Yoshiatom

For this month I decided to something slightly different; I've been wanting to try my hand at making music for a while, so rather than mapping I wanted to try my hand at making some MIDIs for Doom! A while ago in the NaNoWADMo Discord @JustAthel recommended Mixcraft to me for MIDI editing while it was on sale in the Humble Bundle. I've sat on it and a cheap MIDI keyboard for a while but I figured this would be a good opportunity to attempt some actual composition, and since I'm just using MIDI instruments I figured I wouldn't get too bogged down with things like VST parameters. My original plan was to try and replace some of the Doom II tracks I don't like. I'm sure some people will murder me for this but I really think Doom II's OST is a downgrade from the first game's in a lot of aspects. It feels far less atmospheric than Ultimate Doom's and there aren't many more action-y tracks to make up for it. And I don't think there's a single person on Earth who'd associate the track titled "DOOM" with the franchise. But perhaps I'm throwing stones from a glass house since when trying to replace my first target, The Healer Stalks, I was struggling to get the atmosphere I wanted down from the outset. So instead I decided to just attempt to make a song from scratch without aiming for a specific tone or in-game purpose. The tough part for me was figuring out how to make something that sounded like music and not just random keymashing. So I tried to teach myself some ultra-basic music theory. Stuff like chords, beats and measures, percussion rhythm, harmony etc. If there's anything I could pick up from just listening to music, I could hear the "segments" that make up the measures, so I tried to make sure my measures would sound correct as standalone "segments". In addition I recognised how beats and segments would be repeated in a track, sometimes with a new section afterwards. Again, basic-ass stuff. =P I think taking a more "mathematical" approach is how I got something that actually sounded like music, if that makes any sense at all. After about a week I had finished a single, minute-length music track. It certainly could have been expanded and had a rather abrupt ending, but for the first piece of music I ever made, I think I did a pretty good job with it. Once I exported the song as a MIDI I had to face a new problem: The song sounded completely wrong in Window's MIDI playback! The instruments were assigned correctly, but the differences between Acoustica Instruments and GS Wavetable Synth made it sound incredibly muddled. Sure, GS Wavetable Synth is well-known to be crap (the difference between their Override Guitar instruments is particularly embarrassing), but if it didn't sound right in GS Wavetable Synth it probably wouldn't sound much better in superior soundfonts or MIDI synths. Initially I took a trial-and error approach, making changes in Mixcraft and re-exporting it over and over until it sounded better. Thankfully Athel suggested I use Sekaiju to make adjustments to the MIDI file directly after exporting it. I think Sekaiju is too oblique to recommend it for making MIDIs from scratch, but for doing things like changing instruments, adjusting BPM or duplicating tracks for new harmonies, it does the job. After that I made a second MIDI: A replacement for Doom's D_INTRO track. I figured a title track would be fairly quick to make compared to a level song. One thing I ended up struggling with however is since Doom and most source ports don't care about MIDI length and just start the title demos after a hardcoded amount of time, I ended up doing a lot of trial-and-error to avoid getting the song cut off without just upping the BPM too much. Doesn't help the timing's slightly different if the title is being shown after a screen melt instead of the initial boot of the game. If anyone would be bothered to measure exact timings for how long the title demo takes to play, at least one person would appreciate it. ;) I was planing on making more MIDIs, starting with a D_DM2TTL replacement, but I uhh, got distracted? I recently got ADHD meds, while they're making me a lot better at being productive, they don't necessarily make me better at sticking to one thing that is productive. In particular I've been getting around to finally clearing out my room of stuff I don't need and re-organising it. And in the realm of non-productive October distractions, something something Wowie Zowie. Despite my very casual take on NaNoWADMo and low output, I'm pretty pleased with what I came out with and I'm infinitely more confident in my ability to make music now. Really want to have another shot at making chiptune at some point. Both MIDIs are available here if you think they're good enough to use in anything: Yoshiatom's NaNoWADMo 2023 MIDIs.zip There's one other thing I did for NaNoWADMo... As October was coming to close a friend of mine gifted me Tower Unite. After discovering it's kart racer minigame has Steam Workshop support I had a very dumb idea that would involve doing some mapping... You know Doomsday of UAC's famous overturned truck you start out in? How about we make it driveable for the first time in almost 30 years? After painstakingly converting the sectors to be 3D floors so it can be exported as an OBJ, spending far too long figuring about Blender's painful UX and dealing with Tower Unite's 10 texture limit, you too can now confuse your kart racing competition with an ultra-niche reference! Even if I didn't do as much as others, I had a great NaNoWADMo this October. Looking forward to seeing everyone finish/polish up their projects!

