The Guncaster - 3.888b

[ThomasNoname]

Great way to start off my adventures on ZDoom forums. But feel free to contact me if you any kind of evidence.

[DoomKrakken]

You know... whenever I interact with people, and accuse them of being "double-accounters", they simply say "No, I'm not." and it ends at that. Double-accounters that don't want to be discovered put a whole lot of emphasis on the point that they're NOT a double account, and easily seem to get frustrated when it's suggested as few times as we have done. The amount of detail and frustration you put into your comments about how you're NOT jenkins95, and then this bandwagon comment of yours, only adds suspicion.

We are getting WAAAAY off topic, and WildWeasel wants us to lay off on this issue until further evidence surfaces. I would love to follow through with that. So, if you will cease trying to convince us about how this account of yours is not a double account, then I will cease accusation until it's relevant and we have more evidence. I really want to get back to talking about Guncaster.

[ThomasNoname]

Sounds cool. I agree with that idea.

[Tesculpture]

I'm pretty sure the whole point of GunCaster is that you can use guns exclusively, if you prefer, or magic exclusively, if you prefer. If you find your chosen attack method inferior, look upon it as a challenge.

I hope I'm not pouring gasoline on the fire here, but expecting GunCaster's guns to not be overpowered is like expecting Deadpool to be a love story.

[ThomasNoname]

Yes, that is very true. I don't want you to feel like Chuck Norris when using magic, but a buff wouldn't hurt. Initially I may have looked at little too much like I was too with Jenkins95. I simply agreed with some of his statements. This is the last post regarding the whole double account thing I'll be posting. Peace.

[DoomKrakken]

I think magic is used to support the guns. Sure, one can probably do an all-magic run, but that may be extremely difficult in the beginning, with no mana boosters or mana surges. You have your overpowered guns with limited ammo, and slightly-less-overpowered abilities that run off of a constantly regenerating (practically infinite) ammo pool. Guns blow stuff up, magic adds a different angle, which can either kill people or help you to kill people.

Ain't that right...

Anyway......... I FINALLY RECORDED SOMETHING! I haven't figured out what to do with it yet, but here's a .lmp file I just made showcasing my version of Guncaster, with all the changes I made to it. You guys want magic buffs? I give you magic buffs.

None of the spritework and barely any of the DECORATE is mine. Most of it belongs to Russian Overkill.

Be warned, it's kind of long... it took somewhere between twenty minutes to an hour to do.

Enjoy severely.

[Redead-ITA]

I think magic is used to support the guns. Sure, one can probably do an all-magic run, but that may be extremely difficult in the beginning, with no mana boosters or mana surges. You have your overpowered guns with limited ammo, and slightly-less-overpowered abilities that run off of a constantly regenerating (practically infinite) ammo pool. Guns blow stuff up, magic adds a different angle, which can either kill people or help you to kill people.

Ain't that right...

Anyway......... I FINALLY RECORDED SOMETHING! I haven't figured out what to do with it yet, but here's a .lmp file I just made showcasing my version of Guncaster, with all the changes I made to it. You guys want magic buffs? I give you magic buffs.

None of the spritework and barely any of the DECORATE is mine. Most of it belongs to Russian Overkill.

Be warned, it's kind of long... it took somewhere between twenty minutes to an hour to do.

Enjoy severely.

Sems interesting too bad i dont know how to run an lmp on doom
edit: i discovered how but the bad news is that im asking what mapack was use to make it manly because the demo cant run without the "maparena"

[Zhs2]

DoomKrakken, you do know that a demo file is just a set of movement commands and that people will still need all of the files it was made with, and the exact devbuild of (G)ZDoom it was created with, to view it properly or it will go out of sync, right...? "Out of sync" meaning that playback will look weird and the player will just kind of robotically follow the movement commands he's being given without any care in the world as to all the walls he's running into or firing at.

[DoomKrakken]

Oh no...

Ok, I see. I suppose I'll have to record playing the demo...

[Jenkins95]

Dude, that's a long-ass comment. You should really use some spoiler tags to cut down on that.

I see a lot of good stuff here... but unfortunately, I see a lot more complaining. About half of what you said goes to show a lack of experience in coding and how the physics in the Doom Engine work (no offense, seriously... I was in your shoes once). Things like what you mentioned with Skypunch and Annihilation are due to limitations in Doom-based engine.

Many of your suggestions are fairly redundant. I doubt they work with this version of Guncaster... however, I think they'd work a lot better in a separate playerclass: a completely different character, with completely different weapons, and of course, completely different spells. I have a green avian (anthro-bird) who's currently unnamed,and a blue dragonoid named "Zula Dreddwyng" [name pending], which those spell ideas of yours would work for.

