MetaDoom v666 "Titan" (Dev Blog! p118)

[Kinsie]

Used the latest devbuild on the latest SVN and I noticed that the meathook seemed to stick to walls at random. Fired up Plutonia Experiment and the walls with the Imps overlooking the Blue Key could be attached to, but only if the imps were alive. I'm certain the meathook didn't hit them, but I wasn't able to replicate it on a second try after reloading the game.

I think this might have just been monsters having a fairly generous hit box. However, it did lead me to note that hooking the sky eats your hook and forces you to wait for a recharge, so I fixed that. Thanks!

Also, likely unavoidable with how the Meathook is set up, but I managed to get stuck in a teleportation loop with the teleport near the Pain Elemental after I tried to meathook it - i couldn't really turn around to shoot it, so I was stuck forever, even after it floated next to me. I don't have video recording software, so observe my shitty attempts at screencapping it: https://imgur.com/a/qRuzy3B

Fixed. Hitting a teleporter line while reeling yourself towards an enemy deletes your hook and snaps your line. I'll likely have to account for enemies pulling you into a teleport line as well...

Thanks for the bug reports!

[Jayrassic Park]

No prob - I did notice the 'shooting into the sky causes a long recharge', but I honestly thought that was a feature meant to punish spamming meathook. :V

Might not be a perfect solution, but if an enemy pulls someone into a teleport line, maybe make it so that switching to another weapon breaks it?

[Kinsie]

The latest big change in the development builds: The Wretched's tongue attack and the Former Assassin's tentacle attack have both been changed from repurposing Strife's Loremaster attack to utilizing Jekyll Grim Payne's grappling hook code (the same code used for the Meathook). In addition, these enemies have been made a bit smarter about only using those attacks when the target is within range.

[Captain J]

I always love the fact that their tongue/tentacle is made out of shiny, plain giant orbs. I'm not against it but is a decent design choice if you think about it. No need to work on more of rotation.

[JuliusKoolius]

So I came across some bugs in the latest dev build, specifically with the SuperShotgun

Bug 1: If you only have no more shells the Supershotgun acts kinda weird
https://imgur.com/obozSoK

Bug 2: If you fire the Meathook at an enemy through a window/wall you will get stuck
https://imgur.com/aYZiJNl

[Kinsie]

So I came across some bugs in the latest dev build, specifically with the SuperShotgun

Bug 1: If you only have no more shells the Supershotgun acts kinda weird
https://imgur.com/obozSoK

Bug 2: If you fire the Meathook at an enemy through a window/wall you will get stuck
https://imgur.com/aYZiJNl

Thanks for this, added fixes for both.

[Miru]

Been running the latest development build with Compendium, and I notice that this latest build plays a lot nicer with the custom enemies in the Compendium than it used to. The enemies seem to be able to react to fire damage and holy water pretty well when I was playing Hell to Pay. I'm even able to get one with the meathook. The only things they seem to miss out are on gibs and item drops, compared to the Metadoom enemies.

[ShockwaveS08]

The SSG's meathook can get stuck on certain linedefs, if you're aiming low enough during its retraction, at which point you have to step on top of it to get it back. When this happens, the line to the meathook can pass through anything without being severed, even solid walls. Experienced in Ultimate Doom's E1M3, on the way to the Rocket Launcher secret room.

[Kinsie]

The SSG's meathook can get stuck on certain linedefs, if you're aiming low enough during its retraction, at which point you have to step on top of it to get it back. When this happens, the line to the meathook can pass through anything without being severed, even solid walls. Experienced in Ultimate Doom's E1M3, on the way to the Rocket Launcher secret room.

Yeah, the hook can get stuck on walls and such when trying to make its way back to the player. It does have a timer where it snaps back to the player if it's stuck for too long, though.

I've added an experimental fix for this where the hook has NoClip enabled on it as it flies back to the player. This has some side-effects, like not being able to hit enemies with the hook as it flies back, but in these scenarios it should be more responsive. I have no idea how it'll handle portals or whatever, so this fix may have to be removed in the future.

[Miru]

I have a few more observations from playing this again with Wadsmoosh:

* Is there a second chance to get any lore items you missed out on?
* The Demon Wolf and Cerberus, on Content Locust with the expanded enemy roster, don’t seem to ever spawn. I wonder why?
* Icon of Sin’s spawners are able to summon the Hellhound family (former earthlings), while they don’t send out Hell Razers.

[Kinsie]

* Is there a second chance to get any lore items you missed out on?

Yeah, random dumb luck. Lore Items don't vanish from the spawn list if you already have them.

* The Demon Wolf and Cerberus, on Content Locust with the expanded enemy roster, don’t seem to ever spawn. I wonder why?

I'll look into this, a lot of the monster spawner code could do with a rewrite since it hails back to Ye Olde DECORATE era.

* Icon of Sin’s spawners are able to summon the Hellhound family (former earthlings), while they don’t send out Hell Razers.

I haven't touched the Icon of Sin code at all, to avoid fucking up death exits and such. I probably ought to do something with it, though...

[Gez]

The icon of sin's code is split between four different actors, and it's only BossBrain (aka Romero's head) which is used for death exit. There's also no real reason to mess with BossTarget. But you can change BossEye and SpawnShot.

[Miru]

Yeah, only some of Icon of Sin's parts should be altered for the MetaDoom experience. As for Eternal IOS or better yet, VIOS from RPG2, that boss should be a separate entity completely from the basic Icon. Maybe find a way to add the forehead laser attack from Eternal? I wonder why IOS and the Wolfenstein dudes lack codex entries? Since the Reelism 2 Nailgun is based on Doom 2016 concept art, could that weapon work here somehow? Perhaps its ammo would be scrap from dead machine/cyborg enemies.

[Kinsie]

Yeah, only some of Icon of Sin's parts should be altered for the MetaDoom experience.

My current thinking is to add some polish and improved actor spawn handling to the Boss Cubes. Another idea I had would be to have Crucible ammo spawn on BossTargets, but that would require me to find a good way to add the Crucible and I've yet to think of a way that wouldn't be extremely shoehorned.

As for Eternal IOS or better yet, VIOS from RPG2, that boss should be a separate entity completely from the basic Icon. Maybe find a way to add the forehead laser attack from Eternal?

Doom Eternal's Icon is just too darn big to be done properly in GZDoom without it being super-awkward. There are plenty of attempts at full-body icon battles that can attest to just how poorly super-massive monsters work in the Doom engine... VIOS would be neat as a compromise of sorts since he could be a saner size, but again, sprites.

I wonder why IOS and the Wolfenstein dudes lack codex entries?

Under normal circumstances, the Icon's codex entry would either only be viewable for roughly one second or so at the end of any given campaign, or randomly awarded by some death exit somewhere. So not really much of a point. The Wolfenstein enemies are all seeeeeecret.

Since the Reelism 2 Nailgun is based on Doom 2016 concept art, could that weapon work here somehow? Perhaps its ammo would be scrap from dead machine/cyborg enemies.

The unused Doom 2016 Nailgun is not getting added to MetaDoom.

[Finder153]

So I took a look at the language file and what I found was a bunch of obituaries for non-existent variants of the Schutzstaffel. Interesting...



Looks like the Nazi guys were actually going to be expanded further, not just limited to 2D games anymore...