There are a lot of useful guides out there on how to make Doom maps, ranging from teaching newcomers how to use Doom Builder, to how to pull advanced engine-manipulating tricks. But I feel like there's much less tutorials on (to put it bluntly) how to design good maps. Stuff like how to make a good map layout, using monsters effectively, knowing when and where to put health, ammo and armor items, general map cohesiveness, etc. I myself think I know well enough how to use map editors, but when it comes to actually drawing out the map itself I find myself lacking direction and feel like I have no clue what I'm doing. Obviously everyone has a different mapping and gameplay style and there's no one-size-fits-all guide for that, but I think some sort of mapping theory guide would help me.

I can't be the only person who entered the exit on accident during the final Baron fight. It feels weirdly unmarked. Overall this was a short-and-sweet map. In some regards it felt like it didn't utilise Doom 2 assests a ton but at the same time it feels like it was designed around the SSG when it comes to dealing with the bulkier monsters, although maybe that's just because the map is part of a larger mapset and the final megawad will have more spread out usage of Doom 2 stuff. Also I didn't find the Cyberdemons too bad to avoid but not being able to see them is a bit annoying. It's a fun time in the end. One thing I am curious to see is if this map gets any changes between this release and SIGIL 2's release, seeing as there's some mixed opinions and feedback here. Although I certainly don't have the nerve to say I know better than John Romero =P

Whenever I Alt-Tab out of or back into Doom Eternal, sound effects (and the Battlemode announcer) in the game stop playing, start cutting out and only play long after the action that was supposed to trigger them happened. Music is uneffected. This only seems to happen if I Alt-Tab; If I always stay focused on the game window audio has no issues. I've tried the following, none of which have worked: Disabling voice chat (which apparently has fixed the issues for other people) Changing my playback device to use 16bit 48000 Hz or lower audio quality (as recommended on Bethesda Support) Using windowed mode or borderless window I'm pretty stumpted as to what could be causing this; the only thing I can think of is the fact I'm running the game off an internal secondary HDD instead of my main SSD. (I'd rather not have to move it over since I don't have a whole lot of space) Also I'm running the game through the Bethesda.net launcher rather than Steam, although I doubt the two would have any major differences EXE-wise.

My biggest problem with the Dark Lord fight is that it just feels like a Super Maruader, but by this point the player has fought a ton of Maruaders and probably has a decent idea of how to fight them well (especially since the Dark Lord isn't long after the double Maruader + Screachers fight in Immora) and the Dark Lord feels like being plopped back into the first Maruader eccounter in ARC Complex, just with some extra attacks. The problem with this is that most of the challenge from the first Maruarder eccounter comes from trying to figure out how even damage the thing and avoid having a ton of dogs thrown at you. The Dark Lord completly lacks this and as result instead of feeling like a nigh-impossible fight until you figure out the combat puzzle it's just a more tedious Maruader on a flat arena. I do have a few ideas on how to make the fight better without radically overhaulling it, since a lot of the posts here are suggesting totally different final fights (although I can't blame them too much). Instead of making Dark Lord's attacks restore his health, give him an armor bar (that's smaller than his HP bar) alongside his HP and have him restore that. That way he'd still mirror the Slayer's abilites but getting hit by an attack doesn't flat-out remove the player's progress in the fight. Make it actually possible to damage the Dark Lord without faltering him. Even the Maruder could be damaged by Frag Grenades and well-timed detonated rockets, so make it possible to shoot him while his shield is down instead of it instantly being raised the moment a single thing hits him. Have his grenade launcher be a weak point that can be shot off, like Revenant's cannons. It would give the player something to do while waiting for the green eyes to come out and give the player a reason to use the Heavy Cannon or Ballista. (The Dark Lord fight is pretty bad when it comes to making use of the player's arsenal; I only ever needed the Shotgun, the Chaingun's turret mode and the Sentinel Hammer) The launchers could regenerate over time and could have more of them in later phases to give the player incentive to take them out. Replace the Spirit Wolves with spirit versions of weaker demons (such as Imps), not only would this make the fight feel less like a Maruader reskin, but you could also summon tougher demon spirits as the fight goes on, rather than the game just deciding "hey let's dump spirit versions of the Hell Knight, Tyrant AND Pain Elemental all at once!" abruptly during the final phase. Have the Dark Lord's shield break after 2 or so phases, and the Dark Lord attack much faster and aggressively afterwards. This way it doesn't make the whole fight waiting on green eyes but it makes the player want to use the Sentinel Hammer just to stun the Dark Lord for a bit and get some much-needed breathing room. Have the arena change after every HP bar, rather than just a couple. Even if the layout stays the same having more environments would give the fight a better sense of pogression, and the fact the Dark Lord fight takes place in it's own level means that it can't be too resource-intensive to add an extra environment or two. Like several other people have suggested, have the arena layout change after each phase. Even something as simple as a flat area with some damaging floors or a more cramped arena that makes use of a meathook point to get around the Dark Lord would go a long way in making the fight less repetitive. (I do think more complex arenas with some verticality would be good though) Make the fodder demons used for farming armor and ammo more interesting? IDK what to do for this one exactly but it felt very repetitive going in circles to get more armor when I needed it. (If the fight got more complex arenas you could put the fodder demons in more interesting and out-of-the-way spots) When the player does a glory kill attack on the Dark Lord that doesn't change the arena, have the Slayer go for the blood punch but get parried quickly by the Dark Lord instead of it just looking like a normal punch. Currently it just looks like you screwed up the glory kill and messed up a phase. Nerf Cursed Prowlers. This has nothing to do with the Dark Lord, but Cursed Prowlers are assholes and nerfing them would probably improve the Dark Lord somehow.

