holaareola

Due to my computer dying and having to switch to an unfamiliar editor followed by going on holiday -- where my girlfriend will kill me if I sit and Doom map, I'm behind on mine. I've got it playable to the end although there's a real lack of polish from RK onwards. Feel free to edit it, or not include -- I'll be back home tomorrow and will finish if the deadline is extended. Sorry for missing it! Halls of Sleeping Stone wih-map25-holaareola.wad.zip

I respect the French commitment to protest and protecting their rights and way of life, but I suspect the pension situation is an economic time bomb with an ageing population expected to live longer than their forebears. This reality is why IMO, although detested by parties both left and right of Renaissance, the no-confidence votes failed and these reforms will pass. Someone's got to do it, might as well be the incumbent.

Saw a few classic Thief mentions in here, and I'm a Thief lover of some ardour. I remember years ago there was a pretty lively mapping (or Fan Mission by their lingo) scene. Anyone played any standout custom content for them? Harder to eclipse the base game than Doom IMO, but I suspect in any long running game community pre budget gigantitis, the community creations are reaching far above the originals they're building on. I was playing a bit of SOMA rweecently, atmospheric and enjoyable if mechanically a bit bereft as ever with Frictional games, but the plot was compelling -- as ever with Frictional games. But then my laptop GPU died.

Should have mine done over the next few days, I've been slowed down a lot because my PC broke down and I've had to use an old version of SLADE on my work Macbook, which has quite a lot of rough edges. I think a shorter set might actually work better given the central gimmick -- I've had fun playtesting my own map but could see it wearing out in a 32-level dose. I'm aiming to keep my map ~10 mins for that reason. It's a mix of set ups and run and gun. Difficulty is high though, at least for me. I noticed having no health really pushes me towards door hanging, so I removed all the doors. <<map shot removed as it had all the monster locations!!>>

But of course!

Little progress screeny. I'm enjoying how the threat of lost souls in particular is massively boosted by this.

Can I have Map25?

Finished this last week. Great set, I really enjoyed it. Ultra-fun levels which always kept the pace up, greatly helped by the focus on danger over kill duration in the new roster. Even the really highly populated levels never felt like a slog to tear through. One thing I noticed was it had a handmade feel that really gave it a classic charm for me. No major and obvious usage of repetitions / symmetries as have become much more common since UDB offered so many awesome sector tools. It had a sort of analogue wonkiness -- line segments not placed with obvious mathematical precision, weird room shapes. Other fragmentary thoughts since I didn't write stuff down at the time: - Map04 SSG (I think?) ambush in the square area was my favourite in the wad, Really enjoyed it, not sure exactly why. The surprise enclosed->exposed transition maybe? - Outdoor area in Map06 was so cool with the towers of white noise TV screens. The use of the TVs everywhere in general was an effective trope of the wad. - Train level was ridiculously fun. It's a rare setting in Doom, . - Loved the determination of the final map. You will press a switch, you will know what happens next, and you know it will happen even more than the last one you pressed! No deviation. - Finest use of the electrical column I've seen in any wad I can remember. Two examples that stand out. Inspiring. Please don't leave it at just the one episode, I want more!

Nice work ENEMY!!!, thanks for making these available, saves a lot of conversion time. One of the things with texturing in vanilla doom is that typically large scale structures cause a lot of repeats due to the small textures. The GIMP script I've butchered together does a lot of slicing so that e.g. for some of the 512x512 big cliff textures it will dump out eight textures, each of them 256x128 for vertical stacking so you can have 512x512 of non-repeating detail onscreen in Vanilla. It also: - extracts and resizes textures suitable for 64x64 to flats - exports some larger textures to 128 in 64x64 pieces for big flats a la E1M8 tele - slices out a bunch of different bits from the trimsheet textures Two issues. The first is that even with just the first Makkon set (metal, stone and nature) and excluding some colours, it produces ~2500 palettised textures at 52mb. Obvs too big for a vanilla pack. I need to work out a way of making it so that people can choose the colours and sets they want. The other is that I still need to write something that will bundle these up into a wad and assemble the 256x128 patches into 512x128 textures. I remember Slade added scripting support a while back... does anyone know if it supports importing files, constructing textures out of patches etc? Seems a shame to sit on all these great textures when they could save people a lot of manual work.

A wig. Hot damn Doomguy, what the hell is this by-mama's-hands' hairdo?!

Merry antichristmas, OP! //Edit: link YouTube app gave me link doesn't seem to be embedding right - it's a Doom Christmas bauble.

