Cammy

oh no

Thank you so much, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!! Challenging as it was, that one was a lot of fun to write. I adore BTSX, and getting to work on something comparable to its quality and significance would be a dream come true. If you liked Suplex the Stars, you'd probably also enjoy the track I contributed to Peter's No Rest for the Living MIDI Pack, which is similar in style, intensity, and length! That would be a lot of fun! I've never played Doom co-op before so this would be as good a starting point as any. As far as I'm aware, either of the dates we put forth will work out fine for me. Maybe we could make a private Discord chat/server for everyone who's wanting to participate, and perhaps edit together a stream highlights video for Doomkid's channel after the fact?

Since the thread's been bumped, just a quick progress report: wrapping up a couple other projects and freeing up my IRL schedule a little gave me the foreseeable time I'll need to finish my cell by the deadline. I'm a pretty inexperienced mapper and I've had my eye on other things for the past few weeks, so just bear with me. I'm also working on another original MIDI for this map - priority is on the mapping of course, but the MIDI shouldn't come long after! It's just as eclectic as Pain-and-Paper was, but a bit more chill and probably a bit shorter, just so it'll fit in the vanilla file limit.

While we're pointing out names that need updating, just a couple more accurate names based on thread posts and internal MIDI data: "Shotdown" is "Shot Down", "Imperator Mens Aranea" is "Aranea Imperatrix", "Behold, a God Who Bleeds" is "Behold! A God Who Bleeds", and "Untitled" is "Untitled Is Still Technically a Title" (love that name, lmao). Not to hassle you about it though, you've done a wonderful job making all of this happen. Thanks for everything - it's been a blast!! Can't wait to play Doom 2 again and see how it all coalesced together!

Alright, here's my last-minute adjustment - I made some optimizations and edits to Suplex the Stars. Got rid of a couple bits that were just indiscernible noise, and I rebalanced the audio levels a little. The power kit snare won't blow your brains out of your nose anymore. All my other MIDIs are good to go with the most recent versions I sent you - looking forward to the completed project at last coming home! suplex the stars for the super duper ultra REALLY last time.zip

I actually talked to Doomkid about this - I've had the idea of taking the songs we wrote for this project and applying them to the map slots they seem to fit best in Doom 2 the Way id Did. Could be a nice little bonus package, and I've seen some people in this thread who were confused as to whether this was its own project, or if it was intended to be a D2TWID midi pack. That would even be a good opportunity to let the bonus tracks get used - although we may need a couple new tracks for D2TWID's secret Keen levels.

@STILES You are absolutely free to take a look at my revision - let me know if there are any specific questions you have about it and I'll do my best to help/explain. I'm glad you ended up enjoying the revision, thank you for contributing the MIDI in the first place!

Here we are! I didn't want to mess with the song's core mass too much since it's kinda going for its own thing and pretty far-removed from my usual style, but I did my best to spruce it up - I changed the square wave to a koto as I thought it sounded better, added some drums in the beginning, trimmed unnecessary controller events/fixed compatibility issues, and extended the song slightly for a cleaner loop. Hope this all works. STILES - MIA_rev4.zip

@Lippeth I'm on it - I'll have it brought to a finished state by tomorrow morning.

You'd better believe it! I have some other songs I need to finish up first, but once I'm done and the slot's opened up I'll be prepared for NM100S Pistol Start or Else 2 to be a reality. I've got my eye on a solo claim for this project as well - but again, I'll first need to clear my plate just a bit.

"Respect" might not be the right word because it annoyed the hell out of me all the way through, but Speed of Doom's MAP32 feels like it was meticulously calibrated to the point of human impossibility, only to take one tiny step backwards to become just barely beatable. Only after hours of save-scumming and hoping everything infights like it's supposed to, of course. While I feel I should respect it for nailing down the feeling of impossible challenge, it's a cruel and unusual map by any stretch and I would have much preferred something in the style of its much more enjoyable MAP31. Come to think of it, almost every map in SoD so far (I'm on 16) has been either a total blast or completely terrible and unfun. Weird.

Sunlust MAP20 is harrowing in general, but the tiny enclosed ring full of Barons, Archviles, and a Cyberdemon is an absolutely crushing fight. Stack up with health and armor any way you can before you take that teleporter, because that room will cook you until you come up with a very, very good strategy. Brutal map.

