SCF

Another thing I didn't know! What a strange feature that will almost never be noticeable in normal play. I did another run where I simulated stationary enemies by setting their speed to 0, so they're always about 1024 units apart. This is basically what would happen if turret enemies fight. Only 1000 duels this time, but that's more than enough to see the difference. Pinkies were excluded for obvious reasons. At range the arachnotron really becomes dominant over all other normal enemies. Hitscanners in general do a lot worse because some of their pellets will miss (and the cyberdemon once again beats the spider demon every time).

Oh, you're absolutely right, I had no idea about that. They were working correctly, it just looked like they were firing in my direction. I thought I saw some smoke puffs on the wall in front of me too, but that must've been from a zombieman behind him missing. I've updated the tables to include them now.

If you count the baron as a boss monster, then that's right. But the mancubus isn't far behind. Although if the setup was changed to force more distance between monsters (like having a pit in the middle), i imagine the arachnotron would do even better. That's an interesting idea, but it would probably be a hassle to find the right combination for each pair of enemies and set them up correctly so they don't block each other.

Update: Added the Wolfenstein SS We all know enemies in Doom can infight, and that a mancubus is better at killing his fellow demons than an imp. But how much better exactly? How often does a cyberdemon win against a spider mastermind? And is it ever possible for a revenant to kill an arachnotron? I wanted to know the answers to these questions, so I decided to find out. Given that Doom is almost 30 years old, it's possible that someone's done this before, but I haven't found anything like it, and I figured it would be a fun holiday break project. Unfortunately I have no Doom modding experience, and I was worried about putting time into learning scripting only to find out some things were impossible to do. So instead, I just hacked something directly into the dsda-doom source code. This turned out to be a good choice, because the built-in speedup function let me run all the fighting at 50x speed. The Rules Each pair of enemies fights 10,000 one-on-one duels. The duel takes place in a box roughly 1500x1500 units in size. The starting distance between the two enemies was randomly chosen between 512 and 1024 units The starting locations are rotated around the center of the arena by a random angle. This is to smooth out any pathing or other engine quirks*. As soon as one of the enemies dies, the duel is over and the survivor gets the win. If both enemies died on the same game tic, it's a draw. Any projectiles that were still in the air are removed and the next duel starts. * Initially I spawned the enemies right on the X-axis, and if you do that, it turns out a zombieman beats a demon! It will just keep moving backwards and shooting. Funny to watch, but not very representative. To speed things up, I had 30 fights going on at the same, in a huge room separated by invisible walls. It still took roughly 100 hours of in-game time to finish everything. Thankfully that only translated to 2 hours of real time. Here is a screenshot of the test subjects hard at work: Exclusions The following enemies were excluded from the experiment: Spectre - identical to Demons Archvile and Pain Elemental - enemies normally can't infight with them Lost Soul - they lose their target after attacking, which makes infighting weird As a side note, even though Hell Knights and Barons normally can't hit each other with their projectiles, I removed that feature here. Otherwise they'd have to get into melee range to damage each other. I doubt it's going to make much of a difference in what is already not a very interesting matchup. Caveats This experiment was intended to simulate infighting in an open area. In real gameplay, cliffs or obstacles may prevent enemies from getting closer, and some demons benefit more from that than others. I also can't be 100% certain that everything worked correctly. Nothing looked off during testing, but some of the results were not what I was expecting. It could be a flaw in the experiment, but it's also very likely that my expectations were just wrong. Results Here are the main results: Here's how to read this table: The value in each cell is the win rate of the enemy on the left, against the enemy on top. So when an imp fought a shotgun guy, it won 77.27% of the time. There's a couple of things that stood out to me The spider demon had an overwhelming 97% win rate against the cyberdemon! I always thought they were more evenly matched, particularly thinking about Gotcha. I assume it's because the spider demon is weaker at range, and the platforms in Gotcha force them to be further apart. As you would expect, chaingunners are glass cannons. They have a fighting chance against several heavier demons, with a close to even matchup against arachnotrons, but sometimes they'll just die to an imp. Most matchups against the boss monsters were completely one-sided. However, the arachnotron managed to single-handedly kill a spider demon 2 out of 10,000 times! Some of the other really unlikely outcomes are a demon killing a chaingunner, and a cacodemon killing a hell knight (both 0.03%) Also, if you're curious, there were a total of 145 draws, where two enemies killed each other on the exact same frame. The most commonly drawn matchup was between an imp and shotgun guy, where it happened 34 times. Draws were excluded from the results above (basically treated as if they didn't happen). As you can see, there are a lot of 0% matchups, which means that the enemy on the left never won. But you could still look at how close they got to winning. That's what's shown in the following table: What you see here is the highest damage inflicted by the enemy on the left side, against the one on top, as a percentage of total hp. For example, a zombieman never killed an imp, but at least once it was able to do 90% of the imp's health in damage. Some observations: A cacodemon once took an arachnotron down to about 1% health. That suggests that the cacodemon can win, it's just very unlikely. A chaingunner did a respectable 1710 damage to a spider demon once before falling. Fast Monsters What happens if we run the same experiment with fast monsters enabled? The biggest losers are the ss, chaingunner, arachnotron and spider demon. Their sustained damage doesn't increase as much as the other enemies' do. The cyberdemon and spiderdemon matchup flips around completely, with the cyberdemon never even losing more than 65% of his hp. That means the fast cyberdemon never lost to anyone, and it wasn't even close. Besides the cyberdemon, the caco and pinky demon saw their win rates increase the most. Still, I was expecting the pinky to do even better. I guess it's because two or more fast pinkies can easily stunlock an enemy, but one of them isn't enough. They were also at a disadvantage having to get in close first. And that's it! I had fun doing this, and I hope this was interesting to some of you. If you have any suggestions for things to try, I might be able to set up another test.

