bofu

PrBoom+ is no longer supported and has been succeeded by DSDA-Doom, Woof!, and Nugget Doom, among others. There's a new gameplay standard supported by these called MBF21 that significantly narrows the discrepancy between GZDoom mods and non-GZDoom mods when it comes to monster and weapon capabilities, meaning there are more non-GZDoom mods that have significant additions to the bestiary and other advanced features. Doom Retro is a very interesting source port that, while introducing some changes to gameplay, also feels like an alternate evolution of classic Doom. It also supports MBF21. Helion is still in development, but it's a very promising source port that has its own renderer. As for projects you may have missed, one need only go to the Wad Discussion forum to see all the topics made in the last two years. You can also look at the YTubers if channels who play a lot of stuff you may not have heard of (Vytaan is one I highly recommend, as he tends to play things that haven't gotten a lot of recognition, not that I'm biased or anything...)

Nothing should break with going over/under monsters. You may notice an enemy or two escape a monster closet early. Boom Scrollers is the only real crucial setting in the latest GZDoom as it can cause softlocks in a few maps if not set. MBF might be the one I was thinking about.

I think the wad overwrites it via ZMAPINFO, so you shouldn't need to change it.

I believe Default should be fine. I embedded options into the wad itself, but the important pieces are that "Boom Scrollers are additive" is true and that MBF21 features are enabled. In the last stable version of GZDoom, there was a floor movement behavior setting that I had to set due to a bug in GZDoom, but that should be fixed in the newest stable version (not that it will affect you either way).

I have mixed feelings on the Afrit and am not a fan of the Evil Marines thematically (interesting gameplay change, though), but I will make some recommendations, all of which come from the Doom RLA Monsterpack. The Hellstorm Elemental is a Pain Elemental that fires slow-moving portals instead of Lost Souls, which slowly suck in anything unfortunate enough to be close before consuming them into a vortex. It was a definite priority target that could also defend itself by sucking up incoming damage to its portal mouth. At the same time, their attack is easy enough to dodge that you don't need to panic around them as long as you leave yourself some room to dodge. The Hungry are small, very fragile flesh orbs that can spawn in small packs in place of Lost Souls. One in an open area isn't a threat, but they move very fast and chew up your health very quickly if you don't catch them. They're a definite glass cannon, as any amount of damage at all destroys them, but you better not miss it they're charging at you. Finally, and I wish I could remember the name, the Armageddon Mancubus replacement. Instead of fireballs that simply explode, it fires ones that bounce and leave scorching trails, allowing it to fulfill an area denial role. It actually inspired the Cybermancubus I added to Dominus Diabolicus.

Finally got to play some more, and wow, this has made a lot of progress! The only bug I was able to run into while playing through all of Dominus Diabolicus again was an MBF thing: This is fantastic work. I'm going to start putting this through its paces with some other wads and mods.

Apologies for the bump, I had to release one more update which fixes a potential softlock in MAP33, as well as an elevator platform being damaging when it shouldn't have been (thanks @Mr. Meanor for bringing both things to my attention!) The final boss has also gotten a damage upgrade for melee attacks, there's been a very slight rebalancing of MAP26, additional coop-spawn enemies for MAP33, and a potential crash was fixed with the widescreen graphics patch when playing back demos.

I don't do it so much these days because one of the mods hasn't been updated in a while, but I used to do runs with DoomRLA and DoomRPG. I'm back to vanilla these days. Brutal Doom and Project Brutality don't play nicely enough with a lot of stuff released these days anyway.

You could probably workaround the TID thing by using an argument to use a TID mode or a "first found thing in sector tag X" mode via args, if you really wanted to. I love these ideas though and will definitely see what I can do. (Just to manage expectations since there are a lot of other ideas floating around: the draft I'm working on is only for Thing/Weapon behaviors and compflags.)

I think this would be great. I'll have to figure out the math, and it may turn out to be beyond my abilities, but I imagine it would be quite possible to reverse engineer something from the NewChaseDir code or whatever it's called. And that would allow us to perhaps also add a codepointer for simply moving a step in the thing's current direction (or even a relative direction, for sidestepping), no turns required.

I think it's possible, though it might be kind of scuffed. First, you'll want to give the turret thing a very high mass to keep it from getting moved by damage. Then, you'll want to give it an initial spawn state where it keeps calling A_Look. But instead of using A_Chase for its chase frames, you can just give it a cycle of A_FaceTarget starting at its "First moving frame" to make it face its target, and then, after the last A_FaceTarget frame (which will depend on how long you want it to wait before firing), have it go directly to its attack sequence, skipping A_Chase entirely. Have its attack sequence then loop back not to its first moving frame, but to its initial spawn frame. This will keep it from continuing to attack the player after they've left line of sight. It'll require some trial and error, but it should work with enough tweaking. (This should probably go to Editing Questions forum, however.)

Comp settings that I've been able to add (haven't made them configurable in MBF21 yet, though if they become accessible, they will default to whatever the MBF21 behavior was: comp_nohorizontalautoaim: This one was requested by a lot of people. It removes any horizontal aim adjustment from the autoaim of player-fired projectiles, but if a Thing would have been targeted by horizontal autoaim and would've adjusted the vertical aim, the vertical aim will still be adjusted. This will allow for leading shots for enemies at a height different from the player. comp_ssgautoswitch: Fixes a bug in MBF21 where, upon firing the last shells from the SSG, there was a possibility that it would lower and no weapon would raise to take its place. The reason I made these into comp settings is because I think MBF21 could benefit from them being turned on in the future as a user-enabled option (not for demos unless the WAD specifies it in the OPTIONS lump, obviously). I'm able to confirm that the addition of these options, and their consumption, has not impacted MBF21 demos.

I was able to do the following: Add comp_nohorizontalautoaim, a comp setting to disable horizontal autoaim. Has no effect in complevels other than 24 (it could probably be safely added to 21 without breaking anything - just needs to be set to "off" by default). Even though player projectile horizontal autoaim is disabled with this comp setting (which I turned on by default for complevel 24, though it can be overridden), when it would kick in, the vertical component of it still does. This allows you to lead enemies that are higher or lower than you with projectile weapons much more reliably. Fix the bug where the SSG disappears after firing the last shot sometimes. Probably will need to be turned into a compatibility setting, but this one I think should be available for use in MBF21 since the code is already there; it just isn't available. Test MBF21 demo playback against current DSDA-Doom and Woof and eliminate desyncs. Implement and test MBF24 demo recording and playback. Ensure that all new functionality is gated behind appropriate conditionals pertaining to complevel.

From personal experience: if you're making a Doom wad with new Dehacked actors, it's beneficial to make a separate ZScript or Decorate lump (even if a separate wad) to replace them with equivalents, and not too difficult, especially if you used DecoHack to make your DEHACKED. This will help with compatibility with GZDoom mods. I ended up doing this for the final release of Dominus Diabolicus, and I haven't regretted it.