ZBattleship

JTE · Post by **JTE** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 2:07 am

Greetings, humans and humanoid life forms.

I made ZBattleship a while ago and being the pathetic fool that I am, feel that it went largely unnoticed and unappreciated. This being my first ZDoom pwad, I am eager to know how well I did and hear any advice anyone wishes to give me.

It is certainly not the buggy mess you might expect from someone's first wad, but rather, I am actually quite skilled because I have worked with wadding for other engines for years prior to this. This was just my little "crash course" wad for ZDoom's extended features, including DECORATE and ACS scripts. God do these things rock.

I started working on another dueling wad shortly after, this one designed to be a one vs all game where one player was "god" and the rest try to destroy him, but it never got finished and when version 98 came out I decided I might as well take ZBattleship and put it out there since I probably wasn't going to do any more for a good long while.

If enough people like it, I may well come back for some more fun wadding, though I usually do more unique ideas then standard Doom action with some minor enhancements. I am also a very good programmer, and now that ZDoom is compileable by mingw, I may even do some programming stuff as well... And I don't just mean minor things like the ability to script new weapon animations with DECORATE.

So yeah. Go ahead. Play it. Comment on it. Tell me you love it. Tell me you hate it. Tell me the scripted bot is too easy to beat and you have noone to play it with in a netgame. Tell me I could've done better. Tell me what is wrong with it. Flame me for making such a stupidly long post that noone bothered to read it to this point. Just talk to me. Please.

Post by **Caligari87** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 2:34 am

Okay, this belongs right up there with ZPong, ZDArkanoid, ZPacMan, and all those other amazing ACS-God projects! That's all I have to say! Amazing! Awesome!

Okay I have one more thing to say, maybe a bug: I couldn't ever change to realtime mode while in a game; it seems like the keys only work during the ending sequence, which means I'd have to play through a whole game before I can change anything. Ick. Please adjust this behavior if possible.

JTE · Post by **JTE** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 3:04 am

It also works during the building phase. This is so that you can't go "OMG, I'm losing!" and change it to realtime mode in the middle of a game with someone (Though you can still disconnect or noclip through the wall and mdk all the ship pieces by hand... But that might make your friend angry at you!)

I also enabled it at the ending sequence, but couldn't figure out how to make it save that variable when you press the new game button, just forgot to remove it I guess...

Glad to hear you liked it, in any case.

Of that list, though, I have only played ZPacMan... I also like Super Sonic Doom's boss battles, shouldn't they be up there somewhere too? That's what inspired my next work (if it's ever finished enough for release... Hope does look bright, though; I am currently gathering up all my usual Doom editing utils to take another crack at it)

JasonBot also has some lame "taunts" he'd randomly say, among other disabled features you'd have to recompile the ACS script to use... I'm pretty sure it's better that I disabled bot talking, though. I believe there's also a bot vs. bot battle mode in there somewhere, which makes the game think players one and two are both bots, regardless of if they actually are or not, and it's very fun to watch them play realtime games like that because it also disables all waiting and has cannonballs flying everywhere...

Post by **Bio Hazard** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 3:40 am

Heh. That was cool. Could've been better but meh.

JTE · Post by **JTE** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 3:47 am

Tell me how it could've been better. More detailed ships? Special effects like little blue particle fountains when a section of a ship sinks? The AI not challenging enough? (Cause it only chooses randomly, you know. No thought involved.)

Post by **Bio Hazard** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 3:52 am

Detail-wise. Big square blocks are really lame.

What might have been cool would be a table in the middle of the room with translucent blocks via transfer_heights and that could replace the funky camtex.

The input method is also rather clunky. I hit things I wasn't shooting at almost 25% of the time. Perhaps another table like mentioned above (or even use 1 table and swap modes) could have selection stuff via linedef triggers and textures?

I know how I would do it, but I'm far too busy to work on doom mods.

Actually, I'm free right now so I'll throw together a mock-up of what I'm talking about.

JTE · Post by **JTE** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:19 am

Yeah, I know... But come on... Two 9 x 9 grids is 162 tags already. I'd have to seperate them even more to add detail to the ships, and that'd double... triple... quadruple... the tags there are to deal with...

And I've found transfer heights to be very unstable and fairly buggy while learning to use it (though I am using it for the boss machine) ... I'm far more used to having FOFs do all my fancey work, coming from the SRB2 community...

Edit: Wait a second... What kind of dumbass am I? That's stacked sectors, not transfer heights! X_x Augh!...

The shooting the grid idea was one of the few good ideas I had for it, I imagine the problems you're having with it are because you aren't aiming properly; The crosshair must point to the top of the square you're aiming at, rather then the center, because the bullets are dumb and end up below the crosshair... I have not found a way to fix this!

It used to be much worse, though, with the bullet going so fast it often went right through the grid without hitting it and stuff like that. Seriously, I tweaked it for quite a while to get it as accurate as it is (which still isn't 100% thanks to being able to shoot at the grid from odd angles...)

Thanks for your advice, though. It's much more helpful then just "This sucks. Go die."

Post by **Apothem** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:29 am

I downloaded it, and I took a quick look through the file, and I didn't see any source.... Where would it be, and do you still have it?

JTE · Post by **JTE** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:35 am

In the "SCRIPTS" lump, of course. If that has somehow been destroied from your copy of the wad, I do still have it. Also note the other lumps (such as DEHACKED and DECORATE) are fully commented as well.

Post by **Apothem** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 4:57 am

Ah, I found it. Heh, lack of sleep makes one quite ignorant

Post by **Bio Hazard** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:05 am

I got distracted and overdetailed it again but you should get the idea.

http://biohazard.drdteam.org/temp/bship.zip

JTE · Post by **JTE** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:11 am

Yes, that probably would've been a whole lot cooler, but remember, I haven't even used slopes before and ...

Well, I'm not as much of a mapper as I am a programmer, I guess.

I have one question, though, how do you intend to choose where to build ships or where to shoot using this method, though? Press the use button at one of the three little computer things to open some magicly scripted menu system?

Post by **Bio Hazard** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:14 am

I was planning on using the 2 consoles and a series on lines to highlight a square based on your

I would have locked the player in place during play and used a menu to highlight squares.

Also, it may be a lot of tags, but using a third-party program to tag all those sectors and generate a tag array is much easier. (If only I could remember where I put it...)

JTE · Post by **JTE** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:21 am

Also remember, I wanted to leave in a "modern" realtime mode so you could go very fast blasting away at your opponent so it's not just strategy and luck, but speed and skill. I don't think this system would work so well for that.

Post by **Bio Hazard** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:23 am

I just had a thought: You could set up that "screen" thing with the shooty thing via hitscan weapons couldn't you?