Never Breaking Orbit [version dated 2017-01-17]

[Matt]

Well, since I've kinda painted myself into a (reversible, just fugly and irritating) corner with this ongoing Hideous Destructor overhaul, here's another thing!


Never Breaking Orbit

Originally inspired by Nevander's Swift Slaughter mod, but quickly became a sequel to Make It Snappy!. Title is from the lyrics to "Into The Black Hole" by Helion Prime, mostly due to the occasional annoying life/bomb bonus that you can't quite pick up.

Strongly recommended that you play this with TorridGristle's RetroShader.

Summary

A gameplay mod designed to make Doom play more like a shmup.

Overall principles

• Emphasis on both damage prevention and reactive evasion. Everything is a one-hit kill taking you back to start with one less life. In exchange, however, your hitbox is ridiculously tiny and you are far more maneuverable.
• Gameplay is as deterministic as the regular A_Chase movement would allow. All projectiles do a fixed amount of damage and the player can only ever take one hit anyway.
• No unavoidable hitscan attacks.
• "Easy to beat, difficult to master" reward system. If you play well, you can score very high, but if you play poorly you will lose your chance at a high score though you generally will be able to get through the level.

Special functions
clearnboscore: this console command immediately resets your high score to zero.

Player

• Starts with all weapons but only ammo for bullets.
• Base movement speed reduced to 80%.
• Double-jump, increased to quadruple-jump with berserk.
• Hitbox size substantially reduced. Pickups widened or given other behaviour to compensate.
• You are completely invulnerable and unnoticeable to enemies until you move, but you cannot shoot, jump or bomb during that time.
• Each time you're hit, you explode and warp back to start, losing one life. If you are hit after running out of lives, you die "for real" and your ammo resets to 50 clips.

Weapons

1. Melee. Primary for saw, altfire for punch. Gets you bonus points and also explosions if you're berserk.
2. Bullets. Primary fire for chaingun. Hold altfire to shoot the pistol: your crosshair will show first, giving you a moment to either let go and abort your shot or adjust before the shot goes off.
3. Shells. Primary fire for super shotgun, altfire for shotgun. Damage output difference per shot is the same as in vanilla, but the latter has a significantly narrower spread while the former has a faster fire rate.
4. Cells. Primary for BFG, which has no tracers but instead launches dozens of bouncing green plasma bolts that fade over time for a damage-over-time area denial. Secondary fires plasma.
5. Rockets. Primary launches a slow-starting rocket that picks up speed and explodes into a spiral of fireballs. You cannot harm yourself with this but the fireballs look just like enemy fireballs so there is still a risk! Altfire is your jetpack.

All projectiles inherit your momentum. There is no autoaim.

The weapons use the vanilla weapon ammo types, but except for cells each unit of ammo may represent many shots. You have no reasonable prospect of running out of ammo entirely.

Bombs
Hit Reload to detonate your bomb armour. This will instantly kill any non-boss enemy within 1024 units from you and detonate any projectiles within that distance. WARNING: this does NOT take care of sub-projectiles launched by projectiles or parting shots from dying enemies. You may need to bomb twice to be sure.

Scoring

• You have a personalized high score kept between games! Only updated when you run out of lives and die! Can be reset (or hacked!) by setting the nbo_hiscore and nbo_lhiscore cvars or typing clearnboscore in the console.
• You have two scores: level and career. Both scores are reset when you change levels, while career score lasts throughout the game until you run out of lives and die.
• You get points by hitting things, letting things get hit, getting hit by things, almost getting hit by things, and grabbing things beyond what you can actually carry. Useless extra lives are weighted far more importantly than anything else.

Monsters
Lots of tweaks. Go play and find out!

[Somagu]

Firstly Vae I love you. But before I get around to playing this...

Rather than having the melee weapon be pointless, why not have bullets and shotguns build up a decaying Chain multiplier, and have melee kills give 2x or so of that current multiplier? It's a twist on a normal close-range formula for shmups, but just because it's a shmup doesn't mean close range has to be useless.

[wildweasel]

I loved my brief time spent with this but found that it is entirely too easy to die to something you never see or hear. A few times I got shot in the back by zombies.

[Hetdegon]

98277 on Shores of Hell. Was pretty fun, died like a dozen times from the most silly things.
I only have one request. Could you reverse the primary/secondary on the plasma weapons? I keep trying to use plasma rifle to end up firing a BFG. I kinda feel the potent shot that takes 40 ammo should be on secondary fire. I guess the same could be said with the shotgun, but in that case it's far more reasonable.

Other things:
- The flash when hitting enemies looks kinda sweet with bloom enabled.
- Armor bombs seem to be rather plentiful, or I just used them too sparingly?
- The lives/bombs display is a bit vague. While I get an approximate idea of what I have, it'd be nice to have some numbers.
- Related to that, the score display could use a label saying what each score is. While I figured it out, it's a bit strange when starting out.
- Battling the cyberdemon is totally Touhou. Death flying everywhere. Good stuff.
- I totally love the particle effects when hitting enemies. Feels oddly satisfying. And enemies banishing when killed is totally retro and I approve.
- I also love the forward speed boost when jumping.

Gonna try this out next in a OBLIGE V7 map filled to the brim with grunts. I feel it's gonna be pretty fun.

