, but also the layout of the arena now supports more horizontal space to dodge the rockets. Not to mention that now it's much easier to enter the teleporter, without being hit by random rockets. Here's the screenshots for comparison: The background music of this level I originally chose was actually Arctic Voyage by Tristan Clark. I thought this 16-minutes-long winter-themed soundtrack would be perfect for this level. But the problem is that the MIDI was already 5 years old, while the majority of soundtracks were freshly written for this megawad, making notable differences in the MIDI's style. I eventually switched the music to more recent one, Journey to the Other Side by the same maestro, since it also fit really nicely with the winter theme. Besides, I didn't want to request a new soundtrack for MAP24 to Tristan, since there was already too much workloads with mapping and music writing.

While not as interesting as the rest of custom monsters with their own gimmicks, the current Duke of Hell works like a simple "buffed classic monster" with only a slight difference. The first Duke of Hell was introduced, when we applied DEHEXTRA to gain more extra frames and actor slots. With more resources to use in my hands, I was able to add two custom monsters; one as a buffed hell noble, and one as a low-tier flying monster, which I'm gonna talk about at the end of this month. This time, I quoted the sprites of "Bruiser Demon", created by Vader. And swapped its orange color to teal & gold color to give a visual difference, and match the projectiles' colors as planned. Duke of Hell shoot both baron's green fireball and golden energy bolt at the same time, sharing the same gimmick with Struggle's Afriest; shooting multiple projectiles straight at the same time, but with different velocity. This method was designed to make it tricky to dodge those projectiles without using horizontal spread (when I was using vanilla dehacked many years ago), since you have to consider both fast projectiles and slow projectiles at the same time, even if it's still easy to dodge them with continuous circlestrafing. MBF21 allowed me to put horizontal spread to our new projectiles, and I tried to test it out with Duke of Hell. Instead of shooting different projectiles simultaneously, I decided to let them shoot baron's fireballs first, and then shoot energy bolts with horizontal spread. Not to mention that baron's fireballs also had horizontal spread, similar to mancubus' attack pattern. Their movement speed was also increased significantly, as if they're skating around with their flame shoes. Throughout the development history, there were many changes to the spread angle of the last pattern. The minimum spread angle was 2 degrees per projectile, and the maximum spread angle was 8 degrees, during the development. At the end of the day, since there were too many gimmicky monsters in this megawad, when every custom monster except the final boss was added, I decided to make them more classic, rather than putting yet another gimmicks. Their movement speed was rolled back from 16 to 12 (it's still faster than classic hell nobles), their horizontal spread was settled down to the spread angle of 3 degrees, and they no longer threw their green fireballs with mancubus' attack pattern. If I still wanted to put a gimmick to this version, I could let them throw multiple waves of energy bolts with different velocity; one fast wave with small spread, one intermediate wave with medium spread, and one slow wave with large spread. This method was designed by ukiro and Dragonfly. This is actually simple, and yet powerful visual effect. I believe that they'll explain about it later.

Like I briefly mentioned before, Prowler Imp was one of the earliest custom monsters ever designed for Eviternity II. After I finished playing Doom Eternal in early 2020, I thought that Prowler's "teleporting around" gimmick might be an interesting idea to be added to the classic doom. By using TNT1 invisible sprite and MBF's A_Spawn code pointer, I managed to simulate the Prowler's gimmick in complevel 11. It's actually an invisible monster, moving around really fast, and then becomes visible with teleportation visual effect and sound, whenever it attacks the target. Prowler Imp's attack pattern was pretty simple; shooting three cacodemon fireballs. But its premise was still there, as a glass cannon to surprise the player from nowhere. Before we migrated from complevel 11 to 21, there was a short period of development time with the brand-new DEHEXTRA extension, suggested by Xaser. While DEHEXTRA didn't provide new custom code pointers to work with, its extra dehacked resources, such as frames, things, and sprites, allowed me to put custom actors with no concern about dehacked resource management. With this new tool, not only I put lots of custom decorations (mainly tree & bush sprites, provided by ukiro), but also I re-designed Prowler Imp, with the new name "Veilimp". Once again, I quoted Amuscaria's amazing sprite work "Hellion" for our new monster. And I swapped its color to purple, in order to differentiate them from classic monsters visually. I also made their pre-fire delay longer than Prowler Imp, so the players could have more time to react from a sudden ambush. Veilimp also got new attack pattern, quite similar to the Astral Cacodemon's. MBF21 allowed me to make their attack pattern more interesting and reasonable, something like a projectile version of a single barrel shotgun. After that, while making the intro fight of veilimps in MAP15, Scotty suggested to let them have AoE attack, since their "teleportation ambush" movement could work really well with close-range AoE attack. Based on Scotty's idea, I brought the concept of adding short-range flamethrower attack, and Dragonfly provided all the necessary sprites to make this new pattern. Veilimp's flamethrower attack is actually a melee attack, like a revenant's punch. But thanks to MBF21's custom melee range, it will try to "punch" the target within 256 map-units range with its flamethrower.

