The Guncaster - 3.888b

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nax
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by nax »

Jack Mackerel wrote:That's the issue, I wind up forgetting to get mana boosters, and my inner Booker keeps telling me to hurl Devil's Kiss/Murder of Crows/Lightning. :V I think most powers at this stage are all pretty overpowered (well, slightly - lightning does have the inaccuracy bit, so that counts).

The fullscreen HUD is extremely tiny on 16:9 1920x1080.
Oops - my original HUD comment was using 'Hud Stretching'. Of course, if it's stretched that's the issue. But unstretched, yes it is far too tiny.

EDIT: One last thing. Any chance of a Zandronum friendly release? This mod screams coop.
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Patriot1776
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Patriot1776 »

Hellfier wrote:Just wanted to mention that even if I buy the health boost from the shop, it doesn't actually increase my health by 10 as the description of it states.
This. I've noticed it too, but the health boost is the only thing like that I've tried to buy, and its major buzzkill that I basically just wasted 1500 gold and got ripped off. Makes me not even wanna try the other booster syringes if you get ripped off by the normal booster, unless it's supposed to be dropped into your inventory to manually use. In that case, I've not seen it show up at all in my inventory while playing, meaning I just basically gave up 1500 gold for nothing.
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LostSkull
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by LostSkull »

So this is the Heretic approach of Bioshock Infinite on purpose or just pure coincidence?
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PillowBlaster
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by PillowBlaster »

Whoa, that's a bit of stir here alright, heh. Time to give those itchy questions a rub!
Zhs2 wrote:I vote the other way for gold and mana staying on the inventory since they are selectable items with no use so you can keep from accidentally Tome of Power'ing or otherwise. Lesser reasons include compatibility with the AltHUD. (Yes I'm a fogey that likes to see everything at once without the ugliness of a reduced screen.)
Well, no HUD shall be hurt, hopefully. I guess there's a way to implement both without sacrificing the AltHUD (As I am constantly using it myself), so I'll tackle that once all the other HUD issues are done for.
Ethril wrote:Gave this a spin earlier. Was a lot of fun, but I have a few issues:

-There should be more melee options. The smashy punching is great, but I was expecting more RIP AND TEAR clawing. I like that you can do a diving kick or roundhouse, and the aerial stomp attack is awesome, but it's disappointing that there aren't more aerial options. If you could do a bicycle kick or spinning hurricane kick in midair, at least...
The Street Fighter-esque combos in Russian Overkill were a lot of fun, why not bring those back?
Also, I get that you can't do a roundhouse with the bigger guns out, but it should at least be possible with the revolver.

-Weapons should be boosted by the Tome of Power. It doesn't have to be anything major (that's what the boosted spells are for) but something like "bullets can damage ghosts" would be nice. Melee attacks could be infused with dragonfire or something.

-Needs Doom compatibility; Heretic is great, but it severely limits your map choices.
-Well, about the melee - I didn't want to steal Space Pirate's thunder, so I went particularly crazy here in other areas. If my invention and patience will let me, I'll try to come up with something.
I didn't want to rehash same ideas too much, as I thought that comboes should stay within Overkill's area. Not mentioning that I am showered with all kind of movement scripts aleady.
-Could probably come up with something here. It's just I need to crack up motivation and some ideas here.
-Roundhouse isn't implemented in other weapons due to pure laziness, if I remember correctly. It's just I need to mash frames together for that. My bad. I'll see if I could add it at least till autocannon.
nax wrote:Lightning should be replaced by a piercing railgun type ability. There's already fireball, frozen orb, and that super bfg spell for room clearing / multi target damage. The lightning doesn't do enough damage, is outclassed in terms of usefulness by the others, and is too finnicky in aiming to merit it. We have no high damage pierce type gun nor spell, and lightning would be the perfect use for this type of ability. (I don't really count the cauterizer as it's a pretty big / slow projectile)

If you do something like that, it'd be cool to be able to charge something like that. Also if you do something like this, make sure not to overdue the startup animation on firing it (stuff like that usually makes those pinpoint accurate attacks feel too stiff and finnicky)

Less importantly, and not really a balance change (more of a "neato" thing).

