[RELEASE] Cold As Hell: Special Edition (final version!)

[JonayaRiley]

Yay, CAH won a Cacoward!

12 Year Anniversary Edit Or Something: So... I'm back. I've learned that there's some work being done to update and fix this mod (it definitely still had issues) which I will hopefully be able to wrap into a re-upload to the archive. I want to re-upload anyway to remove all the references to my deadname, so yeah... probably gonna do some housekeeping. I have, unfortunately, lost many of my original source art files as well as most of the work on the follow-up to this project. But I would like to at least update it to acknowledge some of the work that folks have apparently been doing while I was... otherwise engaged.

It's been almost exactly four years since I released the original Cold As Hell - now it's back the way it was supposed to be. Again, I have to thank the community, since the response to this project has been amazing. I had a number of very talented voice actors and testers to help me here, along with some additional music, graphics, and sound that I wouldn't have been able to put together on my own. This project wouldn't be at the level of quality it is without the help of everyone in the ZDoom community.

Cold As Hell: Special Edition is intended to be used with GZDoom 1.1.04 or higher* (1.1.06 is the latest release, and you should really use that), and adds a number of major improvements to the original mod. In addition to the numerous bug fixes and visual enhancements, the storyline has been re-written to be more coherent and fleshed out. The levels have been tweaked and ehanced, and the gameplay and design has been tweaked to be more balanced and fun.

Download it now! (final version on idgames)
(filesize should be around 49 megs and the updated date should be 12/15 or you have an old version)

If you feel like adding snow to your game and have a decent computer:

cah_rw.zip

More snow options for CAH: SE.

(4.89 KiB) Downloaded 690 times

[jallamann]

fp and btw DOWNLOADING!
expect a mirror once I get it off rapidass.

editz (and againz):
HTTP: http://mirror.nightmaster.net/?file=cah_se.zip
TORRENT: http://mirror.nightmaster.net/?file=cah_se.zip.torrent

[JonayaRiley]

fp and btw DOWNLOADING!
expect a mirror once I get it off rapidass.

Nice, thanks. I uploaded it to incoming on idgames after fighting with the "durr 2 users from your IP already connected" crap for about a half hour.

[Project Shadowcat]

I just played through this thing non-stop. Holy fucking shit, you sir win.
.... I think I'm going to have a slight problem sleeping this morning. (I just noticed it's 5am over here, lawl)

There were a few very minor bugs -- but it was NOTHING compared to four years ago, and they were all very bearable.
1: Sometimes if you're not at 100% from level changes, you can start bleeding again.
2: Sometimes the Garand double-fires. Is this intentional?
3: On occasion holding down on the fire button for too long (read: 5 tics or so) can cause the sawed-off to fire both barrels. Not a bad thing, though this burns to those who don't want to reload every shot.
4: The ACS HUD isn't sized by screen-size; It's unfortunate because while I like a high resolution playing field, I prefer to keep my text large so I can read it on the fly. (Looked perfect on 1280x800 at Double text size, so 640x400 I assume is the optimal size for your HUD)
5: After the script triggers to regenerate back to roughly 20%, you can move again before it hits the limit and still have it continue to go up to said limit. .... At least, until you get hit.

And I also saw that you took every single one of my suggestions regarding the bandaging and the bleeding out. That makes me feel special.

[Deathman101]

Yay! I've been waiting for this forever! I'll tell you how it goes when I'm done.

[JonayaRiley]

There were a few very minor bugs -- but it was NOTHING compared to four years ago, and they were all very bearable.
1: Sometimes if you're not at 100% from level changes, you can start bleeding again.
2: Sometimes the Garand double-fires. Is this intentional?
3: On occasion holding down on the fire button for too long (read: 5 tics or so) can cause the sawed-off to fire both barrels. Not a bad thing, though this burns to those who don't want to reload every shot.
4: The ACS HUD isn't sized by screen-size; It's unfortunate because while I like a high resolution playing field, I prefer to keep my text large so I can read it on the fly. (Looked perfect on 1280x800 at Double text size, so 640x400 I assume is the optimal size for your HUD)
5: After the script triggers to regenerate back to roughly 20%, you can move again before it hits the limit and still have it continue to go up to said limit. .... At least, until you get hit.

If you found the T-20 Select-fire Garand, then #2 is intentional (otherwise it's a weird bug), as is #3 (that's one of the features of the double shotgun, but I can see how it could be a problem). #5 is intentional, you're supposed to be able to move once you start healing (that's poorly documented, isn't it?). I didn't even think about #4. The optimal size was between 640x480 and 1024x768, so you're pretty close.