Awesome stuff. The intricate little touches and painstaking texturing give it a sense of place that seems to me quite unusual in the Doom world. - Light fitting design game is top drawer! - The research area design is astoundingly good to my eyes. Those beams are so chunky I can feel the weight only looking at them. - Outdoor stuff a bit flat visually (will always be a problem with large areas in GZDoom until lightmaps I guess) but the design itself is cool with the intriguing and unusual mix of sci-fi / traditional East Asian architectural elements. - The plant sprites and your new textures look great. You mention having posted some of the assets, any chance you'd bundle them together? - The little dispensary cubby textures are amazing. Would never argue against anyone spending less time at a computer, but hope you find the balance and that this or parts of it find its way to us in the future!

Holy moly, E1M7. This is incredible! Tough combat but never grindy and what a sense of place. The haunted base feeling is nailed perfectly, so dark and eerie yet really vivid with the coloured lighting. That techy strip near the first area in the vanilla equivalent was extremely cool. Never seen this effect before, had to open the editor but still don't quite get how it's working. A weird interaction between the pulsing light type and change to brightest adjacent? Struggle to understand how this one is within the visplane, drawsegs and blockmap limits -- feels like it has some of the most expansive areas in the pack but they still look so detailed. The meticulous texturing here is superb and suggests a real weight and solidity to the architecture. A more chaotic and trap-filled character than the maps so far, I enjoyed it immensely. Big map anyway but it took me extra-long to get through because I stopped to gawp so often.

On map 6 atm. It's been incredible. It really pleases me to think that had there been the knowledge and tools this could have been released in '95. Hard to imagine more than this ever being eked out of our humble doom2.exe again. Some parts of this must have been absolute torture to make! Love the ingenuity with all the vanilla FX, magicking bugs into features. The transparent floors are so convincing and gave me flashbacks to the stippling in my first can't-afford-a-gpu experience of Quake 2. The coloured flashing area in M2 is incredibly well done- the careful selection of enemies kept the effect believable, felt like I had a bit of an perceptual illusion with my brain tinting the sprites the rest of the way to the ambient colour. The sum of all these tricks is so convincing, the eye gets used to slopes, transparency and coloured lighting. It's funny, because I remember back in the 90s thinking it was really crappy and hacky when seeing lighting baked onto textures etc. But really, why quibble whether an engine is actually calculating a pattern and colour of light on a surface? What is a 3d game if not an illusion anyway? It's objecting to one trick at one layer and ignoring a hundred others elsewhere. The effect is all. I've really enjoyed the downbeat and haunting reimaginings of the original soundtrack too (E1M4 aside). E1M9 has been my favourite map so far, incredibly atmospheric. But they've all been very fun so far, with a constant stream of enjoyable encounters, cool bits of imaginative architecture and visual design -- somehow so ingeniously packed into the punitive vanilla constraints that it appears to have been made without any constraints at all. Map 6 has certainly been the most sprawling so far, but very intelligently routed around the central control room so that it's remained quite navigable. Bbetween the grim visuals and music, it's very funny too, from the re-enactment conceit to the demon energy -> 120v converter. Plan phase 1: make demons leave. So good! Utterly inspiring stuff, perhaps especially to a vanilla masochist like me. The shield mechanic is surely a dehacked first? Looking forward to playing the rest!

For an early example of the midtex overdraw trick for reflections, check out https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/deathmatch/m-o/mcfearsm from '96. Nowhere near as good as KDIKDIZD though, the recolouring and dithering really sell it.

I think it's a given that you should make your maps completable from a pistol start. By the fact that the game restarts you like this on death, whether or not people load -- and I'm sure most do -- it's a canonical part of the game. Seems to me the real trouble is actually balancing continuous for ammo. Not even one classic-style megawad comes to mind where the demons weren't feasting on every kind of ammunition of my choosing by the midpoint. Outside of a slaughtermap context, the backpack is Doom's biggest design blunder for me.

Seems to me that everyone is sampling. AFAIK, if you suffer a brain injury that severely impacts your memory, you will also have a severely impaired imagination -- creativity is remixing elements of prior experiences in novel ways. Or non-novel ones. You can find derivative art by the tonne that gets sold or incorporated into products that are sold. No royalties for the clear inspirations there either. Can't see why it would be prohibited for Doom add-ons, which will join a sea already bobbing with content snatched directly from other games. Who could do the prohibiting anyway? I absolutely agree with your prediction, although I don't see it as an uncomplicated overall good (that said, in many contexts for games I would agree with you). I am a silly romantic, but I value craft, human vision, human intention, human texture. Moving away even further from one's own physicality and the deep satisfaction of practice, time and the improvement it brings is a form of impoverishment IMO. And those people who want to charge for prompts or call themselves artists, my god. You have the clever fuckers who came up with neural nets in the '40s anticipating computers that did not yet exist, you have the ones who designed these chips, the ones who manufacture those chips and the now-existing computers containing them, you have all those who came up with the various layers of the internet, the artists who painted the art that got digitised and uploaded to the internet, the AI frontier lot that built on the work of those ahead-of-their-time geniuses to develop these neural net image generation models --- and then you have me, an idea guy with some text to pop on top. A speck of dust on the Colloseum. The 'Artist'.

