Heretic Element Storm v0.91

[zitro]

how do you run this? the pk3 filename is huge and the executable file with gzdoom -file etc etc, doesn't recognize it.

Someone please give me the coding so that I could beta-test it?

[Maelstrom]

Drag it over the gzdoom exe, and drop easy done. You dont need to use the command line.

[zitro]

Drag it over the gzdoom exe, and drop easy done. You dont need to use the command line.

thank you, i might try it a lil bit tonight, or tomorrow. I got to finish a composition I've been working on first (music)

[zitro]

I played 2 levels so far, at 4th difficulty:

_elemental enemy balances: so far, I didn't notice any monster being much more difficult because of its element (apart from a dark axe thrower which was tough, but of course, dark/light are intended to be tough)

_Difficulty: definitively harder than the original Heretic as the enemies seem to have more health. I like it being harder, tho maybe it's harder because I sometimes forget enemies' resistances.

_weapon balances: so far, the weapons seem balanced.

Errors/complaints (considering i have the newest gzdoom version):
_All weapons stay after being picked up (you can't pick it up more than once tho). It definitively should be looked at.
_non-elemental standard attack's tome of power version is barely stronger (about 30-40?), make it about 2X to make it at least slightly useful. Otherwise, it seems pointless.
_Corrosive Sphere, when picked up, its message is full of typos: "corrossive" instead of "corrosive", "corrosivesphere" (no space), and "causes 'you' enemies.

[Maelstrom]

@Zitro: Weapon stay is coded because its for online play also, so if you want to lan with somweone the weapons stay, because they are custom made they wont seem to stay with weapons stay flag on, so i had to make a special Decorate forum making them stay. Though because ammo seems to be not very plentiful i may be upping that.

I may up the damage of the non-elemental attack.

Thanx for the Corrosive sphere thing I never noticed that one lol.

EDIT: The only thing wrong with Corrosive Sphere was that I wrote you instead of your, all the powerups have no space between them if you notice, but I might add a space. Also I spelled corrosive right what are you going on about :S

[Shadelight]

I've played through the first three maps with this and I did see something that bugged me. The fire golem went into it's melee animation after I had hit it.

[Maelstrom]

Yeah this is a problem i'm working around, its because it flees when near death, all the fire monsters do that, for some reason they keep randomly trying to melee when they know they cant. Something weird that happens with melee monsters and the Frightened Flag.

[Spleen]

@Zitro: Weapon stay is coded because its for online play also, so if you want to lan with somweone the weapons stay, because they are custom made they wont seem to stay with weapons stay flag on, so i had to make a special Decorate forum making them stay. Though because ammo seems to be not very plentiful i may be upping that.

I may up the damage of the non-elemental attack.

Thanx for the Corrosive sphere thing I never noticed that one lol.

The ammo is very scarce when you have one weapon, and very plentiful when you have many. Something that might be cool is when you pick up ammo of a weapon that you don't have, you get 5 times less ammo than usual of an ammo type for a weapon you do have instead. For example you have weapon x which has 20 ammo pickups, and weapon y which has 10 ammo pickups. You pick up ammo for weapon y, but you only have weapon x, so you get 4 weapon x ammo instead of 10 weapon y ammo.

[zitro]

i actually think the ammo issue balances out the difficulty between early levels and later ones, forcing you to use that non-elemental attack in the beginning when the game is easy.

One thing I have in mind: enemies will be too hard to kill in later levels, especially on episodes 3-5. Maybe it's a lot of work, but how about making weapon 6-7 spawners bring a more powerful random elemental weapons? That way, you'll get a few of them everytime you play and it may bring even more replay value.

example for fire:
_primary attack: similar to phoenix rod primary attack
_powered attack: throw fast-moving small fireballs about 6 per second.

so in this case, when you press "1" you will get this overall stronger fire weapon instead, and because you have this one, there's not really much of a need for the other one unless you're trying to aim at a faraway earth enemy.

The thing is: how do you kill minotaurs with these weapons? they aren't that strong.

I may up the damage of the non-elemental attack

you mean the tomb of power version, right? the standard attacks are balanced in my opinion.

anyways, I played levels 3-4 and some of 5. Game is surprisingly tough on 4th difficulty (I like it). I have yet to get the light/dark/acid weapons. Do you find the light/dark weapons in any weapon spawner?

EDIT:
complaints/errors:
_Glass enemies reflection skill is useless against earth attacks. I tend to attack them with this weapon (when i run out of steel) and I never received any damage when doing so, even when really close.
_"air" enemies are far too weak in general. In order to balance out their tiny health, I think you should include fire's "faster attack speed" because an increase on moving speed doesn't make much of a difference to me, especially on enemies that have ranged attacks.

