Your Name: Lieutenant John Doom. Your Mission:

[saegiru]

saegiru - HOLY SHIT that hud is FAN FUCKING TASTIC. Wow dude that is just seriously impressive, I'm so pumped BDJ is compatible with it now!! As a thank you I'll definitely whip up an energy pistol replacement. Do you want it to reload or have an overheat function? Maybe an inverse plasma rifle sort of deal where there's no overheat state but it just fires painfully slow if you spam it too much and the heat gets too high? Let me know and I'll get to it. Regarding the ADS sprites, I know exactly what you mean. Unfortunately they are as high up as they can get right now without having a big floating space beneath them, but I actually have some good news about that. Also I LOVE the random names for zombies, a la river city ransom/streets of rage/other beat em ups. That was originally my plan for the healthbars as well but I didn't know how I'd implement it. I think the temperature readings for the heads are a great idea too.

Thanks man, seriously... coming from you that's especially awesome. I really do love BDJ right now... it's been my go to since I found it, nevermind the fact that the intro kicks so much ass it hurts. You had me at "The Power of Love".

I think an energy pistol just like what you described sounds awesome... an overheat similar to the plasma, but based on how fast and long you fire it sounds just about perfect to me!

It took a bit of work to get those damned names to work right, but everything seems to work now... and if I had my own full mod it wouldn't have been so difficult. The fact that I try to keep UDV compatible with every mod I can is the hardest part, because I have to make a custom decorate for any monster I want to have an actual name and not just "Class X Entity", and as you know... almost every mod out there uses a different actor name for their monsters.

One other recommendation I would make is maybe making your difficulty levels a little harder or adding some even higher difficulties? I know I played through Doom:One on 100% damage and barely broke a sweat. I think maybe adding some speed and damage to the enemies on higher difficulties would be nice.... don't get me wrong, I definitely felt the badassery at the 100%, but I almost felt OP a bit.

Can't wait to see the new weapon sprites... and seriously I can't explain enough how much I love the combo system. I actually melee now! I never used melee in the previous versions.

[Patriot1776]

Patriot - I feel your pain, I play on 40% more often than I do 60% now, and I still manage to die fairly frequently. However, at 40% a lotttt lot lot of projectiles/bullets only do 1% damage, so any lower would basically be invincibility. At 25% most attacks do nothing. I thought about adding the baby/easy/normal difficulties back in, but it's really kind of pointless. 80%+ of wads don't even have separate difficulties taken into account--they make a map, and make all difficulties have the same amount of enemies as ultra violence. So most wads you play will be exactly the same on all skill levels besides I'm too young to die, which is 50% damage and double ammo. I basically don't play doom without cheating at least a little bit anymore, cause dying sucks. I have keys bound to god, noclip, resurrect, spawn backpack, tons of things. Buddha mode might be of interest to you, it feels a lot less "cheaty" than god mode.

I've started playing through BTSX Part 2 using HXRTC instead. The uncapped health and armor of it, along with base max health being 200, is a big help, but even then, I've put together a 'revive' alias that not only resurrects, but also gives blue armor and berserk at the same time. Uncapped health and armor if the Brutal V20 code can easily support could be worth considering for evening things out for the player on maps the designer has zero interest in fairness and instead is seemingly TRYING their best to get the player to ragequit intentionally and left so mad they literally smash something in anger after quitting, which from what I can tell by map 12 of BTSX Part 2 is the main intention of the map authors. I mean geez...cheapshot archvile after cheapshot archvile after cheapshot archvile, spawning behind you with lots of other nasties precisely where they need to be to most effective and cause you maximum hindrance and pain and NOT providing soulspheres and armor. Yeah, I'm at the point in that mappack where the authors are DETERMINED to make me ragequit and break something in anger after quitting. I've gotten to the point I wish I had a special weapon to instakill archviles as soon as I see 'em.

[Xanirus]

I'm starting to think that some of the fatality rewards are a little too much, particularly the Cacodemon and Imp ones. Max Shell ammo? A Cacodemon fatality isn't.....that hard to pull off IMO, especially since we can see health bars now so we can judge easily when to charge in and go for the punch; I'm assuming that's why they're there. And Imps give +80 bullets and +20 shells? Imps are pretty common.

