The Guncaster - 3.888b

[mutator]

it's almost 12 which is going to be next day, it's going to be released sometime today so keep tracking the mod everyone! very excited, I am sure pillow didn't show all the features of the mod to keep it as surprise! I wonder what else he got in the mod that i am not aware

[SenteyHunter]

Did I win?

[Ts879]

Ahhhhhhh! I can't wait! It's gonna be so awesome!

[barosans]

the update will arrive soon ?

[mutator]

the update will arrive soon ?

yes its today but no exact time

[PillowBlaster]

I didn't specify time so I had enough of that beforehand in case something breaks last minute. Eitherway, 3.0 is out! Hoo boy, that was a ride.


(Special thanks to Slax for thumbnail)

Awright, so this update is kinda big, if you couldn't tell yet. For all the key features, look into first spoiler. For a general changelog, the one below it. I wanna give a shoutout to the Crew(not-tm'ed nor c-righted), aka the humble assemble of folks who occasionally gave me their decent-sized and huge support alike. Without them this mod wouldn't be what it is today. To be more specific, special thanks to KeksDose, Zhs2, Cage, DoomNukem, MartyKirra, and last but not least, Sgt. Shivers. You guise are a national treasure!

Also special thanks to Lt. Blam for finally fixing up that massive gap'o'mine that was lack of a proper replacement for Cauterizer. THAT TOOK A WHILE.

Note that this was most recently being done between 3.3.0 and 3.4.1 versions of gzdoom, so things should work on 3.4.1 for sure.

---

If your HUD suddenly changed - I swapped them in places again because reasons. Mod's main HUD should be normal one, while the lite HUD should be the fullscreen one. Soooo lemme apologize for that. Just mess with the screenblocks (in HUD options, or just press -/=) to get it to your liking again. It's more of a detail at this point and everyone probably was using fullscreen HUD anyway, but... whatever. I wanted to please my OCD.

Draugh, alias Darkpants! Your rather hyperactive shadow clone!... hyperactive, cause he loves to spout a ton of lines one after another when switching or acquiring target repeatedly (note: I don't plan to quote-unquote fix that, cause I find it too damn amusing. If the voices of discontent about it will prevail then I'll consider changing it). Occasionally replaces BFG/Firemace in form of a summoning tome, and through pieces in Hexen oooorrr as a treasure chest loot. He doesn't use all the tricks the player has at his disposal because it would be infinitely maddening for me to do so and maintain afterwards. He still uses a major amount of spells/weapons at the player's disposal, making him insanely useful and powerful distraction, often winning whole fights without you having to raise a finger (which probably makes you wonder "Well, what's the point of even trying at this point?". Well, the point is... I don't care!)

Rewrote the weapons from ground-up, so while most of the bugs got squashed, it probably brought new ones to the table, as I am not an all-seeing eye and my tests can't catch everything. Some minor problems I will probably not ever dare to fix as it would cost me too much effort. Still, this rewrite brought three, key changes:

-Your game "should" load a bit faster now given that I don't rely on butt-ton of TEXTURES files for animation anymore. Nifty! ("Should", because I probably killed any semblance of extra performance by adding another ton of crap in its place~)
-Inbetween single frame interpolation. Mumbo-jumbo aside, this means all guns are even more smooth and pleasant to stare at in action. Remember to oil up. Lavishly.
-Detached weapon functions from each other at the cost of my sanity, meaning that as long as the weapon isn't two-handed at the moment, you'll likely be able to cast, fire off and kick shit into oblivion - all at the same time. You thought this mod is overpowered before? Try tossing TNT's while casting Sheepshield, at the same time!... or tomed knives, which are absolutely broken by default. Go nuts!

Also a thing worth mentioning - for my sanity's sake, I resigned from extra handing wherever I could, sorry for making things more bland in regards of some animations and whatnot. It was just too much of a massive asspain to handle with the new system.

A whole batch of new convienience options! Turn off over the top gore, tone down particles, deactivate recoil, and what have you. YOU'D BETTER APPRECIATE IT FOR ALL THE HELL I WENT THROUGH BY ADDING THAT SHIT, HHHHHHHHHHNNNNNNGHHHHH~

Three new spells! Okay, four. One is a secret, unless you are frequent watcher of my youtube. See if you can find it in the wild!

Artifacts! Just when you thought you are not obscenely OP enough, these overpriced and oddly specific for what they cover in functionality items will give you an edge you never thought you needed.

