Small stuff

[Da Werecat]

==>Texture pack<==

Reconstruction/Decomposition (V4|V4 on /idgames|V2)

Spoiler

Loosely based on a map by mrthejoshmon, and was first released here. Among the changes in the second version are difficulty levels (they weren't implemented the first time), a new TRANMAP, a slightly more useful DEHACKED, and a few minor tweaks and fixes. Some textures were updated. The changelog for the third version is here.

Software rendering is advised, minimal compatibility level is Boom. OGG music support also won't hurt.

The Place (download)

Spoiler

A small map for Battle of the Bits. Since the voting period is over, I thought I'd share the updated version that I made a few weeks ago. The differences include skill levels (as if it really matters for such an easy map), sprite trees, the fact that the exit from the secret area is better marked, and some other small tweaks.

I wanted this map to play as a first map in an episode. In hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea for a map that's actually standalone.

The colored lighting on the screens is the result of using a test version of this engine. But the map is pure vanilla.

Fuck You Revenants (download)

Spoiler

A love letter to revenants. Don't take it very seriously. Oh, and turn the volume down.

This map has no exit.

[Simon666]

The spoilers tag work fine, now, taking a look at your work!

[mrthejoshmon]

Huh, must have missed this when it first went up (sorry about that).

Spoiler

Am I right in saying that the Archvile trap is much more deadly now or is different on UV now?

I say that this is definitely how you do suspense and unnerving terror correctly, I also like the effect the broken down lift causes in the background of the earlier parts of the map.

Also you got me good again with those teleport traps and I knew they were coming :(

[Da Werecat]

Spoiler

UV should play exactly like the first version. It's just that the arch-vile encounters are pretty chaotic in this map. For example, the two additional archies at the end have a few very nice ways of fucking shit up, but they often don't. The basement fight also depends on where are you standing when the enemies are revealed.

[Da Werecat]

Updated the thread with another map.

Oh, and I renamed it. I suddenly had a thought that the words "dump" and "shit" didn't mix well in the title.

[jmickle66666666]

i love those textures

[esselfortium]

Reconstruction/Decomposition is a total masterpiece of a map. Inspiring.

And I agree with jmickle, these textures are fantastic. They look great and have a ton of unique character to them. The map detailing works really well with them too. I love all the little touches and extras you've added everywhere. I've always been impressed when you've posted screenshots, but seeing them in action is a different story :)

[Veinen]

esselfortium said:

Reconstruction/Decomposition is a total masterpiece of a map.

This. Absolutely loved the dark and brooding atmosphere and I was constantly impressed by your attention to little details. Great stuff, glad you bumped the thread and glad I decided to check it out.

The Place was a fine map as well but like you said it's probably a little too simple and easy for a really great standalone release. Still, it looks very, very good.

[jmickle66666666]

ReconDecon was a fucking amazing map. The textures were much more lovely in playthrough and the progression through the map was haunting and incredibly impressive.

I love it

[franckFRAG]

The work about textures is just impressive! Good job :)

[scifista42]

Played "Reconstruction/Decomposition". It looked really interesting (awesome textures!), but gameplay wasn't too great. I really disliked how incredibly long build-up walkthroughs there were. Okay, I get that the map tells a story, but it's a boring, generic, subpar story, IMO. Better gameplay would spice it up alright, but no, you just rely on the textures and realistic shapes. Particular fights were average at best. Faster pistol's animation looked a bit iffy, but I've enjoyed using it. Chaingun's animation looked downright broken. Your implementation of ladders didn't appeal to me, the player has been raised above the floor far sooner than he even reached the wall. I rate the map 2.5/5 for the result, but with admiration for your architecture building skill!

"The Place" was much more bearable thanks to being shorter. I've played and enjoyed it back when you've posted it in the BoTB thread on DW, and commented on it there. Gameplay was still weak and I've considered it a downside, but it was a very nice experience anyway. 4/5.

[Da Werecat]

Thanks for your feedback, everyone.

esselfortium said various stuff

It's especially nice to read such things from you, because when it comes to art, your opinion bears considerable weight to me.

scifista42 said:

Okay, I get that the map tells a story, but it's a boring, generic, subpar story, IMO.

