ukiro

I'm guessing you played on GZDoom? Somehow its audio mixer doesn't do the gun's justice the same way DSDA-Doom does, at least to my ears. I haven't bothered digging into why that is—perhaps someone else can elaborate.

In the Eviternity Discord there were questions about how its palette was created. My answer became longer than what's suitable for Discord so here it is in forum post form instead, and I'm posting in the Otex thread rather than the Eviternity II thread for reasons that will soon become clear. While Otex 2 is still quite far off, it will have a major improvement that isn't in the form of the art itself: It enables the use of much more elaborate custom palettes. Eviternity II was the test bed and initial showcase for this. I first made a palette that replaced all 7 duplicates with full bright cyan (yes, the Doom palette actually only has 249 unique colors). I used Slade's color remapping tool to set up a translation table to map duplicates to the first occurrence of the color instead, so now Otex used 249 colors indices. Thanks to the full bright cyan it was easy to scroll through and verify that it had worked—otherwise the cyan stands out very clearly. I then made a new palette where I replaced an additional 11 colors with another full bright (a lime green IIRC, it had to be distinct from cyan for debug reasons). These 11 are technically unique, but are so close to other colors in the palette I deemed them viable for sacrifice. If not for a few odd sprites and special case textures I could have gone further, but I didn't want to visibly degrade anything. And actually I didn't start at 11, but more like 5 or 6. I kept pushing to see what I could get away with, and to my eyes the pain point was at 11. You could definitely go further here but I had dual objectives: Let Otex remain vanilla palette compatible and look as good as possible while also freeing up as much range as possible for additional color ramps. These two objectives are conflicting, so it was a delicate balancing act that led me to 11. I made a new translation table in slade that replaced the lime greens with the closest color to what each of them had originally been. Running this on the entirety of Otex then let me easily verify that no neon pixels remained, and I could begin changing the teal and lime green to the new ramps. So now Otex uses only 238 colors, yet remains vanilla palette compatible. With 18 indices freed up, mappers can add their own custom ranges as they see fit. A drawback is that the changes affect vanilla assets too, which is why (much like BTSX and AA) Eviternity II includes all vanilla sprites in the wad, but with color remapping applied. But, CRUCIALLY: If you don't want to add custom colors to the palette, there is no need to include these assets in any future wads that uses Otex 2. I must point out again that it remains 100% vanilla palette compatible. Otex 2 will not come with a palette in the wad. The warm green range was something I had wanted for a long time. The teal—eviterniteal—that Dragonfly created for the original Eviternity is iconic and has been adapted by wads like Sunder, but it does negatively affect trees and grass in my opinion. So I decided to use 8 indices for this, but have it ramp into less saturation in the darker end so it could use the 4 darkest pale green indices of the vanilla palette, making the ramp effectively 12 indices. This is largely what fed the big focus on tree sprites in Eviternity II and also set the tone for levels like Afterglow's map31 with its new nukage. I also like the super saturated teal we've seen in things like Fractured Worlds. So I used 5 indices for this, much like the 5 magenta we have in the vanilla palette. I set it up so at the dark end it blends nicely with the eviterniteal range (the original green range), making the ramp effectively much wider. Eviternity's original blue is very muted and while often pleasing it did negatively impact the look of the plasma rifle projectiles. So I recolored those as the test use case for the range and really liked the results. We ended up adding back some saturation to the blue range as well, but that was the last change done to the palette after everything else listed here was already implemented. This leaves 3 more indices out of the 18 I'd freed up, and I used those to let dark reds better transition into brown. Here the palette was tweaked in conjunction with the COLORMAP in many iterations to find the right balance. Ultimately this might not have been the best approach or use of the 3 indices, but I think the variety of uses I ended up with—a brand new general purpose color, a standout effect color, and some basic palette improvement—is a good showcase for what's doable, which I hope will inspire others in taking advantage of the 18 indices.

Not sure this solves your issue but I have animated switches in OTEX where only the active state is animating.

https://doom.ukiro.com/otex-downloads/

As the boomer (or at least eldest) member of the team, thank you!

I think it’s more likely we’d release the UDB configs so people can make Eviternity II add-ons. But no promises, we’re still tidying up for a final release.

Thanks everyone for playing! I want to put this into writing somewhere, and this thread feels as good as any: I don't think you need to compare Eviternity II to other megawads, or even to its predecessor. Not saying you can't, of course, but they are different things and playing one doesn't exclude another. A comparison across all of megawad-dom would make more sense in a contect with more constraints: What's the best wad for a Doom newcomer? What's the top recommendation for someone looking for novel takes on Doom's game loop? What is best suited for someone that can only play an hour or two per week? etc etc. As much as I appreciate the flattering comments here, I also want to say that I very sincerely hope that Eviternity II doesn't poison the well for megawads or cause other mappers to feel like their efforts are inadequate. Doom is a million different things, and they don't need to compete with oneanother. I personally want to make something a lot more modest and scrappy next time, because holy hell was this stressful. I don't think I want to give up 1.5 months of salary just to work on a wad anytime soon again.

In case you'd rather read about mapping instead of actually playing the game, I wrote way too much about map36 here: https://doom.ukiro.com/2024/01/29/the-making-of-eviternity-ii-map-36-kenosis/

I started writing down some thoughts about my map but it ballooned to ridiculous proportions so I won't post it in here. Instead, anyone with an unhealthy interest in why/how I built map36 can spend the next half hour or so here: https://doom.ukiro.com/2024/01/29/the-making-of-eviternity-ii-map-36-kenosis/

It's a bit of a curse that I have such a monstrous machine myself, since I can't really tell when I'm pushing too hard, but I'm glad to hear it's still working OK. This is at 4k:

Causing FPS issues is not a specific intent, of course, but an inevitable consequence of the design. Not sure what engine and settings you're running, but try DSDA-Doom in OpenGL mode if you haven't.

the idea was actually hatched before the first eviternity was out: not sure why I wrote refraction instead of reflection. dragonfly then eventually implemented the effect years later after I had somehow managed to talk about it incessantly without actually trying it myself.

May I suggest you test that hypothesis?