Beautiful Doom 7.1.6 (June 2nd, 2021)

[jablon1000]

Small bug report:

When lines in decorate:

Code: Select all

#include "DECORATE/Objects/BD_OBJ.txt"	//decorative objects
#include "DECORATE/Objects/BD_LIGHT.txt" //light sources
#include "DECORATE/Objects/BD_DEAD.txt"	//impaled bodies and other gory decorations

are commented, then candelabras and black candles are very big. Other decals seems to be OK.

[Syrion]

Hey there, thanks for this great mod, this is really a breath of fresh air for good old vanilla Doom Despite only being a little touch, I especially love the fullbright red eyes!

I've got one problem, though. I'm trying to use BD 6.3.2 with Ancient Aliens (and Final Doomer+ in this case, although the problem is the same when only using BD+AA). Nearly everything seems to work as intended, but the graphics of the shotgunners are glitched:



As you can see not all frames are affected.
I've already played around with the order the mods are loaded, but to no avail. I've tried commenting out ShotgunGuy in D_MONSTERS.txt which reduces the glitch, but it's still present in a few frames. I've also tried deleting all the shotgunner frames in aaliens.wad, but that didn't result in any visible change. Does anyone know what else I can do? Those glowing eyes in the dark just mix perfectly with the vivid colours of these maps...

[wildweasel]

The trouble is that Ancient Aliens changes the Doom palette significantly, and includes replacements to the default Doom sprites that reassign their palettes to fit better in the new palette. Beautiful Doom, meanwhile, is designed to work in the original Doom palette. You can attempt to get around this by converting all the sprites to PNGs, but this may have other side effects, like certain palette translations not behaving correctly.

[Syrion]

Thanks wildweasel. I've found that of the 180 animation frames of the ShotgunGuy in BD, most are just pngs, whereas about 50 are "grayscale" Imp files, and those are the ones apparently getting coloured in one of AA'S palettes. Strangely (I know hardly anything about Doom modding, mind) those are just about the only monster frames like this in BD, nearly all the rest are pngs. Is there a way to convert those frames in question to png with their correct colours? I've found that using Slade I can convert them to png easily and have a great choice of palettes to use, but none even come close to the "proper" colourisation.

If that doesn't work, at least commenting out ShotgunGuy in D_MONSTERS.txt worked properly now, I must have done something wrong last time I tried.

[Syrion]

(sorry for the "double post" and spamming your mod account for post approval )
I've figured out that most BD monster sprites are in png, and only those few ShotgunGuy frames in question aren't. I've managed to convert those to png now (After finally finding out that DOOM/DOOM2.WAD has to be set as the "Base Resource"). So far that seems to have done the trick, everything looks fine

Although, along the way I've also noticed that Ancient Aliens actually uses "DeadBodies" and replaces them with one of the included enemy types. This enemy only showed up as a tame skull on the ground when using BD, as that in turn replaced the DeadBodies with a gib of its own. Commenting out DeadBodies.txt (and WolfensteinSS.txt for good measure as that also seems to be used) in D_MONSTERS seems to have fixed that.

So, with that slightly modified rendition of BD 6.3.2 Ancient Aliens seems to work perfectly now. Thanks for the input

[3saster]

@Syrion All of the images in Beautiful Doom should be PNGs, a bunch of them seem to be doom-format from an editting leftover or something. The following should be converted to PNGs:

• Casings
• Rocket Launcher
• ShotgunGuy
• Mancubus

Also, it's better to write a DECORATE patch and load it at the end (or add it into ancient aliens by replacing the decorate and loading aaliens last), as this can give it higher mod compatibility in general. Luckily, I already had one written

This should also allow the decorations to display properly as well (The first episode should have cactuses and skulls and stuff, but I think BD makes them appear as heads on a stick and such).

[Syrion]

Thanks for the info and the patch!

I guess writing any kind of code for Doom is beyond me so far, but I did manage to put the converted sprites in a separate pk3 file to load flawlessly on top of BD, which is indeed the more elegant solution
I've also added your patch as well as m8f's "beautiful-final-doomer" for BD-specific death animations into the one file. If I'm not mistaken, so long as the patch is loaded after BD, Final Doom and the mapsets' wad, there should be no conflict, as for example the changes in your DECORATE patch are specific to Ancient Aliens, right?

[3saster]

No problem man!

My usual load order is gameplay mod -> mapset -> compatibility if necessary. I personally prefer to dump them into the wad itself if possible, so it avoids having tons of extra files AND it has no negative to the wad itself if written properly. All that patch really does is convert the DEHACKED monsters into DECORATE in ZDOOM-based ports, so you could just leave it in there permanently, even if you're not running gameplay mods (and let it swap things with changed sprites back to its base, as the modder intended). I have quite a few more patches for other big maps too if you want them (Deus Vult II, Scythe 2/X, Survive in Hell, and UAC Ultra are the big ones I remember off the top of my head).

