Question About Difficulty Settings

[Jerry_Bambo]

First, I was wondering if there are any mods for Doom that sort of tailor the difficulty settings in-game depending on how well the player is doing?

I have heard that games like Left 4 Dead use mysterious secret algorithms that monitor how well players are doing with their rate of dying, rate of progress, items and health and ammo they have, etc. So if you choose a higher difficulty, then the game will be more likely to spawn the scary Tank Boss enemy if you have full health, as one example.

If I remember, there was also a game called Back Track on the Game Boy Advance with an arcade mode, and if you were getting more kills, the bots would actually get faster and more random in how they strafed in combat.

That would be pretty interesting to see a Doom mod that throws more challenges at you if you are doing better. How difficult would that be to code that into a mod? I assume you'd need Zscript, not just DECORATE for that.

But also I was curious about how often players choose the hardest difficulty right away when starting new wads they've never played before?

What is your experience and preference with difficulty settings?

Do you slam the gas pedal and go full force into the next to last hardest difficulty setting (ultra violence by default)? Or do you start gently and go with normal or easy ?

I was just curious, because when I first played Doom at age 7 I had no shame with choosing the easiest most baby time difficulty option at the very top of the list. But after I beat PSX Doom over and over I ended up only ever playing it on the hardest difficulty available.

And when I discovered there was another Doom for the playstation called Final Doom, I just went right into it on the hardest difficulty available, because it always provided the most intensely engaging experience that forced my brain to fire on more cylinders to survive.

For me, this habit continued in almost all other similar Boomer shooters. Serious Sam, Painkiller, I always went for the next to last most difficult settings.


I recently got a job in the last couple years that has very long hours, like 12-14 hour shifts sometimes. It's a good job, I enjoy it, and those long hour shifts are often of my own choosing, but I found that with this level of engagement in another priority in life, I often do not have the same level of energy to concentrate on an intense fast experience after a long shift.

And so it's a very interesting experience to me to rediscover that there's things called easy difficulty settings, and even BABY difficulty settings, you know, that tourist baby option you can choose at the top of list.

who even needs cheat codes when you have BABY difficulty? hahah! It's just weird that I rediscovered this as a serious leisure.



I was forced to go easy cause of real life stuff happening all around me.



I found that unlike riding a bicycle, you can kind of forget how to dominate Slaughtermaps with your hands tied. When you play Doom 6 hours every day it becomes easy to breeze through impossible situations.

But now because of such a humongous chunk of my life spent concentrating on important documents and projects at the office, I can't quite jump back into these Boomer shooters with the same agility and precision right away.

Keep in mind that I also always turn off all auto aim or aim assist, as well as reticles. I never use aim assist or reticles. Ever. I mean if there's the option to turn that shit off.

But the point is, the easy difficulties have suddenly become a thing I never really even bothered to look at, but now I have a newfound appreciation for them for sure.

I spent my early 20's raging through every hardcore experience on maximum resistance extremes!

But one of the main reasons I'm choosing easier difficulty is that I find myself suddenly getting very confused when playing new Doom maps.

Specifically I was recently playing JPCP (the Japanese Community Project from 2015 I think it was). These maps are quite sophisticated! Feels like very advanced mapping to me.

The main reason I choose easier difficulty is because I get confused where to go, and that in combination with overwhelming amounts of monsters gets a bit unpleasant.

Some of the maps as examples, like the Magnetic Force Apparatus, are really quite simple in their floor plan, as far as the player figuring out where to go. But the first time I played that map on ultra violence I was running around in circles continuously missing a vital little corridor with a teleporter. It's cause my brain was in fast alert combat mode, watching constantly for more hitscan bastards hidden somewhere on the other side of the map, hah!

I dunno why, it took me a while to finally think of trying an easier difficulty, just to get familiar with the floor plans and where to go. Plus I have found you find many more secrets when you're kinda bored for a bit, and not constantly engaged with walls of sprite clones.

I'm very grateful to have a job too right now, given this current situation with finding jobs out there, depending where you live. Hope I don't get laid off!!! But until if that happens, I'll be beaching it with "not 2 ruff" & " TOO young to DIIEEEE" etc

[JohnnyTheWolf]

It always bothered me how overly generous most Doom maps were in terms of supplies and ammo (so much so that a lot of it would just go to waste), so after much experimentation, I made my own difficulty setting mod, complete with custom difficulty titles (thank you, Doom Text Generator). Basically, I replaced vanilla Nightmare with one that increases enemy health by 1.5x, but reduces the amount of damage you take by 2 and added two more modes : Ultra-Nightmare, which increases monster aggressiveness as well (not speed, as I do not like how Pinkies move at double speed) and Maximum Nightmare, which on top of everything else makes the player take full damage again.

