ZDoom

There's a feature that I think I recall Brutal Doom having that might be good here: An indicator for when you have a berserk powerup. BD does this, iirc, by replacing the medikit graphic in the HUD with a berserker pack, unless I'm remembering another mod entirely, but it's still a good feature!

Balance with weapons is pretty great in general, but it feels like, with the fodder enemies, the chainsaw is killing them instantly. I like its fast cycle, but feel like maybe it should do less damage per cycle?

RUH ROH.
- Commander Keens are invisible. They can be found, and some of their frames seen, if you shoot them, but they are invisible for some reason.
- There are no SS in the secret levels of Doom 2. Not sure if that was just a personal choice or what.

Another:
- Revenants fire at me without even looking at me. It's disrespectful! One of them literally condescendingly lobbed a missile right out of his ass at me. :\

vitriolicv wrote:RUH ROH.
- Commander Keens are invisible. They can be found, and some of their frames seen, if you shoot them, but they are invisible for some reason.
- There are no SS in the secret levels of Doom 2. Not sure if that was just a personal choice or what.

Are you using the BFG Edition IWADs?

Nope. I've got nazis and Keens both without BDLite loaded. Only other things in my autoload are Shane's music (Doom covers) and a status bar face replacement.

To clarify, it's not a sprite overwrite affecting the SS (but it seems to just be that for the Keens), but a total replacement of the actors -- possibly because original BD was doing weird shit with its SS, and David probably just took something out in the cleanup. Where there were SS before, there are just inert piles of gibs now.

I got brave and actually opened up the decorate. DEAD.txt, line 820:

actor CrushedRemains: DeadMarineLegs Replaces WolfensteinSS //Reduce all nazis to small melted splats

So it's intentional. Possibly because fuck nazis, possibly because of edgelord BD modders, dunno. I would contest this on grounds that this kind of breaks original game maps, but eh, it's David's mod.

As for our dear Commander Keen, KEENA0.png is in the mod's sprites\blanks directory as a 667 byte file, which when opened in a graphics program shows a red circle and slash symbol, 32x32 pixels, but in GZDoom shows nothing (actually, it might be showing something, but the offset might be wrong and putting it up in the ceiling or into the floor).

I have no idea what files reference the graphics in sprites\blanks or why they are there, though.

Thanks so much for your continued comments and interest - I'm watching this thread even though it might not really seem like it, life has been absolutely nonstop for me recently I'll see what I can do about fixing the points raised - in the meantime, merge requests on the Git repository are always open as well!

I think that I did that to the WolfensteinSS monsters because they were the last one on the list and I decided I couldn't be arsed to rework them when they were used so little (and like you said, there was some oddity with them that I can't remember), but perhaps I should do a proper replacement... the Keens are definitely a problem, though!

I'd probably leave the WolfSS and Keen alone (or use an EventHandler to toggle replacing them) to avoid issues with Boom-targeting mapsets that use DEHACKED to turn them into new enemies.

Finally got around to trying this; and I like to call it 'Gibbed Vanilla'.

When I first started I wondered why it was actually more bloody than base Brutal when I realised I also had nashgore at max settings in the loadorder, lol. XD

Any chance we'll see you at least adding in the single-barrel-by-barrel fire for the SSG, and the pistol as a Rifle Replacer option?

I can't do without those I don't think; back to Tometefar's BD mod for now, but its still a quality mod so good work on that.

I found another potential problem: When lots of monsters die at the same time, and some of their gibs land in a swimmable area, there seems to be a lot of slowdown. I found where they were floating (because I was testing a map) a minute after I did "kill monsters" in the console, and watched gibs floating around, seemingly endlessly -- it's because, in water, the gibs can fly a long way without hitting anything, so it takes a while for the bounce count to get incremented so that the gibs themselves can finally die. So, I don't know what needs to change: The bounce count? How much processing each chunk of gibs takes? The gravity? The projectile speed (assuming they're projectiles? I have no idea).

It was a fairly small number of monsters that could cause this. I base this on the fact that, while building this map, I had done "kill monsters" in the console a few times without seeing long lags like this, but after adding a liquid 3d floor where there were monsters close enough to gib in it, that's when I started to see the issue. It's something like 10-20 monsters in that area.

FURTHER INFORMATION -- IMPORTANT!

I decided to do some "natural" map testing and play through what I've got in this WIP map, and all the killing was just fine performance-wise, until I got to... PAIN ELEMENTALS! They're intensely gibby I guess, or there is something wrong/excessive in their code. I isolation tested it by adding an isolated sector with swimmable fluid and three pain elementals, turned on god mode, noclipped over there, and killed the first pain elemental -- instant slowdown.

I mean, I've killed pain elementals before with your mod, in less performance-demanding situations (this map has a lot of lights and 3d floors), and it was fine, but something about the pain elementals is taking me, in this situation, from "performance is fine" to "lagged to death." 5-10 second freezes, seriously.

ALSO VERY STRANGE: I don't get that slowdown (or any at all even when using "kill monsters" in the console) in Brutal Doom, even as poorly coded as it is known to be, even as feature-loaded as my map is.

Okay, turns out it's other monsters, too. Oops. I should make a comprehensive test map for this...

Here's that test map (attached) I mentioned. It has just one of every monster, in a very simple map, no effects anywhere except the 3d floor used to flood the map (only 32-units deep though). Doing "kill monsters" in the console can lag for 5-10 seconds while they die. I also tried killing them one by one to see if I could isolate it, and it seemed it was mostly the pain elemental, baron, and cyberdemon that slowed things down, but it might be solely a matter of what the gibs chance to randomly hit -- a wall or a fluid plane.

vitriolicv wrote:ALSO VERY STRANGE: I don't get that slowdown (or any at all even when using "kill monsters" in the console) in Brutal Doom, even as poorly coded as it is known to be, even as feature-loaded as my map is.

This is because Brutal Doom defines special XDeath states for the "Massacre" damagetype used by the MDK and Kill cheat commands that don't spray gib actors everywhere, so that the game doesn't enter seconds-per-frame hell upon typing "kill monsters".