Barons, for being the absolute most boring enemy to fight. If I want to dodge fireballs, I'll fight Imps or Hell Knights, and if I want to dodge really strong fireballs while being scared, give me big guns and throw a Cyberdemon at me. Barons are just damage sinks and it's really difficult to use them right. The most interesting thing you can do is ambush the player with one or two Barons in an enclosed space, because their tankiness and low pain chance makes them really good at applying close-range pressure and scary when they're slowly closing in on you. Aside from that, not much can be done. I also really really hate Specters, especially when they're put into dark spaces. What a dick move. Sorry, but making enemies harder to see isn't a real challenge. In literally any case where you can use a Specter, just use a Pinky instead. If you're Dehacking your wad and looking for enemies to replace, Specters should be first up on the chopping block after Nazis and Keen IMO.

you guys are mean, let the bun marine live (and tear)

If you haven't played it already, I'd strongly recommend The Plutonia Experiment. It can be a tough SOB even on the lower difficulties, but stick with it. It requires you tackle every fight with much more care and strategy than pretty much any Doom 1 or 2 map (except maybe E4M6), and gets you familiar with what every enemy and every weapon can really do. It won't be easy, but you will be a far better player by the end of it, and much more prepared for the kinds of fights that most wads will spring on you. Aside from that, Deathless is an excellent Doom 1 wad with a lot of tight and well-rounded maps - I don't even like Doom 1 combat and I had a blast with it. Both of the Back To Saturn X episodes are pretty tough when they want to be, but they never get crazy hard and would be a pretty good next step up from Plutonia. You could also just play back through wads you've already beaten, but raise the skill level up a notch or two. Wouldn't be getting into anything super unfamiliar, but the new placements and combinations of enemies could take you out of your comfort zone just enough to improve. It's a journey for sure - but ultimately what's important is you play how you want to. Games are supposed to be fun, after all.

That works even better! Great fit for MAP24, love the subdued mood - the echoes add a lot of depth to the sound. Once STILES, Peccatum, and Doomkid finish up their last submissions, we've pretty much gone gold!

@Bucket The only slot remaining open whose completion is not contingent upon one person wrapping up their work is MAP24 - Roofi asked for their midi to be removed and the consensus seems to be that nothing on offer so far has quite fit its atmosphere, so something new needs to be made. I'm going to be messing with some music stuff on my other computer tomorrow and I was thinking I might make a quick start to a Chasm midi based on an idea I had in the shower - if you'd like, I could send the product of that noodling over to you for fleshing out into a fuller song?

Alright, here we are!! Sorry to keep you waiting. I did indeed look to the older version of the song from the 25-mid zip for inspiration more than the recent update - I essentially ended up building a new song using the bassline he laid down there, just with the tempo upped a couple notches. I'm pretty pleased with how this came out, and after a quick playthrough of MAP11 with the song added into the wad, I feel like it fits pretty well!! Hope you guys enjoy it too. Concocting Erinon's Milkshake.zip

It's an interesting discussion for sure - there are songs in here that could have easily been slipped into the original Doom soundtrack without anyone noticing, and there are songs in here (like all of mine, I admit) that are pretty much just their own musical compositions with relatively scant influence from Prince's work. Whether that constitutes a failure, though, is from my point of view a matter so subjective it's not really meaningfully discussable - because even if we were to agree that some songs here weren't Doomy enough, I doubt anybody here would come up with the same list of songs that are and aren't appropriate. I think it's rather late to try and kick everything we've made into line - whether it's Prince-y or not, I believe what we have here is a good and proper midi pack that will enrich future playthroughs of Doom 2 and give the community a new resource of music, so many other key goals of this project have been realized. And either way, in the future I'm sure we'll do a MID The Way id Did for Ultimate Doom; if enough people turn out believing this project's work didn't adhere to the Doom style closely enough, that could serve as a chance to start on a clean slate and make something more in line with it. As an aside, I'm about 60-70% done with the remake of Joe's midi! It will come no later than tomorrow, and a release late tonight isn't out of the question. I understand the confusion (and perhaps unease) around it, so to clear the water, it's not fair to say I truly used the original midi as a skeleton to build on - more that I saw some ideas buried in there that I thought I could refine, so I started on a clean slate with those ideas in mind. I feel awkward saying this after the conversation has steered so heavily in the direction of whether we did Doom's music justice enough, but it's inspired by Rise of the Triad's more jazzy, upbeat, chord-progression-having style. I hope you guys will end up liking it regardless!

Thanks for the heads-up - I'll get started on the Joe remake as soon as I can! Should be done and dusted in just a couple days.