I understand fireball is a low cost spell so it shouldn't be quite as powerful as the others. Still, I'd love to see like a 'charge' mechanic added to it. As it charges it gains speed, with max charge throwing out a single flaming boulder from the tome of power version of the spell. charge time, perhaps 3 seconds for max charge. 1 sec 25% faster, 2 sec 50% faster, 3 sec 50% faster + boulder, something like that.

Honestly I'd love to add charges to most of the spells. Seems like it'd make spell casting a little more separate from just being another weapon (which isn't a problem at all)
Good points!

I can tell that Thunder isn't particularly useful due to being tricky to use. It was much better before I started cracking up more ridiculous spells, so I guess it could have some refinement. I won't get rid of it, because I like too much to drop a fricken lightning on one's head - I'll see if I can improve it at any rate. It still kills stuff in water areas quite nicely. Otherwise, I can add a railgun-esque spell, sure.

I don't think I'd have patience to add charging to all of the spells. I can't hide I had an idea to make some alternative fire spell that is typical warlock's wet dream, but I guess I could put that to in form of charging for the one that's already in... that'd raise the spell's cost to questionable level, though. I'll see what I can do.
Jack Mackerel wrote:I'd kill for Bioshock-esque weapon upgrades.

Also, I'm agreeing with the rally to nerf Devil's Kiss. Granted, I'm slightly biased because the vigor I used the most in BI was Devil's Kiss, but here, it's effective against everything, even without a Tome.

I think Threadcutter needs a bit of a boost to make it viable without a Tome of Power.
The gun upgrade thing is left for T-*brick'd* (Don't wanna spoil too much, but you can easily take a guess for what, heh. Don't wanna burn out zany gameplay enchancements too fast.)

As of the questionable balance of the things, that's something I might have fucked up hard, as I Pillow-thatguywithoverkill. I'll try to give this a whirl, albeit not everyone's gonna be happy after those changes for sure. And by saying that I mean myself. Just kidding of course. :P

(Also, what's with naming that spell like that. Crows are really obvious, but the Skullfire is still different enough in my eyes. Ah well, whatever.)
nax wrote:threadcutter is already very powerful. Early on it doesn't seem that way due to mana issues - when you upgrade a level (or 2) of mana regen it is probably TOO strong and can end up just replacing your need for weapons outside of the rocket launcher / bfg.

Once you play a bit more threadcutter is pretty ridiculous.
wildweasel wrote:Anyway, with your permission, I've updated my copy of the HUD to include yours as the fullscreen variant and adapt some of the extra stuff for the statusbar variant:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/766 ... caster.pk3
Getting there, though on the largest screen size it takes up far too much space on 1280x1024. The Skulls in particular seem a bit overkill as far as screen real estate. Font size could be lowered slightly and the box for ammo takes up a bit more space than it needs to. With the gold / ammo indications on the right shrunk slightly you could place the key indicators on top of them to keep it fairly even with the health/armor/mana bars. Also the item box could probably use a slight shrink (nothing major). As for the spell indicator, enlarging it hurts the quality a bit much. I'd probably just put at the radial menu's size and put it right next to the gold bar.

On 16:9 resolutions these are still valid changes, but the problem really comes in with 5:4

The hud itself though looks very nice.

EDIT: As far as mod stuff goes - I know a few heretic mapsets use doom / hexen monsters (hordes of chaos for one) and they do not drop gold. Is there a way you could do that or is it basically just a wad thing.
Threadcutter's power lies within toming the hell out of it!

For all the HUD-related issues, I recommend to take them to the creators, as I honestly have zero experience with HUDs and SBARINFO, sadly.