New shop! Flashier than ever before, as fast as the original one while fixing all the bugs, and adds a silly shopkeeper on top. What's not to love?

---

At first I thought of the shopkeeper to be Korax for lulz; undermining his own sibling, D'Sparil, by selling junk to Cygnis, thus also making himself more wealthy and powerful in the process. But then I realized this won't work in Hexen setting after I added iwad support for that. I've decided to fix it by adding someone closer to the base material, kind of. Say hello to Nithor Flaynithere - flaming deity of anger, passion, and... Cygnis' far and laidback ancestor. A wisecracker slash asshat of absolutely insane power, cause let's be honest - I am a slut for terrible humor and power. Serving as a mere shopkeeper of his own grand-grand-grand-grand-etc.-grandson, among other, not exactly on par to his capabilities efforts, cause... well. He's a lazy prick. He has some sins to pay for, though. He's be the insecapable part of the new shop!

Contacted Yholl at some point and he was keen on getting the DRLA monsters work with this mod. Once 1.1 is out on his side and you'll want s'more challenge - well, that should help in that regard!

If you think that's all of the good stuff!... that's where you're wrong, bucko, for I contacted the local Strife-compat Guru, Amv2k9, and with our combined effort (95% his effort so all the props go to him~) got this shit to work with Strife, from start till the very end!... Or so I hope. Things might break on the way, plus there was a problem with replacing blown-up transmitter token, which we sadly weren't able to fix. But other than that, it works! (Of course be warned that while I did test it and all, there are probably some unforseen problems, I can only spot so much during two-three entire playthroughs. I can't also guarantee I'll be able to fix them all. Strife is a really, reaaally tiresome one to work with...)

Another note is that Gzdoom support for Strife's veteran edition has been added some time ago. The Strife-compat wasn't tested nor covered with that one in mind, so you play with it at your own risk. It most likely will work, just all the new bits that have been added there aren't covered.

And last but not least - I quote-unquote hired a rather dedicated fan of my work (who woulda think) and by our combined effort (mostly his though, I was more of an advisor here, but I did have to work on it a bit myself to fit with the rest of weapons and perform a lot of tweaks) here comes a treat that all you lot have been waiting four years for, myself included - the "Augur" AMR, pinnacle of railgun technology. Principle-wise, it's the same as Cauterizer, except shorter on ammo and it can't dish out as many shots in a row. To compensate for that - it has tremendous firepower and can succesfully annihilate rows of enemies in one shot. And if that's not enough, with a stratocaster on, it can see and shoot enemies through walls! Talk about 'farsight!' [/kneeslap]