Btw, as you mention playing in DOSBox, the original Blood shipped with an insane bug where damage scaling is inverted after loading a save. Loading a game saved on easy will still have less monsters but with absolutely lethal attacks, whilst the hardest skill will give you gentle hordes. The middle skill is the only one that functions correctly in the game as released, although it's admittedly still fairly hard. In terms of all-round raw fun out of the box, Blood is the best shooter of the 90s in my view.

On Win 11, right click on chocolate-doom.exe, click show more options and then create shortcut. Then right click and select properties on your new shortcut (or highlight it and press alt+enter) and then change the target to something like below: "C:\Games\Doom\Chocolate Doom\chocolate-doom.exe" -file KDiKDi_A.wad KDiKDi_B.wad -deh kdikdizd.deh On Linux you'd start choco with the same args. These instructions assume the zip is extracted into your choco Doom folder.

Not an aficionado of the genre, but Planescape Torment is amongst my favourite games and for certain my favourite RPG of any perspective despite its flaws. The writings, visuals (no tiles!) and world are fantastic, the game's bittersweet end run actually moved me. Can't say more without despoilment, but the particulars of Planescape's amnesiac protagonist schtick really do add layers of emotional weight by the end of the game. Actually, thinking about the visuals, the character art was pretty shite and not up to the level art. Especially weapon-grade-cringe bikini babe with a tail, Ana. OK so stick that on the flaw show, it will have company by the end of the post. The other thing that I always think of when Planescape comes up is how it's the only party RPG I've played (but then -- not an aficionado) with a cogent in-world reason why each of these poor sods will follow you around as all-in-one servant, soldier and donkey. The world is not quite as branching and responsive as Fallout, but the core story and cast of memorable characters are much more engaging IMO. The Ravel Puzzlewell conversation at the game's heart still remains one of my most fondly remembered gaming experiences. But back to those flaws. The combat is whack whack dogshit. Avoiding it is only to the good of one's experience, so I'd recommend a stealth character or maybe magic if you're desperate to intersperse some death dealing into all the traipsing about and reading, reading, reading. There is also a shortage of voice acting, but forgivable considering the ridiculous amount of writing in the game and budgets being what they were at the time. I'd love to try BG but I feel like it's going to be too expansive for the time I have. To anyone who's played both, is Disco Elysium much smaller? DE is another game that sounds right up my alley and I've heard so many good things.

Just took a look at the dehacked file. The fire actually spawns near whatever the archie is attacking as per usual. The random position is achieved by a) giving archie fire a walking speed of -20 and b) most of its burning frames are changed to duration 0 (so they all play within a single tic of the Doom gameloop) and now call the monster chase code pointer. The fire calls this code 12 times, so it instantly blinks up to 240 (12*20) units away, but as the monster chase code is randomised this can vary considerably. Pretty ingenious. If you want to see it in operation, comment out Bits = 536 on line 12 of the file to make the fire visible and then add some duration to the 0 dur fire frames. But yeah, telefragging and sometimes stuck monsters will be an issue. If you're dead set on vanilla compatibility I can see some workarounds: - Telefragging: give the fire some visible frames at the end of its run so the player has some warning to get away. - Stuck monsters: Ensure big bounding box monsters like arachnos and mancubi are never spawned by copy/pasting different monsters into their slots.

The arch vile fire is always spawned a little in front of the player. Linguica mentions making it walk backwards a few frames to allow even more space for the incoming monster. Whatever calls A_SpawnFly must be targeting the fire. He did attach the deh file so you can check it out: https://www.doomworld.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=88055

What crash? If this is a crash, I need a new word for what has happened to my portfolio of actual stock in actual companies that produce actual things. You'll just have to hate a little longer, haters. I'm fairly sure the crash you're praying for will be along at some point. I share your scepticism but will not be praying with you.

Nah, the spawn cube flying code pointer just needs whatever mobj (a mobj is anything that can be placed in a map) calls it to have a target set. The target is used to determine the co-ordinates that the spawnfire and monster should be spawned at. Demon spawner cubes target the spawn spot they are flying towards. Luckily, the A_VileTarget function always sets the fire mobj's target to the player, which is why it is able to call A_SpawnFly to create a monster and not crash. // EDIT: Ah no, wait, that would spawn directly on the player. Also, A_VileTarget spawns the fog targeting the arch vile -- so that's not how Linguica's dehackery works. In any case, you don't need a spawnpoint to spawn a monster. Code in question:

I've seen the bias creep in as political tribalism has taken on an increasingly religious character. But it's an amazing resource nonetheless and there are still many topics that don't attract political energy thank god, so I still donate every year.