Payback {Modern human/monster Replacer}

[ShepJP]

I always wanted a human enemy pack but it used to be hard to find one, I stop playing for a bit, come back and there's this and the Ashes (not all human but very nice) mod waiting. Very nice to see.

[openroadracer]

I talked to Xim about this once over in the Star Wars DooM thread: You really should not apply the "AMBUSH" flag to generic enemy types. It can make it impossible to get 100% kills on maps that place certain enemy types in inaccessible teleporter rooms.

I would also suggest against making enemies drop Pistols on death instead of dropping ammo; some mods like Pillowblaster's Trailblazer have certain items that spawn on ammo drop slots, and your mod makes it less likely for those items to drop from enemies.

[LossForWords]

In my mods, lately, i've started to make things, like revolvers/akimbo pistols spawn on the pistol slot, so a happy compromise would be random chance for both, maybe even making pistol spawns a little rarer.

About the +AMBUSH flag, i agree, in both PB and Army of Oz. Certain enemies like snipers/those cloaked enemies should absolutely be able to move/position themselves before entering sniper position.

I don't know what to do about mounted enemies, like the minigun guys.
Because yeah, they do get stuck in teleporter rooms, but also, i think they complement levels a lot.
DBP58 Immortal Warfare benefits a lot from having those dudes around.

Another suggestion would be adding Explosion deaths for enemies.
Explosions in Doom have their own proprietary damage type, so if you wanna incorporate gibbing/burning, that would be a good place to add them, with the Death.Fire/XDeath.Explosion states.

Also, i'd like to suggest both, converting all the enemies into the Doom palette/PNGs, and saving your mods as PK3's.

[openroadracer]

In my mods, lately, i've started to make things, like revolvers/akimbo pistols spawn on the pistol slot, so a happy compromise would be random chance for both, maybe even making pistol spawns a little rarer.

I feel like this is fine; but I'd actually suggest that it would be best to just make such items have a chance to spawn on Bullet pickups. This way, it's highly likely you'll still get the items, especially if the map has lots of basic Zombiemen, and you can increase the odds of certain pickups for certain things, like making certain weapons that spawn on Bullet Clips more likely to appear on Bullet Boxes.

[DeeDeeOZ]

-a happy compromise would be random chance for both, maybe even making pistol spawns a little rarer.

-About the +AMBUSH flag, i agree, in both PB and Army of Oz. Certain enemies like snipers/those cloaked enemies should absolutely be able to move/position themselves before entering sniper position.

-I don't know what to do about mounted enemies, like the minigun guys. Because yeah, they do get stuck in teleporter rooms, but also, i think they complement levels a lot.

-Another suggestion would be adding Explosion deaths for enemies.

-Also, i'd like to suggest both, converting all the enemies into the Doom palette/PNGs, and saving your mods as PK3's.

- I will tweak the pistol drops to be random choice of clips/pistol to balance this slightly
-I'm going to drop the ambush flags on everything, probably going to make the ArmyofOz snipers start mobile then settle into sniping when they see you.
-mounted gunners going to have to stay stationary because they work great it certain themes, understand this is not ideal
-I've got the fire deaths done and implemented, sprites for Xdeaths in there as well only thing I don't like is that some mods use pistols + shotguns with very high damage output that will gib low level enemies constantly. Xdeath isn't just for explosions but also for high damage versus health.
-thought I had but will go through and do this, what does saving as a PK3 instead of a zip benefit it?

[LossForWords]

-I definitively like this idea for the snipers, and while i am sad that there's no way to fix the issue with the gunners, i'm glad they're staying.
Maybe not having them count as enemies with the -COUNTKILL flag could work?
-I understand the situation with basic, yet high-damage weapons gibbing enemies, and i'm fine with not randomly gibbing monsters with a pistol, i'm just suggesting adding those states for weapons that use the 'Explosive' damagetype only.
-I think it's generally handier than saving it as a zip. Personal opinion, mostly.

[openroadracer]

You know, what I need for this is a texture pack that makes techbases into city locations, makes hellbases into industrial sites, and makes hell maps into jungles.

Then it'd feel like I was working steadily deeper into cartel territory.

[Kaution]

You know, what I need for this is a texture pack that makes techbases into city locations, makes hellbases into industrial sites, and makes hell maps into jungles.

