D4D - v3 Alpha 8.8 Final (11/22/2020)

[snackerfork]

Oh, no wonder, I didn't have that button assigned. Thank you!

ETA: OK after playing with it a bit I'm a little surprised people are saying it's a "little too rare." On PRCP MAP32 (which in fairness is a slaughtermap) I had literally hundreds of the things and could spawn any powerup and as much ammo and armor as I wanted for free with plenty to spare. I would seriously consider having items cost multiple crates as well as putting a cooldown period on summonable crates (so that you can't just mash the button for infinite stuff).

ETA again: As an experiment, I added a 5-second cooldown to crates and made them cost 5 crates in my modmod. Personally I think that works much better, although they might be a little underpowered outside of slaughtermaps - they're extremely random, so it's difficult to balance. It might be best to reduce the cost but remove some of the more OP drops, such as Quad Damage/Soulspheres/Megaspheres, so it doesn't feel like you're getting "dud" items when you get something like shells instead. At any rate, it takes a little more effort to spam them now.

You said you wanted to balance them with Credits mode, but I don't think that's advisable (and they might be OP in Credits mode as-is too). In Credits mode, there's an opportunity cost to crates in that you can use your Credits to buy upgrades as well. There's no opportunity cost in Pickup mode, which makes Crates effectively free. They need to either be rarer or cost more.

[Major Cooke]

The thing with credits mode is, it costs you the ability to purchase upgrades directly and pushes your ability to gain critical upgrades back that you might need.

Slaughterfest maps is to be expected that you'll be swimming in them. I'm not going to balance around that so much because that just makes it harder to survive normal maps.

Also take into consideration crates aren't that good without upgrades.

If anything, I will either introduce a limit to the maximum number of crates one can carry at any time and allow continuous spam until they deplete, or have 'charges' that must regenerate over time, where one must wait for a cooldown. I.e. by default they have 5 charges. Upgrades will naturally affect both of these things, depending on which I choose. This will only apply to crates mode though.

I'm leaning more towards the charge system, but we'll see.

[snackerfork]

Testing it in other maps, I find the five-second cooldown and five crate cost works fine. Even on very simple maps like Doom 2 MAP01, I got thirty crates by the end. That's enough to use crates six times, which still feels way excessive for such an easy, simple map. It's the same thing on Doom 1. Hell, I don't think survivability is really that much of an issue - I was playing without crates at all on PRCP for a while since I didn't have the button assigned and was surviving fine, it didn't even feel that much harder than a normal map. If a map's properly balanced in terms of health and ammo, it should still be balanced in D4D.

That's a good idea though, adding charges, but personally, I think just a cooldown and a maximum number of crates is simpler to understand. If you also made crates rarer, instead of more expensive to purchase, that would also balance out well.

Also I disagree that crates aren't good. Crates are crazy good. Spawning Quad Damage and Soulspheres is enough to make them always worth spamming, and just spawning large health packs and armor is enough to make the difference between life and death. They feel OP, not underpowered.

Anyway, unrelated note - I'd like to see the Unwilling from the HF mod added officially to D4D (once you get permission). Playing with it, I think they'd make a good random zombieman replacement if they were a tiny bit faster to move and to hit. You could either make them spawn via a spawner like in HF, so that multiple Unwilling can spawn at a time (this is a bit glitchy though) or just do a 1:1 replacement (with a rare chance to spawn instead of Zombiemen). What do you think? Should I work on this?

[XavierStudios]

Trying to balance random drops around an arbitrary value with no good correlation between them is an exercise in futility.

How I'd do it is let the monsters drop fake credits that count up in the background. Once the fake credit total reaches 500, let them drop. If you want to add some variance, let the crate drop chance ramp up logarithmically, topping out at a 30% chance to drop from any monster once the fake credit counter hits 500. When the crate drops, set the fake credit counter to 0 and start over again.

That way, once you get 500 fake credits, you're mostly guaranteed to get a crate within the next few monsters. You'll probably end up with a slightly higher number of crates than if you paid directly for them, but it's more consistent and less dependent on completely random chance. Also, if you decide to rework crate contents and price in purchase mode at a later date, you can adjust the number of fake credits required in pickup mode.


Also, regarding the Possessed/Unwilling, I believe it would be better to have them spawn alongside existing monsters. I'd only give them a chance to spawn with the different zombiemen, imps and demons, and even then only at a 10-20% chance per monster.

[snackerfork]

Good idea. Here's a mod that makes Unwilling spawn on top of Zombiemen, Imps, and Demons without replacing them: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B36UuN ... sp=sharing

It's in Decorate though so it'd have to be converted to ZScript.

