ZDoom

Beed28 wrote:Just wondering, when can we expect the results?

Spoiler:

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AFADoomer's post:
"Posting this as a WIP... Probably final at this point, though.

This turns the player into a flying vehicle that can fly through maps in a style similar to Descent. Just load any ZDoom-compatible map.

Doom armor items are replaced by shields that take 100% of the damage until they run out (and they regenerate at a rate of 1% per second).

Controls are pseudo-aircraft style.
- Jump and Crouch increase/decrease the throttle speed
- Forward/Back pitch the nose forward or back (pitch angle)
- Left/Right turn the ship left/right (yaw angle)
- Strafe Left/Strafe Right roll the ship left/right (roll angle)
- Attack fires the laser weapon

*Note: You pretty much have to control both yaw and roll to have controlled flight. I'm using both WASD and arrow key bindings, using the left/right arrows for turn and A/D for roll

GZDoom recommended - this will work in ZDoom, but you lose full pitch range and the models, and the effects look like crap."

THE REVIEW:
Mmmm, Descent. I've always wondered why nobody ever attempted to pull over the mechanics of the Descent games into ZDoom, since we clearly have some capability for that now, especially since Nash and company helped get camera-roll support into GZDoom. Shuttle is, as near as I can tell, an earnest attempt at this, with as-near-as-possible 6DOF movement support. Though it's rather difficult to control; forget about using the mouse, as mouselook kind of tends to break this if used too much. The "replacement" controls use ZDoom's own move/strafe and turn keys (so be prepared for either a learning curve, or some key rebinding). They do work to some extent, but IMO they don't operate fast enough, so flying any faster than about 10% throttle is pretty much asking to smack into a wall by accident since your turn radius winds up being extremely wide. And beyond that, striking walls at a fast enough speed tends to damage you, and doesn't reset the throttle in the process, so it's entirely possible for one collision to kill you if you can't slow down fast enough.

Included in the PK7 file is a pretty respectable amount of code; 10 KB of Decorate, a few bootstraps in GLDefs, Mapinfo (enough to replace the player class), and an entire player model (I can only assume this mod was intended for multiplayer, since this wouldn't be seen in single-player mode in most circumstances). 7-Zip compression was used to keep it below the 64 KB limit.

ORIGINALITY SCORE: 12/20
Personally, I've been waiting ages for any Descent-like thing to get made in ZDoom, so this gets some bonus points for appealing to my own interests. Bias? What's that? =P

EXECUTION SCORE: 28/50
As far as how this actually runs and plays, there are honestly a few little details that make it not as easy as I'd hoped. When the game starts, there is a control guide on screen, but even though I am a fast reader, that guide disappears a little too fast. In addition, I was not a fan of the shuttle immediately accelerating to 10% throttle afterwards, which often throws me into a situation I'd rather not be in. I had some difficulty coming up with a control scheme that worked for the new movement control setup, and maybe it's just me, but I feel like the enemies are doing more damage than they should be. I don't think the difficulty settings or enemies have been changed, either...I'm not sure what's happened, but I really, really suck at this mod, and I'm not sure to what extent I can really blame the mod, because it's a fairly good piece of work. I'd suppose it just needs some balancing and some tweaks to the controls.

INGENUITY/TECHNIQUE SCORE: 20/30
Easily the biggest thing in this mod is the player model, an MD3 replica of Star Trek's Galileo-type shuttlecraft. The model and skin together take up a bit over 52 KB uncompressed, but crunch down nicely with the 7-Zip compression used. It wouldn't appear that AFADoomer needed to take any extreme measures with the code, either, aside from the smaller lumps like MAPINFO taking only a single line to define the player class. ACS does not appear to have needed any compromises either, as the entire ACS file takes a mere 7,059 bytes and compresses well.

Where the ingenuity comes in, though, is using the camera roll function to run a full 6DOF movement system in an engine that really was never designed for that, which I can only assume involved a lot of...*shudder*...math. Code-wise, it runs without any real kind of forcing, and that's about all I could ever hope for from a solid project.

PENALTIES: --
This was submitted on time, under budget, and required no effort on my part to acquire and run. No penalties issued.

FINAL SCORE: 60/100
A fairly good attempt, however problems with getting the hang of the controls and gameplay mechanics were getting in the way of my really having fun with this.

Spoiler:

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Beed28's post:
Feeling confident about this, as in, it shouldn't be too buggy. Hopefully it shouldn't lag too much on other people's systems. Load it before any PWADs for best results, and there's a settings menu you can mess around with, which is bound to the 'K' key by default. Also, the radiation suit has been replaced with a new item that should help you out. Mostly.