Glad to see this project coming together at last - not much longer to go now, and you guys all have great work to show! Like Doomkid said, I would still like to try building something off of Joe's base - I think with some cleanup and direction it could be used as a more solid launchpad than one might expect. I'm gonna try and solve the two-intermission-theme dilemma, because I think @Bucket's take better suits the intermission formula. I do like the melody and ideas presented by @Gustavo6046's intermission theme, though - this might sound pretty odd but it actually aligns rather closely with the direction I was going to try to take a remade Joe MAP11 midi in. I'd hate for the work to go completely unused, so Gustavo, would you mind if I incorporate Just Another Day into the completed work? (This is, of course, contingent upon Joe being alright with me remaking his midi in the first place.) If this was all to go through then the only slots left incomplete would be MAP06, MAP15, MAP24, MAP28, MAP31, and the text screen. Of those, 06 and 31 are up to Peccatum to finish, and Doomkid has the text screen theme and 15's extension under control himself, being the project lead and all. Since Roofi requested his midi be removed, 24 has completely opened up, which I imagine Bucket would be interested in. I just asked STILES in DMs about how his 28 progress is going. As an aside, @Roofi, thank you for contributing. Learning how to compose is an uphill battle, but the honest effort you put forward to contribute is genuinely the kind of energy that keeps communities alive. If you've taken an interest in music, I'd encourage you to keep writing it! You never know where you might end up.

It's perhaps worth noting that I'm not actually done with Doom Eternal yet (just got to Taras Nabad) so forgive me if any of this sounds stupid, but here's what comes to my mind: 1. Remove 1-ups. Just kill me the old-fashioned way. I'm an adult, I can take it. 2. Remove improved air control as a rune, and just give you its effects by default. In both 2016 and Eternal this was the rune I got first because it alone makes the game feel so much more fluid and fun, and I can't imagine taking it off for any reason whatsoever which basically means I'm only choosing 2 runes I like instead of 3. 3. Why in god's green earth is there a button to switch between Flame Belch and Ice Bomb and a button to fire the selected one?? If there are only two options you're switching between, just have one button to shoot one and the other button to shoot the other. 4. Potentially a hot take, but bring the number of mods per weapon down from 2 to 1. Having such a huge number of options feels more overwhelming than exciting to me, and for almost every weapon there's one mod that is clearly much better than the other (like why would you EVER use Remote Detonate when Lock-on Burst is an option, why would you EVER use Micro Missiles when Precision Bolt is an option, etc.). This is exacerbated by the fact that switching mods mid-fight is a much bigger commitment than just switching weapons, and often yields less significant effects (for instance, if I have the Shotgun with Sticky Bombs equipped and all of a sudden I need to apply sustained fire, I'll never switch to Full Auto. I'll just pull out the Chaingun.), so altogether I barely ever switch mods once I find the better one. I think the Super Shotgun is one of the most fun and intuitive weapons to use in part because it has only a single mod which fulfills a very unique function specifically designed to synergize well with the core weapon instead of having to be held back by being just one of two options, and seeing that design philosophy spread to all the other weapons would trim a lot of fat from the player's arsenal, imo. Obviously this would take a LOT of rebalancing compared to all the points aforementioned, so this would be a full-on sequel thing instead of a "man I wish this slight change was implemented in Eternal" thing, but still. 5. I'm not altogether sure how I feel about Blood Punch; it is undoubtedly useful and there is a fair amount of gameplay content balanced to accommodate for its existence, but it still just feels kinda superfluous to me and I think with some rebalancing it could easily be phased out of the gameplay loop without losing much substantial. Frag Grenade and Ice Bomb are already crowd control options you can use to do up-close bursts of AOE damage; while you're missing out on the instantaneousness of the Blood Punch, I think the timing and spacing and situational awareness required by the grenades makes them more inherently interesting options because it leads to a greater sense of risk that you'll be punished if you don't use them well for their intended purpose. You can just kinda throw out Blood Punch if you're uncomfortable and not much bad will usually come of it.

I'm chipping away at E2 - progress has been slow as I have other projects I'm working on and I'm far from the most experienced mapper, but I intend to hold up my end of the bargain. Good luck to everyone else with their sections as well!

Awesome! Congrats to everyone on the release and thanks to Peter for the opportunity. Can't wait to play through it again and hear everything live!! Can we expect a release on your YouTube channel some time in the future?

For the onlookers of this thread, yes, I did have something to submit ;)