BDLite [V1.1 RELEASED - 2019-02-15]

[-Ghost-]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but is it possible to get just the monsters and effects, without the weapon changes? Then it'd work great with other weapon mods as well.

Kind of a shame to lose the hitboxes, since I've always thought that was the best part of BD, even beyond the gore, but I can see why you took them out, they're intensive and not really that well put together code-wise.

[SHayden]

Oh that's much better now...I feel shotgun is now more comfortable to use, did you actually enable reload interrupt or was it here the whole time and me being an idiot

[hybridial]

I'm not one who can really understand the idiosyncrasies of coding very well, but I did feel just as a gamer that Brutal Doom had too much of a kitchen sink mentality and strayed too far from Doom's base gameplay.

I like that you've really nailed getting the basics of Brutal Doom to work well, and to be honest the only thing I would suggest is perhaps looking at improving/changing some of the weapon sprites. Some are good, both shotguns look great, as does the Plasma gun. The BFG and chaingun are kind of middling, the rocket launcher and assault rifle look very bland and monochromatic.

I think having an option to use the vanilla weapon sprites (including getting the pistol back over the rifle) would also be nice.

It sounds also that people will be able to easily expand on this, so maybe the future is a more modular Brutal Doom experience?

[DavidN]

The opportunity to make it more modular will hopefully be there - thanks for the feedback! Doing a bit more with the weapons is definitely on the table (it would particularly be nice to change the rifle so that you don't begin by staring at the same rifle as the original Brutal Doom) but I need to seek out suitable sprites I believe the weapons could definitely be separated out.

That's great, SHayden - I adjusted a couple of timings on the shotgun reloading and when it was allowed to react to kick and otherwise interrupting reload... I don't think the ability was outright missing before, but it's good that it's working now in any case

New snapshot fixes a couple of bad bugs I somehow didn't notice - imps could remain blocking when dead if you shot them when in the air (because they went straight to their Die states instead of doing the noblocking routine first) and less awfully, monsters could sometimes futilely attack burning barrels because they were set as +FRIENDLY (why?!) I've also added the option for bullet casings to fade, same place as the Gibs option under the Display menu. (Doctrine Gamer, thanks for your comments as well! Blood on the walls can be controlled by the "Number of decals" option, again in the Display menu - once the number of splats and/or bullet holes reaches that maximum, old ones will start being deleted to make room.)

I'm slowing down on the huge fixes a bit here and I think that I've basically done all the overhauling I want to do to declare this a first actual version, once I make sure that everything still works in multiplayer. I'll write up a guide on how to add a new weapon and a new monster soon, and am also working on an overhaul of Vulkan Inc to demonstrate a whole game based on BDLite

[SHayden]

imps could remain blocking when dead if you shot them when in the air (because they went straight to their Die states instead of doing the noblocking routine first)

That was such a problem since i was playing a map set and i killed the imp and he fu*king ended up blocking the doorway and I was like "wtf" there was invisible wall or something.

monsters could sometimes futilely attack burning barrels because they were set as +FRIENDLY (why?!)

LOL

[Doctrine Gamer]

"Blood on the walls can be controlled by the" Number of decals "option, again in the Display menu"

Thank you very much for the information.

I did not know this option, I will always follow updates.

[DavidN]

All right - I slowed down on this since the flurry of October, but I've started seriously moving this to an actual release version now. As part of that, I got distracted by another item on the stack of my side projects (BDLite being itself a side project that I got into while distancing my own episode from Brutal Doom) - but we now have a proper home page for the mod and everything. I've patched up some more things, tested it in multiplayer and it just about works, and so I'm now ready to call this a beta!

http://teamouse.net/games/doom/bdlite/
http://bit.ly/zdoombdlite

The majority of the work for this website went into the "ZDoc" section. At the start of BDLite I'd put together some diagrams of the insane nest of classes just to see what I was doing, but I realized that it would be much more useful (and less painful) to be able to generate them automatically. This was combined with the need to have an overview of all the classes and what they were meant to be doing - I'd commented the DECORATE files where I could, but it was still awkward to jump around between them to find the complete makeup of the mod. So, having no parser writing experience, I set up a nightmare of regex to automatically extract data about the classes and their hierarchy, the flags and properties of each actor and how they're inherited down the chain, and an optional comment field that you can include in your Decorate/ZScript by using /** */ tags before your classes like in PHPDoc/Javadoc.

http://teamouse.net/games/doom/bdlite/hierarchy.php - The (large!) class hierarchy for BDLite.