One of the things in your comment with which I agree is that the magic isn't getting enough love.

Another thing I agree with is the flight stamina. However, that's going to be kind of hard to program. What I would want to do is unlimited jumps... but with about a 0.5 to 0.333-second delay between jumps (else people will rape that jump button and go total hummingbird).

Guncaster was never designed to work with Strife.

TL;DR: Easier said than done. I encourage you to try and program at least some of this stuff yourself, and then come back. It will help you to put this stuff in perspective, as you will then know what can be done, what can't be done, and what's difficult to do. You can have more authority to your tone when you do this. You can find a couple of people here to help with your endeavor, and things will start rolling from there. That's how I got here.

I would most definitely love to hear more about your magic ideas, though (PM me if interested). I'm not part of the Pillow Crew, I'm just another Guncaster enthusiast.

Pretty sure he's the same dude(s) in that one underpowered magic whining thread on the second video's in the OP.

A while back Somagu halved (or so, can't remember what exact value) the ammo count for pickups and it balanced a lot of what I felt was too powerful; but then again, this is a slaughtercentric mind, so slaughter maps are, generally, going to be what this mod focuses on and plays best with.

Lemme guess.......... Jitterskull?

I agree with him that the magic should be shown a little more love... but to go so far as to say that it's weak? I heartily disagree. I rely on the abilities just as much as I do the guns... maybe even more so, now that I've improved on the magic on my end.

I'm pretty sure the whole point of GunCaster is that you can use guns exclusively, if you prefer, or magic exclusively, if you prefer. If you find your chosen attack method inferior, look upon it as a challenge.

I hope I'm not pouring gasoline on the fire here, but expecting GunCaster's guns to not be overpowered is like expecting Deadpool to be a love story.

Ugh… I’m not Jitterskull, neither Thomas, nor pretend to be one; although I’m indeed one of those persons in ]that “thread” on YouTube. I never said that overall magic are weak. I only said certain magic are weak and some are really good. Then again, I never, never said to nerf weapons or anything like that, nor nerf anything else, as that would just upset all those who like to use weapons more. In fact, I suggested giving Cauterizer an upgrade Stratocaster, as I'm still hoping to see the day when Cautizer gets an interesting new upgraded attack too, maybe along with some improvements too (the skin just looks… nevermind, maybe I’m picky here). So I don’t need to be reminded that this is more of a "slaughtistic mod".

Gosh, please stop pulling misconceptions and read the whole post before assuming crap based of your own ignorance about what I truly said.

By the way, only because you found suggestions I proclaimed as redundant, doesn’t mean everyone will agree with this. However, most of those ideas were written by peeps from YouTube, I only did testing to validate if it’s true, some were discovered by me as well though. I even asked permission if I could use his ideas for forums, as none of the folks are arsed enough (or just not brave enough to handle criticism) to make forum post. Although I admit, that huge post was written not just by me, but with the helped of those guys that PM me, and some help to correct English. I as well shared some of their ideas, otherwise I wouldn’t bother posting it on forum, and I as well feel like the magic is lack love and attention they deserved. But if you truly believe if it was really easy for me to write this huge text, waste days to correct English to a point people will understand me, test all the stuff to confirm it’s all true, and if you truly believe that full power of Old Dreadful at maximum upgrade is anywhere balanced to what any magic can ever do and that I’m just complaining by saying my opinion, then there is just something wrong with you, besides I’m not regular forum user.

Then again, there is a things like Old Dreadful in the game which leaves a huge grasp between balance of overall magic and guns; and while to your subconsciousness it may sounds fair it to be that way because you can’t regenerate ammo for even after a hour of waiting, it doesn’t really feels fair toward magic and would be lovely if magic treated same way like guns. This is why I suggested adding purchasable ammo packs at shop just so the “ammo can’t regenerate” argument would be irrelevant and so all kind of folks will be happy now and feel like it’s fair for both. After all, a single shoot of let’s say of suggested Black Hole would result you won’t be able to use magic for a while due to how fast it drains your mana, so you gotta sacrifice that for having the ultimate shoot, and it could give a nice competitor to Stratocaster + tiberium core powered Old Dreadful. I doubt it’s too hard to implement considering they already made one for Russian Overkill.

