MetaDoom v7.1 "Ghost" - This Mod Has Moved. See OP for details.

[Spaceman333]

Yeah good point about the shotgun and the assault rifle ate0ate.

I agree on that, I think that has got to be the biggest contributor to the grindy feeling of combat I mentioned. As soon as the super shotgun, rocket launcher, chaingun and either gauss or plasma rifle are aquired, the game really kicks in to high gear. Prior to that, with the early stuff, not so much. I kinda wish the starting weapons were better. Another thing is expanded melee with a flying kick hotkey, that deals more damage than the uppercut, but does not give out health pinata loot.

I forgot to mention the underslung grenade from the single shotgun being ineffective against bosses, like they shrug off either most if sometimes all the damage. I have TargetSpy on, so I could see the thing do barely any damage. Maybe theres a bug with that projectile and bosses ignoring its particular type of explosion damage or something.

[Kinsie]

My main issue with gameplay is the weak feeling assault rifle and shotgun. They have no real oomph and I find myself avoiding the assault rifle entirely. It just eats ammo with its primary or secondary attacks and feels like it does next to nothing damage wise.

The primary fires of these two weapons use the exact same hitscan attack settings as the vanilla shotgun and chaingun, so I'm generally a little bemused when people declare that they're weak and ineffective!

To be fair though, I think the assault rifle might fire slightly slower, it's been a long time since I checked.

I forgot to mention the underslung grenade from the single shotgun being ineffective against bosses, like they shrug off either most if sometimes all the damage. I have TargetSpy on, so I could see the thing do barely any damage. Maybe theres a bug with that projectile and bosses ignoring its particular type of explosion damage or something.

The shotgun grenades inflict a good chunk of splash damage alongside their usual impact damage. Cyberdemons and Spiderdemons are immune to splash damage, just like in the vanilla game.

[Spaceman333]

The primary fires of these two weapons use the exact same hitscan attack settings as the vanilla shotgun and chaingun, so I'm generally a little bemused when people declare that they're weak and ineffective!

To be fair though, I think the assault rifle might fire slightly slower, it's been a long time since I checked.

Yeah they are effective against minor enemies like zombies, imps and pinkies, but I think the new mid-tier (hellknight, baron, cacos, arachs, mancubi) enemies have outpaced them, since they can jump, leap, dash, teleport and have upgraded attacks in some cases. I think they can close in the gap with the player faster than in vanilla and generally mess with the player with all their special abilities that gives a feeling like those two weapons have not kept up with the other content.

The shotgun grenades inflict a good chunk of splash damage alongside their usual impact damage. Cyberdemons and Spiderdemons are immune to splash damage, just like in the vanilla game.

Ah that makes sense and explains why it did so little damage.

I think I'm more annoyed with that mechanic since I tend to play on maps that feature boss monsters regularly mixed with lesser enemies, making the splash immunity feel like an arbitrary contrivance. It just feels wrong on a logical level when the regular hitscan of a shotgun is more effective than an explosive grenade blast that eats 4x the ammo per shot.

[Spaceman333]

Been playing some more. Although I've had a wonderful time with the mod, I've hit a huge problem with performance.



With maps in excess over 400-500 monsters, the gibs man, THE GIBS, they're piling up so much that my framerate tanks into a slideshow.
I had set the blood to vanish within seconds of it appearing, I disabled brass, I maximized blood culling, but none of these things get rid of the gibs!

Is there any option to make gibs dissapear after some time or atleast limit their total amount on the map?

The mod is an absolute blast to play, it is super fun, but performance via gib littering overload eventually makes the game unplayable on larger maps.

I also noticed the Wretched (blue tongue caco variants) corpses are just large enough that they too obscure vision. Not to the same degree as the SM boss, but still noticably enough to matter. I wish both of these corpses were solid, shootable objects that could be destroyed into gibs. It would prevent monsters from being able to attack me without me being able to see them from behind the non-interactive corpse.

[Doctrine Gamer]

I had already commented with Kinsie about this performance issue suggesting the option of the gibs and blood disappear automatically over time but no one cared.
If I could help or had some knowledge about mods I would help with this option but ...

[Kinsie]

I've pushed through some WIP changes to the dev build. See if these answer your prayers:

- The Unwilling now have a toned-down gib effect, reducing the amount of debris generated in Arch-Vile heavy maps.
- An extra, ugly, squished-down sprite has been added to the Wretched's death state, hopefully providing additional visibility.
- Gibs now respect the Blood fade times CVar, mopping up your carnage and reducing your gratification severely.

