New maps, and other projects whose primary focus is new maps, belong here.
Note: This forum, and all forums below it, are not for questions or troubleshooting! Threads created here are for active projects only! If you have questions please feel free to use the Editing subforums or General forum.
Forum rules
The Projects forums are only for projects. If you are asking questions about a project, either find that project's thread, or start a thread in the General section instead.
I'm tagging this as both since I never posted about the original here :-P Download links are near the bottom of this post.
Quick Overview:
Singleplayer only
GZDoom 3.4.x or higher and Doom2.wad
You must include brightmaps.pk3 and lights.pk3, both of which come with GZDoom
dmflags/dmflags2 are both expected to be set to 0
Mouselook is required. I also suggest binding Swim Up to a key (I personally used F during testing).
The hardware renderer is required, and the following must be enabled: dynamic lights, high resolution texture, and 3d models Enabling bloom is encouraged, but not necessary. Shadowmaps (gl_light_shadowmap) can be used as well, but there's some visual artifacts in some places with them enabled since it wasn't designed with them in mind.
No jumping/crouching
Additional mods are not supported. This include mods that may not seem like they would break it, like Beautiful Doom.
Designed for a widescreen resolution (16:9, 16:10, etc) of at least 1280x720
Make sure you enable music
Like my last mapset, Shadows of The Nightmare Realm, the premise is inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. The story takes place many years before Doom 1, and revolves around a man (NOT the Doomguy) who is on vacation and is out enjoying a day of hunting while his wife and infant son are at home. After a long and boring day, he starts walking back to his car, only to discover a ravine that wasn't there before. Feeling an unusually strong urge to find out what lurks beyond the ravine, he jumps down into it and heads out into the dark, foggy forest night. The rest of the story is told in the level itself through additional (skippable) text.
Umbra of Fate an experimental map, where I tried to push the type of gameplay that I personally enjoy to the limit rather than trying to include something for everyone. So expect an emphasis on dark, spooky areas; intense colored lighting; an emphasis on fights with a smaller number of tough enemies; a mix of Quake, Doom 64, and Doom 3 inspired map design; and interesting boss fights. It's also one giant level, conceptually split into four areas that are roughly equal to one level each.
Difficulty settings can be adjusted in the level itself right at the beginning.
The music is all done by me, and is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. If you'd like, you can grab the soundtrack from my website: https://www.partition36.com/discography/umbra-of-fate/
v1.1 Changes (6 August 2018)
v1.1 adds some new options for boss mechanics and performance tuning. The biggest change is that the bosses should now feel a lot less "chewy" and "grindy". Check out the Umbra of Fate Options menu for all the new options.
Full changelog:
Spoiler:
Added an options menu for UoF-specific stuff.
Added a "levels" post processing shader for fine tuning the final picture. Think of it like the Levels filter in Gimp or Photoshop. You can adjust this in the menu.
All water and lava textures replaced.
Added new liquid warping shader for lava and water that's based on Quake's liquid warping code
Area 2's boss now has (optional) new mechanics where he is less chewy. With the new mechanics, he will not go into a sub phase unless you do a minimum amount of damage. There is also a limit of three sub phases. The old mechanics are still available in the options menu.
Changed final boss arena so that there are no longer cages that open. Instead, there are now teleporters on the side of the pillars. This fixes the bug where cages weren't closing.
Reduced final boss's health a bit
The final boss's guardians can now take splash damage
The final boss's guardians have had their health slightly increased
The final boss has new (optional) mechanics. With the new mechanics, he will not go into a sub phase unless you do a minimum amount of damage. There is also a limit of three sub phases. The old mechanics are still available in the options menu.
Removed foggenerator.wad and replaced it with a customized ZScript version. This changes the look of most of the fog slightly.
Removed needless shader attached to the fog that probably impacted performance a bit
Added a menu option to hide all fog things in the map
Added a menu option to hide ground clutter in the map
Added a menu option to lessen or remove some of the messages that get printed during play
Added a menu option to enable debugging output
Reformatted bits of ACS and ZScript code here and there
Lava and water transparency (160 for lava, 180 for water) and scale should now be consistent across the map
Changed texture2D() to texture() in all shaders that used it (thanks _mental_)
Added CVars for all menu options.
ACS code now uses libalexa, an ACS library I recently started.
Changed a few Loop statements to Stop statements in ZScript because I was a derp
Added Doomsphere
Added a modified quad damage sound
Some ZScript source is now in separate files and in their own folder
Added some impassible lines in the cyberdemon boss's area, and moved the health spawn points slightly
Fixed a typo in one of the messages
Umbra of Fate was originally released 1 May 2018.
* Yeah I know about the misaligned skull textures in the screenshots. Those were already fixed :-P
Even after the new update, I can't seem to hit 60FPS in places, even if I turn dynamic lights off. For the record, I always play without texture filtering, multisampling, SSAO, bloom, lens distortion and all the other bells and whistles. The same applies to ZDCMP2, which especially puzzles me, because I've seen gameplay videos of it which were smooth as butter. My rig consists of a GTX970, i7-4790k clocked at 4GHz and 16GB RAM DDR3.
I have a similar system (GTX 960, i7 2700, 12GB ram) and I don't hit 60fps in the initial outdoor area. My FPS does increase with fog and ground clutter turned off, though. I generally hit around 50fps then. That's with texture filtering (which I never turn off), no AA (which I never turn on), SSAO, bloom, and shadowmaps. So while the new settings should help. don't expect a full 60 FPS on systems like ours. In most other places, you should be hitting 60fps like I do.
The update was mostly focused on the boss fights anyway.
I must say that your lighting and architecture are absolutely amazing. All of your maps have a very distinct feel and during my first play-through of any of them I find myself often getting absolutely murdered while staring at some particular area's design that caught my eye. The music and lighting are particularly immersive. As much as I do thoroughly enjoy your customized monsters and gameplay I was wondering if you have any plans on making any maps using only vanilla monsters/weapons/items so they could be played through with various randomizers or gameplay mods?
No, I dont really have any plans like that. When I start a project, I usually have a very specific idea for it, and allowing external mods tends to throw in too many unknowns. It's not that I don't appreciate the work others do, I just have very specific visions for my levels.