The Guncaster - 3.888b

[elCreyo]

Any chance to get a "pistol start" mode, so we can start every level from scratch?

[Rowsol]

Any chance to get a "pistol start" mode, so we can start every level from scratch?

viewtopic.php?f=43&t=61079#p1060800 Get IDCLEVer Starter here.

[MaxRideWizardLord]

There's a sort of funny oversight in Heretic.

In Heretic, if you manage to kill the serpent he's riding on with fire (turning it black) D'sparil himself will also spawn and show up black
https://i.imgur.com/YWnzt8x.png

I've discovered this myself when I played Guncaster Heretic on 4th difficulty on android, I think it's pretty much meant feature. The only thing that did bother me is the fact that the guy didn't automatically vanish over time like the rest of bosses, even though I convince him to be my close buddy and fight npc on my side.

[Rowsol]

Finally got around to trying one of those fancy slaughter wads today with this. Nearly unplayable even with all the toaster stuff turned on. I get that with all the scripts and effects it's going to be rough but if there's something else that could be done to improve performance I'd be all for it. One thing stuck out for it's lagginess and that's the core dreadball. I can fire the green ball all day but if I upgrade to blue balls (lol) and pop a gunzerk my framerate takes a giant shit. I have all enhanced graphics disabled in case you're wondering, like AO, bloom, ect.

Edit: In an attempt to speed up the BFG ball I started to remove some effects from it. By the time I was done I had removed everything and it still lagged. An invisible ball lagged. I am at a loss of words. I give up.

Edit2: Okay, apparently the GLdefs of the core ball is like 90% of the performance hit. I removed them and now I can spam them and stay around 50 fps on a large map whereas before it was in the 10's. I never would've imagined. Oh, and apparently 'dynamic light options' doesn't do shit because I turned off everything in there and they still shine and lag to shit.

I was just killed by my Draugh buddy. I was playing and all the sudden I died and saw "%o didn't think hatred spirits can sport such firepower."

[comet1337]

official robotjoe addon when

[AL-97]

Finally got around to trying one of those fancy slaughter wads today with this. Nearly unplayable even with all the toaster stuff turned on.

I second that problem. Recently, I have tried playing the latest GC through both Stardates, first Combat Shock, Realm Of Demonology and Summer Of '69. All of those have nasty performance problems with framerate dipping into single digits during the most slaughtery moments. You don't even have to upgrade the Old Dreadful projectiles to blue ones, as firing three to four shots in a room with hundreds of monsters are usually enough to bring the frames down to an almost halt. It would be awesome if some sort of a solution to this can be found.

[Rowsol]

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Finally got around to trying one of those fancy slaughter wads today with this. Nearly unplayable even with all the toaster stuff turned on.

I second that problem. Recently, I have tried playing the latest GC through both Stardates, first Combat Shock, Realm Of Demonology and Summer Of '69. All of those have nasty performance problems with framerate dipping into single digits during the most slaughtery moments. You don't even have to upgrade the Old Dreadful projectiles to blue ones, as firing three to four shots in a room with hundreds of monsters are usually enough to bring the frames down to an almost halt. It would be awesome if some sort of a solution to this can be found.

Turn on the toaster modes and disable the lights. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the difference. Here's a quick how-to in case you aren't aware. edit: this isn't needed with 3.5.0, 3.4.1 has a bug causing the dynamic lights options not to stick

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Open GC and then GLdefs.txt. Slade is a good program for this.
Insert /* at the top so it looks like this.

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/*
#include "Gldefs/Hexen.txt"

Scroll down and put */ before the brightmaps

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#include "Gldefs/Artifacts/Strider.txt"
*/
//Brightmaps
#include "Brightmaps/Misc.txt"

Save the changes.
Remove lights.pk3 from your load order.

You're done, play the game. If the wad provides difficulty settings to lower the monsters I'd use them as gzdoom in general doesn't like thousands of guys. I made a sort of work around for wads with too many guys and no difficulty settings.

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Added this

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	Spawn:
		TNT1 A 0 NoDelay A_Jump(128,1)
		Goto Super::Spawn
		TNT1 A 0 A_ChangeFlag("CountKill",0)
		TNT1 A 0 A_BossDeath
		Stop

to the 2 boss monsters (arachnotron & fatso, left cyberdemon and mastermind alone, gotta get those sweet chest drops) and the same thing to all the others, minus 'A_BossDeath'. This just says 50% of the time, when spawned remove yourself from the game.

[AL-97]

Turn on the toaster modes and disable the lights. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the difference. Here's a quick how-to in case you aren't aware.