[Spaceman333]

I've pushed through some WIP changes to the dev build. See if these answer your prayers:

- The Unwilling now have a toned-down gib effect, reducing the amount of debris generated in Arch-Vile heavy maps.
- An extra, ugly, squished-down sprite has been added to the Wretched's death state, hopefully providing additional visibility.
- Gibs now respect the Blood fade times CVar, mopping up your carnage and reducing your gratification severely.

Super! These are exactly what I needed!

Good notice on the Unwilling gibs, they did indeed contribute a lot to the gib pile, especially on maps with bottleneck corner corridors where the Unwilling kept coming through, while the Arch-Vile hung around at the back and behind a corner, requiring me to blast a whole lot of Unwilling before having a clear path for a long enough time to reach the Arch-Vile.

Big thank you for the gibs respecting the blood fade time. That alone is probably the biggest thing that will fix the lag.

I'm happy for the Wretched's squished corpse, but what about the Spider Mastermind?
Making that SM boss corpse solid, shootable and gibbable would fix the issue without requiring overhauling the graphics.

[Kinsie]

Big thank you for the gibs respecting the blood fade time. That alone is probably the biggest thing that will fix the lag.

Actually, the biggest thing would probably be not playing slaughtermaps, but you do you.

I'm happy for the Wretched's squished corpse, but what about the Spider Mastermind?
Making that SM boss corpse solid, shootable and gibbable would fix the issue without requiring overhauling the graphics.

It would also require a bunch of extra frames of spiderdemon gibs to not look like half-assed garbage, and I've already asked way too much of DrPySpy as it stands. To say nothing of implementing a shootable corpse system that isn't a trainwreck under the hood (seemingly a rarity) for just one character...

There's also the whole thing where you're honestly proposing asking the player to waste ammo to gain general visibility...

EDIT: I've added another (poorly photoshopped) Spiderdemon death frame to try and alleviate the problem. It sucks and looks awful and probably doesn't solve your problem.

[Spaceman333]

Big thank you for the gibs respecting the blood fade time. That alone is probably the biggest thing that will fix the lag.

Actually, the biggest thing would probably be not playing slaughtermaps, but you do you.

But I wanna play this mod on slaughtermaps!

Still, I think its pretty common for the most popular megawads to have the monster counter range be in the 50-1000. I personally consider something a slaugher map if it goes beyond 500 monsters, but this mod was not able to handle 400, so I think its a fair critisism.

I'm happy for the Wretched's squished corpse, but what about the Spider Mastermind?
Making that SM boss corpse solid, shootable and gibbable would fix the issue without requiring overhauling the graphics.

It would also require a bunch of extra frames of spiderdemon gibs to not look like half-assed garbage, and I've already asked way too much of DrPySpy as it stands. To say nothing of implementing a shootable corpse system that isn't a trainwreck under the hood (seemingly a rarity) for just one character...

There's also the whole thing where you're honestly proposing asking the player to waste ammo to gain general visibility...

EDIT: I've added another (poorly photoshopped) Spiderdemon death frame to try and alleviate the problem. It sucks and looks awful and probably doesn't solve your problem.

I'll have to check out later this night, gotta go visit the city now. I do really appreciate the update and I'm the type of person that prefers gameplay over visuals, so my standards for if something is ugly or pretty may be somewhat low. It may be a sufficient fix enough for me.

Just to clarify, I was more thinking of just making it explode into a generic gib fountain and make the whole thing dissapear, without the need for custom graphics. Kind of like a the classic nashgore or ketchup xdeath thing.

I also don't mind using ammo on the corpse to blow it up. It actually feels satisfying to do so and the mod does offer the infinite ammo pistol and grenades/mines to counteract the ammo loss to a suitable degree I think.

[Kinsie]

Just to clarify, I was more thinking of just making it explode into a generic gib fountain and make the whole thing dissapear, without the need for custom graphics. Kind of like a the classic nashgore or ketchup xdeath thing.

This would look like shit, feel anticlimactic, and make the gib situation you were reporting even worse.

[Spaceman333]

Just to clarify, I was more thinking of just making it explode into a generic gib fountain and make the whole thing dissapear, without the need for custom graphics. Kind of like a the classic nashgore or ketchup xdeath thing.