I'd have to look into every heretic wad with custom monsters and add customised definitions to them to counter that. Sounds less insane than doing that in Doom, but still... you can tell that's a huge no-no from my side. I guess I could add those to major heretic wads, but otherwise... I just wish there was a better way to add that, obviously.
nax wrote: One last thing. Any chance of a Zandronum friendly release? This mod screams coop.
Considering this mod relies heavily on named scripts and fresh functions... Don't think so, heh. Unless HexaDoken would feel nuts enough to take a tackle on this one too, as he is already taking a struggle with Overkill.
Patriot1776 wrote:
Hellfier wrote:Just wanted to mention that even if I buy the health boost from the shop, it doesn't actually increase my health by 10 as the description of it states.
This. I've noticed it too, but the health boost is the only thing like that I've tried to buy, and its major buzzkill that I basically just wasted 1500 gold and got ripped off. Makes me not even wanna try the other booster syringes if you get ripped off by the normal booster, unless it's supposed to be dropped into your inventory to manually use. In that case, I've not seen it show up at all in my inventory while playing, meaning I just basically gave up 1500 gold for nothing.
Bugs happen, my appologies. The script's fragment that was responsible for it got nuked by accident on the way of fixing other things, and I didn't notice that. Shall be fixed in upcoming fix.
LostSkull wrote:So this is the Heretic approach of Bioshock Infinite on purpose or just pure coincidence?
It was a thing of it's own, as it was in the works before it, first steps taken somewhere around august 2012, and first compilation of all guns for it done around december 2012 (two spells were aviable back then, then I dug it out out of boredom in may 2013 and made a short video for fun). After I played that game, and diablo 2 again, let's just say I had a huge "inspiration" boost, heh.
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LostSkull
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by LostSkull »

Still awesome tho. :D
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Patriot1776
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Patriot1776 »

Bugs happen, my apologies. The script's fragment that was responsible for it got nuked by accident on the way of fixing other things, and I didn't notice that. Shall be fixed in upcoming fix.
The mana cap and mana regen boosters do work though, so me being somebody who doesn't like waiting when its something so minor, I may look through the code and see if I can take a crack at fixing the issue myself, seeing if I can copy the fragment of code that has the other boosters working into the section of the script dealing with the health booster.
Tux
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Tux »

Dude! This mod is awesome! I just blasted through e3 with it! Once you have one offensive spell and 3 green bottles of something, game turns into a cakewalk. Even bigger cakewalk when you obtain annihilation and have all the green bottles.
btw is annihilation supposed to oneshot dsparil?
nax
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by nax »

PillowB - Yeah I had figured about the custom monsters gold dropping thing. Thankfully many heretic customs use either only additional hexen monsters or add doom monsters as well. I would also not mind donating some time to working on that myself if I was shown how or given some direction on it. Doom compatibility if not too difficult would alleviate the one thing this mod has a problem with - only having heretic custom maps to work with.

As far as Lightning goes, yeah that makes sense. I was thinking maybe you didn't want to add anymore spells :P. I might want to use this mod as a springboard for some ideas I had if that's fine with you. So far I just messed with dosh amounts on some of the really difficult wads like HoCX, but I'd love to add another menu to the radial for upgrading weapons the same way spells are upgraded - one upgrade that increases something about the weapons. All of them would be 8k+ dosh upgrades as they'd permanently improve the weapons. Some of the ones I've been looking into - explosive shotgun shells (originality!), slowing firerate of the pistol but massively improving damage, adding shrapnel to the slug launcher's explosions.