Mind you, I am also using QoL mods that do make Doom easier or at the very least remove some of the unfairness, such a "Intelligent Supplies", "No More Hitscan" and "Alternate Take on Invisibility" as well as my own mod that makes all projectiles shootable.

Here it is, if you are interested!

[Enjay]

"Alternate Take on Invisibility"

That one is a fantastic tweak. It actually makes the invisibility powerup useful.

[fakemai]

There are mods that have enemy scaling but mostly that's just hooked into completing levels to compensate for the player getting more powerful, not a true dynamic difficulty like Resident Evil 4 or its close cousin God Hand. There's also mods with tiers where it's simply luck of the draw but those are probably a good place to start tinkering. Even the vanilla enemies would be OK to adjust some of their stats though.

• DoomRL Arsenal is probably the closest, the monster pack specifically has "adaptive" difficulty where monsters are replaced with higher tier ones as the player "danger level" goes up. This normally goes up from making higher level assemblies in the weapon mod, but it can be set to increment on new levels too. Collecting upper tier items also prompts random backlash from boss-tier enemies on future maps.
• Lithium, enemies level up more or less as you do, I don't remember to what effect. There's also the shadow guys that you'll gradually meet and each is more powerful than the last.
• Wrath of Cronos, same deal but there is also an explicit "Director" that periodically spawns in new enemy clusters and power-ups. I'm not actually sure if it's weighted in any way though.
• Colourful Hell, this doesn't have difficulty scaling but with all the palette swap versions of the enemies roughly increasing in difficulty, it's the kind of mod you could make an addon for to change the random spawners into ones weighted from how the player is doing.

As for difficulty preference I normally use the closest to UV for Doom and Strife, but NM for Heretic and Hexen since there isn't hitscan garbage to worry about.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

"Alternate Take on Invisibility"

That one is a fantastic tweak. It actually makes the invisibility powerup useful.

Indeed, but beware: it can cause GZDoom to crash ("VM Execution Aborted" error) with some mapsets, notably Belot (which is odd, as it works fine with previous Ayba maps), and it will cause enemies to freeze when invisible if the mapset uses a 'Vanilla' or 'Boom' complvl file or the 'compat_invisibility' CVAR; in the latter's case, you can prevent that by deleting said complvl file and the 'compat_invisibility_ CVAR line.

[Enjay]

Interesting. I've been using it extensively ever since it was released and not had a problem. I guess I've never played a mod with the complevel that interferes with it (generally, I'm not that bothered about having to play something that is 1:1 vanilla-like, and if I do, I'll probably use a different port anyway).

Thanks for the "heads up". I'll know what to look for if I ever do get the VM abort.

[JohnnyTheWolf]

I am most interested in finding out what is causing the incompatibility with Belot, since it appears to lack both complvl file or compat_invisibility CVAR.

Then again, it does not just make enemies freeze; it just crashes on starting a new game. Sometimes, moving it around in the loading order does the trick, but not with Belot.

[Enjay]

[Edit Nevermind, I think I found it.]

I can't find a copy of Belot to have a dig myself. The Doomworld thread doesn't seem to have a download link and google gives me Bethesda.net links but I don't have a Bethesda account and it looks like you can't get anything from them without one. Is there a public download anywhere?

[Edit2 Well, I don't know what to tell you. I have no problems running Belot with sal-invisibility.pk3. I tried GZDoom official (4.14.2) the most recent GZDoom Git build and a github build of UZDoom. They all worked no problem and the modified invisibility powerup worked just fine too.



Taken in UZDoom - several creatures attacking the place that I last made a noise while I stand and watch them. You can just see my barely visible weapon at the bottom of the screen confirming that the invis powerup is active.]

[JohnnyTheWolf]

Ayba left Doomworld and has been reuploading her work on her personal website.

But you are right: after further experimentation, it looks like the incompatibility stems for Zhs2's Intelligent Supplies mod (another must in my opinion); I moved the load order around again and it appears to be working now. Go figure.

UZDoom is out now? I have heard about the split, but I did not know there was an available build already.

[Enjay]

Yep, Google (eventually) managed to find Ayba's site for me. That's where I got Belot from, but thanks.

Good that you've tracked down where the problem lies. I managed to play the whole of Belot with the modified invisibility and had no problems at all. I guess that's not too surprising given that's not where the incompatibility is. I wonder what it is about the two mods that means they don't cooperate in certain orders? I suspect their code is too much for me to figure out why a problem exists.

UZDoom isn't out as such. However, it is possible to download a build that gets created automatically on GitHub every time a commit is made. Also, some people have compiled their own executables. Both of these are very much based on the work in progress code and are not to release standards though. I haven't had any major issues, but we are talking beta-like software.