"Mod replacing Doom 2 OG textures with Duke Nukem 3D" is probably the closest available right now.
viewtopic.php?t=61471

One could use the textures of Nam to create a jungle texture pack.

[openroadracer]

You know, what I need for this is a texture pack that makes techbases into city locations, makes hellbases into industrial sites, and makes hell maps into jungles.

"Mod replacing Doom 2 OG textures with Duke Nukem 3D" is probably the closest available right now.
viewtopic.php?t=61471

One could use the textures of Nam to create a jungle texture pack.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

[DeeDeeOZ]

updated main page with updated versions,
-only non-ambush tag X versions of both AIR and ground available now (just easier for everyone)
-now most pistol enemies have 50% chance of dropping clips or Pistols (still not perfect but should help with compatibility)
-all sprites converted to Doom palette/PNGs
going to work on putting gib deaths in, extra enemies soon. enjoy and let me know if anything broke.

[openroadracer]

So, between this and Raging Bull by LossForWords, I've been inspired to come up with a MegaWAD concept if anyone wants to take a stab at making a map set to suit this enemy set:

---

As a rising agent in the Drug Enforcement Agency, it's your job to stop illicit drugs from getting to the streets. Your mission starts in Chicago, Illinois, with a rise in violent crime that's happening alongside an increase in drug-related incidents. Take to the streets of the Windy City and beat some answers out of the various thugs and creeps that are causing trouble all over town.

You eventually get led towards abandoned industrial sites, as you cross state lines into Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and find more elaborate drug operations being run out of the old factories there. You start running into more foreign cartel operatives, which leads to you trying to hunt out where they're coming from.

At one point, there will be an optional side mission: Apparently, cartel activity has been rising in Miami, Florida, and has been tracked to Cuban immigrant Russel "Raging Bull" Torres. Fight your way through the beach-side resort town and get to the bottom of things, before raiding Torres's mansion in a level at least partially based on the Payday 2 "Scarface Heist" level.

After digging up some maps held by a cartel operation in Milwaukee, you find out that these drug cartels are coming up from Peru. Take to the South American jungles and burn the cartels out of their holes. Destroy their crops, salt their fields, eradicate their soldiers. In the end, you will track down a Peruvian kingpin and raid his fortified compound, bringing him down for good.

---

The fight against the Raging Bull, Russell Torres, is going to be a long and difficult one, with five distinct phases:

1. At first, he just comes at you with his Berettas, a pair of 9mm semi-automatics with modest damage. But Torres is fast, and it will take lightning reflexes to keep him in your sights.
2. After the player deals a serious amount of damage to him, Torres throws away his Berettas, drinks an entire bottle of whiskey, and proceeds to draw a pair of Ingram machine pistols. Torres begins firing huge numbers of weak bullets all over the place in his drunken state, forcing the player to find cover or get shredded.
3. After Torres takes another serious beating, he drops the Ingrams and pulls out a block of his newest product: "Black Taurus". It drives him into a rage-fueled frenzy, where he charges the player with a chainsaw. Keep your distance, or he'll carve you like Thanksgiving turkey.
4. Somehow, even after all the bullets you've pumped into him, Torres still isn't dead, and now he goes for the big stuff: he injects a dose of "Valhalla" into himself, an experimental drug alleged to be tied to some kind of super soldier program. Torres brings out an M16 with a mounted M203 grenade launcher. With powerful bullets and a lethal grenade launcher, you're praying that this will be it.
5. But it somehow isn't. The Valhalla flowing through Torres keeps him alive through levels of abuse that would kill an entire battalion. He forces himself back to his feet one more time, this time discarding the M16 in favor of an M60 general purpose machine gun. Firing larger numbers of harder hitting rounds than the M16, Torres makes his final stand.

And all of this is after you've had to fight your way through his entire mansion and all of the various thugs and grunts Torres has amassed around himself.

That said, I would make this an optional sub-.WAD instead of including him in the .WAD directly.