As for your idea for Crates... I like it, personally, as long as they drop from monsters. I don't want a pop-up and a sound effect to play every time I collect enough credits, that'd get annoying really fast. However, I still think the drops need to be toned down - not to beat a dead horse, but powerups dropping randomly from monsters still sounds insane. At least the random Runes (while OP as hell) are fun to play with, instead of just raw health or damage boosts.

[XavierStudios]

Yes, they should drop from monsters as they do now, just at a more controlled frequency.

In fact, I'll just do a bit of silly math to give an estimate of how many crates you'd get with my method at 500 fake credits per crate drop.

After running through E1M1 and E1M2 on Ultra-Nightmare without Rainbow monsters, I got a total of 6,472 credits, meaning that's around 13 crates if we're just going by numbers. The completion bonus from one map is 1,500+ credits, so subtract two crates for each complete map, or four total for this example. There's at least two guaranteed crates from the level completion bonus once you hike over to the next level and frag a couple monsters, but let's not count those.

We're sitting at ~7 crates in two levels with just killing monsters and finding secrets. Before any upgrades, you're fairly likely to get small health and ammo items. However, that's not to say you won't get lucky and make serious bank on a supercharge or full armor. In seven items, I got a couple small rocket cases, shotgun shells, bullets, plasma cells and a radsuit. In another seven, I got full armor and a supercharge, as well as some bullets and a couple plasma cells.

Given that this is an experiment with a sample size of one, I wouldn't put too much faith in my idea here, but I feel as though 1,000 or 1,250 fake credits per crate would be a more acceptable rate. However, there's no way to tell if this is a good idea at all unless someone implements it, and I'm not the guy to do it.


As an aside, I like the Unwilling addon you put together, snackerfork. They don't seem to spawn as often as I'd expect, which is just how it should be. They didn't spawn at all in E1M1, but then there were fairly large pockets in E1M2.

[treos]

well, this is good news for me. ty for not uploading this to moddb because their download links suck!

i try copy/pasting a moddb download link into JDownloader (a download manager i use) and the resulting download can't be paused/resumed so whenever i pause it or stop it to resume later, the entire download restarts from the beginning. (yep, apparently some websites STILL do that for some reason. >.>)

huh, not as big as i thought it was going to...oh... i see, it's the map and resources that are the big downloads. well still, huzzah for pause/resumable download links.

and... downloads of the 3 D4D pk3 files is finished.

[snackerfork]

Is there a way to turn off the Akimbo weapons? I find them kind of unintuitive and it's annoying when I'm switched to them automatically, but it also causes crashes. I've had a PlayerPawn crash and several error messages relating to akimbo weapons when I assume I run out of ammo and it switches to them.

[Major Cooke]

No. However I did just change it so it should never be selected again without ammo. Redownload the bleeding edge.

[Major Cooke]

I am aware the bleeding edge download link is broken right now. The little big garden gnomes of burly gallon-sized manliness are working on it.

[Major Cooke]

The auto-compilation host has shut down, unfortunately. However, this is easily fixed by simply downloading directly from the github itself -- I've taken the liberty of replacing the bleeding edge link already. Simply click on Clone or Download, save it as a download to your normal area where you download it from and use that to launch D4D in place of the original .pk3 (you can rename it to D4D.zip if you'd like.)

As usual, you only need to download the resource package whenever I say to, and that's only when a big update comes around.

[SLAMNDAN]

Credit upgrades no longer seem to work in bleeding edge. You can buy them, but the amount of credits you earn doesn't increase at all.

[Major Cooke]

I thought I was missing something... Thanks for the report. Fixed.

[MrRumbleRoses]

so. i recently had a little experiment with D4D & newer GZDoom ports. and it turns out that i can actually play in OpenGL/Hardware mode in newer GZDoom ports. it seems that 1 of my recording things was the issue that made it to where textures of weapons and even fonts and other things were messing things up. part of me is happy to know that i can actually play newer GZDoom's in hardware/opengl mode. but the other part of me is confused as to why a recording software is sorta interfering with newer GZDoom's

[Major Cooke]

Yeah I had that problem long ago. It was on an older laptop of mine which caused the game to lock up when recording, it was so frustrating.

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In other news, I will be putting all mods belonging to me on hiatus for the time being. Development has practically ground to a halt as capstone projects will require most of my time and energy. If there's any development pushed about, it's probably just to fix a few bugs, or it will be Michaelis doing stuff to it.

No, I'm not retiring the mod... yet. Not until I add a few more features and finish off everything else.

However, heavier duty stuff will have to wait until around late this year, probably November/Decemberish.