Thank you, you're right, it is much better. It is interesting though, that using Prism Laser after acquiring that blue upgrade thingy for Old Dreadful still produces low FPS dips. Or even sometimes using the unupgraded version for longer than a few seconds.

gzdoom in general doesn't like thousands of guys

Makes one, I guess, admire all the stuff that goes on under the hood of Guncaster, because the very same scene with the unmodded Doom gives me a stable FPS of over one hundred with occasional dips into sixties. And that is with both brightmaps and lights loaded.

[Rowsol]

I guess I should make another feedback post before 3.2 comes along.

• Molten armor isn't in the shop, why is this when every other syringe effect is?
• The pulverizer spin down gets you into trouble, queueing up a dynamite quick toss only to have to wait for the spin down to toss it. The spin down also causes problems with grabbing barrels. You'll attempt to grab it while it's spinning down, it won't grab it, you'll move too far from the barrel, and then it will attempt to grab it but because you are too far away your weapon deselects and reselects itself, quite annoying.
• While aiming down sights with the Longhorn you can't do routine stuff like switch weapons. Auger might be similar, I wouldn't know I don't zoom with it.
• Your kick reaches way too far. Lowered the projectile speed from 170 to 85 and it's much more sane.
• Barrels take too much damage from kicks/melee, not allowing you to kick it away without it blowing up.
• I wish the ground stomp was more responsive. I'll jump and hold crouch and wait until he actually does it. I've never gotten good enough with it to want to use it much.
• There should probably be a notice somewhere to 'lower your crosshair scaling in the options'. I've seen so many videos of people playing this with giant crosshairs, seemingly oblivious to the scaling options.
• Maybe the Longhorn strat could be added to the ammo spawns like the dynamite so you can actually find it.
• If money sharing is turned off you don't get gold from finding extras of items, it simply refuses to pick the item up. It seems a_givetotarget doesn't work right. It doesn't really matter for single player purpose though.
• The draugh tome only gives you gold if you have in in your inventory already. This is a problem because if you have the draugh suit on and a draugh companion it will give you a third tome, which will be discarded when you start the next level.
• I set my guy up to auto use certain items when I hit a certain health threshold. These include medbag and rejuvcaps in particular. I understand not wanting to automate stuff but maybe a toggle for such a thing would please certain people like myself who don't want to be bothered with such things.
• I try not to mention balance in my feedback but one thing I do want to point out is the BFG spawner. Having a chance at a suit instead of the BFG makes the game easier and creates a big problem if you're playing a map that starts you with a BFG and has nothing but cells on the map, like many slaughter maps. Having the powersuit spawn in 1/40 radsuits is already very generous.
• Megasphere gives 400 armor points when it only gives 200 armor.
• I like using the Tib bomb as a mine but the damn thing bounces so much it makes it hard to put it where you want it.
• Prism Lazer is OP. The intended way of using it is fine, it's OP when you are close to the enemy and use it. You can roast a cyberdemon in less than 1 second and with minimal mana if you are in melee range. If it's initial damage was reduced drastically and increased in power as the beam came together it would make much more sense and not have this problem.
• Longhorn knocks guys back really far. This is usually not a problem. Sometimes you see a propane tank and think, okay I'll shoot this to kill the room, only to find that your shot caused it to be launched to the back of the room where it's now too far to matter.
• How about a gore setting in between off and on, like a half option?
• Having the pulveriser casings do damage creates a balance change when you turn on toaster mode and the casings are removed.
• The Matriarch explosion has too much damage variance. After I boosted monster health I found that sometimes chaingunners could survive a direct hit. All the other weapons are pretty reliable on how much damage they deal.
• Mana drops are too generous. 25/50 is a lot of mana and would really only be suitable with mana regen turned off. I lowered them to 10/25 to match the health pots and with default mana regen have no issues maintaining mana.
• With mana regen turned off the surge boosters are useless, so you'll feel bad if you find one.

I guess that's it. Thanks for reading.

[Zhs2]

• I wish the ground stomp was more responsive. I'll jump and hold crouch and wait until he actually does it. I've never gotten good enough with it to want to use it much.

Hmm, right now stomps are only allowed 15 tics (about 0.42 seconds) after jumping from solid ground. I can lower this a little!

• I set my guy up to auto use certain items when I hit a certain health threshold. These include medbag and rejuvcaps in particular. I understand not wanting to automate stuff but maybe a toggle for such a thing would please certain people like myself who don't want to be bothered with such things.

