Hideous Destructor 4.10.0b

[Somagu]

Tempted to make litter disappear again like it did before the June 18, 2012 update.

Ahh, please don't do that, pretty please. One thing I really really love is being able to look back on the carnage and destruction, which I can't do in the vast majority of mods because they sensibly disable permanent shell casings and gibs.

[Matt]

The aesthetics don't bother me at all, just performance - HD is already extremely badly optimized (one might even say "pessimized" when you consider how many ordinary Doom behaviours are being recreated through higher-level functions to effect subtle functional differences - it takes dozens) so it's always good to minimize actors where possible.

In other news, this SMG is shaping up to be quite a powerful weapon - it's actually much more accurate firing full-auto at medium range than the rifles or chaingun (though the Liberator is pretty close), and the stopping power per round isn't that much worse than the '66. Won't take down an arachnotron with one mag, though, but I haven't tested it against cacos or knights who I assume don't have the same resistances (not having shiny metal parts).

Now to figure out how to make a ZM66-wielding zombie that is comparable in threat level to a shotgunguy without giving it ludicrous hitpoints or speed...

[JimmyJ]

Tempted to make litter disappear again like it did before the June 18, 2012 update.

Ahh, please don't do that, pretty please. One thing I really really love is being able to look back on the carnage and destruction, which I can't do in the vast majority of mods because they sensibly disable permanent shell casings and gibs.

I second the love of the permanent casings and hulls, possibly it could be made optional for people with less beefy systems?

[Matt]

It only seems to look like it could be a problem when I'm in god mode and I'm just letting a bunch of guys shoot me for prolonged periods of time. Normally, you're either behind cover or in the process of being killed, so it generally doesn't get too terribly out of hand.

That said, I just noticed the zombies' attack ranges are far too short so I need to update those...

[HexaDoken]

Now to figure out how to make a ZM66-wielding zombie that is comparable in threat level to a shotgunguy without giving it ludicrous hitpoints or speed...

Make them a bit more likely to hit you. I've recently been shot at by zeds like 70 or 80 times but was hit only once.

You could do an option to disable visual effects. Most of the performance drops are caused by those only.

(granted, disabling some of those could be considered a cheat given the mod nature)

[Matt]

Right now the new zombie's got 90 HP, no minimum time between shots, higher chance of shooting again, and always uses the 3-round salvo. In terms of threat increase it should be comparable to being slightly worse than the original shotgunguy as compared to the original zombieman, versus that vicious spike that always happens in any Doom mod where the shotgunguys are given something comparable to the player's shotgun.

As for performance lag spikes, it always happens to me where there are lots of explosions - but the main culprit seems (I haven't tested this properly yet) to be translucent sprites, rather than processing stuff (like the fact that every single grenade fragment must explode in order to hit and hurt the shooter while crediting kills correctly). But this is my own computer only, and I've got an assload of RAM and processing power while my video card is riddled with little compatibility issues that prevent me from using it to its full potential, so the situation may be different for others - I might have to try killing a couple cybies in software mode to confirm.

[Abba Zabba]

The casings never seemed to slow me down; the cyberdemon and spidermastermind deaths always do a bit, but only for a few seconds. Barrels would be the same case when there's more than 3 going off at once.

[HexaDoken]

I randomly wonder - has anybody actually tried to play this beast of a thing in deathmatch? For some reason I feel this would be rather silly.

Zombies have okay damage as of right now - unlike shotgun shots, almost never immediately fatal but still not something you can just ignore. It just feels kind of silly that they keep firing and never quite hit.

Unless they are fifteen miles away. Apparently, when they take no more than 5 pixels on my monitor, they instantly gain a high quality aimbot.

Much like Lava Grunt, the only consistent case of noticeable FPS slowdowns for me are the bosses deaths. Large amount of translucent sprites does produce a huge amount of work for your processor and videocard. Also notable that high amounts of actors spawned also do well to bring your system down. I think it's more those two that the fact that every single grenade fragment has to call A_Explode.

If there is anything that A_Explode could be the culprit of, it's probably crashing network games.(this is assuming zdoom multiplayer works more or less the same way as zandronum multiplayer which could very well prove to be slightly less than entirely wrong)

[Matt]

I've tried getting rid of all translucency on the impball-based smoke actors, then killing a cyberdemon. The framerate change is negligible. Also tried setting off a large number of healer imp balls (the ones that smoke for a long time) in one spot and that doesn't slow things down much at all after the first second or two.