Plus, this mod tries to balance spell around weapons, not around boring melee unlike most other games, which is what appeals me to Guncaster a lot too and I’m sincerely hoping that in later updates the Magic no longer will be treated like support or just merely a backup, but some will be even as powerful as Old Dreadful, even if as downside it will take a time to charge before cast and you won’t be able to use spells for a while as it would waste all of your mana instantly. This is not Bioshock either, where magic mostly used as backup or situational support, I’m sincerely not a fond of this idea either. And I’m fully aware that some of the magic are quite good and balanced even in comparison to rest of guns, too. But having dual of that and no dual of this?? With ability to activate dual weapon wield in menu for free without using any item and being unable to use spells at all while holding weapons?? This is not how you do it.


However, I'm fully heartedly against any class deviation, because as a result in a long run you will end up smash your head for not picking up the best class or the one you would prefer later in game, or the one that gets better over time in the game. This would as well result in feeling of injustice if your favorite class would be weaker than the rest and it would take a lot of time and give a huge headache trying to balance one to another instead of just add new things you like that would please everyone, or at least won’t sadden someone. Then again, having a character that can do everything and have a huge set amount of things you can do as you please on your freewill, have a true variety of things you can do that you can freely choose without punishment in back, rather than having pseudo-choise and being forced to have restricted classes with their limited capacity, then feel damned for not selecting the other one as you could feel he would suit more later in the game and feel this unpleasant feeling for the rest of the time is not good way to go.


Also, I simple drop suggestions I gather from comment section, not “whine”, nor demanding anything anyway. That doesn’t mean I should be master of modding, I only gather information about GZDoom from other moders, and my experience gained from mods, and my pitiful attempts in to reading the Decorate. Only a few mods I ever done were back in Skulltag era when I did monsters reskin, personal sound replacing mod for my own preference and a crappy weapon mod using simplest basic coding Decorate had, as any further subject in Decorate surely made be agitated like hell, it took me month to translate all the stuff and figure out how to create proper weapon animation. Decorate is very not user friendly language to anyone who is not native English speaker; unlike Gmod and Skyrim, of course, whose workshops and script editor use language that is really easy to understand even if you’re not native English speaker, like the Papyrus.

This is why I said if something is impossible to make in GZDoom engine, they could just use the stuff they already made, just improve and balance it a bit. I wouldn’t post suggestions of the new stuff that would fit a lot in this mod if I could do it myself, do I? Suggestions means simple to give a few ideas that would improve something or fits something to the subject you drop the suggestion in view of someone, and the one who consider the suggestion may not like it and simple deny it, or like it but unable or don’t really want to apply it, or if he really like it he would apply it, it’s all depend of the person who you drop those suggestions to.

So stop using this obnoxious fallacy and calm down your attitude by being nitpicking to me like I demand you personally to make it all for me.

Honestly, I posted it mostly for PillowBlaster himself and some other crew of this mod to know if they actually like those ideas and announce their opinion (since PillowBlaster insist to post on forum anyway rather than youtube). After all, the Black Hole was suggested by PillowBlaster himself. Sure, would be awesome if those spells and bug fixes would apply in the game; if not, well I would be really upset, but I won’t threaten them, demand them, or being mean to them if they will refuse to do it for whatever reason. And what else the forum would exist for if not just to write suggestion ideas and bug reports??

And I’m absolutely careless about authority from generic forum dwellers. I’m not here to build my Ego so big it would shine and blind everyone’s mind, I’m here to attempt to improve Guncaster the way I see would fit it a lot and make it much more enjoyable to play. That doesn’t mean the suggestions of other people that are irrelevant to suggestions that have been proclaimed by me shouldn’t apply in the actual mod, somehow.

Also, hopefully the next update will alleviate the problem of needing to rely solely on passive regeneration with its new reward drops. It's weird the things we think of when we receive rabid fans with oddly pushy feedback.

I’m totally not against passive Regeneration and actually like it a lot the way it is now (although feels really slow, and even slower than it was in older versions of Guncaster), but I wouldn’t mind if the “new reward drops” applies as long as it implies the old passive regeneration would stay, as I prefer more strategic gameplay than rush-rush-rush one. Not sure if it’s even necessary considering there is already mana potions and mana recovering items. In fact I sincerely would love it a lot if the passive regeneration applies on health as well, but you would seriously rip your ass off to get it to work and won’t just be granted to you for free. Personally I would love to have expensive syringe like in Killing Floor for balance reason and to make things fair, but having an permanent item that would slowly regenerate health (even slower than not upgraded mana regeneration) would be a lot lovely too.

You know... whenever I interact with people, and accuse them of being "double-accounters", they simply say "No, I'm not." and it ends at that. Double-accounters that don't want to be discovered put a whole lot of emphasis on the point that they're NOT a double account, and easily seem to get frustrated when it's suggested as few times as we have done. The amount of detail and frustration you put into your comments about how you're NOT jenkins95, and then this bandwagon comment of yours, only adds suspicion.

