DOOMablo: a looter-shooter DOOM (v0.2.2a - Your eardrums should be safe now)

[Deon]

This is fantastic. Any chance you consider supporting custom weapons in the future? I am trying to play Doomer Boards Project 68 (Wasteland) with Ashes monsters and Ashes weapons. With this enabled it would be a true Wasteland experience.

[sidav]

A new prerelease is here: https://github.com/sidav/doomablo/relea ... prerelease
No gameplay changes there, but UI-related code is reworked. There is an equipment menu, accessible from character stats menu. It is targeted to replace the current "hold reload to see your items' stats" which is not that beautiful.
The menu is quite basic as for now, and it shows equipped items only, but I believe it still is an improvement over the current item stats screen even in that state. Any feedback is welcome.

Any chance you consider supporting custom weapons in the future?

Sorry, but no promises here. As I described in the first post, there is too much custom logic involved (literally every weapon is in fact a custom one) for this to be compatible with weapon mods, so it would be an extremely complicated task. I think I'll have to ask GunBonsai dev how the hell did they make their mod everything-compatible, but it seems it would restrict at least some of the affixes from working anyway, especially the affixes which alter the weapon's speed (rate of fire, reload speed).
Another point is that I'm trying to make this at least partially balanced experience, and I have zero idea how to even try to achieve it if the mod doesn't know which weapons are in play.
Tl;dr: I would really like to add universal compatibility, but it's still not a main point as for now. For now I'm going to add more weapons here to compensate for that.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Sorry, but no promises here. As I described in the first post, there is too much custom logic involved (literally every weapon is in fact a custom one) for this to be compatible with weapon mods, so it would be an extremely complicated task. I think I'll have to ask GunBonsai dev how the hell did they make their mod everything-compatible, but it seems it would restrict at least some of the affixes from working anyway, especially the affixes which alter the weapon's speed (rate of fire, reload speed).
Another point is that I'm trying to make this at least partially balanced experience, and I have zero idea how to even try to achieve it if the mod doesn't know which weapons are in play.
Tl;dr: I would really like to add universal compatibility, but it's still not a main point as for now. For now I'm going to add more weapons here to compensate for that.

I think I gotta agree here. If you can get it working, then that's great, but don't push yourself too hard to make it universally compatible, especially if it means compromising the other mechanics. Just implementing your own custom weapons would be good enough. After all, DRLA isn't compatible with weapon mods but it still gets tons of attention because of its wealth of custom weapons. I could see compatibility patches also being a thing. For example, Final Doomer's weapons are nearly identical to vanilla, so an addon for it might be easy but a tad time consuming. If I could comprehend Zscript and had more time on my hands, I would try to do that myself.

[ZSaturno]

If we can't get the main mod to work with other weapons mods at least I wish we could have a "monsters only" version of this, I know there are other "monster enhancement" mods, but none of them work in a progressive way like this one is trying to, if we had a separate mod that is only monsters affixes/levels then we could add custom weapons mods in. i hope something like that is not too hard to do.

btw, I know this might not be a priority right now, but wanted to ask, would it be possible to add some options for the monsters HP bar or are there any plans for adding them? (like being able to change its position on the screen)

[Jareth247]

If DOOMablo is open source, then it wouldn't be too out of the question to just simply make a fork of DOOMablo that works with IWADs and mods that don't use the default Doom weapons. Granted, many of these mods and IWADs would require their own fork, unless mods can add DOOMablo's code into it as a sort of additional feature or suite of features.

[sidav]

btw, I know this might not be a priority right now, but wanted to ask, would it be possible to add some options for the monsters HP bar or are there any plans for adding them? (like being able to change its position on the screen)

Not really a priority (just because I didn't think about that tbh), but not really hard to do either. I think it's a good idea. Could you please elaborate on which options you would like to see there?

And a question for everyone who tried the pre-release: is the equipment menu good enough as for now? In other words, does it fully replace the previous "hold R" screen for you?

[ZSaturno]

[quote="sidav"]
Not really a priority (just because I didn't think about that tbh), but not really hard to do either. I think it's a good idea. Could you please elaborate on which options you would like to see there?
[/quote]

Stuff like, settings to adjust the x,y position, and maybe the scale of it too, that would be cool

[fakemai]

First, so far I haven't noticed any monster mod related spawning issues so thanks for looking into that. Now on the weapon stat display, it's more awkward if they're buried in a menu, it's annoying in LegenDoom as well though that also has a simpler mod system and displays icons next to each weapon on the HUD depending what it has. Anyway having an on-demand key is very convenient for reading out my equipment's stats whenever I want to since it is tricky to remember at times, but it could be lessened for picking up weapons by displaying both stats side-by-side and not just colour-coding the basic stats. Oh, also is there a reason stat display was set to the reload key and not on a different weapon state or zoom like recycling?