This shouldn't be too hard to do, though Pillow's opinion is to curb further option overload. We'll see.

• Megasphere gives 400 armor points when it only gives 200 armor.

This is intentional, to represent the fact that Megasphere grants you tank armor-level protection.

• Having the pulveriser casings do damage creates a balance change when you turn on toaster mode and the casings are removed.

A very small balance change. At 1-2 damage per casing, their best use is to stun monsters trying to rip you up to your right. They're a horribly inefficient use of your pulverizer ammo otherwise, compared to just pulverizing things in the face.

[Rowsol]

Well, it's not the damage but the stun of the casings. A guy to your right that should be hitting you, isn't because he's stun locked from a flurry of hot metal.

I've come up with three more things.

• Arbiter shots should probably take more than 1 ammo.
• It would be nice if the recoil scaler affected a_recoil.
• Diamond being worth 20k is quite extreme and even at 10k is still damn good.

[DemonbaneSol]

I don't suppose it's possible to make it so that the Wizard's Eye doesn't get removed between maps within a hub in Hexen, is it? It'd be nice if it would either persist in the map you got it in so you'd still have it each time you came back, or persist across the whole hub if that's not possible/too much of a coding pain.

EDIT: Also, checking out Strife just now with Guncaster 3.1, it gives an error message when I click on Convenience Options under the Here be Dragons menu. It says, "Attempting to open menu of unknown type 'ConvienienceMenu'." This makes me unable to turn off the tilting and stuff.

[MaxRideWizardLord]

• The draugh tome only gives you gold if you have in in your inventory already. This is a problem because if you have the draugh suit on and a draugh companion it will give you a third tome, which will be discarded when you start the next level.

Last time I checked, it gave me gold when I had suit on and companion with me rather than having "third" tome.

I rather it leave this way as it is, because I love to have TWO of draugh tome along with me without a risk of accidently one to vanish because I forgot to equip stealth suit. One for stealth suit, another for companion to fight for me. Unless mod devs decide the user to carry two of draugh tomes along with you, one if you already equip stealth suit unto yourself, I really don't want it be changed.

• Prism Lazer is OP. The intended way of using it is fine, it's OP when you are close to the enemy and use it. You can roast a cyberdemon in less than 1 second and with minimal mana if you are in melee range. If it's initial damage was reduced drastically and increased in power as the beam came together it would make much more sense and not have this problem.

plz no, noooo!!... please leave the spell as it is. It's the only spell that goes somewhere in to the competition of not-upgraded BFG, and I sincerely believe it's initial spiral "charge up" is meant to be "overpowered" up close since you charge it up just to make it perfectly accurate at long range while not-fully charged is good at close range as well. I really like this way, and only because of this I still bother using it rather bfg or other spells since full charge is too much mana consuming and very uncomfortable to use. (especially considering the full charge of 100% accurate beam lag the hell out of my PC)

• I try not to mention balance in my feedback but one thing I do want to point out is the BFG spawner. Having a chance at a suit instead of the BFG makes the game easier and creates a big problem if you're playing a map that starts you with a BFG and has nothing but cells on the map, like many slaughter maps. Having the powersuit spawn in 1/40 radsuits is already very generous.

Suits give you different playstyles rather than just make you "OP", so you end up getting something different and specialized that fits one's taste rather than raw firepower in form of BFG that capable to clean a whole slaughterhouse map in single click of mouse button. Considering I do love to play default games like Heretic with Guncaster on android, which gives you quite a challenge by itself, I find it fair that powersuit and BFG have about same chance of spawn considering that BFG spawner in default Heretic is extremely rare, and I really find powersuit much more fun than old dreadful BFG IMHO. Also, in fact, I wish the draugh tome spawn more frequently considering you need two of these to be full instead of 1 unlike bfg or powersuit.

Besides, if you play on slaughterhouse maps with crapton of enemies and energy cells, what's the point of complaining in first case? You get enough ammo to not even bother about "balance", since you're already get the map full clean by clicking firebutton at walls, causing pretty much everything die in a radius of mile even behind the tickiest walls without even taking any damage yourself.

[PillowBlaster]

There is in-game option to turn off all the lights. If it's not doing what it's intended to do and it worked before (note that's a master switch that should disable all of them) then it means something is borked on the engine side and one should absolutely not resolve to such workarounds. Otherwise, I can't make the performance much better than that. The mod is quite complex as it is, I toned down a ton of particles already, and playing it on slaughters with potato PC's with gldef lights on will bring obvious results. Please take note that my computer isn't really that obscenely strong either, being merely a medium-end laptop from 2013.