---

-Added the Draugh.
-Added spells: Apocalypse, Darkpath, Hammersmite... and something else. You'll know what if you watch my youtube videos.
-Added artifacts!
-Added items: Tiberium Bomb.
-Added Toaster Mode/No Gore options! For all you who's computers are less than on par with standards or are simply dealing with some slaughterfest bullshit. I generally tweaked particles in a whoooole lot of places, so it should work better. Kinda.
-Returned to the time-only based Frostbite/Lead Ball projectile, as both seemed hella unreliable lately. Bumped it's price and lowered non-tomed mana cost by 5. I hope their projectiles won't get stuck in map geometry for eternity again... Or even worse, crash the game.
-Added lights/brightmaps to strat boxes. Also fixed Pulverizer strat box color, and the Matriarch strat particle color. How I could not notice that I was halfway done with it, forgot about it completely and it was missing from the game this whole time, geezus.
-I removed the gldefs on the money pickups. They made it way easier to spot the gold, but it had waaaaay too much of an impact on performance. I might re-add them once I figure out a better way to handle it. To compensate for that as a last minute decision, I scaled up the gold pickups and you get a money radar while using Dergovision. Talk about having dragon's nose for gold!
-Added a voxel for possessed shotgun. Sadly I can't change its pitch, so it can't be raised like it does with sprite. But it still looks nice. Also added to it some extra movement. (If you wish to return to sprites, just type r_drawvoxels 0 in the console.)
-Added Cyg's face wearing suits for mugshots. After such long time, I've figured there's actually a non-invasive method for it. (Which is also apparently deprecated. Something so freaking useful as changing mugshots on a fly. Great. Like, fucking fantastic, thanks for that! That being said, not like entire sbarinfo is ditched at this point, but since I can't into zscript HUDs, this will do.)
-Added Footstomp attack! Backwards + kick triggers what could be described as stomp without jumping into the air. While useful to take out unuspecting popcorn enemies or while being surrounded by them, it makes you vulnerable by wind-up time and being unable to move, so user's caution is advised. It also has a brief cooldown before you can use it again. Generally, if you have space to use regular stomp, use it instead.
-Added uppercut. It works same way as footstomp, except its crouch + punch. It has no cooldown and sends enemies flying away, but be wary of you slowing yourself down with it and being generally slower option, requiring from you just a pinch of precision. It has practically higher knockback than the kick, but doesn't do any damage towards monsters around impact zone.
-Speaking of all those melee attacks - it'd be worth mentioning that melee has wider selection of animation to pick punchings from. And there's new knockback system enrolled alongside it. It should work with any monster, out of the box.
-Added a vision limit. As much as having to deal with darkness is a pain in the ass, I felt having infinite lightamp was a bit on the cheap side. Still, if you miss the old behaviour, it can be retained via cvar if someone encounters some Satan's Contemporary Shitshack of Eternal Darkness - the Megawad Edition.
-Added idle sounds to BFG replacements pickups, so they are easier to stumble by, considering that leftover loop bug isn't the case anymore. Also had to remove it from BFG itself because of new gun system making short work of viable soundslots...
-Added ledge climbing. Boy oh boy, can you feel the feature creep!
-Added a cvar for steps and other clonky noises to force default ones in case powersuit noises drive you crazy after a while.
-Added mthruspecies to most of the player's projectiles so they should go through other players in multi!... Should. Also lets you fling shit through/shoot through sheeps with single-handed weapons. NEAT.
-Added recoil controls at the cost of my shattered nerves, and making the code look even more like a Satan's Contemporary Shit Shack - Code Edition.
-Added a warning in case of not having enough mana capacity while trying to employ tomed spells, so newcomers won't scratch their heads why this spell ain't working.
-Added an air timer to the air bar. (as I can't make it span whole non-default limit. Thanks sbarinfo. I should learn how2zscript HUD at some point. Some beautiful day.)
-Added tiberium-enchancement to the Firebreath while donning a Powersuit, complete with a blue core upgrade. I feel by accident I made this one hell of a cheap, strong attack, whoops.
-Toned down the Dreadful's effects a bit on regular firing mode and gave a "tiny wee bit" buff in terms of blast power. I felt like I use dynamite more often than the BFG itself for tactical overwhelming.
-Added a Powersuit HUD overlay. (Can be toggled off in HERE BE DRAGONS\convienience options) and some extra, nice touch - you get a couple more inches of height in it. Can be toggled off though, as it makes aiming through some places a bit troublesome.
-Added key markers, this was something I wanted to do for a long time, but didn't think of any good method until I found out there's a really easy way. I completely forgot Heretic did that on low difficulties. (Special thanks to Kinsie for me stealing that idea from him! [I dunno how you can thank someone from stealing an idea from him but I bet he'll appreciate the silliness behind it~])
-Added punch charge to the powersuit. Now you can release a flurry of power punches!... Because why the fuck not.
-Added more obvious indication that you are kicking dynamites. It also takes your view pitch into account, and benefits from berserk/powersuit. (As much as dropping them onto ground with this much oomph without blowing them up or landing in some not shit position is a biiiit tricky.)
-Added in-mod support to damagetypes for Xaser's DamNums. (BASED XASER THANK YOU FOR MAKING IT SO EFFIN' EASY~)
-Added a lil' glow to armors to make them stand out more in the dark.
-Added some fire resist in Powersuit so Lava in Heretic doesn't chew on your feet. Also added same fire resist ratio in the Asbestos Suit.
-Added a chance to trigger corpseblast effect with one of the Prism Lazer's lasers hitting upon corpses.
-Added a Berserk after effect. Ergo it leaves you double damage for your melee attacks after it burns out, so you have at least a bit of vanilla doom's Berserk going.
-Retooled Space Nuke. Now it's a traditional nuke. I know, boring, but hear me out - Space Nuke wasn't nowhere near the level of crazy I was aiming for, as it got cut way down by the performance issues of handling so many particles, and even after removing like, 80% of them (I am not kidding here) - it still worked like piss. So, this should look better, feel better, and work better.
-VEGETABLE POWERSLIDE.
-You can no longer stack envirosuit with powersuit. Sorry!
-Gave Longhorn perfect accuracy on regular firing mode to make it clear this is gun devised for makeshift/weak target sniping. If you need actual sniping, use Augur instead.
-Returned to old Skullfire trail because performance issues.
-Due to devs' lockdown on modifying controls menu, I moved stuff from there into separate menu. It's "Mod Controls" now in the main menu.
-Improved Prism Laser's performance over big distances as that was quite problematic.
-If you don't wanna use up your precious dynamite by accidental light-up, you can cancel it by switching to another weapon while it burns. SCIENCE! (More like, unintentional side effect turned feature, lol.)
-Made mana pickups stay in place again, just added a cvar toggle for always pick-up.
-Bumped up Strucker pellets from 12 to 14, and tweaked its spread. The reason for that is a new, shiny, over-under skin for it. (Which I supposed to add long-ass time ago, but stuff happens.)
-Bumped up the contrast on the Matriarch's pickup so it fits more with the rest of gun pickups.
-Increased the chance of ancient amplifier to drop from Archviles.
-Added a cooperative health/name preview. Thanks again, Keks!
-Moved Tiberium Core and Philosopher's Tome to artifacts.
-Tweaked backpack spawns a bit.
-Boss monsters don't drop Diamonds or Strat boxes anymore, but drop chests instead. See what's inside!
-Changed the way TNT toss vertical adjustment is handled so it might feel slightly off now. In exchange it should work better with autoaim now.
-Did some equalizing on Cyg's voice volumes. Could cost it a bit of quality, but should generally be less ear-grating.
-Annihilation got a bit of a behavioural change. It has more rays in its spray, but also ejects them from the impact source in a whole circle rather than the 90-degree cone sourced from the player like stock BFG spray. Considering I used it mostly for longer distances anyway, this should give it more leverage in this regard instead. Also got a damage buff, as it felt underpowered compared to other, high-tier spells.
-Tweaked Scourgebreath visual part by chugging a whole lot more transparency to it. (And quite a bit less of particles.)
-Changed the way the Threadcutter's bleeding works a little, so it can work properly with the DRLA monsters.
-Bumped Skypunch cost by 250 and it's mana cost too, and bumped it's rarity to tier 2, considering this spell got waaaaaay better after adding spirit fists to it. Also fixed the fact that money share didn't work for it when picked up.
-Tweaked Flamewave a bit; less mana usage, possibly less power, but it gains damage over travel time up to some point for compensation. Also tomed wave is the same pattern as regular one now, except with just four wave bits extra.
-Nerfed (snarl) prism laser a bit. I feel I "still" should lower its damage output as its still insane on full focus.
-Made Pulverizer's strat a bit more convienient to aim with; the lead ball gets centered onto player before firing off.
-Made Pulverizer a bit more beefy in terms of firing sound/firepower.
-Kickflip Superman 720.
-Changed Dynamite quick-toss delay from 8 to 10 seconds. Might nerf (snarl) it further in the future.
-Tweaked the tomed Gumpop a bit - it doesn't go through walls anymore. (WHAT'S WITH THOSE NERFS ARE YOU STUPEED?!)
-Made tomed Thunderstruck's rain of lightning go off in a sequence, rather than all at once - it feels more satisfying and causes less lag by not going off all at once. Also increased the delay between the shots. It's not like it doesn't destroy everything already.
-Changed the handling of the Powersuit's airstrike marker from a model to a flat sprite, so it can be seen from below now.
-Tomed Skypunch and both Flamewaves now take your firing pitch into account!
-There was a bit of requests for a return of God Mode powerup icon in the powerup bar so I guess I might as well re-add it.
-"RUNNIN IN THE 90s! WOOOOOO~"
-Made the Ironblast spawn in Doom 1-based game on shotgun spawns. The drops are still Struckers, but if it's a shotgun placed as a weapon pickup, it'll be an Ironblast. I know this makes Strucker not available in deathmatch there, but I completely ignored deathmatch support this whole time anyway, so maybe if there'll be a need for such, I'll try to fix things up.
-Hijacked a bunch of iwad-specific graphics and slammed them into the mod, cause constantly being told that "I get those errors, can you do something about it~" got annoying, especially when there was no real threat from them whatsoever.
-Spiritcannons are player-colored in multi now. And I made its icon suck less. Oh sure you know from where I based those wings off, yeah.
-Empowered Ironblast's knockback and added extreme death capability in close to medium range. Because I can. (I wanted it to trigger only on close distance, but the projectiles travel too fast. But it works and I don't wanna resollve to any further haxing.)
-Happy little explosion clouds.
-A lot of scripts got rewritten. Look into mod files for an idea how freaking much.
-Fixed random holes in the bigfont among some other issues it had, freaking finally. (Thank Jimmy for help!)
-Fixed Ancient Aliens map18 causing the game a seizure. Generally, the performance should go heaps better on many maps after I did some lame trick with item particle spawning.
-Fixed spasmatic monster whirling when its held with Chillgrasp. (KEKS ON DUTY.)
-Fixed 2nd wyvern not spawning floatercannons while tomed.
-Fixed the berserk pod pickup's brightmap, as it was supposed to use its own pattern, rather than the gunzerk one.
-Fixed the auto-use cvar not working correctly on powerups.
-Fixed the missed frame in cored BFG strat activation, thanks to Sgt. Shivers.
-Fixed that case where you don't have auto weapon switch enabled in Hexen, it won't let you assembly the powersuit after grabbing all the pieces.
-Fixed some cvars not working as intended, like muting the Ironblast. (And updated a bunch of them to use getcvar directly instead of using a script, where possible.)
-Fixed missing gldef on Wizard's Eye pickup.
-Fixed flight sound getting a cut-off while doing a flight + direction.
-Fixed GLDEFs in a lot of cases due to handling change.
-Probably a lot of things I didn't note cause I forgot or didn't care while I still remembered to add them here~
-And one last, completely inane entry because no one will actually read through this anyway - BIGGUS DICKUS.