[abelar]

Played this monster pack recently with Aracnocide 2.5b:
https://youtu.be/PgFKKEyT40c
https://youtu.be/G--S2z85iyk
https://youtu.be/ZKhnjJZAYLY
So, as far as I played it I personally preferred this mod more over a "Hell from earth" one, because of more coherent art-style and absence of asset flips: HFE developer seems to rip 3d models from other games and "baking" them as sprites. And I can't stand it, that's breaking all the aesthetics and immersion.
But, non the less, I want to point out some things. The whole simplistic style of characters is neat, as they more differ by body parts color but not actual details on them reminds me of Jagged Alliace 2, where it was hard for developers to draw every single type of gear for each sprite so they just decided to standardize them like bag of plastic army men figures. And because of this bosses (and replacements for bigger monsters as well) ended up looking much the same as the other lower tier enemies. I think this is more a psychological thing, but when you fight tougher enemies you expect them to be more... complicated looking? Like higher tier enemies, like "badasses" and "mercenaries", should have more sophisticated gear, like radios, backpacks, MOLLE jackets to visually distinguish them from just some random street trash.. Speaking of it, this demographic can also profit from having some prints on their shirts, different types of cargo pants, mohawks types and colors and so on. And yes, I know that art, especially pixel art, is very hard to create so just take my note with a grain of salt.
Next, gameplay. Very easy mod, compared to really unbalanced HFE, where everything just destroys you in seconds. To make it more interesting, I will of course not promote the idea of just buffing enemy health points. Instead, rather introducing weak and strong spots on enemies, maybe adding some plates of destructible protective gear (like falling off helmets in Cyber's monster randomizer: viewtopic.php?f=43&t=63901 and other games) can add more variety to the gameplay. But it will break compatibility with the original Doom in that case.
Also, another psycho-immersive thing I want to point out: enemies do not damage each other at all, nor infight! At least you expect different groups of organized crimes to fight between themselves, instead they seem perfectly fine working together trying to kill player. I know that in the original Doom the same type of monsters cannot damage each other (which is not true for hitscanners anyway), but it doesn't work in this case. One solution will be to make each group of enemies aggressive to another and attack on sight, at least higher tear(baddies) vs lowest tear(robbers), but I imagine only highest tear will survive in this case doing all the job for you. Another solution is to make lower tier infights more often, and no infights for "mercenary\militia" tiers at all.

[openroadracer]

One BIG thing I'd like to suggest that should be applied across both this and the Payback weapons set:

1. Firstly, for within this mod, fully change over ALL enemies that currently drop Pistols to only exclusively drop Clips instead.
2. Secondly, within the Payback weapons mod, make it where all ammo pickup types have a chance to spawn appropriate weapons for their respective ammo types.

This way, Payback Enemies is fully compatible with other mods, and Payback Weapons makes it easier to explore all of the unique guns within it.

[DeeDeeOZ]

Nice to hear you like mod, and thanks for the videos. always enjoy watching people play my stuff.
Haven't been active as much lately due to real life, but still working on things here and there.
-understand the bosses blending in with regular guys, and idea of the higher tier guys looking more serious than the lower tier fodder, It's honestly a case of time/effort and what I can realistically get done, I have a lot of unfinished stuff and stuff planned that just didn't make it in (hopefully at some point) including more unique boss type enemies. (Appreciate the understanding over spriting being hard to create)
-The enemies being easier to take down is kind of an attempt at balancing the lack of infighting, I'm also not a fan of huge bullet sponge enemies (especially human sized ones) They are capable of taking you out quickly enough if you let them, but most of us are not going to just stand there and let this happen. I have some ideas here as well.
-I do plan on introducing infighting (in some form) at some point but will require some level of balancing. Most likely faction based with criminal groups unable to hurt there own faction, and the higher tier guys not fighting amongst themselves and taking minimal damage from weak guys.

1. Firstly, for within this mod, fully change over ALL enemies that currently drop Pistols to only exclusively drop Clips instead.
2. Secondly, within the Payback weapons mod, make it where all ammo pickup types have a chance to spawn appropriate weapons for their respective ammo types.

I get this and understand what you're suggesting here. I'll think about it when I get around to updating this with more content. I've tried to compromise slightly already because while I get the current pistol drop problem, I also don't like the every clip could be a pistol giving me levels where guns are scattered all over the ground (will test some stuff out).

Thanks again for the Feedback, always enjoy it. Hope you guys have some fun.

[LossForWords]

I don't see what the problem is with clip/pistol drops, frankly.

Keep it 50/50, and if someone has a problem, they can go in and change it manually.