Seems more like an issue of spawning actors?


Anyway, all that will have to wait until the NEW UPDATE! right after this one.

Changes:

• Bugfix: manual said pistol was caseless.
• Bugfix: undead rifleman (not the new guy below, the one that you get when a healer imp and player corpse really like each other) was still using the shitty old shooting code.
• Bugfix: drunk imp doing cover fire would occasionally turn to face the out-of-sight player, ruining the whole effect.
• Bugfix: zombies took less time to aim from a great distance than up close. Should be the other way around.
• Added an SMG! Some zombiemen also use this (in fact right now it's the only way to get one short of selecting the appropriate loadout). Second weapon in slot 2.
• Changed pistol bob.
• Added a slight delay when switching to any weapon that must be held with both hands.
• Chainsaw beatings shall not continue until morale improves.
• Added a new, helmeted jackboot, as an excuse to add more ZM66 ammo in shotgunguy-heavy maps especially now that zombiemen are spread between ZM66 and SMG. To make up for their significantly lower stopping power on any given hit, they are much more aggressive, use only the ZM66's unique salvo ability and have 10 more hitpoints.
• Increased zombie maxtargetrange.
• Added a new passing-by sound for the pistol bullet, using the old plasma rifle distant sound.

EDIT: if your zip file ends in 17 and not 17a, download again!

[Josh771]

I randomly wonder - has anybody actually tried to play this beast of a thing in deathmatch? For some reason I feel this would be rather silly.

I, living in my lonely, lonely world, did actually play around with a botmatch to get a feel for what a real deathmatch might be like. I rather liked the concept once I had something tangible in front of me -- of course, it's a bit different than your typical Doom deathmatch (who knew?).

One of the bots had the Hideous Destructor loadout. Everytime I heard that sucker charging up I gave him a couple blasts with my Slayer. I'm growing fond of the Contractor loadout.

[Slax]

How about a Blood/Tommy Gun styled strafe alt-fire for the lil' SMG? Just a thought.

[Abba Zabba]

Little bug: the SMG is missing one of it's frames when press the reload button while the gun is already full/you're out of ammo (the missing frame seems to be when he pulls the gun back the farthest, right in the middle of the animation.) Also slightly off-center. Otherwise, nice work. I like the new pseudo-marine zeds, they're proving to be a new type of challenge. Haven't really seen what the SMG man can do, but I imagine he won't have as much of an accuracy problem as the other zombies up close. With it's butter smooth recoil, I already feel the SMG fitting it's niche pretty well. The pistol is still good as a finisher/main weapon ammo augmenter.

[Matt]

Thanks, LG! Keep the bugs coming, hopefully they can all be fixed by the usual Monday update. (already fixed for next update: water warping making it unplayable in Doom 1; SMG sprite not on HUD; marines weren't fixed the way zeds were wrt: long-distance aimbot.)

I haven't touched the zeds' close-versus-far behaviour in any way to distinguish them depending on their weapons. Right now I'm banking on their lack of audible warning shots to make them insidious enough. no wait i did reduce the spread increase after every shot, it's only the first shot in a given burst that would be the same. this sustained fire combined with stealth capacity might ironically make the SMG zed far more effective - or at least accurate, if facing an armoured target - at very long ranges.

Slax: increase mouse sensitivity. This is a mod where even the shotgun must be pumped manually, so binding a special, arbitrary rote move to a gun would seem very out of place. (granted, the fist is already like that, but it's also substantially different from all the other weapons on numerous other counts anyway)

[Abba Zabba]

There are some times where I can't make SMG mags and I don't know why. No matter what I do (switching weapons, pressing reload, etc) it doesn't convert mags. Restarting the level let's me do it again. Maybe something is locking up?

EDIT: Theres another missing frame (which seems to last only half as long as the aforementioned one), during the "no more ammo" reload. I've also noticed the SMG being cocked once or twice when you hit reload with no mags left, what is it doing during that?

So, to recap:

• There's a rare chance that you're unable to convert any pistol mags, seemingly forever or until you restart the level. I don't know what caused this, sorry.
• Missing frame during the animation for reloading while the gun is full.
• Missing frame during the animation for reloading when there's no mags left.

[Eric_]

Newest version crashes on startup if you try to play with Ultimate Doom.