My NaNoWADMo project is done, at least in the sense it's in a releasable state. While I didn't get to my intended goal, I'm pleased I actually have something to show off and I didn't procrastinate the whole thing away. And there's a good chance I'll take part next year, so who knows I might have something bigger and better after this small step.

So I decided to take part in this year's NaNoWADMo in an attempt to properly get my foot in the door with Doom modding, as while I've had interest in it for the longest time I've never really sat down and actually tried to make a map or mod. My inital goal was to try and make 7 maps, then after spending the first half of the month making the first map I scaled down to a goal of 3 maps, and even after that I only got 2 out of 3 done! The end result is a couple-map long Boom-Compatible WAD. Technically it's 4 maps long as there's an unfinished MAP02 and jokey "ending" map in the MAP04 slot, although MAPINFO-compatible source ports will skip the former. DOWNLOAD You may be thinking "why throw this out into the world when it's a fairly barebones state?" the main reason is because I wanted to show what I accomplished for NaNoWADMo rather than disapearing off the site after October ends, and also so I can get feedback on what I have completed so I can avoid making rookie mistakes later down the line. Obviously I would like to continue to work on this, but with October over I have some obligations that are currently more important than this.

I beat Episode 2 yesterday on Ultra-Violence. I ended up marathoning the whole thing in one session because it was longer than I expected (in a good way), here's my poorly organised thoughts on it: The plot is by far the best part of this mod. I'm honestly impressed with much it's engaging me and I'm really curious to see where it goes next how it fully links up with Doom 3's plot. It felt a lot easier to get lost in this episode's levels compared to E1 or unmodded Doom 3. I think this mod could benefit from some kind of way to remind you of your objective (since the PDA isn't a thing in this mod) so you don't end up wandering aimless for ages. I'd say an automap of some kind would be helpful but I imagine that would be prety difficult to implement. Puzzles also felt more cryptic and sometimes dragged on for too long; I'm mainly talking about the moving platform section with the different coloured rails. I got stuck there for way too long. I think the monster variety could be better? Like I was a bit dissapointed that the new monsters such as the Pain Elemental and the Arachnotron only showed up once, and even then some of Doom 3's more common enemies like Maggots and Wraiths felt rare compared to the large amount of Imps, Commandos and Z-Secs. On the technical side, I find it odd the pressing Q to swap to the Grabber doesn't swap back to your last weapon when press again like with the pressing F for the Flashlight. Also some of the reflections in the game act very odd, but this might just be due to my AMD GPU (like how turning Bloom on messes up the FOV). I hope this doesn't sound too harsh; even with my gripes I think the mod is worth playing and I look forward to seeing what Episode 3 has to offer!