You should trying looking at some basic coding for Doom, DECORATE in particular is a lot easier to learn than you would think (Maybe look at the patch I gave you, see if you can figure it out). You don't need the converted images in a separate pk3, you can safely replace the originals (the fact that they're still there is likely a bug). Or if don't wanna do that, I can send you my custom version of BDoom that has that and a bunch of other stuff

[Mko74]

Hey 3saster, Can you post your custom version of BDoom please?, thank you!!!

[3saster]

Sure, if you want. Mostly just minor bug fixes and nitpicks, but features black gloves! Make sure to read the changelog

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13-gWQA ... sp=sharing

[Mko74]

Thanks 3saster!!

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

Hey guys. Just letting you know, the mod is still in progress. I'm almost done with Modern Guns weapon set. Hopefully a September release... I promise to take a look at your bug reports by that moment as well. Thanks for all your dedication, folks.

[bisousbisous]

Would it be possible to add a "Blood fads out in X seconds" option?

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

Would it be possible to add a "Blood fads out in X seconds" option?

Could you explain a bit why you would need that?

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

Hey!

Since you've already managed to convince Gifty to let you use his smooth animations, what do you think you could convince him to let you use the remaining ones that you still don't have?

Gifty is perfectly OK with it. But incorporating even already existing animations is a whole lot of work.
First, I have to rename sprites because we use very different naming conventions and otherwise it'd be pretty confusing with me to work with. (Also to make sure the new names don't overlap with the existing ones.)
Second, in both mods monsters' definitions are riddled with custom functions, so I can't just copy the animation definition from his code; I have to redefine it in my code frame by frame manually, checking the lengths, incorporating my features, etc. Pretty exhausting.
Third, I also have to double-check with the original Doom actors, making sure the timings and other things are correct and don't violate vanilla rules (not everything is perfectly vanilla in Smooth Doom in that respect).
Fourth, I can't say I like all of Smooth Doom animations. For example, the Chaingunner death animations where he falls on his face looks pretty horrible and I'm not planning to use it at all. On the other hand, I have some other animations that Smooth Doom doesn't have and I don't want to go overboard, you know, making more content just for the sake of making more content.

So, in short, I introduced only those animations that I either liked or they weren't a ton of work to introduce. It's quite likely I'll add more in the future, it's just not the highest priority, to be honest.

As for Hell Knight's SD gibbing animation being a regular death in BD, you're not quite right. In short, the gib deaths from SD actually ARE gib deaths in BD, they're just easier to trigger. Let me explain with a wall of text.

I've always been kinda reluctant to include gibbing for big demons because it's always been sort of a convention in Doom that big demons don't gib. (Only small zombies do; supposedly because bigger demons have sturdier bodies that don't shatter as easily as zombie flesh, I guess?) And I kinda wasn't into the idea of breaking that convention. There's also a technical limitation: in Doom in order to trigger a gibbing animation you have to deal so much damage to a monster that his health have to become the negative number equal to his total health: so a Zombieman has 20 health and to be gibbed it has to become -20 in one single attack. Hell Knight, for example, has 500 health, and even if he's at 1 health when you attack him, you'd have to deal a whopping 501 damage to gib him, and there are simply no attacks like[ that in Doom.

Now, of course I have control over how much damage you need to deal to gib a monster and indeed I tweaked that a bit: for example, ChaingunGuy's gib health is -50 (vs -70 in vanilla Doom) so he's a big easier to gib, but this is a relatively small change. But if I wanted to make Hell Knight gibbable, I'd have to come up with an amount that would trigger that. But I don't think there are any attacks that deal over 128 damage in a single shot in Doom, and it seems just weird to me that such a tough monster as Hell Knight would have gib health of -100 (plus even with -100 in actual practice it would be impossible to gib him). To me it just doesn't make a lot of sense conceptually.

It was actually this line of thinking that made me introduce an intermediary type of death for some monsters, a Dismemberment death. For zombies that would mean having 3 deaths: regular, dismemberment (usually losing head and arm) and full gibbing. But as I explained, I don't think big demons should be gibbable. HOWEVER, there's nothing wrong with them having a Dismemberment death too: i.e. "a bit more violent" type of death but still not quite gibbing. So, Hell Knight actually has Smooth Doom gibbing animation as its Dismemberment death (and, what do you know, it's activated at -60 health) but it doesn't have any proper gibbing animation. (Well, if you want to get technical, code-wise it's actually a gibbing animation but conceptually it's not.)