Use the latest SVN revisions if it doesn't appear to work!

THE REVIEW:
Beed didn't really give a lot of clue as to what this submission was, outside of the name. It could have been anything. But what we got was perhaps the only thing that could really live up to a name like "MegaBounce." Simply put, the entire level bounces up and down repeatedly. (Oh, by the way, if you have any kind of photosensitive epilepsy or extreme motion sickness, this isn't the mod for you.) The chaos that ensues will prevent most monsters from walking properly, and with you constantly being airborne, you may find yourself at the mercy of Doom's utter lack of air-control (easy enough to change in gameplay settings if it gets irritating). One amusing side-effect of this is that Doom's monsters also tend to miss more frequently due to you bouncing so ridiculously. But it doesn't have to be so ridiculous (or it can be MORE ridiculous, if you want), since the mod also includes a settings menu where you can adjust the bounce strength, disable the screen movement, or even cause objects to be sent in random directions when bounced for even more chaos.

ORIGINALITY SCORE: 13/20
Well, I certainly can't say I've ever seen anything quite like this before...it's surprising how much this affects gameplay. (Unless you turn up sv_aircontrol.) And yet, compared to some of the submissions, this still doesn't quite reach the top originality score. Kinda funny, these competitions.

EXECUTION SCORE: 23/50
This mod...well, let's not kid ourselves, this isn't exactly the kind of mod you'd want to load for regular gameplay. This is a mod that is best foisted on your friends without a single word as to what it is, and watch them scramble with the keys as they accidentally fling themselves off a cliff. (Or challenge them to speedrun Doom 2's "The Chasm" with it.) For pure laughs, Megabounce gets 20 points from me for execution...sadly, the joke doesn't really keep holding up once the novelty's worn off. Actually, let's throw in a few extra points for including the boots powerup, which stops you from bouncing in addition to the usual protection from damaging floors.

INGENUITY/TECHNIQUE SCORE: 15/30
Megabounce is light on resources; it contains only one new sound (the "THUD" you hear with each bounce) and one new sprite (a pair of boots, presumably from HACX, replacing the Radiation Suit). The requisite definition lumps are present, and scripts all include normal names for variables and labels. I imagine Beed had no need whatsoever to pare anything down, considering he didn't come anywhere close to the size limit. What's most interesting to me is Beed's implementation of random bounce delay; rather than using actual random numbers, he has implemented his own PRNG, an array of 14 numbers that are chosen by the script and subject to mild amounts of math.

PENALTIES: --
Megabounce was submitted long before the cut-off time, and is far under budget. No penalties administered.

FINAL SCORE: 51/100

Spoiler:

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Blue Shadow's post:
[semi-serious]I'll be the first to participate: NC HUD -- 51 KB. Beat that, people! Yeah![/semi-serious]

THE REVIEW:
NC HUD is a nice customized HUD intended for high-resolution monitors that includes slick-looking translucent quadrants with both numbers and rich bars. It is somewhat customizable as well, with optional changes to the formulas behind the bars, and the ability to show or hide the kills/items/secrets stats with one CVAR.

ORIGINALITY SCORE: 8/20
Well....it's a HUD. I'd imagine most of the ZDoom Forums userbase is familiar with this one, too; NC HUD is one of the more popular drop-in HUD replacements out there, and this release doesn't make any seriously big changes to stay within the filesize limit, aside from the removal of the extra patches for stuff like Brutal Doom. So...maybe a slightly below the middle of the road kind of score for Originality.

EXECUTION SCORE: 30/50
As nice as this HUD is, it unfortunately makes a lot of assumptions, for example that the player is not running any gameplay mods. A Patch Guide is included, giving budding modders a chance to adapt their own mods to work with NC HUD, but something with the way the mod's put together prevents anything other than the default Doom weapons from displaying their ammo counts on the HUD. So unless you're willing to get down into the nitty-gritty...I'll give the HUD some points for looking nice and being pretty functional (though with as much space is given to the ammo bars, I'm surprised there's not an optional all-ammo-counters section), but I feel like some effort could be undertaken to keep it compatible with other mods out of the box.

INGENUITY/TECHNIQUE SCORE: 20/30
The codebase of this mod is surprisingly clear and commented. There are even a couple of sample weapons to demonstrate the (otherwise unused) dual-ammo display, though they ultimately don't do much aside from demonstrate. Textures lump is used to scale up the Doomguy face to fit the larger HUD boxes (which makes it compatible with mods that replace this face). Decorate dummy inventory items are used to monitor and display the different colored bars on the HUD for health, ammo, and armor, and there are even concessions for displaying air supply for maps with underwater sections. It's clearly a very advanced and expandable HUD...which only makes it more confusing that it doesn't work with custom weapons without being modified.