[CuppaBro]

you could be onto something here--this is a blast to play in short bursts, and i could only imagine even more so if i dedicated the time to playing an entire mapset with it

[HexaDoken]

D2MAP01-08: 146,271 on first try

still alive, will play more later

I have no idea how to hit anything at not point blank

[CuppaBro]

update, playing NBO has made my aim worse in other mods because i keep trying to account for projectile inheritance

vaecrius, you bastard, i love you.

[Matt]

Somagu: I've got some ideas for the melee. Will implement them soon.

Hetdegon: Glad you like it! I'll consider swapping the plasma and BFG... for a long time before the initial post the plasma sucked so much (1 shot per cell) it was to the BFG what the pistol is to the chaingun. All weapons are set so the more effective gun is primary fire.

Bombs are supposed to be plentiful but you tend to lose out on some extra points by using them.

Weasel: If a zed can shoot you, it must have had LOS with you very recently. I've found a lot of the game involves running around the area trying to figure out where everything is - it's designed basically to be the polar opposite of HD.

That said, I'll try importing the HD pistol bullet fwoosh sound for the bullets to see if that helps any.

HexaDoken: Neither do I, lol.

CuppaBro: Ha!

[mumblemumble]

Neat mod! Love it. Feels more like contra doom than...well....contra doom.

I do suggest maybe rocket fireballs get a recolor, fighting cyberdemons is crazy considering you lose track or whos fireballs are whos.

Also, the shotguns seem pretty damn weak, a single shotgun blast cannot kill a commando, while the double blast is very wide, and barely useful unless im up close. I find the chaingun is a better bet unless its crowds or something...actually scratch that, its always better, unless I have no bullets

Keep in mind, THIS isn't hideous destructor, so having a super strong shotgun isn't unreasonable, and given the nature of the mod, shotguns should be powerful, in my opinion.

Think metal slug : the shotgun had barely above knife range, but would blow through groups, and do more damage than rockets, but in exchange, you needed to get close. Infact, doing just that might make it more interesting. A series of low range rippers / explosions in a wide spread, designed so point blank is ridiculous damage, and longer range it can damage everything with light damage with a relatively large splash damage (or series of them)

It also would be neat if you could do something with the pistol, say, an internal combo system, with higher damage on combos? This way pistol normally is very weak, but could surpass the chaingun in damage with good combos, and rapid fire hits that never miss.

[Someone64]

I honestly use the shotguns way more than the chaingun and feel like they're pretty balanced.

I feel though that the delay for the pistol should be switched to the chaingun instead (but still keep the crosshair for the pistol when firing).

[Kinsie]

This is very fun! Very arcadey. Well up my alley.

Some brief thoughts:
- I feel like the HUD could be more informative. For example, displaying when you are in the start-of-level cant-do-shit state.
- The player "death" effect could be improved by adding a third-person camera that zooms out ala Descent/Terminal Velocity and maybe a message detailing what it was that murdered you dead.
- While the super-low filesize is very impressive, I feel like some custom sounds wouldn't go amiss, even if just edited versions of the original sounds to differentiate them between different actions (the rocket explosion noise is used for like ten different things!)

[Someone64]

Hmm... It seems to be incompatible with Going Down. On the first level the level immediately ends after a second or two.

EDIT: Happens on all of them actually.

[Tapwave]

A gameplay mod designed to make Doom play more like a shmup.

Auuugh, I had something in the works but my shitty coding skills stopped me from making it workable. I had weapon concepts, new-ish monsters and a plot, even!
It's alright, though, I'll try this soon and tell you how it goes.

[Somagu]

Hmm... It seems to be incompatible with Going Down. On the first level the level immediately ends after a second or two.

Most likely the player character is so skinny that their voodoo dolls are passing through bars or something.

[mumblemumble]

So after a bit of experimenting, I have a few observations / opinions.

First, barrels, mancubi shots, baron shots, rockets, ect, anything that splits would likely be better firing fireballs in upward parabolic ARCS to better emulate an explosion, and make them slightly LESS dangerous across the map, but MORE dangerous up close... This is just an opinion however.

cacodemons could really use a small buff. They are piss easy to avoid compared to other enemies of similar ranks, their big hitbox makes them easy to kill, and strangely them flying makes them easier.

Just an aesthetic idea, but maybe remove the "reload" / pump frames from both shotguns, and just play the pump sound for the SSG? Make it pretty much like quake, and a bit faster as well....

Revenants are absolutely terrifying in open maps. What is it with you and making revenant rockets like drunken angry bees? This is in both your mods...

What if the jetpack rained down fireballs in exchange for a very low usage of rockets? Would be rad to rain fire on zombies while flying over.... Or if not fireballs, just a series of splash damage explosions?

This would be rad if it could be setup for dm... But obviously tweaks would be needed. And I doubt this is zandronum compatable

a challenging map for people to try with this is https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/level ... i/gizainv2 Very open (besides a few walls) lots of bullets, and enemies, and area to fly around.... and good luck dodging those revenants! Its very possible, but hard with all the bullets flying. Using the jetpack is pretty much mandatory, and killing the revenants is also extremely important, as they are shockingly hard to shake. Once you kill the revenants and destroy the rockets, its much easier, but theres still enough zombies to keep you jumpy. Everything else is pretty much cannon fodder though.