We are getting WAAAAY off topic, and WildWeasel wants us to lay off on this issue until further evidence surfaces. I would love to follow through with that. So, if you will cease trying to convince us about how this account of yours is not a double account, then I will cease accusation until it's relevant and we have more evidence. I really want to get back to talking about Guncaster.

Well, I was warned that the Zdoom forum would be a bad place, but I didn’t suspect it to be THIS bad… People seems rather listen their own quick assumption than actually challenge their conclusions they harshly jump to.

Do you even realize that you could mindlessly say exact same stuff if he just said “k, whatever”, using exact same fallacy ungrounded on anything? Plus you’d be shitting your pants once admin of forum would talk to you with suspicious tone, and you would like to prove of your innocence polite way if you’d know for sure you’re innocent, as your account's safety could depend on it. Same psychology plays in real life.

And instead of just spamming blunt accusations based on nothing but strawman logic, you could actually do a proper analysis. There is an old like world way to check if someone is clone or not - look at their IP of message they post if you have administrator privileges. Always work on any forum, not to mention I doubt anyone could of made double accounts nowadays since most forums allows only one per house, and even proxy is very easy to detect nowadays, proven by Zandronum forum admins.


Now would both of you please stop derail it? Do it in PM, not here.

Would be lovely if those off topic posts containing nothing more but absolutely unfounded accusation, other than, of course, someone liked idea of a person that does contradict mass opinion (what a heresy!), would just be removed as it’s completely off-topic and not related to Guncaster, not to mention I specifically was hoped to post on new page so everyone would see it and give it more constructive opinion other than “loadsa complaintz” and “do it urself scrub”.

[wildweasel]

Jenkins, speaking as a moderator, I feel the better response to being accused of sockpuppeting isn't to tell people they're idiots and attempt to invoke confirmation bias. Politeness wins the day around here. If you've really got a problem with us around here, I'd encourage you to either use the Report This Post button or otherwise contact a moderator, otherwise leave things alone, because this kind of response is likely to fan the flames more than solve anything.

[Zhs2]

The thing I like about Pillow mods is that you can typically use whatever you want and you'll still win. I at least personally feel this mod tries to capture that at heart, so if you're not winning you must not be doing something correctly.

I’m totally not against passive Regeneration and actually like it a lot the way it is now (although feels really slow, and even slower than it was in older versions of Guncaster), but I wouldn’t mind if the “new reward drops” applies as long as it implies the old passive regeneration would stay, as I prefer more strategic gameplay than rush-rush-rush one. Not sure if it’s even necessary considering there is already mana potions and mana recovering items. In fact I sincerely would love it a lot if the passive regeneration applies on health as well, but you would seriously rip your ass off to get it to work and won’t just be granted to you for free. Personally I would love to have expensive syringe like in Killing Floor for balance reason and to make things fair, but having an permanent item that would slowly regenerate health (even slower than not upgraded mana regeneration) would be a lot lovely too.

Passive regeneration stays, although there is now an option in that same menu you love that lets you dual-wield at will (which was simple to add after Pillow did all of the hard work modelling Gunzerking after Borderlands 2, mind you) that also allows you to tweak passive regeneration to your preference, including off if you feel you'd like that kind of rush-rush-rush magic only challenge. Health stays as is because it keeps to traditional feel of needing to find your healing items and there's plenty, including a nice suit that makes it oh-so-slowly come back too

[Jenkins95]

Jenkins, speaking as a moderator, I feel the better response to being accused of sockpuppeting isn't to tell people they're idiots and attempt to invoke confirmation bias. Politeness wins the day around here. If you've really got a problem with us around here, I'd encourage you to either use the Report This Post button or otherwise contact a moderator, otherwise leave things alone, because this kind of response is likely to fan the flames more than solve anything.

Didn't call anyone idiots, nor imply they were, nor didn’t see anyone called someone like that. The reason why I said forum is a bad place is because instead of being focused on topic, people start nitpicking to one another. Well, this is honestly really upset that my post I put so much effort in to it just got ignored and derailed, although I really wished the developer team, especially PillowBlaster, just like the rest of forum community would read it, so maybe this was reason I sounded a bit frustrated.

This is why I suggest just removing those meaningless posts containing nothing more but barking one to another and not related to Guncaster, neither to my post, neither to anyone else that is regarding the topic. Wouldn’t mind if as a result my last post will get edited and thus the last part of it where I tried to silence both of those fine gentlemen will be removed.