PENALTIES: --
The HUD works (more or less) without problems, and was submitted on time and under the size limit. No penalties.

FINAL SCORE: 58/100
Just remember, guys, this isn't a percentage rating.

Beed28 wrote:Yep, the boots came straight from HacX.

I noticed a tiny mistake in your review, for the settings menu, you say that "you can adjust the bounce strength". It's not the actual strength of the bouncing, just how frequently it occurs.

kodi wrote:

Doomshock updated. It may be all kinds of broken but has some neater stuff. Thanks and good night.

Edit: Documentation below

Spoiler:

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Introduction:
This mod aims to take some of the gameplay of the first System Shock game into Doom by replacing the weapons and the movement/aiming system. It also gives you access to a small number of "programs" of which you can run two at a time on your cybernetic rig.

How to play:
1. Use development builds of ZDoom or GZDoom.I strongly suggest Zdoom with a resolution of 640*400. My bad! use GZDoom with vid_renderer 0 or some of the angle math goes bonkers. Below 640* 400 the text just won't render proper though, and at very high resolution the charm is kind of lost
2. Play in a 4:3 resolution in any other case!
3. Remove your hud, by minimizing it away and turning off the crosshair for example.
4. Bind Weapon State 1 (+user1) and Weapon State 2 (+user2) to the keys you wish to turn left or right with respectively.
5. +user3 and +user4 make you look up and down, but I suggest ignoring them and playing without this feature.
6. Use your alternative fire key to interact with the menus in the bottom corners.
7. Use Doom2.wad as your IWAD or there'll be a few graphics missing.

The DS_TURNFACTOR cvar multiplies your turning speed if you feel the standard amount is too sluggish.
DS_ALTXHAIR will provide a high visibility crosshair when set to true. (for you ck )


Weapon guide

Unarmed
Unmodified fist
Laser rapier
Powerful melee weapon. Goes bananas if you find a berserk pack.
9mm pistol
A pretty lackluster pistol.
Tactical carbine
100% accurate with a moderate fire rate. It's basically chaingun-tapping in a can.
Pump action shotgun
Slightly faster than the vanilla shotgun, has a fairly accurate conical spread.
Break action shotgun
Fires 14 pellets instead of the vanilla 20, but does more damage to compensate. Slightly reduced fire rate, slight bit of recoil.
Gast gun:
Multi-barreled machinegun with a fantastical fire rate. Single-handedly makes bullets a valuable resource.
Grenade launcher
A fairly standard grenade launcher.
Laser pistol
An efficient and accurate weapon. Hits like 5 plasma gun shots and costs the same amount of cells.
Graviton Collider
Costs 75 cells to fire. Extremely powerful room-clearing weapon.
MFD Software

GravBoost
Turns your movement ffaster but more slippery. Does not consume cells.
FarSight
Puts a zoom overlay on top of your crosshair. You may tweak the level of zoom with the arrows. Pretty useful in the intended 640*400 resolution!
Active camo
Acts like the blursphere. Consumes cells quite quickly.
EnviShield
Acts like radsuit.
NiteLite
Acts like like light amp goggles.

Known bugs and issues

Spoiler:

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Pistol doesn't use ammo.
The aiming angle is just bitshifted to integer before being sent to the weapon's decorate, so there's a great loss of precision.
All the debugging print/log functions were mistakenly left on for the MFDs. Whoops.
MFDs crash and lock under some circumstances. Entering the next map restores it at least.
The code is made of spaghetti and sleep deprivation
No widescreen support. Adjusting the position of a scaled hudmessage was a can of worms I did not have the time to deal with before the deadline

If you find any more bugs or would like to express your opinion on the mod in general I'd appreciate hearing about it.

wildweasel wrote:So I've decided that I really shouldn't hold off releasing the scores until all 31 reviews are done; what I'll do instead is start posting them as I finish them, so you can all be kept up to date with my progress (and so I don't feel like I have to do them all at once, heh). So here are the first few.

AFADoomer - Shuttle

Spoiler:

---

AFADoomer's post:
"Posting this as a WIP... Probably final at this point, though.

This turns the player into a flying vehicle that can fly through maps in a style similar to Descent. Just load any ZDoom-compatible map.