STUFF YOU CAN DISREGARD~ (as in, the weapon handling got rewritten, so these got fixed anyway, but probably introduced a whole plethora of other idiocies, instead. Kept those for posterity's sake that I actually bothered to fix those issues before I commenced a major rewrite~)
-Fixed zerked kick/midas zerked kick getting a cut-off.
-Fixed the Scourgebreath's tome gldef, as I never changed it to red after color switch. Which happened a loooong time ago, and I didn't notice ever since, whoops.
-Fixed TNT gunzerking right powersuited hand flickering into normal one after perfoming a toss.
-Fixed TNT kick being misaligned for regular/midas kicks.
-Fixed Reaversphere's delays in particle spawning.
-Fixed Reiver's death frame being screwed up in XDeath, again. (As I swear I had fixed that before! Hnnnnn~)
-Fixed flicker on Longhorn's radsuit-equipped hand in firing animation.
-Fixed Longhorn's midas mode kick appearing still as a regular one.
-Fixed getting animation stuck in the unusual taunting, and preventing the audio clip from playing as well.
-Fixed Longhorn's powersuit gunzerked mode handing not appearing.
-Fixed midas mode kicks being screwed up for Cauterizer in regular and gunzerk mode.
-Fixed Dreadful not having a suited hand while casting under effects of asbestos suit.
-Fixed midas melee not having same changes as the regular/zerked melee after previous update. And some animation fuck-ups.
-Fixed hand going suited with Matriarch's strat meteorfist. (Never gonna delve into such madness ever again. Not without total rewrite. Sheesh.)
-Fixed midas mode casting spells while firing with melee.