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Molten armor -Having so many survivability options now it won't matter whether you can buy it or not. And the fact you can't buy it always makes it nicer to find a one. Regardless, I added it out of an impulse and not sure if I am entirely sold on it; I think something breaks with armor picking thanks to it and I am on the verge of just removing that feature. Unless we'll rework the armor pickups before that.
Chaingun problem -Trying to make a weapon switch viable during that timespan... I dunno, that sounds like invitation to a massive headache. But yeah, that was a thing before, so I probably should get that in again. If it will be doable without me losing my hair (and I don't have much left) then I'll do something about it.
Augur/Longhorn switch -See Chaingun problem. It's related in the coding way.
Kick range -It might be obscenely long, but nothing infuriates me more than crap-short melee options. Will stay as it is.
Kick power -I prefer it exploding when kicked. If anything, I'd rather have it get kicked further and then exploded, but I don't think I can do much about it without making the barrel lighter or die longer for extended velocity applying. (Wish Doom wasn't at times so weird to work with, even if I know most of its kinks, I still learn something dumb on daily basis.)
Aerial stomp -I added foot stomp for that matter if you can't get enough aerial time to use it.
Crosshairs being too big -I am not a babysitter. I try my best to explain things from the mod options standpoint, or make it self-explanatory whenever applicable. But this is one of those cases where I'd leave things to people and let them figure it out cause that's something they can research on wiki/ask or look for answers on forums/ask a friend/look for a solution between mod options themselves, given it's pretty clear it should not look like that.
Longhorn strat spawning -I admitedly forgot about it, was supposed to get in the first place.
Moneyshare problem -For some reason I am using givetotarget instead giveinventory in artifacts\strats cause... well, I probably had a reason I don't remember now; the system prolly changed and I didn't adjust for it. I didn't play with moneyshare off for ages, else I'd notice. It probably carried over to other items as I copy-pasted and didn't pay attention. Will fix that.
Draugh tome picking -Intentional behavior. Sacrifice that money for extra clone if you want one. If you want to convert it to money, just call Draugh back and pick it up.
Autoheal -We'll see about it if it won't prove to be an asspain.
Megasphere armor points -See Zhs2's response.
???? -I... don't get what you are getting at here. You first talk about BFG spawner, then suddenly point out my joke addition which is still very map-dependant, and... what? On the second point, or so I think it is, through all my playthroughs (and I had quite a bit of them, trust me) I could count on one hand how many times I had found a powersuit in place of a radsuit.
Tiberium bomb -It's a foremost a death nuke device. Otherwise, a BFG shot without BFG that you can lob around the corner into the room to wipe it clean (which admitedly can be done with TNT too, but Zhs2 wanted a death nuke for MP so there it is) - being able to pick it up or use as a mine is a last thought on this one, as I did that to mostly be an option to pick it up back again in case it'll end up a dud and increase the detonation chance. I could probably tweak it, but after some plays I found it that mine function is least useful cause I most times end up blowing up maybe three monsters at most.
Prism Laser being OP -Admitedly, it is supposed to have some really obscene damage output, but I didn't notice I fucked up and it got way beyond planned level. I'll see about retooling it. It won't change much, though.
Longhorn knockback -Intended behavior, won't change. That gun is supposed to have a monstrous one.
Gore mid-option -I am diving into the mess that is the gore code only when I really, really have to. Adding mid option would require from me either retooling the whole thing to have a dynamic system or add a state where it's diminished, which would be going through supported iwad times their monsters worth of crap... Not really feeling like it. If someone has an idea for a better alternative that also will work decently (aka not slow down the computer to a crawl even harder like the nashgore does), looks good and won't take ages to implement, I'm all ears. No promises on actual implementation, though, as that would be more tedious than one thinks.
Chaingun casings -The casings seem to have a sizable performance impact at times, so I'd rather remove them altogether and sacrifice a miniscule stunning option than trying to figure out some alternative here.
Matriarch shots -Never felt that was a problem, but will make it more or less stable now, then.
Mana ratio -Nope, won't change. I think mana input you get now is fine. Your regen is crap at the beginning, so is the limit, and later your usage gets stronger anyway, so might as well let the player have it.
Mana regen syringes -Will make them replace themselves with mana cap syringes on mana regen ratio set to zero during spawn time, then.
Arbiter shots ammo usage -Will see about it. Making ammo checks in weapons is a pain in the dick when I have to make alternate check for it in Hexen.
Recoil -Nope, won't change. I removed recoil on revolver and other, lighter weapons and toned it down on the rest in 3.0 that still has it, so I think it's fine as-is right now.
Diamond -You get 20k off Powersuit or Draugh tome. The chest with money is still rare enough as it is, so I don't think I should change that. (If anything I should remove it from nazis, but those are also pretty rare occurance, depending on the mapset.)
Wizard's Eye extension -Not sure if it won't make it too good, especially in strife environment, but I could give it a whirl. I mean, this mod is all about being too good~
Convienience Menu being borked in Strife -I... have no idea why that happened. I only added a space in the definition there and it works again? Well, whatever, at least it was easy fix. #gzdoombeinggzdoom
Draugh killing the player -Not enough info. I need to know what he was using when he killed you as just combing through all his attacks to find a needle in a haystack is not something I look forward to.
Toastsparil -Yeah, that's not what's supposed to happen. I'll see if I can fix it.
Iron Maidens being replaced with Ironblast voxels in Hexen -Its a very long standing bug. Thought I fixed it, buuuut... I guess having voxel named the same as that still caused the same problem, lol. Will fix.
Gold arrow getting stuck -Will page Zhs2 about that.
Iron liches not triggering stuff -Yeah, that I noticed lately while chasing it down in another place, will get fixed.
Firing while being dead -Not sure if I wanna fix that... It's pretty hilarious and harmless in the long run, can't do much while being dead anyway, and might prove to be an asspain to fix. Will see about it.
Strucker on no ammo crash -Yeah, I am a dumbass and copied over the ammo check in wrong place. Is fixed now.

