Hideous Destructor 4.10.0b

[Matt]

Next you people will be asking for a numerical health counter...

Anyway, as a huge massive spoiler, the red flicker is just HD's primitive low-health "bloody screen so real", while the black flicker is actually just the pain flash.

If you're seeing red and no black, a stim is perfectly safe to use and possibly even recommended.
If you're seeing black, bandage up first before using the stim.

[HexaDoken]

In a nutshell - red flashes represent your health, while black flashes represent the amount of bleeding wounds.

Rapid red flashes and no black flashes indicate that you're in no immediate danger now, but the next blow will probably be the knockout one. Medkits handle this poorly, but stims do good, as well as berserks. Be wary that berserk will need to be followed by a medkit, as it causes bleeding. If you grabbed a soulsphere or a tonload of bottles o health before, they should probably kick in now and save you.

Rapid black flashes and no red flashes indicate that you're healthy now, but only NOW. Until you will nom upon a medkit, you will rapidly lose your health until the wounds close themselves or you will die. My experience tells me that the latter one happens much more often than former. In this case, medkit is an absolute must(unless the black flashes are really faint), while stims and zerk packs will make the situation even worse, although the latter one can certainly buy you some time.

If you see both red flashes and black flashes at the same moment, eat a medkit to heal black ones first, and then follow it with a stim to get rid of red ones. If both flashes are rapid, better quaff a berserk instead and follow it up with two meds. Otherwise, your next stop is most probably the load game menu.

[Abba Zabba]

That's all I wanted to know, thanks HexaDoken. I appreciate it.

And I'm sorry if it came across as annoying Vaecrius. It would be one thing if I had an inkling of what it did but I didn't at the time.

EDIT: The bleeding mechanic gives me a neat idea for a HD map; you recover from being a prisoner or something, and you start off with some toxins in your system; effectively making a time game.

[Matt]

NEW UPDATE

Changes:

• Grenade fragments now explode as their damage. Please let me know if this makes fragmentation grenades terribly underpowered against bigger monsters or if you experience any slowdowns.
• The Icon of Sin now talks! Sort of.
• It was always my intention that the caco powershot would be this huge scary thing that would make everyone run away as it builds up. In larger maps, however, it's more of this stealth sniper drone attack that kills you out of nowhere. Added some more audio cues and made the chargeup audible from much further away.
• Some minor tweaks to dynamic lights.
• Explained the health-related HUD feedback in more detail in the manual.
• Reduced the berserk wounding by more than half.

[JimmyJ]

That's a great change for the Cacodemons, a lot of the time they'd be charging a shot up but I couldn't see them at all, so I'd get splattered with no warning. Not fun.

[Ethril]

That's a great change for the Cacodemons, a lot of the time they'd be charging a shot up but I couldn't see them at all, so I'd get splattered with no warning. Not fun.

It WAS kind of funny, though. Like, in an I Wanna Be The Guy kind of way.

[Matt]

I Wanna Be Hideous is now officially the title of any potential sequel to this mod.

[Matt]

After all these years it finally occurs to me that the canon Doom setup makes perfect sense in a sci-fi orbital-space setting:

• pistol and shotgun ammunition only to minimize hull breach and ricochet risk, the latter being a much worse problem in very close quarters and often no gravity.
• caseless ammunition despite the heat-sink advantage provided by brass, both to save on delta-v and because flying, bouncing brass everywhere in a firefight is just too much chaos utter cake-eating chaos for most people to handle.
• multi-barrel slow-firing machine pistol designed to minimize heat load on any given part of the gun.

Unfortunately none of this can be reconciled with the appearance of the zombiemen and players whose weapons are far too long to be shooting low-powered rounds. And the rocket launcher makes even less sense in this context. Oh well.

[DoomRater]

Personally, I want whatever they make those walls out of. I mean BFG blasts don't really do anything to it.

[HexaDoken]

I stick to the idea that 9mm bullets and 12 gauge rounds are incredibly cheap to be made and as such UAC pretty much spams them. Pump action shotgun and double barreled shotguns still don't make much sence in the year 2145, but it's possible that doomguy is just unlucky and most of his arsenal are random archaic finds rather than real weaponry. Uselesness of the pistol could be explained by the fact that UAC never really expected a demon breach happening on Phobos, and armed the security with the most cheapest weaponry they could find, instead of something serious. Chaingun... well, perhaps a high firerate chaingun is just impractical most of times, so they released a chaingun with sort of firerate switch. And every single chaingun doomguy found had this switch set on lowest firerate and broken there. BFG and plasma rifle are most probably made in some way that makes them able to damage only living beings, doing little damage towards structures. That COULD make sense with rocketlauncher as well.

[Matt]

But if they're so lousy and outdated how come all the shotgun guys have them?

(and besides some refinements and the development of automatic weapons I don't think the basic mechanism of the gun has changed much since brass and smokeless powder became standard...)

[HexaDoken]

Well, auto-shotguns exist nowadays, ya know. And the year is 2145. Suddenly, pump action and manual reload shotguns.

Shotgun guys just love pump action shotguns. They just refuse to use any other kind of weaponry. As for the absurd quanity of the outdated and lousy shotguns - they aren't manufactured by UAC. They are summoned from the thin air by shotgunguys, using their powers of Hell.

[NeuralStunner]

BFG and plasma rifle are most probably made in some way that makes them able to damage only living beings, doing little damage towards structures. That COULD make sense with rocketlauncher as well.

This makes sense to me. Given the hilariously tiny blast radius of DooM's rockets, I always got the impression they were specifically antipersonnel weapons. Plasma weapons could be designed to devastate living tissue (effectively cooking the victim like a microwave) but dissipate harmlessly on construction materials.

The backstory (in the manual) says that Doomguy's squadmates took all the good weapons in, and left him outside to guard the perimiter with his pistol.
It's also implied that plasma weapons are well known to the military but somewhat rare.

It always seemed to me that UAC labs put most of their funding into their research supply, leading to poorly-cleaned installations and old weapons. Shotguns and low-power rifles seem like a good choice for indoor use, as they'll minimize structural/collateral damage. I think the old n' rusty style is probably a result of next to no budget for weapons. After all, who was expecting some kind of enemy invasion out on the butt-end of a Martian moon?

[Matt]

This design is little slower than semi-auto, but offers greater flexibility in shotshells selection, allowing mixing of the different types of loads and usage of low-power or unreliable loads.

Maybe that's why? Experiments that involve shooting things at different speeds (e.g., into a teleporter), less-lethal loads for deterrence or compliance, improvised loads in shortage situations, contracts expiring and different suppliers winning different bids...

...though none of this explains the breechloader.

EDIT: Also the disadvantages of auto mentioned here are easily applicable to Mars, space, equipping an army of brain-dead zombies, or any combination thereof!

[Greenmarine]

Pump-action shotguns can have a pretty high rate of fire.



Who needs an auto shotgun? ;p