Stethr1

Right now I'm in the middle of replaying Saints Row 2. It's definitely one of my favourite games of all time and probably my favourite open world game. It feels like 12 year old me made my dream version of GTA San Andreas. I just love how dense and detailed it's world is and how memorable each district is. The world honestly feels 10x bigger than it really is. The fact that there's just tiny little mini-games that you can seamlessly enter by just screwing around is awesome. The fact you can walk into a music store, buy songs you heard on the radio and make a custom playlist is something I've always wanted in GTA. It's just a shame the PC version is so completely scuffed. I Have a 5600 and a 3050 and I struggle to get 30fps at times despite the game being over 10 years old at this point. It also just seems to randomly crash with no real warning or reason. It probably has to be one of the worst PC ports out there. I'm convinced that once 360 and PS3 emulators are easy to run for your average user it'll be easier to just emulate it than suffer through this port. Right now I'm playing it with Gentlemen Of The Row installed and a few visual mods that increase the draw distance and darken the nights along with a custom reshade preset I've made. Mostly tweaking the contrast and vibrancy along with Marty Mcfly's RTGI shader to replace the game's own AO and HDR. I think I've found a nice balance between improving the look without pushing the colours too far (I tried not to make the character's skin glow orange for instance).

Gotta give props to them for shooting it on film for some reason.

Probably Megaman X on the SNES is the probably the oldest game I can think of. I can pretty much pick it up at any time and just play through it right up until the last few stages before quitting or getting bored. It's practically a comfort game for me. The original Spyro is another one of those comfort games for me. Whenever I start playing I usually get most of the way through in one sitting. I've always loved the way the OG Spyro trilogy looked, especially the magic Crafters stages. Could just be nostalgia talking but I feel the original games still hold up really well when emulated in HD.

I've been using FLstudio since around early 2016 and haven't really used any DAW since. I have a copy of Studio One 4 but I haven't really touched it much since I'm honestly just not a fan of it. I've been meaning to learn ableton since it's what most of my musical peers use but modern version's lack support for 32-bit VSTs which would mean having to abandon alot of my daily drivers since they don't have 64-bit versions. My gear is a set of 4-inch ave fusion studio monitors that are honestly kind awful but they get the job done whenever I need to check my mixes on speakers instead of headphones. I use a set of DT-770 Pros as my headphones and what I mostly use for making and mixing music with. I have them plugged into a Focusrite Scarlet Solo but before that I had a digidesign Mbox 2 mini that I got from a pawn shop for 15$. It worked well enough but the driver support in windows 10 was buggy as hell so I eventually had to stop using it. I don't use soundfonts much anymore, partially because I can just use Kontakt libraries and spitfire plugins for realistic sounding instruments but also because I've largely moved onto making electronic music (especially trap and EDM) instead of rock and orchestral stuff so they don't really get used much unless I'm trying to make cheesy ps1 game music. I do occasionally use Roland Sound Canvas VA whenever I'm making doom midis though. In terms of other plugins I mostly just use Serum for 99% of synths since it's easy to use and most presets I find nowdays are made for it. I usually use either Vengeance or KSHMR samples when it comes stuff like effects and drums but when I need realistic sounding drums I use addictive drums. In terms of effects and stuff I usually Saturn for distortion, OTT for heavy multi-band compression and an old distortion plugin called drove for extreme levels of distortion.

I've always just used BIGDOOR3 for techbase doors that can only be opened by switches since I've rarely seen it used as a regular door. Other times I've just used bars or some kind of object that works like that. Usually I like to put enemies and/or items behind switch doors so that players will notice that the doors been opened and that that's where they're supposed to go now. I usually like to put them in tight areas as well so that players absolutely won't miss them once they start backtracking. tbh I'm not entirely sure myself how to solve this problem, I've kinda just resorted to letting the level funnel the player to said door and switch as a brute force way around it rather than designing doors and switches that intuitively signal to the player what they are.

I've made several VRChat maps before but most of them were pretty bad and I didn't really know what I was doing so I've since deleted them. This was before the Udon update so making maps was a weird mess using event triggers and trying to work with VRChat weird limitations and quirks. I don't have actually any proper experience with unity so most of what I know about it comes purely from stumbling through the VRChat SDK. The map is really just one empty room that does nothing but look pretty (or at least as pretty as I could make it with my limited experience). All of the models I made myself (using Sketchup or sculptris since at the I didn't know blender) with most but not all of the texture coming from various texture resources (the wood and rock textures being an exception). I only really use it as a homeworld since it's 5mb in size so I can quickly download and load into it and immediately go to another world. I hate waiting for a 50mb world to download on my slow internet just so I can immediately leave it for someplace else. The only other purpose is because it has reflections, real time and baked lighting and light probes is that I can test out realistic avatars and see if they actually play nice with lighting. Alot of popular worlds have borked lighting that goes unnoticed or unfixed since everyone has flat shaded avatars.

Ah yeah, playing without secrets is something I figured out early on. Cheesing my own levels and blocking off entrances is something I didn't think of but really sounds like something I should try. Thanks!

My first taste of doom was probably either Doom 1 or Doom 2 when messing around with a GBA Emulator, but in terms of what people typically call a "source port" it was likely either Zdoom or Skulltag back around 2013/2014.

I never actually knew that Chaingunners could get gibbed until very very recently. Their death animation is already basically them getting gibbed so I never noticed until it was pointed out.

Ah thanks. I'll read through those!

Hi, I hope this is the right place to post this (I'm still kinda new). I wanted to know you guys make your wads more challenging/difficult without making it feel unfair or cruel to the player. I'm asking this partially out of curiosity but I'm also just kinda looking for tips since I often find my maps are a bit too easy for my own liking.

He uses them for eating. The mouth is purely for killing.

Sure!

I haven't really made many textures for doom but here's a couple. Generic brick texture. It's based off a photo I took of some bricks from my old school. I wanted to use it in a wad but ultimately I just used the stock doom 2 textures. Red skybox. Just based off a random photo I took of the valley I live in. (higher res version here) Don't know if this one counts since It's based off an HDRI from Polyhaven but I did modify it somewhat.