Also, if you want some references for my previous comments about monster bodies hurting the player, I was mostly playing Eternal Doom. It seems to happen quite a lot in the first few levels. However, I'm now trying out Community Chest 1, and...either I'm not standing still long enough to get hurt, or bodies don't seem to hurt here. The player teleportation pentagram bug is still here though.

[Woolie Wool]

Would there be any chance for a version that sacrifices fatalities to bring back the green Baron/Hell Knight blood?

[Devianteist]

Would there be any chance for a version that sacrifices fatalities to bring back the green Baron/Hell Knight blood?

Wait, fatalities are the reason Barons/Knights don't have green blood?

[Woolie Wool]

Yes. In the oldest versions of Brutal Doom, the Barons and Hell Knights did have green blood, but this made their blood translate to the player's color during a fatality.

[MisterM]

Just wanted to say that this has rocketed up to the top of my favorite BD versions list. Loving it. I do have one suggestion though: up the follow distance on the ally marines. They're great when you're in combat, running out to engage the enemies, but outside of combat they're clingier than a cat at feeding time and it can be a real chore trying to shove them out of the way in a narrow hallway or corner, and the fact that they're often directly behind you when a fight starts can be really hazardous to your health if you've got a rocket marine with you.

Also saegiru, thanks so much for making a UDV version for this, my doom experience is now at its apex.

[johnny]

Just a quick update post--don't worry, I'll type up a response for everyone whose posted since my last post tomorrow afternoon. I love each and every one of you.

Added the UDV test, the fragnades, and crudux's tweak pack to the OP links so they don't get lost. Also finished the mutator for the old clip-based plasma rifle, and I made a wad with the original BD difficulties restored for those of you who need moar power. K THX

[-Ghost-]

Would you be able to do a pistol start/finite pistol ammo mutator as well?

[Woolie Wool]

While for the most part I really like this and think it's a huge improvement over the regular Brutal Doom, I have to talk about the ADS sprites because...well, they're bad.

The way an ADS mode is supposed to work is that the front and rear sights should be lined up as if the weapon is trained on the target, and the top of the front sight post/blade/bead should correspond exactly to the point of impact (in the case of Doom, the center of the screen). With ADS, you should not need the crosshair at all, your bullets should naturally hit where you place the sights. Also, the front and rear sights should be lined up so that the aim point of the front sight and the "wings" of the rear sight form a straight horizontal line.


This is the ADS sprite for the rifle from my Modes of Destruction mod, taken from a beta of Brutal Doom v19. It is not a particularly pretty sprite but its sights are almost perfectly aligned, which makes using it feel natural.

Now I will draw lines from the rear sight wings to the point of impact, and from the point of impact up and down the front sight post. Ideally these lines should form a perfect cross shape centered on the top of the front sight post. I could take away the crosshair and hitting enemies with this would still feel second nature.


The red night sight dots on the rear sight aren't perfectly aligned but they're very close.


Looking at the BDJ rifle ADS sprite, it's clearly wrong. The front and rear sights are out of alignment and the front sight is well below the impact point. The iron sights of this weapon are useless.


Oh dear, that's very wrong indeed, in fact I doubt it's even possible for sights to look like that--the perspective is all screwed up. The sights are also horizontally off-center but that might be due to the scripted swaying effect (which I don't like, it looks jerky and not at all natural).

So yeah, the ADS sprites need a complete do-over--I don't think a sprite this off can really be fixed.

[Devianteist]

-snip-

Not to be rude, but evidently you haven't read back into the thread: This issue has been addressed and will be fixed in time.

[Max Dickings]

Also finished the mutator for the old clip-based plasma rifle

Woo!

[johnny]

Devianteist - Yeah some are quieter than others, I'll get it sorted out in the next version. I just wanted to get something out there.

ArtVandelay - Thanks for the recs dude! I love that people are actually playing this, this was just my personal version of BD for months and months until I decided I'd try and release it. I showed it to a few of my old doomworld friends in early November and only one of them even played it so I was like yeah well fuck you guys I'll make a zdoom thread!!11

Ghost - Those beefy sounds are pretty good. I'm probably gonna steal some of the explosion sounds for the main version too. There's already like 12 but more MOORRE. Doom 3 weapons/pistol start mutators are a possibility but they'd be a little further down on the priority list. Finite pistol ammo is a no go since I'd have to reintroduce a fist type weapon, and not having one is my BDJ "thing."