Also note to everyone: Please disclose, whenever possible, what are you loading this mod if something explodes or what personal changes you had made if you made any, at least in any possible relation to some very odd or unexplainable bugs, and check if it still happens with just the mod and particular mapset being loaded. Third party stuff these days is causing more issues than ever, given the complexity of the mods or them overlapping in functionality and breaking stuff.

[Rowsol]

?? -I... don't get what you are getting at here. You first talk about BFG spawner, then suddenly point out my joke addition which is still very map-dependant, and... what? On the second point, or so I think it is, through all my playthroughs (and I had quite a bit of them, trust me) I could count on one hand how many times I had found a powersuit in place of a radsuit.

Well you've gotten very unlucky with spawners because I find them in place of radsuits all the time, sometimes as early as map02. The point I was trying to make is that if you pistol start a level and there's just a BFG and cells on the map, if you get lucky and get a powersuit or draugh tome instead, now you have to finish the map with your fists because you don't have a BFG to use.

You know, on second thought, if you just had a check in place to where the suit could only spawn if you already have the BFG that would be perfect. D4D did a similar thing with it's weapon spawning.

Gore mid-option -I am diving into the mess that is the gore code only when I really, really have to. Adding mid option would require from me either retooling the whole thing to have a dynamic system or add a state where it's diminished, which would be going through supported iwad times their monsters worth of crap... Not really feeling like it. If someone has an idea for a better alternative that also will work decently (aka not slow down the computer to a crawl even harder like the nashgore does), looks good and won't take ages to implement, I'm all ears. No promises on actual implementation, though, as that would be more tedious than one thinks.

Mainly I was just channeling my own change, which was to the blood replacer; dropping the actors spawned when hit from 2 to 1.

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TNT1 A 0 A_SpawnProjectile("SuperGoreBloodTr255", 0, 0, random (0, 360), 2, random (0, 360)); //usually AA here
		TNT1 A 0 A_PlaySound("misc/xdeath2");
		TNT1 A 0 A_SpawnProjectile("Brutal_FlyingBlood", 7, 0, random (0, 360), 2, random (30, 150)); //and here

I think the gore produced when blowing something up is fine. It's just laggy when you shoot a fatso to death with the pulverizer and there's a hundred blood spots on the ground.

Draugh killing the player -Not enough info. I need to know what he was using when he killed you as just combing through all his attacks to find a needle in a haystack is not something I look forward to.

I wish I had more to go on, unfortunately I wasn't recording at the time. I turned around with the auger, killed a guy near me by shooting at the ground, then died less than a second later. Yesterday I had Draughman injure me, with what I can only assume was either the auger or corpseblast because in both instances it was a single powerful blast. It appears he only uses what you have so I'll try and narrow it down today, or until I get bored.

Strucker on no ammo crash -Yeah, I am a dumbass and copied over the ammo check in wrong place. Is fixed now.

Matriarch might have the same issue as I saw

fixed problems with matriarch and strucker causing game crashes with gunzerk

in the patch notes of Dino Nerd's spinoff.