The page also provides a zip of the command line tools I've written to make my life easier (including ZDoc in PHP form!) but they aren't documented just now - I'll work on improving that, and starting a separate thread for ZDoc in the hope that it might be useful to other authors of large mods.

A Github with the extracted PK3 files and the tools is now also available, linked on the site - it doesn't really give anything that the zips don't, but it gives a nice central place for the code to live and keeps me organized.

[DavidN]

After some more adjustments, I've released Beta v0.99 (having sort of boxed myself in with these version numbers) on the BDLite site now - everything is off my immediate to-do list and I think that this has now got to where I want it to be There are two major changes in this version:

- I completely forgot about monster infighting, and didn't realize that monsters that inherit from each other are counted as the same species by default. I've fixed this by adding explicit Species declarations to monsters, and infighting is now restored.
- As suggested several pages ago, I've moved to having weapons explicitly alert monsters instead of having it handled automatically. Now, kicking, melee attacks and throwing a grenade won't alert monsters, but the chainsaw will do it continuously.

In addition to that, I've written up a couple more tutorials/in-depth looks on how to build a project on top of BDLite. These include:

How to add a new weapon (using the Revolver sprites from Project Brutality as an example)
How to add a new monster (Zombie Plasma Scientist)

I also want to mention that I'm very grateful to both Mike12 and Minigunner for replying and explicitly allowing permission for their sprites to be used in the project!

[ketmar]

there is still unfixed bug with BdDemon: it wants to jump to "LostSight" label, but real label is named "SeeLostSight" (prolly a copy-paste bug). brutal is really hard to fix! ;-)

[DavidN]

Thanks, doomed stranger! I'll fix that - out of interest, did you just happen to notice that when looking at the file, or is there some debug mode that I've overlooked that could have told me this?

[ketmar]

i am developer of k8VaVoom sourceport, which has its own decorate parser, not derived from gzdoom. it also does alot more checking (correct argument types, labels, etc.), and it tells me when actor tries to jump to inexisting state. it also works slightly different than gzdoom in the latter case: gzdoom just silently ignores a jump to an unknown state, while k8VaVoom removes an actor. so, i noticed both "jump to unknown state" in runtime, and disappearing demons. ;-)

[Enjay]

Not sure if it's been mentioned or not but I see this quite a lot:

Code: Select all • Expand view

ACS/DECORATE: 'BdBleed' is not a flag in 'ShotgunParticles'

[DavidN]

Thanks Enjay, I only very recently discovered the developer-mode messages in GZDoom and missed that! I'll fix that with the next upload - it came from a naive find/replace that I did a while ago on a class that was called BloodSplatter.

That's really useful to know as well, doomed stranger - I downloaded the win32 k8vavavoom and had a try, and the stricter messages are very useful! BDLite looks a bit shabby in general under it, and I'm not sure if it's due to things that are deliberately unimplemented there or if there are things I should correct (such as models not existing or some sprite scaling not happening). Anything you can recommend?

[ketmar]

k8VaVoom doesn't support md3 models, only md2. this is something in my devplan, but not the top priority yet. also, decorate support in VaVoom is almost 10 years old, and i am slowly catching up.

basically, if something is not working/looking right, it is almost always my fault. i don't think that you should invest your time in supporting k8VaVoom specifically -- i'd better try to fix k8VaVoom instead. ;-) and if i'll find something really broken, i will prolly simply came here and report.

still, if you can convert models to md2, it would be nice. GZDoom supports md2 too, and your models are mostly simple enough to work as md2 (but note that there are some precision problems with md2 format).

k8VaVoom cannot parse MODELDEF yet, but if i'll have md2 models in bdlite, i can start implementing MODELDEF support. internally, k8VaVoom is able to attach models to both states by number, and to sprite frames, and it can even interpolate animation (and it can have inter-state 3d model frames too), so the only thing i am missing is md3 loader and MODELDEF parser. if you can provide md2 models, i will have something to work with (and nintendo switch users will be slightly more happy, 'cause switch port will support bdlite with nice blood splats ;-).

p.s.: also, k8VaVoom can aligh 3d models to floor, so they will lay correctly on sloped floors:
TNT1 A 0 A_LayToFloorWithYaw(Random(0, 360))
this line aligns floor splat model to floor, and rotates it randomly. if GZDoom can simply ignore unknown decorate actions, you can use this in floor splat code.

[CasualScrub]

So Mark released a new version of his "Ketchup" mod, renaming it as "Bolognese", and he's apparently completely reworked the code for it. In his own words, all the "spaghetti code" has been entirely reworked and made much more readable, including adding comments and deleting useless actors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW07VJBTjME

Just providing this info since I figured it might be relevant.