Hell-Forged (updated to v1.11 - development paused)

[neoworm]

I generally play Doom in widescreen windowed mode, without the stretching/tall-pixel, so I kinda forgot it was there.

It may work for DooM, kinda. But it definitely don't work for Hexen melee weapons. Original sprites takes the stretching into account and unstretching them makes things like the mace ridiculously stubby. Dealing with the stretched pixels is a hassle, but I think it's necessary.

[Amuscaria]

It may work for DooM, kinda. But it definitely don't work for Hexen melee weapons. Original sprites takes the stretching into account and unstretching them makes things like the mace ridiculously stubby. Dealing with the stretched pixels is a hassle, but I think it's necessary.

Never really noticed. I play in 16:10 for all ZDoom source games. Guess I got used to looking at the sprites the way they appear in the wad files.

[SpaceyStrife]

I gave this a whirl last week, and here are my thoughts:

Pros:

In my 15+ years of playing Doom mods, this has the most authentic looking sprites I've ever seen. The new monster sprites look amazing and blend in perfectly with their vanilla counterparts, and I can understand why so many other mods use them. The best part about it is that even though they were drawn specifically with this mod's more medieval style in mind, they work just as well in more traditional tech settings.

The new weapons look great too, and I appreciate how the arsenal as a whole breaks the traditional pistol-shotgun-chaingun-rocket formula in creative ways and how every weapon retains its functionality throughout the whole campaign without being outclassed by something else later on. You know you're in for a treat when the pistol equivalent shoots archvile flames. The alt fires are a welcome addition too and made it that much more fun to discover which weapons work better in certain encounters.


Cons:

The scarcity of ammo did hurt my first impressions. While Ultra Violence (Grandmaster in this case) is my usual go-to difficulty, I fell back to the easiest setting here solely for the double ammo bonus. (Wheel of Pain's alt fire helps but it's slow to recharge so it isn't always ideal.) Consequentially, the Vorpal Blade feels too cumbersome for how frequently I was forced to use it. Sure, it does more damage at full charge and its alt fire one-shots most things, but to get to that point after using the charge I have to run up and slowly whack at a monster 20 times, which is exactly as fun as punching with the default fists in Doom. 95% of my deaths occurred while using it.

Suggestion-wise, I'd say it depends on what your intention was with the Vorpal Blade. If it's meant to be used more frequently than the other weapons as the bread and butter of the arsenal, I'd love to see it buffed in some way, either by making it a speedier weapon or by allowing players to use the charge attack at any time while scaling the power of the attack based on the amount of charge. If it's meant to be just another weapon that has better use in some situations than others, I think placing more ammo in the stages would help encourage experimentation. These are honestly minor things I could work around with either console commands or continuing to play in Squire difficulty, but it still may be something to think about.


Overall, I'm excited to see how this develops!

[Amuscaria]

@SpacemanStrife: Thank you for the testing, and your feedback is most welcome.

-Ammo Shortage

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There is an options in the ZDoom-based source ports, under Game Options, to double ammo-pick up. Try that on UV and lemme know if the ammo is still too stingy. I balance ammo following 3 criteria:

1) There is enough ammo to kill all monsters, without secrets. This takes into account the amount of Vorpal Blade usage, although I generally add some extra ammo for those that don't want to Hexen-style thru a Doom mod.

2) Ammo is adjusted based on the enemy types found in the map and the generate safe engagement distance. Maps full of pinkies will have less ammo than ones filled with multiple archviles where the players have a higher chance of missing. In general the opening levels have less excess ammo.

3) Later levels will have more and more excess ammo, to allow for more spamming so the player has more fun with the 2nd-tier weapons (weapons that use more than 1 ammo per shot)

All ammo balance is catered to my needs + about 5-10% to compensate for my knowledge of the maps.[/spoiler]

-The Vorpal Blade:

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The Blade is not meant to be a mainstay weapon. It's there to serve as a back-up room-clearing device and as a source of health (charged-up alt-fire melee hit gives back 25 HP). In Demon Eclipse: Episode 2, the predecessor to this mod, the blade only took 10 hits to fully charge, but there wasn't an alt-fire to allow you attack without spending the energy. I added alt-fires and raised the charge count to 20 to compensate. Having a near BFG-level weapon as the 1-key was just too much for me. I might adjust this later.

I will probably make the Vorpal Blade cleave a short distance for its melee attack that increases in cleave damage as your charge up later. I'm not sure how best to implement this except using an A_Explode atm. I might need to reduce the base damage to adjust for this. I'll probably also allow you to alt-fire an energy-wave without having the blade fully-charged.

Thanks again for your feedback. I will do some internal testing on adjustments when school lets out.
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Future Weapon Changes:

-The Wheel of Pain:

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This weapon's healing effect will be adjusted. Right now it cures 1-HP for every hit. Blueshadow was kind enough to write a ZScript that fixes the collision problem arising from removal of the NOBLOCKMAP flag required to make the health-missile pickup-able. But something is still lacking, so I've decided to make the following changes (when time allows):

In addition to 1 HP it heals, there will now be a "regeneration pool". Every enemy you kill will add points to this pool and you will regenerate 1 health per second for every point in it. Points will only be subtracted from the pool when you have missing health, and will not heal beyond 100. The pool has a maximum size of 10. So every enemy you splatter with the AOE effect will now also heal you over time. Monsters give points based on their health (1 point for every multiple of up to 100 health), so Imps give 1 point, while Barons and above give 10. That should make the Wheel of Pain more useful than it currently is (hopefully not too much so).