Xanirus - The pentagram is actually an item that is spawned that just looks flat which explodes in a radius of 64 for 2 damage every 100 tics. I have no idea what purpose this serves other than being annoying, because Mark had the spawn and death states as the exact same thing continuously looping forever even though the pentagram itself slowly fades away. The getting hit by nothing thing was due to water splashes, which I took care of. Sometimes blood splashes will hurt you too, or flying body parts that look like they're lying on the ground but are actually moving verrrrryyyy sloooowwwllllyyy. There are lots of idiosyncrasies in the code that I just cannot understand the purpose of or logic behind, and those are two of them. A lot of these weird things might be experimental stuff that Mark halfway hashed out and deemed as a "fix it later" sort of thing, seeing as this is based on a test version. For the fatalities, I just added some redundancies that should take care of turning the camera off. The ready state now constantly turns the fatality camera off and forces the player to be able to move. This should also cut down on the downtime between fatality over -> getting back to first person.
The fatality bonuses being too much... yeah I'm kinda with you there. Before I had the bonuses as pretty lame and I wanted to ramp them up to make them worthwhile, and I went over the top to see how it'd pan out. I'm gonna have them all (almost) changed for the next version anyways, cause just ammo and health is boring.

Wivicer - Hahaha thanks man, I spent way too much time on that. Does it sync perfectly for you? Because it should, and I think it actually only syncs right for my slow ass laptop.

Saegiru - Yes!! Power of love! Hahahah I love it. It was between either that or I'm walkin on sunshine, and huey won all the way. Can't beat that keyboard. I know what you mean about the names, I'm sure mine were an extra pain in the ass with all the spaces involved. I uploaded a patch to restore the original BD difficulties if you wanna check that out. I'll probably make the damages go by tens for the next version, and span from 50 - 150% since you're not the only one who said they needed more of a challenge. Ultimate doom is definitely a breeze with how powerful the shotgun is, this mod doesn't really get difficult til you encounter the higher tier doom 2 bad guys. As far as your energy pistol goes, it's coming right up!

Patriot - The health and armor in BDJ actually are already uncapped, and the bonuses give +2 instead of +1. Everything really is set up to keep you alive as much as possible, what with the extra health/armor available through fatalities. Are you using the WASD keyboard + mouse setup?

Woolie Wool - Yeah I could probably do that. I was thinking about making a patch with fatalities disabled altogether for people who just wanted to run and gun and punch faces off anyways. Also I see what you're saying about the ADS sprites--thankfully I'm in contact with the guy who originally made that rifle sprite and he's in the process of reworking it right now, along with my terrible attempt at the shotgun. Next version will have all ADS-related things good to go.

MisterM - Thanks for the kind words dude, I'm glad you enjoy. But yeah I know exactly what you mean, they are always stuck right on top of you or stop directly in your path. I end up killing them to move them out of the way all the time. How would you feel about being able to walk through them altogether? They'd still have collision detection for enemies and walls and stuff, just not you. Also for the next version I'm making the helpermarine rockets into their own separate damagetype that the player is immune to. Them being able to damage the player whatsoever makes them pointless to spawn in the first place.

[-Ghost-]

I'm glad the sounds were able to help! Let me know if you need help finding any other particular sounds and I can poke around a bit to try and find better ones.

[Edward Marlus]

While for the most part I really like this and think it's a huge improvement over the regular Brutal Doom, I have to talk about the ADS sprites because...well, they're bad.

The way an ADS mode is supposed to work is that the front and rear sights should be lined up as if the weapon is trained on the target, and the top of the front sight post/blade/bead should correspond exactly to the point of impact (in the case of Doom, the center of the screen). With ADS, you should not need the crosshair at all, your bullets should naturally hit where you place the sights. Also, the front and rear sights should be lined up so that the aim point of the front sight and the "wings" of the rear sight form a straight horizontal line.

Oh hello. The person Johnny's been keeping in contact with regarding the ADS sprites would be me. I've had time to review your post and insofar as I can see, I definitely agree with the height and impact point being problematic given that the sprites are not dead center in the middle of the screen. However, the perspective issue regarding Rear Sights not being exactly lined up with the Front Sights in my opinion is a subjective matter and one of art style. Either way, I am open to all feedback regarding this concern and would gladly consider redoing the sprites.