If you played Heretic, you might remember that one particular monster with a killer smile. Iron Lich is a mini-boss monster from Heretic, and it's one of my favorite monsters from id Tech 1 games. Capable of casting three different spells to oppress its target, Iron Lich is undoubtedly a monster to remember, despite its homing tornado projectile may be annoying to deal with. With complevel 11, I tried to make a special monster, with a concept similar to Iron Lich; a high-tier monster with three different patterns. Overlord was a prototype monster with this idea and had three special patterns; arch-vile's flame attack, charge attack with a stream of bullets (similar to the one from Archangelus' second phase), and a giant short-range projectile bombardment for area denial. Since the charge attack was way too OP to deal with, I replaced it to simple mancubus fireballs pattern pretty quick. In order to help the player to recognize different patterns, I gave different colors to its eyes, before each pattern was about to be started. Like other custom monsters, MBF21 allowed me to design more complex, and more interesting concepts, instead of just using A_Mushroom. Astral Mancubus is the replacement of Overlord, featuring three different attack patterns with distinctive sound effects and colors. The yellow attack pattern is pretty much straight-forward; a projectile version of super-great-ultra-hyper shotgun. Just remember not to stay right in front of it, and you should be fine. The purple attack pattern follows the directional pattern of the original mancubus, but it has one special gimmick. By using MBF21's A_SeekTracer code pointer, these purple fireballs are able to change their direction, heading toward their target, for a single time. After they finished changing direction once, they'll behave just like normal projectiles. This gimmick was designed to counter a player, hidden behind a solid cover. The green attack pattern was pretty simple at first, shooting straight streams of energy bolts. To give more characteristics, I gave it spread pattern later, so it can counter the player's circlestrafing tactic. One secret tip is that, if you stand still right in front of Astral Mancubus, you can actually dodge all green fireballs with no problem. MBF21's A_MonsterProjectile not only customizes the pitch and angle, but also allows you to give custom horizontal/vertical offset of projectile's spawning point. It's difficult to think about standing still with classic doom's projectile attack at first, but this is an intended way to counter the counter-circlestrafing attack. Here's the video footage of the first version of Astral Mancubi, before their green projectile attack received spread pattern. Like Astral Arachnotron, the original sprite was designed by Amuscaria. The majority of sound effects were quoted from Wolfenstein 2009 by Raven Software, the original creator of Iron Lich and Heretic. Astral Mancubus has 1400 hit point, making it the tankiest monster among the non-boss variants. Just remember that it's also a great monster infighter, thanks to its wide-spread patterns.

There is no denying. In retrospect, Struggle MAP30 was atrocious. Maybe the concept itself wasn't that bad, but the execution was really terrible. It's no wonder many people picked that level as the worst level ever designed in Doom. After I learned lessons from the two final bosses from Struggle and Eviternity, I tried to deliver something different this time. MBF21 was a really powerful & useful tool to create something more than just an Icon of Sin. So I hope to see you guys in MAP30 at the end of this month.

