Scavver's Paradise V1.8 - A Survival Horror Mod

[Abba Zabba]

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Right, work on version 2.0 is commencing. I'll be posting occasional videos on my YouTube channel to show new features and whatnot. Progress will be slowed though since I am in the process of getting a job, likely going to nail an interview soon.

Hope you land it!

So far, a few weapons have new sprites to make them look and feel that much nicer. The chaingun has been given a buff in the form of a larger magazine, and the LMG has been replaced with a lighter SAW, boasting a reduced magazine size, but is more accurate than the chaingun with a faster fire rate and a relatively speedy reload rate, while also being lighter in weight than the LMG to make it that much more attractive over the chaingun.

While I'm not overly familiar with either the chaingun or LMG (since they're so rare generally), these changes sound good. I think I never had an issue with the LMG running out too soon, but the chaingun definitely felt like it ran out fast for a weapon that's supposed to either be belt fed or have a large magazine/multiple magazine ports.

The revolver is now both a bit nicer to look at with new sprites, has better reload animations, and is less painful to use thanks to some new code. Now the player character has realized they can remove all spent casings in their gun at once before speedily loading bullets into it, rather than removing a spent casing, adding a new round, then moving on to repeat the process ad nauseum.

Good change, the old behavior made it seem like it was some ancient (especially by the mod's time period) fixed cylinder revolver.

To further improve the revolver, I'm working on adding a speed loader, allowing for an instantaneous reloading, as well as the function where you can load spare bullets into an empty speed loader.

Love this idea, to the point where I might reconsider keeping it over the compact colt .45 ACP and select-fire 9mm.

I'm planning on adding alternative ammo types to a few different weapons. For the sake of not having a nightmare of a time trying to balance clip/clipbox and cell/cellpack spawns, I'm specifically targeting slot 3 and slot 5 weapons (with one exception, see below) since those ammo pools are a bit less varied. 20 gauge shotguns are getting slugs which overall are slightly weaker than if all pellets hit in a standard shell, but it pierces armor significantly better. I'm still split on what to add for 12 gauge shells, currently considering either dragonbreath shells to flambe your foes, flechette shells that are a bit weaker but pierce armor, or 000 buckshot which has fewer pellets, but they're much stronger. The crossbow is also getting new ammo types, two of them in fact: An electric bolt that stuns fleshy enemies and deals extra damage to robotic enemies, and an explosive bolt. Gonna throw in hollow point bullets for .357 weapons which would be significantly stronger than the standard round, but would fare much worse against armor. 40mm grenade weapons will also gain incendiary rounds, and I'm contemplating adding plasma shells for the 20mm cannon.

Great options to make loadouts more flexible! If you want just one alternate ammo type for 12ga, I'd go with flechette (even though they're unfortunately sort of meme tier iirc) or triple-ought buck so that you can use the totally not a Spas against crowds of chaingunner tier spawns.

All in all, this update sounds hefty. Will this update change medical to a finite system rather than acting as a temporary ticket to gain a powerup healing effect? I'll try to help where I can, but I'm at roughly the same, if not less, level of experience you're at. At the very least I'll throw around word to see where it goes, if and when. Thanks for keeping us up to speed, and I hope the interview goes smooth!

[Sartana]

I had a small suggestion re:armor the player doesn't plan to use, either because it's a step down from their current gear or its stats not being what the player is looking for.

Maybe we could interact with it with the "scrap weapon" state active and turn them into an "armor patch" that instantly restores a little of your current armor's durability. Perhaps a static number, or more ideally, a number based on the tier of the scrapped armor. My thinking was 10 or 15 points per tier. Scrapping a ballistic jacket would give you 10 or 15 points of durability. Scrapping a marine armor would be worth 50 or 75 points.

It just seems a shame to leave armor behind, especially late-game when you have good armor that you'd rather try to keep.

[CaptainNurbles]

It's going to be a long trip to getting everything I've planned for version 2.0 finished and fine tuned. Before I can start this journey off properly, I've done a bit of cleanup duty to make things look and feel a bit nicer.