I'll still take it as a compliment, because I didn't even know that it tells a story until now. :)

you just rely on the textures and realistic shapes

I don't. If my setups in RC/DC don't work, they just don't work.

On the other hand, gameplay was almost an afterthought in The Place, because I made it in the course of 5 days - an absolute record for me.

Chaingun's animation looked downright broken.

PrBoom+ with game speed lowered to around 50% or less will prove that it's not broken.

It may look iffy when the framerate is bad, because the muzzle flashes disappear very quickly. Actually, it was the only change.

Your implementation of ladders didn't appeal to me, the player has been raised above the floor far sooner than he even reached the wall.

Maybe I'll shift some vertices around and see what feels more natural, if there's ever gonna be another update.

[Xaser]

I haven't played Recon just yet, but The Place is absolutely muddafuggin beautiful. There's something about the slight abstractness of the layout combined with the quasi-realistic architecture that makes it feel so right in Doom. No idea if that makes sense, but there you go. :P

[Salt-Man Z]

Just played through both of these on HMP. They're both absolutely gorgeous. The Place would make a fine megawad opener, IMHO; on it's own, it's not much of a thing, but as a mood-setter for another half-dozen maps or so? Brilliant. As for Recon/Decom, I haven't had a WAD unnerve me that much since Unloved. Just phenomenal. The finale is maybe a little too easy to avoid with a quick exit dash, but I stuck around for the max kills all the same.

Spoiler

Don't think I've ever finished off a cyber with a chaingun before. :)

[mouldy]

Played both of these, very nice textures! I like the atmosphere of R/D, very sinister. The challenge was mainly from getting caught out in the open by archviles (I just ran from the boss) but the atmosphere and weird random teleports keep the tension going. The Place is quite an easy one, guess it feels like a map01 of a longer thing, but the visuals make up for anything it lacks in challenge. Interesting stuff.

[scifista42]

Why did you make the chaingun's muzzle flashes disappear quickly? I don't think it looks any better than the default.

[Da Werecat]

Xaser said:

There's something about the slight abstractness of the layout combined with the quasi-realistic architecture that makes it feel so right in Doom. No idea if that makes sense, but there you go. :P

Makes sense to me. Although I've heard at least one person complaining about just that. Like, the map looks realistic, but it's not, which makes it feel weird.

scifista42 said:

Why did you make the chaingun's muzzle flashes disappear quickly? I don't think it looks any better than the default.

I do.

Although the main reason it works like that is because I'm usually using various machinegun sprites in my unreleased mods, and they don't look very good with the default behavior. I ported some changes from one of those mods, but decided to not include any new sprites.

[SirBardCat]

this is the best map i have played in like, i dunno, 8+ years? sooooo sick of maps with 100's of enemies, no "vibe" just ugh. i've seen it literally a thousand times. this is such a breath of fresh air. the music, textures, everything was on POINT. I literally jumped when i went to walk out of the red clearance room after discovering i couldn't open that door, and found that surrounding had changed entirely. wasn't expecting it at all! more of this PLEASE!!

I may regret saying this, but also, something that really bugs me is all of the unwarranted, outright malicious criticisms that seem to be the norm here. i dig constructive criticism, but i dunno, maybe phrase your critique in such a way that doesn't sound like you're angry at the person for creating something? but anyway, again, the map is excellent!

[scifista42]

I really don't think that giving unwarranted malicious criticism is a norm here. But in this statement:

SirBardCat said:

phrase your critique in such a way that doesn't sound like you're angry at the person for creating something

You have a point. Speaking for myself, I didn't want my words to sound malicious, and I'm genuinely sorry if they were anyway. I've just attempted to "dissect" the map and make fair points about its various aspects, according to my honest opinion. That's my preferred way to give away feedback, I believe it's the right way (but I realize I can't do it that well). With my sentence "it's a boring, generic, subpar story, IMO" I wanted to stress how much I considered it the map's downside, because I seriously did. So I thought it was okay to use such words, but didn't intend to sound like angry. Sorry if I did, I (actually!) meant it good, I might have just exaggerated my expression.

[kmxexii]

review is up for RCDC, thanks for a fresh experience

[Da Werecat]

Thanks a lot, very interesting.

