TerminusEst13 wrote:The melee animations in particular seem really...really weak.
I'm trying to get them replaced with the scratching ones which are in there, as those seem more appropriate.
The level design is plain, a lot of blank rooms.
The final levels will have more detail, these are more proof-of-concept.
You plan on distributing this on Steam?
Yes, because that looks like the best platform after doing some research.
What do you plan on doing with the sound effects? I recognize a lot of these sounds. Are they original? Are you using from a stock library?
As far as I know, all sounds were either made or used from sound libraries which were legally available to us. A chunk of the sound and texture assets in here are straight-up placeholders because it takes time to do them the right way, and sometimes someone else already did something perfect. (the green-paneling stuff, for instance, really fit with what I was looking for)
"Maps will be huge (10 times the size) compared to these"
This actually sounds like a really, really bad thing. GZDoom is not actually a very good engine for working with 3D models on large-scale projects. Hunter's Moon is a project that uses a lot of 3D assets, and even on relatively small mapsets the engine tends to choke. Making maps 10x the size (even assuming you don't hit the blockmap limit) sounds like it would destroy computers.
Actually, GZDoom is pretty good at it if you're aware of your BSP tree and can properly control Occlusion, especially if you're working from the assumption that your players will be using an OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphics card. (Also if you like, don't abuse portals)
can you really fill in "as needed" for sections to match him?
Yes. I'm not going to be doing enemy models or anything like that, but I was the one who set up all the Specular Mapping stuff so far, and some of the textures in there are edits of things he gave me. Remember, I've been screwing around with Doom on and off for over 10 years: I'm no stranger to doing my own art in GIMP.
What development hardware to you need? Why do you need 10k to hire additional artists? What software do you need? There's very little information as to what the money would actually be going for.
I've seen other campaigns with less information, but yeah, it was a bit vague for me too. Basically, I can work a lot faster on hardware which could meet the requirements to test stuff like PBR in a detailed map, and could view the map in GZDB without significant lag, because GZDB is far less efficient when it comes to rendering than GZDoom itself, all while keeping other programs open so I don't have to open and close programs. To this end, I invested $800 of my last paycheck into a heavily-discounted 2016 MSI computer, which is far more than I spend on the computers I use to make websites and knick nacks for clients.
you got brought on really recently and you're asking people to pay you so that you can actually do work for it.
Yes and no. I first started talking to Don back in May, so if a couple months is recent then yes. If we don't make the goal, it's not that I "won't" be working on it so much as "I have to find other sources of income while I work on this", which means there can't be any guarantee of timeliness of work, and I might not be able to take the time to give those maps the polish that a commercial game should have.
You're also involved in multiple other projects (I didn't know you did work on Hedon! Did Metroid Doom ever get a release?), so would you be working on this full-time or would you be dropping the others to support this?
I've already been pulling out of my other projects, both inside and outside of this community. After talking with the
Metroid Doom team, R4L and Bauti aren't interested in heading the project themselves, so I will be putting together a final alpha release of the project with all the loose ends tied together for someone else to potentially pick up from, and I'll be available to advise on that project, simply because I'd like to see a working Metroid game in the Doom engine.
I'm 100% in favor of people asking for money to support their work, mod authors do a fantastic job entirely on their own dime and I imagine a lot of this shit is really difficult. But this doesn't seem like a good investment. If you want it to rival Total Chaos, Nocturne in Yellow, and Blade of Agony in terms of polish, then, well...out of those, one isn't released, one was done in a month and wasn't all that well done, and the other is kind of split down the middle in terms of community reception.
Compare with another scenario for another source port, Marathon Rubicon, which is doing everything that you're pitching (gigantic levels, in-depth storyline, enemies with unique behavior), but has 30 levels. And is, like, completely free.
So... Should I be using that as an example? I honestly didn't even remember that one existed...
I just looked that up and I'm not sure if that's comparable. Obviously we haven't really gotten across what this will look like in a few months, but that's ok. The point of a crowdfunding campaign is to get seed capital and check for actual market interest, not to show off the final product.
You...don't even know what the money will be for?
Let me put it this way...
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Don: Blah blah blah, something about the software he used in college, blah blah blah, and then use Blender to make that work in the new Bone-Animated model format, blah blah blah.
Raccoon: Sounds totes gnarly brah, how much ya need for dat in da budget me homie g dog?
Don: $500
So, he told me at some point, but honestly, he's the one with the Pixar-esque background, so while I understand what he's saying I don't actually know enough about it off the top of my head to give answers off the top of my head. He has a sort of "wishlist" he's working with, and I'm really not the one to explain details...
Yeah, it's not the same as getting it to run in GZDoom, it is significantly easier than getting it to run in GZDoom. And honestly, this can go one of two ways, neither of them particularly favorable.
...I'm... actually surprised you don't know this.
So, like, the DoomBuilder renderer that Code Imp wrote doesn't render maps in the same way as the actual renderer. That's why you can do things like go above the map and see a bunch of rooms at once, which is great for an editor, but it means that all the neat little tricks that someone can use to optimize a map don't do anything in that renderer, and in some cases can even slow it down. This becomes noticable when you're working with large maps, especially since, as Code Imp stated himself, that renderer is NOT built with the need for 30+ FPS in mind. So, in order to quickly map things in GZDB, I need a computer which can handle rendering a full map with models and lights and all that without any occlusion being handled. It also helps to be able to run the game at a relatively high fidelity without having to wait very long for it to load.
If you're having trouble getting the game to run except on very specific, advanced hardware, how do you expect people to play the game and play it reliably?
I actually have reason to expect that it will run on the newer Raspberry Pi, albeit not at the highest settings. I'd have to do math for you to prove that though, and I really don't have time to maintain the thread like this, so you're just going to have to figure that out for yourself.
Blade of Agony had to delay a release in order to streamline things to make sure more people could run it--and it's still one of the most demanding projects out there.
Funny you should mention BoA: I actually know the meticulous details on why BOA doesn't run at the speed it should. In fact, I was actually one of the first people to really get into analyzing why that was, and eventually explain it to the team. That's not the engine, that's how they've been misusing it.
Likewise, if you're doing mapping for a project and it's not at a level where you can, like, reliably test it because you don't have the hardware to run it... How can you be sure what you're developing actually works? Like, lots of stuff can go wrong in mapping. Stuff that seems good on paper breaks constantly. You need to tone down the level of stuff you're making so that you can run it, not theoretical hardware that you might be getting in the future can run it.
Once again, clearly there is something that has been implied by what's been written that is not true. This runs fine on older
hardware, an if there's anything in there that should make you believe that, then it is a typo, so let me make this clear, for the record, once and for all:
This game's minimum fidelity has been run with consistently good resullts, in Linux on a 2015 laptop with only 4GB of RAM, and in OSX on a 2009 iMac.
These minimum requirements will not change significantly, and using older systems will be possible with the final release.
why are you saying you have 10 years of experience in mapping
The first time I picked up DoomBuilder and screwed around with mapping to make and improve maps for me and my friends to play in Hexen was over 10 years ago, and I've been popping in and out of the community on and off to do various mapping things. There's probably a better way to say that, but Indiegogo has some strict character limits. If you have a better way to describe it then I'm all ears.
with credits on Hedon, if you didn't actually do any mapping for it?
Because, as Zan pointed out to me on Discord, I
have been significant in Hedon's development, and since Zan thinks it was enough to put it here, I'm going to go by his judgement and leave it.
