MugMonster

made a small change to make to the status bar more legible. trying to decide if I want to take your advice into consideration to improve the look of things. my goal wasn't really to make something that looks super professional, I just wanted to see Doom as-is in this 4-color palette without the diminishing lighting making it basically unplayable. I don't really mind the way the monsters look, messy though they are. I do think some of the health and ammo pickups might need some examining to make them blend in with the environment less. if I were to expand the scope to include redrawing everything, I would just do sprites and not textures, and I would probably go with putting a black border around them all as a simple way to distinguish them from the background rather than dithering.

I know, this concept's been done before. Previous takes, such as the one deathz0r has in the idgames archive, were way too dark, presumably because they weren't intended to be seriously playable, which is the main difference I wanted to tackle. and then there's @NihalRahman123's which looks very aesthetic but isn't intended to be faithful to the 4-color format. earlier this week while watching a dev stream for The Crimson Diamond, a point-and-click game being made with an EGA palette, I got inspired to finally try this. you might be thinking turning the entire palette into 4 colors is quick and easy, and maybe it very well would be if you were already very familiar with Doom's palette, but for me this was a lot of trial and error. I did use Nihal's palette as a base before converting everything, I hope that's alright. to deal with the previously mentioned issue of being too dark, I made the COLORMAP almost entirely the same as the PLAYPAL on every row, which gets rid of the engine's diminishing lighting; well, except for the last layer, I left that black so that sector effects like the dark room at the end of E1M5 would still work, and of course I had to make the invulnerability layer different. one thing that isn't completely faithful is the damage indicator/item pickup flashes and rad suit overlay, however, I tried to make them unobtrusive by tinting the damage pink instead of red, and the item pickups and rad suit cyan instead of yellow and green respectively. also, because of how spectres are affected by layer 6 of the COLORMAP, they were very hard to see, so I put in a dehacked marker that I found in a @plums post to make them visible because I couldnt figure out a way to edit layer 6 that would actually make them look better, no matter what I tried they always looked the same. admittedly this is unsatisfying, if anyone knows something more interesting I could do with them, feel free to make a suggestion. the dehacked is included in the wad, but on the very off chance someone wants to try this in a port that doesnt read internal dehacked files, plums' file is here. but enough blabbing, here's the actual mod! does it look good? debatable!! is it actually playable unlike previous true CGA attempts? it should be, I think! screenshots taken from DSDA-Doom in software mode, though OpenGL mode looks almost exactly the same, only difference I noticed is it handles the single layer of black colormap slightly differently

I'm not surprised they added it quickly, but I am surprised they didnt wait to see if Romero might change some things before adding it, like I know the first Sigil was revised a few times before its current v1.21 state. I guess there's nothing stopping them from updating it if Romero does, but have they updated any of existing add-ons before?

I also started playing this one today. my internet was down this morning, perfect time to throw on a classic of the offline games genre ;) I remember when Romero released E1M4B, people liked how the level kept opening up behind you, and then MyHouse took that idea to 11, but man, this wad was doing that back in 1996! it's quite clever seeing what every switch is gonna end up doing

with the addition of The Troopers' Playground to the official bethesda add-ons, I decided to make a quick (lazy) widescreen pack for it, perhaps in the hopes that @Devalaous will make a QoL patch to go along with it ;) https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/enq8gplx4a355x8eersmo/TTP_ws.zip?rlkey=94o0ec8f9wk19294i4oo4kvit&dl=0

insane theory cooking time (for legal purposes this is a joke) - Tom Hall's Doom Bible, aka the game's original plan, was going to feature numerous characters both selectable and NPC, none of whom were named Blazkowicz. - despite the above, Tom claimed in 2018 that "originally" Doomguy was intended to be a member of the Blazkowicz family, and Romero agreed with him. - again, despite the above, Romero claimed in 2002 that "there was *never* a name for" the protagonist ("because it's supposed to be you!") - in 2009, the Doom II RPG gave its version of Doomguy the name Stan Blazkowicz... now, consider the following: in the game The Stanley Parable, we have a protagonist with a name, who is acknowledged by the game's narrator by that name, spoken directly to as if he is an active entity within the game's world. and yet, he is not an active agent, he can never reply to the narrator, he cannot speak at all. he can follow or defy the narrator, but he does so entirely at the player's discretion. despite his name implying he is a distinct character, he is not a character at all, he is the player. Doomguy has similarly been referred to as both the player and as Stan Blazkowicz. could Stanley of The Stanley Parable also be Stan Blazkowicz? is The Stanley Parable an AU of Doom???

as we enter the last third of October, any chance someone could make some assets for Unloved?

because I want colored marine corpses back Q_Q

huh, I thought the SNES was the best console of the 16-bit generation? I feel like the GBA was also somewhat impressive by handheld standards (sure the Sega Nomad beat it to the punch, but the Nomad also wasn't very energy efficient)

admittedly I dont know much about the 3DO, I guess I just assumed it was a bad console because it has what's generally considered the worst Doom port (though that likely owes more to the rushed, single person, development than to the hardware) and that the PC version of Killing Time is not just better but essentially a different game. but I also didnt realize it was 2 years older than PSX. conversely, I guess I assumed Jaguar was somewhat decent because it produced the Doom port that begat most of the others, and because of Tempest 2000's soundtrack lmao. had no idea it sold THAT badly

Jaguar was more of a failure than 3DO?

I still tend to think of Doomguy as a character, but I agree with this part. the new Dooms may be better video games, but Doom 3's protagonist was a better attempt at redoing Doom's protagonist, having him as simply a single marine in a terrible situation rather than some mythical hero with super armor.

Revolution!'s icon fight is pretty simple, but Revolution in general is a pretty easy megawad

I played through jimmy's Deathless a few months ago, and since then, I kinda forgot all the secret levels were modified versions of Doom 2 maps. tonight I was playing regular ol Doom 2 to test out the Voxel Doom mod, and when I got to MAP05, and I kept expecting it to be harder than it was... where was the Caco and Cyberdemon in the dark room? why weren't the watery tunnels damaging floors? why was I so sure I had experienced this level with those things? I'm well aware of maps that pay homage to other maps, like MAP32 in Plutonia and Doom Zero, but I couldnt seem to rationalize that someone would remake The Waste Tunnels... until of course I did remember lol

an idle thought I had a while ago is that while people have made commercial games from total conversions, using both advanced GZDoom features (Supplice) and vanilla DEHacked tricks (REKKR), so far as I know no one's used the luxury of open source to make a game out of the code itself, the way Hexen/Heretic/Strife were. I guess with everything GZDoom offers it would just be redundant, but I still feel like it would be interesting for novelty's sake