---

You've seen this coming. If you wanna support me in any way, feel free to throw buck at me via this or this.

PS. Y'all funi bois suggesting their birthday dates for release date should know that this is, in fact, my birthday.

[Valherran]

PS. Y'all funi bois suggesting their birthday dates for release date should know that this is, in fact, my birthday.

Did not know that, happy birthday!

Gonna check this out, DL now!

[BoneofMalkav]

Thanks Pillow, Can't wait to try this out. And have a kickass happy birthday!

[D3athStalker]

RIP my precious time, I can't think of spending it in a better way than playing my favourite mod which just had a massive update <3

[RedoLane]

Congrats for another major update, and happy birthday!
On that note, which wads would you recommend to try it on?

[Redead-ITA]

Wow, what timing, happy birthday pillow!!

[AvzinElkein]

Have a man-and-a-half of a birthday!

[MaxRideWizardLord]

Happy birthday PillowBlaster!

[Regios]

Already played a bit of it, can say it is a good'un. The Draugh is awesome whether you use him as a summon or fuse with it and become Drago-Reaper. I'm having soooooo much fun with it!

Oh, and... Yeah, happy b-day, Pillowblaster! Hope you have an asskicking one!

[eharper256]

IS THERE SOMETHING YOU FIND FUNNY ABOUT THE NAME... BIGGUS... DICKUS... (yes I read all the patchnotes, lol)

Thanks for the release, and happy getting older day. I love your OP mods for slaughterwads (Trailblazer especially).