Doom armor items are replaced by shields that take 100% of the damage until they run out (and they regenerate at a rate of 1% per second).

Controls are pseudo-aircraft style.
- Jump and Crouch increase/decrease the throttle speed
- Forward/Back pitch the nose forward or back (pitch angle)
- Left/Right turn the ship left/right (yaw angle)
- Strafe Left/Strafe Right roll the ship left/right (roll angle)
- Attack fires the laser weapon

*Note: You pretty much have to control both yaw and roll to have controlled flight. I'm using both WASD and arrow key bindings, using the left/right arrows for turn and A/D for roll

GZDoom recommended - this will work in ZDoom, but you lose full pitch range and the models, and the effects look like crap."

THE REVIEW:
Mmmm, Descent. I've always wondered why nobody ever attempted to pull over the mechanics of the Descent games into ZDoom, since we clearly have some capability for that now, especially since Nash and company helped get camera-roll support into GZDoom. Shuttle is, as near as I can tell, an earnest attempt at this, with as-near-as-possible 6DOF movement support. Though it's rather difficult to control; forget about using the mouse, as mouselook kind of tends to break this if used too much. The "replacement" controls use ZDoom's own move/strafe and turn keys (so be prepared for either a learning curve, or some key rebinding). They do work to some extent, but IMO they don't operate fast enough, so flying any faster than about 10% throttle is pretty much asking to smack into a wall by accident since your turn radius winds up being extremely wide. And beyond that, striking walls at a fast enough speed tends to damage you, and doesn't reset the throttle in the process, so it's entirely possible for one collision to kill you if you can't slow down fast enough.

Included in the PK7 file is a pretty respectable amount of code; 10 KB of Decorate, a few bootstraps in GLDefs, Mapinfo (enough to replace the player class), and an entire player model (I can only assume this mod was intended for multiplayer, since this wouldn't be seen in single-player mode in most circumstances). 7-Zip compression was used to keep it below the 64 KB limit.

ORIGINALITY SCORE: 12/20
Personally, I've been waiting ages for any Descent-like thing to get made in ZDoom, so this gets some bonus points for appealing to my own interests. Bias? What's that? =P

EXECUTION SCORE: 28/50
As far as how this actually runs and plays, there are honestly a few little details that make it not as easy as I'd hoped. When the game starts, there is a control guide on screen, but even though I am a fast reader, that guide disappears a little too fast. In addition, I was not a fan of the shuttle immediately accelerating to 10% throttle afterwards, which often throws me into a situation I'd rather not be in. I had some difficulty coming up with a control scheme that worked for the new movement control setup, and maybe it's just me, but I feel like the enemies are doing more damage than they should be. I don't think the difficulty settings or enemies have been changed, either...I'm not sure what's happened, but I really, really suck at this mod, and I'm not sure to what extent I can really blame the mod, because it's a fairly good piece of work. I'd suppose it just needs some balancing and some tweaks to the controls.

INGENUITY/TECHNIQUE SCORE: 20/30
Easily the biggest thing in this mod is the player model, an MD3 replica of Star Trek's Galileo-type shuttlecraft. The model and skin together take up a bit over 52 KB uncompressed, but crunch down nicely with the 7-Zip compression used. It wouldn't appear that AFADoomer needed to take any extreme measures with the code, either, aside from the smaller lumps like MAPINFO taking only a single line to define the player class. ACS does not appear to have needed any compromises either, as the entire ACS file takes a mere 7,059 bytes and compresses well.

Where the ingenuity comes in, though, is using the camera roll function to run a full 6DOF movement system in an engine that really was never designed for that, which I can only assume involved a lot of...*shudder*...math. Code-wise, it runs without any real kind of forcing, and that's about all I could ever hope for from a solid project.

PENALTIES: --
This was submitted on time, under budget, and required no effort on my part to acquire and run. No penalties issued.

FINAL SCORE: 60/100
A fairly good attempt, however problems with getting the hang of the controls and gameplay mechanics were getting in the way of my really having fun with this.

jpalomo wrote:I've been working on my rpg mod a little bit. Here is version 3: Dropbox, Mediafire, GitHub. It exceeds the 64k limit, but it still isn't that big (I could easily remove the sounds to put it back into the 64k range). Not much is different from my previous version regarding the monsters, but I did rework the leveling system a little bit. You can now optionally pick a level up bonus for each level. To do this you will need to change cl_autolevelup to false and bind a key to user4. I intentionally set the default value to true so that gameplay isn't interrupted. I've got source code for the scripts on GitHub. Enjoy.
Maybe I should make a new thread for this?