Thank you, I'll take it as a compliment :D I wanted the map to have some teeth, but I don't think it's close to the hardest submission so far (although it looks like you haven't played the ones I'd consider harder yet). The lower difficulties should be significantly more forgiving. I will say that chaingunning the archvile and praying he gets stunned is not the intended strategy in that room, it's not meant to be *that* unfair :)

I tried it in both dsda-doom and in gzdoom (the first version of the map) and I think it only worked once for me. I assume it has to do with the fact that the teleport lines are on the edge of the platform, but I don't know enough about the engine/complevel specifics to say why that would be the case. I played through the last remaining maps. This should cover all submissions so far. Blueberry Castle by @DynamiteKaitorn Trapped in Remnants (v2) by @RastaManGames Vile Keep by @ryiron

Finished my own entry. I started this map for the previous thread using vanilla textures, and in the end I decided to just go and retexture those rooms to make the map more cohesive. Map Name: Irregular Expression (v1) Author: SCF Theme: Techbase Music: "Wheezer" by Alfonzo Difficulty Settings: Implemented (Exactly 30 monsters on all difficulties) Ports Tested: dsda-doom 0.22.4, GZDoom 4.7.1 Description: 5 small arenas, featuring every non-boss monster (although not all of them on every difficulty).

Ah yeah, I tried that and it worked. I'm not sure I would've gotten that on my own, but I also just don't play puzzle maps. So the problem is that I didn't realize it was a puzzle at all. The setup in the blue key room is much more straightforward because you immediately see what pressing each button does. Crate Processing v2 by @lokbustam257 This map is in slot 28 but it's not mentioned anywhere in your post. I saw that @dac changed the top post to not have map numbers anymore (and they weren't going to be final anyway). I can't speak for the project lead but since the order isn't fixed it's probably easier for playing to just submit every map in slot 1. Tomb of Nephren-Ka by @PinkFlamingo

More maps played: wiltingDryad by @BENCHY Demon Electrica by @Bri Caco by Caco by @Origamyde Pitted Iron by @Obsidian

I would've been on your side, but then I saw A1s' D2ALL run of Stardate 2x07. And really, playing maps one at a time is basically like saving in between maps. I always agree that you should play however you enjoy it, but if you're not beating the entire wad saveless in one sitting- you're missing out on that thrill, that relief, and that accomplishment.  It's almost as if goals are arbitrary and what's challenging/rewarding is different for everyone.

Playing some of the levels posted so far in no particular order: Spider Testament (v2) by @alexsa2015sa Misjudging the King by @Bloodbath Giraffe Paroxysm by @NoReason Rapturous Grief by @myolden

Haven't quite finished the level yet, but after clearing the YSK area I was curious: Anyway, very cool map so far, even if I got lost a few times because I didn't know where I was supposed to go next.

I'm slowly but surely making progress on my map. It should be done before the end of the year at the very least. I wanted to play through some of the other submissions, but I've been struggling with dsda-doom. I normally play in GZDoom, and the controls in dsda/prboom feel sluggish in comparison and I don't really know why. It's a shame because I wanted to record demos as well, but the way it controls is a pain for any remotely challenging maps. From what I read GZDoom should have MBF21 support but it's not listed among the compatibility options. In any case my map doesn't use any new features so it shouldn't be a problem there.

FWIW, that's the first strategy I tried, and it didn't work for me because the hell knight, caco and imps can all hit you from above your view. So it's probably not too strong even without the archvile attacks, but I also gave up on it pretty quickly.

@finnks13: Damn, that map was really mean. You're being assaulted from so many angles at the beginning, having to dodge the pits, hide from the archvile (with very limited ways of doing that), and take out the hitscans all while dealing with the roaming enemies. Some feedback: - The water pit in one of the corners isn't damaging, so it's a softlock if you fall down there - The pop-up shotgunner on the stairs doesn't fit very well. If you run up quickly he'll appear behind you, so I was getting confused at how there was an enemy I missed and kept dying to him. There's already so much else to pay attention to. - The archvile can attack you at the chaingun spot even though you can't see him, because the pillar is barely low enough. I don't know if that's intentional, but it was pretty annoying - I have no idea how you're supposed to do the final fight properly. I found that if you hide in the corner (where the shell box is), the enemies generally can't hit you at all, so you can chaingun the revenant that teleports in front of you and then take out the rest slowly. But that's not a very interesting way of doing it.