[Maelstrom]

@Spleen: I would have no idea where to start to ever attempt that.

@Zitro: No idea what you mean by the powerup weapon thing but I probably won't be doing it, took me awhile to get happy with these weapons.

Minotaurs the same way you woulds kill anything else, though I do recommened using their elemental weakness. Cause then they will take more damage.

Yeah I meant the tomed damage.

Light and Dark can only be found rarely on a powerup spawn point and something is wrong and they arent spawning anyway, and i'm looking into it for the next version. If you want to try them out you will have to use give all.

Yes earth doesn't hurt you when it's reflected and honestly I have no idea why, it by all means should, when its reflected kill you, cause I'm pretty sure fire tomed grenade does, but I might investigate this further.
Air is like that, cause I feel it should be the weakest enemy. There needs to be one element you can go round the corner and say thank god to. If I give them the faster attack speed I need something else for Fire. Also I would need to give water slightly increased attack speed aswell.

[zitro]

I see, looking back, my post didn't make that much of sense, especially since we can use a tome of power in case we fight for example minotaurs. I also understand the logic behind the air enemies now, from now on I'll see it as the opposite of a "dark" enemy (which are really difficult).

I like the gameplay around the tome of power by the way. Unlike the original Heretic, they really eat up your mana here. They also seem to appear more often (or maybe i just forgot how Heretic was like). My decision on using it is not only if I would run out of tomes, but also how my ammo would drop.

I'll play lvls 5 and a couple of others now. I'll check online how to get to the secret level so I play that too.

[zitro]

ok, I finished playing. I'll give some observations:

_weapons: they are really well balanced. I actually found the light weapon, and liked it very much. It was more powerful, yet not overpowered. The only weapon I'm not too crazy about is the acid weapon, as it doesn't let you aim. No matter how up/down you're looking, the acid shoots at the same angle/arc.
_enemies: dark/light enemies are a tad too difficult to kill (besides being extremely dangerous). if light/dark weapons are very rare, I think their elemental strengths could be less significant (lets say 70%). A light disciple (flying mage) was extremely hard for me.
_When playing the secret level and most monsters were transparent, it was hard to tell which elements they were (the golems), but I guess there's nothing to remedy this.
_except for lvl1, I like how the difficulty is balanced. At first, you have to rely on a couple of weapons and the non-elemental attack Then, you can take advantage of elemental weaknesses and kill more and more types of enemies with ease. This was something I initially thought was gonna be a major flaw in the game, but it's actually the opposite. Congrats for being able to avoid having more than one weapon for each element.
_a light golem punched and killed me, and it said "acid golem" in the message. Minor, but I'm pointing it out. (when he killed me with its ranged attack it said 'light')

and

_when I kill the liches (there were only 2, I thought there were 3), I get stuck. I don't know if something was supposed to happen or I have bad memory and there's a hidden button somewhere. I go back up, kill all the golems, and there's nothing else to do.

and finally:
_I really enjoyed playing this, it is an excellent, balanced mod. Maybe not very user-friendly, but once you get used to the elements, it's quite fun.

[Maelstrom]

@ Zitro: Yeah acid is always going to be a problem because of how the weapon was coded makes it impossible to aim, I may have another idea on how to aim it though so, hold out on me for that .

I may make dark and light easier cause alot find them very difficult especially the shooting ones.

Lol I'll fix that message you seem to notice alot of them

There were only two lichs cause not all of them are done only Fire, Water and Earth is half done. Because of the engine I can't make that wall lower when you kill the lichs, its a hard coded script, that runs when all lichs on that level are killed, cause tehre technically isn't any lichs it never lowers. Which means once you kill those lichs you pretty much won the first world.

Thx, it gets easier when you learn a few tricks and stuff, a bunch of us were playing survival on it, on the Skulltag version, cause we have a permanent testing server up for that now, but I don't know if you play Skulltag so you know, we found it really challenging to keep alive.

[Ichor]

Have you tried inheriting the Iron Lich behavior? For example:

ACTOR FireLich : IronLich

Or using +BOSSDEATH?

Also, the specialaction command in MAPINFO might help:

specialaction <monstertype>, <action special>, <arg1>, ...

Assigns an action to a monster class. This action is executed when all monsters of this type are dead. The monster needs to call A_BossDeath for this to take effect. Unlike the specialized death actions you can define as many special actions as you want and these special actions can call any action special they like.

[Spleen]

Also, the specialaction command in MAPINFO might help:

He's trying to avoid making it map-specific.