[Da Werecat]

I've decided to release RC/DC "properly" by uploading it to the archive. Since the archive is a big deal, I've also decided to fix things I wasn't happy with before doing that.

The current version.

V2 was a pretty clean release, as far as I know, so pretty much all the changes in V3 are just cosmetic improvements and not bugfixes. The (more or less) full changelog:

Spoiler

+ Added an "Okay, you can exit the game now" map so the players won't see any stock levels in all their untextured* glory (unless they cheat).

+ Added 3 identical demos spoiling the shotgun secret so the players won't witness desynching** stock demos showing stock levels in all their untextured glory.

+ Added a few new textures that I was too lazy to make at the time.

- The invisible steps are much thinner now.

- The hanging cryopod's cardboard nature can't be seen with Y-shearing freelook anymore. Can't do much for "true" freelook though.

- Synchronized wall and flat parts of the small fan animation. Apparently, it depends on the texture order.

+ Intermission level names.

+ Included my rocket launcher muzzle flash fix, because why not.

- A few spontaneous minor changes here and there.

* Due to the way I build my texture pack.
** Because of DEHACKED.

By the way, the "music" track for MAP02 is lo-fi and has noises. I took it from Quake. Maybe someone knows a good cavernous water dripping sound that cycles well?

[mrthejoshmon]

Da Werecat said:

By the way, the "music" track for MAP02 is lo-fi and has noises. I took it from Quake. Maybe someone knows a good cavernous water dripping sound that cycles well?

The only thing I could think of is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwnu_MzE4xI

And I don't even know if it even loops any good/fits the theme.

[Da Werecat]

Quietly releasing V4 and the texture pack with "proper" documentation. I wanted to wait for the /idgames link for the former, but apparently there's some kind of problem.

The textures are being released separately for several reasons. I decided to remove all unused assets from the /idgames release of RC/DC, and The Place never included them to begin with (not to say there's a lot of them). More importantly, now there'll be a clear permission to reuse the stuff, so no need to contact me anymore. I used the /idgames template for the text file, but I have no intention to upload the wad there, because the place makes frequent updates inconvenient.

The credits are incomplete. I couldn't track some of the sources used, and then I got lazy and sat on the stuff for weeks. Then I decided to release it as is, for now.

Not all the textures are vanilla-friendly. Some of them are crappier than others. I've tried to improve the naming conventions, which means that this version of the texture pack is thoroughly incompatible with everything that was before. The naming conventions still kinda suck though.

[Cupboard]

Oooh I like that orange. Wicked. Goes the distance and ties the rooms together and it's in the sky. The sky is really just the tits. Feels like a dusk event on earth.

[jmickle66666666]

I really really love these textures <3

[axdoomer]

@Da Werecat: I really love your maps and your textures. A while ago, you've post a picture in the Post you Doom picture thread that had the same trees and sky from the picture you've posted here, but you had a custom pistol sprite and a Doom3 machine gun sprite too. I also saw a bus. Are you going to release this one too? It looked very promising.

EDIT: Busses
EDIT2: Machine gun
EDIT3:Pistol

[Da Werecat]

If you're talking about the map, I doubt I'll ever finish it. It was supposed to be the opening map of my partial conversion, but it was barely working under the vanilla limits, and I wasn't happy with the sacrifices I had to make. If I will ever work on that conversion again, I'll probably just shove The Place in the first slot.

If this is about the resources, I think I scrapped the bus at some point because I wanted to redraw it, and I never came around to do it, because I didn't need it. I suppose I can add it back, it wasn't that bad. As for the sprites, I don't think I'll ever use them, so they can be shared to.

[Da Werecat]

Getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

Fuck You Revenants, a love letter to, well, revenants. I got the idea when someone described the major part of The Plutonia Experiment as "fuck you, revenants" (the words "fuck you" aimed at the player). All the skeleton appreciation of late prompted me to actually produce this masterpiece of shit.

Turn the volume down, and don't try to find the exit - there isn't one. Boom + OGG.

[Breezeep]

NO! HOW DARE YOU ATTACK MY BROTHERS!? I WILL HAVE YOU DESTROYED AND AGITATED FOR LIFE FOR THIS, YOU UNGRATEFUL HUMAN PIECE OF TRASH!