@LGmaire: Nice map, feels like a very condensed version of a regular map. A few specific comments: I didn't like the see-through walls in the last fight. At a distance you can't see anything behind them so in my first playthrough I couldn't tell that there were still chaingunners remaining, or where the arachnotrons were (until they shot and killed me). I don't know how much the translucency depends on graphics settings. I'm pretty sure I'm using the dsda-doom defaults. Pretty minor, but I never noticed the yellow key on top of the crates because there's nothing drawing your eyes up there. So when I teleported onto it I didn't even realize I picked up a key, and after the archvile fight I went "Where do I go now? Oh, I got a key somewhere".

@dac I already started working on something after seeing the old thread, so I'm in. The deadline seems very generous for a small map so I shouldn't have any trouble finishing it in time.

Just finished my playthrough, and there's a lot of great maps in there. Just like with the previous set, you can barely even tell that there was a restriction on the mapmakers. Big standout to me was Antares' entry which looks gorgeous and plays well on top. I also greatly enjoyed the hectic opening section of Bridgeburner's map. I'm not a big fan of the custom enemies though, but that's just me. The plasma guy has a similar color scheme as the shotgunner and can deal a ton of damage when you fail to spot one, and the quick flying gargoyle is just annoying. However, the worst enemy is this one. This one right here: I call it the Rocket Catcher 9000.

I figured Sunder map names would work pretty well, and I was right:

On the second level, this guy somehow got himself stuck up here and couldn't get out: And when I tried to line myself up for a screenshot, I fell into this little corner and couldn't get out: By the way, is it normal that the gamma correction can't be changed in the menu? I'm using the executable that came with the Steam demo.

I played through the first level of the demo, and it was pretty fun. I think most of my issues were covered by other people, but here it goes anyway: Enemies are *really* hard to see. Apart from the colors blending into the background, they also seemed to be barely lit in a lot of places. I know this got pointed out a lot already, but it was easily my biggest complaint with the demo. While the blue key was very obvious, with both the green and orange key I didn't even realize I'd picked them up at all until I was looking where to go next and noticed them on my HUD. This is probably because I wasn't accustomed to the pickup icons yet and just mistook them for ammo or something, but they may also not have been placed prominently enough as key items. The Tandems seem interesting as a chaingunner variant you can't just juke by seeking cover for 0.1 seconds, but when you're not in immediate danger, it's pretty annoying having to sit behind a wall for several seconds until they calm down so you can clean up and move on.

Congratulations on the release! It was fun taking part, and there's some great maps in there. I'm playing through the wad, and I ran into a softlock on @Pistoolkip's map. You can fall into the gap behind the crates here and get stuck:

Played up till map 12, great wad so far! Just two things that stood out to me: In map 11, after you grab the yellow key, you can just go back up the lift and sit in the corner until everything's finished infighting. Was that intended? I gave up on doing it the 'normal' way so it was convenient at least. In map 12, if you get the red key before going to the BFG section, that area gets locked until you reach the exit. This resulted in a very confusing gameplay experience as I saw piles of cell packs lying around but nothing to use them with. It ended up taking a lot of saving/loading to get through the remaining fights without the BFG but at least it was possible.

Thank you for your comments and for pointing out the glitches. Seems to be another node builder issue since the geometry looks normal. FYI, the map06 demo I uploaded was recorded on a beta version (which had even less health), so it's not compatible with the final release. Because I died during that attempt, I always wanted to give it another go and record a proper UVMAX demo, so I gave it an hour, and well... I almost finished it, but then I died in an extremely stupid way at the end. 10mm_v1_map06_scf_attempt.zip I tried to play it very safe so I cleared out all enemies before getting the blue key. But since I didn't practice that fight, my plan didn't end up working out. In any case, the first few minutes are probably the most relevant. Once there's enough space to circle around it's just a matter of dodging stray rockets, so as with the first demo I think it at least shows the map is beatable. The first loop around is pretty consistent, but after that it becomes hard to plan a route due to how big a difference enemy infighting patterns make, and every attempt was mostly improvisation. I get blocked my monsters a few times in the demo, but that's usually just "I can probably make it through" stubbornness on my part. There's probably a more optimal way of doing it though.

Trying to get around to playing some of the maps I missed. I think the map is broken. The starting location seems to be where a voodoo doll should be. I didn't play the earlier versions of the map, but this one was fun and I couldn't find any issues to comment on. I'm grateful for the barriers during the platforming sections that keep you from running too fast and falling off. Short map, but very nice detailing on the environment, especially the first area. It does feel a bit anticlimactic even with a cyberdemon at the end, since you're given a BFG and tons of ammo. It would probably help if you had to work for the BFG (like if it was where the red key is). @MFG38 Just a suggestion, if you do another community project where people are assigned a map slot, you may want to put in the OP if people should put their maps in slot 01 or in their designated slot. And if it's the latter, people should probably put the map number in their submissions to make it easier to playtest them. Now that the map order has changed a lot of submissions are in a slot that doesn't match the number in the list, and it takes a bit of work to find them.