Nothing super meaty's been worked on so far, mostly just new sprites for the revolver, .22 WMR pistol, and the burst carbine, with the LMG being worked into a lighter SAW. Also new bullet casings, and most importantly, improvements to the revolver. I think currently the revolver is the most mechanically complicated weapon in the mod, since you've got a firing state, an alt fire sequence that speeds up the firing state, two different reload states, and several under-the-hood workings to make it all work just fine. Getting it to spit out all spent casings at once when reloading was a RIGHT pain in the ass to fix up, lemme tell you.


What wasn't pointed out specifically is all the tweaks I've made to many weapons to make things that much more balanced, not to mention several fixes (The 7.62mm battle rifle is so rare it took me til recently to realize that shooting grenades with it also spends a round of 7.62mm ammo and also spits a 7.62mm casing in the process.) Constant work is going into fine tuning the item spawn pools, particularly the weapons and especially ammo. When you've got so many different unique types of ammunition available and only have 8 ingame Things that are ammo pickups, making sure that every weapon gets just as much ammo as it needs is a real pain in the ass.


Hopefully next time I'll have more to actually show. Progress is going to be slowed since I'm now back in the work force, and unlike my last job I won't be able to code during down time. Planning on doing even more writing as well. So far I've added 16 more data logs that can be found and read, and plan on adding more as ideas come along. I'll also be working hard on getting alternate ammo types implemented for shotguns and the crossbow, give them more versatility and more reason to hold onto them outside of their common ammo.

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Hope you land it!

Thankfully I did, appreciate the concern man!

Good change, the old behavior made it seem like it was some ancient (especially by the mod's time period) fixed cylinder revolver.

Yeah, that was just a result of me not thinking too deeply into how to get all the casings to eject at once when I first added the revolver.

Love this idea, to the point where I might reconsider keeping it over the compact colt .45 ACP and select-fire 9mm.

I am definitely doing lots of thought on how to best balance the .45 magnum and the revolver out. I don't want one to be too much better than the other, so I'm trying to make sure that both are appealing in their own ways.

Will this update change medical to a finite system rather than acting as a temporary ticket to gain a powerup healing effect?

I'm definitely going to look into this. At the moment, I haven't a clue how to manage that, but I'll poke around the forums to see if others have managed something better, maybe see if a better system is available in any of the Realm667 items.

I'll try to help where I can, but I'm at roughly the same, if not less, level of experience you're at. At the very least I'll throw around word to see where it goes, if and when. Thanks for keeping us up to speed, and I hope the interview goes smooth!

Feel free to send me a PM here on the ZDoom forums and we can hand over our Discord IDs. If nothing else it'll be nice to swap ideas and get some input from someone who's really invested in the mod and is smelling what I'm stepping in, as it were, with the general ideas and intentions with the mod.

I had a small suggestion re:armor the player doesn't plan to use, either because it's a step down from their current gear or its stats not being what the player is looking for.

Maybe we could interact with it with the "scrap weapon" state active and turn them into an "armor patch" that instantly restores a little of your current armor's durability. Perhaps a static number, or more ideally, a number based on the tier of the scrapped armor. My thinking was 10 or 15 points per tier. Scrapping a ballistic jacket would give you 10 or 15 points of durability. Scrapping a marine armor would be worth 50 or 75 points.

It just seems a shame to leave armor behind, especially late-game when you have good armor that you'd rather try to keep.

I'm not sure if I'll do exactly that with the armor, but I do want to have it where you can remove or even carry armor with you. Ideally, I'd want it how Hideous Destructor does it, with armor keeping track of its condition, but that is impossible with DECORATE without making an incredibly convoluted series of checks and custom states for each piece of armor. With my skill with ZScript (AKA none) and my patience for this sorta thing, it'll probably end up being closer to how Doom RL: Arsenal handles it (Removing armor that isn't in perfect condition destroys it, and armor can be carried and worn as desired. An addition I'd add is carried armor having weight, to keep the player from just infinitely hoarding copies of every armor in the game. Otherwise you'd just don a suit of marine armor and keep a spare suit on hand 24/7, breaking the difficulty of the mod.)