Anyway, glad you enjoyed it. Your suggestions were good, yeah.

[Enjay]

Downloading... downloading...

/hopping around from one foot to the other with excitement.

[Deathman101]

Not sure why this is happening...but when I shoot at the enemy, it doesn't seem to hurt them, only my fists work...and you can imagine how THAT goes over against the legions of hellspawn. I'll try to get a video up soon.
Oh, and I was using GZDoom 1.1.4.

[Michi]

I'm sorry to be the sole voice of negativity here but I believe it must be said:

I hate - no, make that *HATE* - games that force me to manually reload weapons. It's no fun to play because it always breaks the flow of the action. What makers of such weapons tend to forget is that with real weapons the manual flow of a reloading action is something natural. However with computer games it forces to completely switch controls. I only have a 3 button mouse and I need one button for shooting, one for running and one for opening doors so where to put reloading? The only solution is the keyboard so I am screwed because I constantly have to take one hand off my normal controls. I can't play that way and as a result CaH is an utter pain to play (read this as unplayable, please, because due to the high number of monsters there is normally not enough time to both move and reload quickly enough with the available controls.)

It's a real shame. Now this thing has been released twice. The first version suffered from a horrendous reloading problem but it looks like this only addresses the technical issues with that but not the actual problem - which is that reloading in computer games sucks balls!

[JonayaRiley]

@Deathman: You might want to try 1.1.06, the latest release. 1.1.04 isn't fully tested and may not work properly.

@Michi: Fair enough; not everyone likes everything, and there's nothing wrong with that. That being said, have you tried a WASD walk control with R bound to reload? I find that doing this with the mouse provides a natural flow to reload with games that have manual reloading. I chose the manual reload as a kind of survival horror thing, so I will be leaving it, although I may release an optional "automatic reload" thing later. Still, feedback is appreciated always.

[Ryan Cordell]

Seriously, I don't see what's so hard about using the keyboard in addition. That's how basically many, many other people play. =/
Hell, I still use the arrow keys and some pretty fumbly controls and yet I'm not complaining.

[CaptainToenail]

Well, I just downloaded and have been playing a while, this is the first time I've played Cold in Hell, it's pretty cool but totally fiddly! The bandages and reloading is completely and utterly annoying! Also, I'm stuck, I go down an elevator and get blasted in the face by a Fatso just outside the door, there's nowhere to move, and the double barrel isn't good enough to finish him off before he blasts you to peices. Am I missing something or do I just have to keep trying till I get lucky?

[Deathman101]

Works perfectly. I often forget to check for updates.

BTW: The difficulty of the WAD is right up there with Quake 4 on General.

[Graf Zahl]

and the double barrel isn't good enough to finish him off before he blasts you to peices.

I'm sorry to say this but the double barreled shotgun is close to useless. It only shoots once before it needs to be reloaded and reloading it takes forever which makes this weapon unusable.

Concerning the reloading I have to agree with Michi. This WAD with its high monster count screams for fast uninterrupted action. But instead we get:

- manual reloading which often takes far too long
- the bleeding feature which also grinds the gameplay to a halt
- reducing the speed of the player to 2/3.


Frankly, after disabling these features (it took me an hour, most of it tweaking the SSG replacement to make it useful) it's actually fun to play. But as it stands: Sorry I would have passed. (I know perfectly well why I didn't bother to fix these features back when I tried to salvage the first release.)



A few unrelated tips for optimization:

- I think the trees in the skyboxes can be significantly reduced. The ones far in the background aren't really visible but they all need to be processed by the renderer.
- The use of skyboxes can be optimized. The current configuration uses tids and explicit skybox pickers to enable the skybox. This, however causes some performance issues when sectors come into view that don't have a skybox picker. In that moment 2 skies come into view which causes the engine to use a far more inefficient way to render the sky. I don't think any of the maps needs this and the skybox viewpoint can use tid 0 and all the skybox pickers removed.
- Here's an idea I had to get more trees in while not affecting performance too much: You could add some multi-tree textures and put some two sided linedefs in the background behind the object based trees.

[Nash]

The RapidShare link doesn't work anymore, and jalla's mirror keeps cutting off the download whenever it likes. I gave up after trying to download off jalla's for the 5th time.

More mirrors, please.