Finally I'd like to personally look into spell charging. Probably far beyond me but god it would be so much fun charging some of these spells up.
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Zhs2
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Zhs2 »

Patriot1776: One line of code, preferably not in any sub-blocks of script "Guncaster" in GUNCASTER.acs:

Code: Select all

SetActorProperty(0, APROP_SpawnHealth, 100+(CheckInventory("PowerStimulant")*10));
sorry I forgot it.
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Patriot1776
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Patriot1776 »

Zhs2 wrote:Patriot1776: One line of code, preferably not in any sub-blocks of script "Guncaster" in GUNCASTER.acs:

Code: Select all

SetActorProperty(0, APROP_SpawnHealth, 100+(CheckInventory("PowerStimulant")*10)); 
sorry I forgot it.
Okay, so I gotta just insert that into the "Guncaster" script OUTSIDE the 'while' loop, correct?
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Zhs2
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Zhs2 »

Whoops. For one, I forgot this script was first written by somebody else and yes you will need to put it inside the while loop which is being used in lieu of [wiki=Restart]restart[/wiki]. For two, you will need to recompile the object file and place it in the ACS folder to get it working...!
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Patriot1776
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Patriot1776 »

Zhs2 wrote:Whoops. For one, I forgot this script was first written by somebody else and yes you will need to put it inside the while loop which is being used in lieu of [wiki=Restart]restart[/wiki]. For two, you will need to recompile the object file and place it in the ACS folder to get it working...!
I already knew about the need to recompile, but yes thanks much for the correction. :D
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TheDarkArchon
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by TheDarkArchon »

nax wrote: Getting there, though on the largest screen size it takes up far too much space on 1280x1024. The Skulls in particular seem a bit overkill as far as screen real estate. Font size could be lowered slightly and the box for ammo takes up a bit more space than it needs to. With the gold / ammo indications on the right shrunk slightly you could place the key indicators on top of them to keep it fairly even with the health/armor/mana bars. Also the item box could probably use a slight shrink (nothing major). As for the spell indicator, enlarging it hurts the quality a bit much. I'd probably just put at the radial menu's size and put it right next to the gold bar.
OK, I'm going to address these point by point.

1) The Gargoyles were mostly for flavour sake. I get the point they take up unnecessary screen space but I thought the HUD looked fine at 4:3 and 5:4 resoultions (I checked at 640x480 with HUD scaling on and didn't think it looked too big at those resolutions)
2) The font used for the gold and ammo counters is the standard Heretic HUD font so changing the font sizes would mean recreating the font at a lower resolution or just just using the smaller numbers for the counter, which would bring legability issues. The reason the ammo box is as tall as it is is to prevent the ammo icons clipping through the bar, particularly the revolver ammo icon.
3) Similar to the ammo box, the item box is the size it is to prevent icon clipping issues; The box is deliberately just wider than the Dark-Visor icon.
4) The radial menus boxes are scaled down in-engine from 100x100 PNGs. I manually scaled down the icons for the HUD because I felt the in-engine scaling made them look out of place with the rest of the HUD

QUICKEDIT:
Here's a version of the HUD that removes the Gargoyles and also slightly shrinks the Gold bar. No other changes have been made: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gnchmrt5g9csw ... leless.pk3

EDIT2:
Also, in case anyone is interested, here's a tweaked version of my HUD for vanilla Heretic usage. Fullscreen only. Contains versions with and without the Gargoyles: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mzh0rk5qt4f5n ... EREHUD.zip
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Ctrl+Alt+Destroy
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by Ctrl+Alt+Destroy »

Fingers crossed in the hopes of amv2k9 porting this to Doom faster than you can say overkill. :P
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PillowBlaster
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Re: [Release] The Guncaster - Rock the Dragon... today!

Post by PillowBlaster »

Ctrl+Alt+Destroy wrote:Fingers crossed in the hopes of amv2k9 porting this to Doom faster than you can say overkill. :P
Fingers crossed for some patience here, as I can't do everything in mere days, even if I have a break. I have other things to attend, after all. Otherwise, I need to get this mod in somewhat sane state (there shall be overpower of course, but not in the way that other things feel out of role, with few exceptions, heh) and iron out some things before moving on to Doom, as after couple of plays in comparison with some other mods I can easily tell that balance is sadly off as hell here. Unless you all don't mind it that much, but I don't feel like this shows good from me.
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