I'm not sure if ZScript is better for this than ACS; will decide after more research.

-Soul Weaponry & Armored Monsters:

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The Souleater has the +PIERCEARMOR flag, since its intended to attack the soul directly. However this only worked on players, as they're the only actors that can get armor in the game. This will be changed.

The Soul weapons will both pierce armor, and certain monsters will get have their health reduced while given an armor equal amount of armor that saves 100% (effectively giving them the same health to most weapons). If the monster looks like it has armor, it will most likely have it. Any current/future soulless enemies will take reduced damage from soul weapons. This will make the soul weapon type more unique and also give an extra layer of weapon choice in the future. The damage will be lowered slightly to compensate. The following monsters have been adjusted:

►Guardian: 25 Health, 75 Armor. (was 100 Health)
►Draugr: 200 Health, 100 Armor. (was 300 Health)
►Aracknight: 400 Health, 100 Armor. (was 500 Health)
►Sentinel: 1000 Health, 2000 Armor. (was 3000 Health)
►Hellduke: 3500 Health, 500 Armor. (was 4000 Health)
►Director: 2000 Health, 1000 Armor. (was 3000 Health)
►Hellsmith: 4500 Health, 1500 Armor. (was 6000 Health)

[SpaceyStrife]

You're welcome! Thanks for the detailed responses.

I took your suggestion and tried the first three stages of Grandmaster with double ammo:

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- In the first map, I felt an improvement in pacing, to the point where I wanted to go for 100% kills instead of avoiding what I didn't need to kill (particularly that swarm of Cacos at the end). I also started thinking more about how to take advantage of the Immolator's alt fire since ammo for it wasn't as much of a concern as before.

- During the second map, I realized something: Increasing the amount of ammo each individual pickup gives actually suits Hell-Forged's map design well, and I daresay I would prefer it over simply adding more pickups. There are a lot of side rooms and alternate paths in the second map that don't move the player forward but simply reward them with ammo pickups, and with double ammo in place, they felt like a suitable reward for exploring, while at the same time giving enough along the main path to deal with the main monster encounters.

- By the third map, I felt like I was in a pretty good yet tense rhythm: Using the Immolator and Nailgun as my main weapons until I fell below 25% health, switching to the Wheel of Pain to heal, then rinse and repeat, occasionally using the Vorpal Blade for clutch situations. I could rarely stay above 50% health but I never felt like I didn't have what I needed to pull through.

Vorpal Blade, Wheel of Pain and enemy armor:

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What you mentioned about the Vorpal Blade makes sense to me; I figured it was meant more as a backup weapon judging by its situational usefulness. I felt that as my arsenal filled out, it remained useful for wiping out powerful single enemies like Archviles, with the tradeoff being that I have to find pinkies to whack to recharge it.

The Wheel of Pain changes sound cool. While I like the "health missile" pickups, their red color can make them easy to mistake for enemy projectiles in a heated fight. If you find that the new method is a little too good, maybe you could force the amount of ammo you get from the alt fire to always be 1, since it's currently 2 with the double ammo flag active (which I think is reasonably balanced the way it works right now, but if its healing properties in the update are better than they are now then I would certainly keep an eye on that).

Enemy armor is something I'm surprised I haven't seen in other mods, and the idea of armor-piercing weapons almost reminds me of elemental weaknesses. Having soul weapons inflict less damage than non-soul weapons sounds like a good tradeoff for ignoring armor completely, since they would still take down heavily-armored monsters faster. This also sounds like it'll make them perfect anti-Guardian weapons, and the Guardians were something I had a tough time dealing with.

[Amuscaria]

On second thought, giving monsters armor that saves 100% is probably functionally the same, and more cumbersome, then just adjusting their damage factor to Soul damage to the appropriate amount.

[Amuscaria]

Did the Director sculpt this morning. Will converted to sprites after final presentations.

[Captain J]

That Locust-esq legs are totally great and wicked on this one. Looks very slimmer than one of your custom arachnotron sprite! What color scheme it'll have? Full Black?

[Amuscaria]

Looks very slimmer than one of your custom arachnotron sprite! What color scheme it'll have? Full Black?

Grey-black body armor, tan color bones ornamentation, and maybe white or pink-red brain part.

EDIT:
added new version with some bug fixes.

[Tango]

new monster progress looks excellent. looking forward to seeing more

[Amuscaria]

new monster progress looks excellent. looking forward to seeing more

Thanks!

The new Bloodfiend and Devil sprites will be done by next Monday and following weekend, respectively. The boss monsters won't be made into sprites until the levels that need them are complete. The Assembly Line map doesn't require any and will be the next level to be finished. Probably won't get around to that until August.

[insightguy]

I'll be honest, I initially thought those were dainty female human legs on heels and that this monster was supposed to be some sort of meat puppet made of human flesh. Oh well. Cool design anyway.

Also, do you have a guide on how you convert your models to sprites?

[Amuscaria]

Also, do you have a guide on how you convert your models to sprites?

Nope. Kinda still experimenting with that myself.

[Amuscaria]

New Bloodfiend completed. Will be testing for animation issues. Will be included in the next update:

Please don't use these sprites until the next patch.

[Doominer441]

I really like the death animation! Do they have XDeath frames?