Astral Arachnotron is one of the earliest custom monsters ever designed, along with these scrapped complevel 11 monsters: Lost Chaser, which is basically an astral lost soul, chasing the target with Astral Cacodemon's charging pattern. Astral Motherdemon, a super pain elemental, designed to test a simple concept for a mini-boss fight. and Prowler Imp, inspired by a new monster from Doom Eternal. Unlike other custom monsters, Tristan brought the initial idea of Astral Arachnotron first in 2019, providing all the necessary resources to design the new custom monster, and a simple dehacked code. Under the complevel 11's limitations, the first Astral Arachnotron's design was pretty simple. Compare to its original monster, it had about 45% faster movement speed, slightly less pain chance, and 300% faster attack speed, resulting one plasma shot for every 2 tics. After I made them even faster and slightly tankier than Tristan's design (because, why not?), this new monster was really scary to encounter, pouring out a stream of endless plasma fireballs. To reward the player who knocked out this insanely-high-DPS powerhouse, I decided to let it drop a cell ammo when it was killed. After we adopted MBF21, I wanted to make this new monster more interesting than before, rather than just a straight-projectile-spammer. With MBF21's A_MonsterProjectile, I was able to put new custom projectiles with any angles and pitches. So I applied horizontal spread first, and then added one more stream with vertical spread later. To compensate the addition of an extra projectile stream (it's now two plasma shots for every 2 tics), I halved the damage of Astral Arachnotron's projectile. Astral Arachnotron was indeed a threatening monster, but it was also really good at provoking monster infighting, thanks to its spray patterns. One last change I made, besides switching projectile's color from gold to green (because of the addition of the another custom monster), was adding a small delay to each cycle, giving a brief moment to dodge between the streams. In the end, I was satisfied with the final design of the Astral Arachnotron, despite it had a potential to be hated for being a crazy projectile spammer.

For a long time, since the beginning of the development of Eviternity 1, ukiro asked this question to the team; is it possible to design a railgun in classic doom? The initial premise of a railgun was a weapon that is powerful enough to kill an arch-vile in a single shot, but had a long reload time as a disadvantage. Back then, under the limitations of complevel 11, only two options were viable to make a railgun-like weapon; a highly-stacked hitscan attacks, or a highly-fast projectile attack. Because it was impossible to give more than 32 for a projectile's speed (any value above 32 will only make auto-aiming crappier, while it actually won't increase the speed of projectile), stacking multiple hitscan was the only possible option for a railgun that ukiro asked. But then again, complevel 11 doesn't provide enough extra frames to make this happen, since I also needed those precious, limited extra frames to design custom monsters and decorations. Stacking multiple hard-coded hitscan attacks also wasn't capable of gibbing low-tier monsters, so the result was somewhat underwhelming, despite its tremendous damage output per shot. Although we were limited to complevel 11 back then, the idea of adding a new weapon, replacing a chainsaw, kept on going during the early stage of the development. The original MBF provided two new code pointers, A_FireOldBFG and A_Detonate. A_FireOldBFG is self-explanatory; it shoots multiple plasma projectiles of the beta version of BFG with a random spread. And A_Detonate is capable of adding custom blast damage, instead of classic doom's hard-coded blast effect. To me, those code pointers were perfect elements to design a flamethrower, so I quickly designed a concept weapon of a new custom weapon, replacing a chainsaw: But pretty soon, I needed to withdraw the idea of using A_FireOldBFG because of one reason; it doesn't support vertical aiming. Even if its random spread occasionally reached quite above, and its custom blast damage allowed me to damage flying monsters, I wasn't satisfied with the projectile weapon without vertical aiming. Even after I obtained more extra frames to use with DEHEXTRA, we decided to rather put more custom monsters and decorations than adding a custom weapon. The development of a new custom weapon met the new solution with the introduction of MBF21. The new A_WeaponBulletAttack code pointer was capable of adding a hitscan attack with custom damage, RNG, and horizontal/vertical spread. A perfect solution to design a hitscan railgun. Once again, after we migrated to MBF21, ukiro asked the same question to the team, so I decided to design a concept weapon, in order to finally answer this 4-years-old question, demonstrating MBF21's new hitscan code pointer. The sound effect was quoted from this video, since a big gun deserves a big sound. The first model was quite faithful to ukiro's initial request; it was powerful enough to kill an arch-vile with a single shot, but its long delay made the player be more careful with aiming the gun. The damage output model was designed by Bauul, stacking various hitscan attacks with different damage value, such as 141, 61, and so on. This model was highly useful to demonstrate both "gibbing low-tier monsters" and "penetrating through multiple targets", and I was really happy to finally answered the question with this. There was also an alternative option, thanks to MBF21's new code pointers. By using A_SpawnObject, it was possible to design a weapon with an actual beam attack, like a railgun from various video games. The result was so satisfying to watch, penetrating tens of zombiemen with no mercy. But there was the same flaw that I encountered with the flamethrower; it wasn't capable of vertical aiming. Besides, it could actually penentrate through solid walls, regaredless of the thickness of the walls. So this idea was scrapped pretty soon. After this, Bauul took charge of designing the new railgun, and I moved on to create other elements, such as monsters and decoration. And he managed to design our brand-new super weapon perfectly. It got a fancy particle effect as a muzzle flash, instead of sprite images. It shoot burst rounds of deadly railgun shots, instead of just a single shot. And it got wider spread, instead of the previous pin-point accuracy. This method not only solved the issue with classic doom's blockmap (if you take a look at the video of the first concept weapon of railgun, one arch-vile actually managed to neglect the railgun shot with proper blockmap placement), but also allowed the weapon to plow the area with low-tier monsters much better than before. As the designer of the new weapon, Bauul gave a new name "Gib Ditcher" to our railgun (it was changed again to Perforator later), and applied a new weapon sprite, designed by Sonik.O.Fan. At first, I was actually against the ammo consumption of Gib Ditcher back then. I was thinking about 50 bullets per shot at least, and increase the ammo capacity of bullets from 200/400 to 300/600, since spending only 25 bullets to kill a baron of hell sounded really overpowered. But I decided to move on, after I playtested MAP31, because shooting a Gib Ditcher around without a serious consideration about bullets was indeed fun.