[Darkbeetlebot]

And a question for everyone who tried the pre-release: is the equipment menu good enough as for now? In other words, does it fully replace the previous "hold R" screen for you?

It's useful, but it's also slow and clunky. Perhaps if it also paused the game like Gearbox does it would be excusable, but I think otherwise I'd like to have the quicker previous menu version back. Perhaps they can coexist?

[Deon]

btw, I know this might not be a priority right now, but wanted to ask, would it be possible to add some options for the monsters HP bar or are there any plans for adding them? (like being able to change its position on the screen)

Not really a priority (just because I didn't think about that tbh), but not really hard to do either. I think it's a good idea. Could you please elaborate on which options you would like to see there?

And a question for everyone who tried the pre-release: is the equipment menu good enough as for now? In other words, does it fully replace the previous "hold R" screen for you?

I am using Target Spy for HP bar. It works well.
However fancier options would be welcome.

If HP bar is implemented, customization options would be great, to change its style/size/position.

[sidav]

if it also paused the game it would be excusable

Wait, but it should pause the game! At least it does so for me, as it is with any ZForms menu. Interesting...

[Jareth247]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDFSvd5Ng8A

Guess who got a shout-out in a PotaDOOM video?

The Youtube embed option doesn't seem to work for me.

[sidav]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDFSvd5Ng8A
Guess who got a shout-out in a PotaDOOM video?

Ha-ha, great! Thanks for the news.

[stainedofmind]

Took a bit of a break from Dooming, but I've finally been able to sit down and run through a few levels, so I can offer some feedback now.

And a question for everyone who tried the pre-release: is the equipment menu good enough as for now? In other words, does it fully replace the previous "hold R" screen for you?

I'm finding I'm not really using it at all. I was mainly using the original to compare current/pickup info, as the "hover over" info doesn't compare affixes. With the current version, I just hacked together an updated "hover over" info panel to also show the current weapon/armor/backpack you may have, also without having to have the matching weapon type equipped. If the new equipment menu is to be very useful, I would definitely say it would have to be openable with a single keypress. It does look nice though.

As for the how the gameplay feels overall, I'm really liking how things are flowing. Mind you, I'm only a few maps in, so maybe my thoughts will change as I get farther in.

I think I'll have to ask GunBonsai dev how the hell did they make their mod everything-compatible, but it seems it would restrict at least some of the affixes from working anyway, especially the affixes which alter the weapon's speed (rate of fire, reload speed).

As someone who has dug pretty deeply into GunBonsai's code and made a few addons for it, I can confirm that going the GunBonsai route would severely limit what affixes you'd be able to use. Perusing GunBonsai's forum thread and GitHub suggestions will yield a lot of ideas people have suggested that simply aren't able to be done in a fully universal way. While you might be able to borrow some code to use across weapons, your current method of having custom weapons is the way to go.

I did have a request/suggestion, namely for a pair of new weapons. I'm pretty sure the idea of a high accuracy weapon for long range has been brought up before, but I would be tickled to have a Rifle-type weapon that uses Bullets, and maybe a Railgun weapon that uses Cells for such things.

[sidav]

Thanks for the feedback.

As someone who has dug pretty deeply into GunBonsai's code and made a few addons for it, I can confirm that going the GunBonsai route would severely limit what affixes you'd be able to use. Perusing GunBonsai's forum thread and GitHub suggestions will yield a lot of ideas people have suggested that simply aren't able to be done in a fully universal way. While you might be able to borrow some code to use across weapons, your current method of having custom weapons is the way to go.

Just as I feared, then. Well, it seems adding more weapons is the way to go.

I did have a request/suggestion, namely for a pair of new weapons. I'm pretty sure the idea of a high accuracy weapon for long range has been brought up before, but I would be tickled to have a Rifle-type weapon that uses Bullets, and maybe a Railgun weapon that uses Cells for such things.

Both of those are planned. In general, I think the current plans for the mod are as following (not in specific order):
- Finish UI stuff (Configurable HP bar, better menus if possible)
- Add weapon slot system with upgradeable slot count (as a backpack property, I think)
- Add more weapons so that each slot will have two weapons of choice (as in Chaingun/SMG and Shotgun/SSG pairs)
- Allow stat-changing affixes
- Add one or two more affixable item types (and that's all, I think there's no need for any more artifacts types than that... Weapon+armor+backpack+flask+helmet is enough already)
- Rework how the affixes interact; allow multiple suffixes on a single item
- Add unique items (non-generated ultra-rare items with unique sprites and special affixes seen only on that item).
After that I think it would be safe to call it 1.0.