The thing I like about Pillow mods is that you can typically use whatever you want and you'll still win. I at least personally feel this mod tries to capture that at heart, so if you're not winning you must not be doing something correctly.

I wish it was true, but then there are those immunity and resistances that some enemies still do have, at least against magic. So if you truly love certain, even one of the beginners one, the chances are that even not so hard enemies will get full immune against it or way too strong resistance, so the fighting won't be any fun, if even possible.

I’m totally not against passive Regeneration and actually like it a lot the way it is now (although feels really slow, and even slower than it was in older versions of Guncaster), but I wouldn’t mind if the “new reward drops” applies as long as it implies the old passive regeneration would stay, as I prefer more strategic gameplay than rush-rush-rush one. Not sure if it’s even necessary considering there is already mana potions and mana recovering items. In fact I sincerely would love it a lot if the passive regeneration applies on health as well, but you would seriously rip your ass off to get it to work and won’t just be granted to you for free. Personally I would love to have expensive syringe like in Killing Floor for balance reason and to make things fair, but having an permanent item that would slowly regenerate health (even slower than not upgraded mana regeneration) would be a lot lovely too.

Passive regeneration stays, although there is now an option in that same menu you love that lets you dual-wield at will (which was simple to add after Pillow did all of the hard work modelling Gunzerking after Borderlands 2, mind you) that also allows you to tweak passive regeneration to your preference, including off if you feel you'd like that kind of rush-rush-rush magic only challenge. Health stays as is because it keeps to traditional feel of needing to find your healing items and there's plenty, including a nice suit that makes it oh-so-slowly come back too

Eh, maybe I'm just really being tired of all those endless pickups, or just praying that in future will be more medkits, or I miss the oldschool games that had option of "item independent" gameplay (yes, "health regen" existed WAY before Halo did, that made this thing be, ugh... popular? At the same time, hated a lot by le "hardcoerz" gamers, although back in time it was obviously much slower). I sincerely would love an item that would let you regenerate as much hp as your current health limit without the need to rely on those darn pickups, even if it’s super slow, and even if there is plenty of medkits as I feel really bad even when I pickup at least one of those.

[Zhs2]

I wish it was true, but then there are those immunity and resistances that some enemies still do have, at least against magic. So if you truly love certain, even one of the beginners one, the chances are that even not so hard enemies will get full immune against it or way too strong resistance, so the fighting won't be any fun, if even possible.

I dunno man, it's like trying to make a case against people Mike Tyson'ing (fist only) in vanilla Doom or poking everything to death with the staff in Heretic, and there are people crazy like that. At least the Iron Lich isn't completely immune to crows anymore due to a little mixup that's been since fixed, and I can't think of any other true immunities. (Wendigo vs. ice?)

Also, if you don't mind me asking, which old games had regenerating health? I feel like I've played one or two, but I can't name any of them off the top of my head anymore.

[DoomKrakken]

I still like the idea of magic being a support piece. It's still whoppingly powerful for being support... and where it is right now, though it could probably use a little improvement, it really doesn't need that much tweaking.

Do consider the fact that Cygnis absolutely hates magic, as it was used to practically glass his homeworld... so the role magic plays in this mod fits quite nicely with his overall character. The only reason he uses magic is because it's useful... this would imply that, while not as good as the guns, they do provide other advantages... things that guns can't do:

- Scourgebreath can go through walls.
- The Meteorfist can enable you to practically fly.
- Corpseblast severely damages unlucky schmucks that come close to a corpse... and they eliminate corpses so that Arch-Viles cannot resurrect them.
- Hitchcock's Birds stunlocks Cyberdemons after three successful launches until it dies.
- Gumpop increases damage dealt by your weapons and prevents Arch-Viles from resurrecting monsters killed by Gumpop.
- Chillgrasp grabs people even from behind bars and turns people into ice-sculptures, stun-locking them as it happens. Thereby preventing Arch-Viles from resurrecting them.
- Frostbite turns people immediately people it freezes into ice shards. Thereby preventing Arch-Viles from resurrecting them.
- Sheepshield blocks stuff and goes through walls, exploding when they come into contact with people when released.

Need I say more?

There is room for improvement for the magic (and once I make a video, you'll see what I mean), but they really don't need to be as powerful as the guns.

I have another suggestion... for the new awesome Tiberium deaths... it'll be different killing stuff with the Old Dreadful and similar weapons, but it'll be cool. One thing I'm worried about is all the dynamic lights that'll be active while they're laying around... especially if I play this on big maps and need to kill everything super fast. My suggestion is this: make Tiberium-soaked corpses explode after about 30 seconds of laying around, and they can do some light Tiberium damage to other monsters around them. Any takers?