This would look like shit, feel anticlimactic, and make the gib situation you were reporting even worse.

I think it depends on how its done. This is what I had in mind:


Thats from ketchup and its the Mancubus' xdeath aftermath.
Yeah its minimal and simple, but combined with a few big meatballs gibs and a blood sprays/splats that stick around for a while and then vanish, I'm pretty ok with it. Again, my standards are for visuals aren't too high, so maybe its not enough for MetaDoom. Still, I just wanted to let you know what I'm ok with.

Since the gibs vanish with the blood now, the gib problem isn't a thing anymore. Personally the only thing I'd change was make the boss death spew less gibs during their death geyser, since that creates an enourmous lag spike. But besides that, its cool now.

Anyway the original SM boss wasn't obscuring the vision much at all:

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Meanwhile, this is the situation in MetaDoom right now:

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[Doctrine Gamer]

Also thank you Kinsie for correcting this gibs problem, I expected this a long time ago, I thought it would not even be implemented. Thank you.

[Kinsie]

Also thank you Kinsie for correcting this gibs problem, I expected this a long time ago, I thought it would not even be implemented. Thank you.

I'm not happy with the implementation, I'll probably revise it to make it more configurable.

Again, my standards are for visuals aren't too high, so maybe its not enough for MetaDoom. Still, I just wanted to let you know what I'm ok with.

I know what you're okay with. You've repeatedly said as such. I also know what I'm okay with. I try to maintain a reasonably high standard for my dumb free videogame mods, because that's what seperates them from the animals. Also, the Spiderdemon is the final boss of Doom 1 and also packed with tons of custom art from a very generous donor, so I'm not interested in copping out on anything regarding it.

Part of the problem is that the Spiderdemon's legs alone are big. Like, really big. And they make up most of the character.

Pretty much any attempt to squash down the sprite has to deal with this in a way that looks consistant with all the other frames - these aren't organic objects, just squishing them vertically or whatever would look terrible, and you can only clip them into the floor so far before they'll start looking fucky (especially if OpenGL floor clipping gets a proper fix one day).

So the solutions I see here from the perspective of sitting up at the bastard hour are:
a.) Scale down the entire Spiderdemon globally in the code. Does anybody want that? I honestly don't know. It's pretty big, but I haven't compared it with the vanilla sprites recently.
b.) Force DrPySpy to render out an entirely new, less vertically-tall death animation, because he is my personal model slave and not a human being with obligations and hobbies and other projects and potato chips to eat.
c.) Photoshop up a Cyberdemon-style death animation that just leaves a pair of poorly-edited feet that'll still obscure your vision, while being less satisfying.
d.) Just spray a bunch of gibs in the air because nothing is good anymore and the only certainty in life is suffering.

I'd like to get some feedback from other people on this, preferably from people who don't repeat "I DON'T CARE IF IT LOOKS LIKE GARBAGE" ten times an hour like they're trying to convince themselves. This is clearly an issue, but I'm not finding a solution that works and doesn't suck.

[Spaceman333]

<.<

>.>

Option... d)?

But yeah, I'm sorry about being repetitive about the whole thing, I just needed some clarity and to fully say what I had in mind. I certainly want to respect the work you and DrPySpy have done for this mod and I appreciate the level of visual quality it has. The reason I did so was because I was unsure whether or not you saw it an issue or not, since prior I had read Doctrine Gamer's post about how the gib issue was not addressed for some time (until now) and you weren't offering any concrete solutions on what you were planning on doing to it, if anything (until now). I just felt worried if I wasn't fully understood or if this was even seen as an issue.

I recognize this is a harder problem to solve. I simply though the idea I had could be a simple temporary fix that would atleast make the mod not become crippled with maps that feature Spiderdemons. I'll try to make a fix patch for personal use at some point.

[isaacpop23]

I just pulled up the mod to see how big the Spidie was, I never realized it was that huge.

A seems like a decent way of dealing with it, though I'm not sure how small you want to get it, so for all I know the end result would make it the size of an Arachnotron which just creates more issues.

B of course seems like the best option from an outside position where neither me or someone I properly know is doing the work, but of course you people have lives and this is without pay so I can't exactly expect you to do this.

C and D just sound like they'd fix the issue, but destroy all the good things as well, I'd go with A before either of these, but among the two C seems better.

If this was somehow unclear in things, have a nice list from best to worst in my mind.
B > A > C > D