In Eviternity 2, two notable changes were made to the original custom monsters from Eviternity 1, and you can check out both of them in MAP03. First, Former Captain was replaced to Former Corporal. As you can guess from their rankings, Former Corporal is actually a weaker version of the previous monster. Since Former Captains were basically just a color-swapped version of Changun Elite from Struggle, they received the same complaint; their DPM is surprisingly high for a low-tier monster, so you could lose a bunch of health, if they ambush you from a blind spot without any notice. Former Corporal received some notable nerfs, compare to their superior. Their HP is reduced from 80 to 30, their pain chance is slightly increased, and their projectile is now weaker and slower; from "4 damage/28 speed" to "3 damage/20 speed". They also now shoot projectiles with longer interval, so you should be able to dodge their high caliber bullets easier than before. Also, like ReaperAA mentioned, they drop one armor bonus when they're killed normally, and they drop five armor bonuses when they're gibbed by strong firepower. Since gibbing a group of zombies with rockets is always satisfying in classic doom, I wanted to give a small motivation to the players to spend some rockets against those new low-tier monsters. The second change was about the Annihilators. While I still personally like their original attack pattern, which is basically a combination of two classic boss monsters' attack patterns, many people pointed out that their hitscan attack is really annyoing to deal with, especially when they have lots of hit points. Since this was a common isuue with the Annihilators from Eviternity 1, I decided to give them Former Corporal's high caliber bullet instead, but buffed the projectile's speed from 20 to 32. They still have pretty much low base damage of 3, so just consider them as imp's fireballs with about three times faster velocity. Thanks to MBF21, I was able to put lots and lots of custom projectiles and visual effects for Eviternity 2, so adding an alternative version of one projectile was not a big deal, compare to the classic dehacked. But, I actually had to apply DSDHacked during the development, since we even went far beyond the MBF21's static limits with those new custom elements, like the new trees and bushes. This unfortunately made Eviternity 2 incompatible with the source ports in which don't support both DSDHacked and DECORATE. But we decided to move on, as long as both DSDADoom and GZDoom had no problem with it, and hoped for the best. Speaking of MBF21, the beginning of MAP03 features a new visual effect, falling leaves. This is basically a recreation of Hexen's falling leaves effect, using MBF21's A_SpawnObject function. You can also notice that MAP02 and onward have a fancy raining effect throughout the outdoor area. This MBF21 weather effect was designed by Bauul, who also designed a brand-new powerful weapon, which I'm gonna talk about later.

Here's the list of custom monster's health in Eviternity 2. Major Spoiler Alert to those who haven't played the megawad yet: