[WIP] The Good Guys V2 [Updated P1 20080317][Screenshots P4]

[MartinHowe]

Update (See page 1):

2008.01.06
-Finally sorted the WMD effects and made them work decently
-Each of the WMD now has its own distinctive behaviour
-Violent gibbing, gibbing with flame debris or utter disintegration
-Feel the power!!

Please remember the previous warnings concerning confined spaces; you don't fire a rocket launcher right next to a monster or near a wall, nor run towards the rocket and catch it up - treat these WMD with the same respect! It feels really good to take out large roomfuls of monsters with these terrible weapons

I also made some minor under-the-hood improvements to some of the code to take advantage of functionality recently added to ZDoom.

[Matt]

To fix these problems would require the ability to transmit "who owns me" information via hitscan attack codepointers such as A_CustomBulletAttack that are used from generic actors either by using a different field from self->target or adding another argument to them, plus some messing about with P_SpawnPuff. In other words, until DECORATE feature requests are being considered again, firing black magic and nuclear weapons in a confined space without getting killed is a non-starter

Are you sure you can't use an invisible projectile? Or is that planned for the next update?

[MartinHowe]

Well, I have been bothered by this for some time and there are still a couple of bugs anyway; however, there's bad news and good news.

The bad news is that to cover the same area as a hitscan with projectiles is very expensive and not very reliable; just look at the nuclear detonation - it slows my machine to a crawl. Removing the sprites and rendering would speed things up, but it's still a heck of a lot of work for the engine. Fortunately for the nuke, it's not too bad an effect; after all, most people would freeze with terror and/or slow down with confusion if they found themselves right up near a nuclear blast, so perhaps it can be justified as a sort of "feature". For the WMD/BM, it'd definitely be a bug, though.

The good news is that I think the WMD/BM problem at least might be fixable in two different ways - just have to try them both

[MartinHowe]

OK, I have solved the WMD detonation splash problem; partly it was a bug (missed the Stop command out of an actor) and partly now uses a pure hitscan attack for the damage, so no explosion damage to anyone/anything from the hits themselves.

Although it's not normally noticeable with simple bullet weapons, hitscan impacts do have some splash damage, because damage formulae usually include a "damage radius increases with distance" calculation. Because these weapons use at least 128 damage points per bullet, there is still a bit of residual splash damage from the larger weapons; however, the effect is no worse than with the rocket launcher; in fact, you can often get away with firing these weapons in spaces where the RL would kill you.

In other words, you can now fire these weapons from confined spaces as long as you don't just fire them point-blank into a nearby wall or whatever.

I've attached an updated DECORATE file, pending a formal update.

[MartinHowe]

OK, WMD functionality ported to the HoH

You can use the HoH in corridors without dying now, yee-hah! Same "don't fire right into a wall or run into the blast area" rule applies, out course.

No formal update tonight; it's too late (nearly 1am here in the UK) and I should go to bed. Also, still need to figure out a way to use this method with the BoB and SoS - the SoS primary attack made as a hitscan cannot distinguish between living enemies and, e.g., barrels - barrels don't go "cough cough" when hit by faked poison damage (real poison damage only affects players, so can't be used here); they ignore it.

C'mon Graf, where's my extended puff states submission Actually, for efficiency reasons, I really should add a flag to mean "don't spawn the puff if the actor type is any for which no state is defined, just don't even let the actor have been hit in the first place" and resubmit it; also because even if damage is 0, the actor enters the pain state which may not always be valid.

Just use this DECORATE script after the 20080106 version, or use SLumpEd to overwrite the old one!

[MartinHowe]

Update (See page 1):

2008.01.08
-Ported the WMD architecture to Bible of Blasphemy and Heart of Heresy primary attacks
-Some minor improvements elsewhere
-Extra gibs for the Neutron Degenerator

The neutron degenerator extra gibs are rather cool - it really turns enemies into cat food!

---

Literally! At least, I do have a working implementation of this, but much fine-tuning is needed; otherwise the little sods spend all their time eating and don't go after your enemies unless attacked. These are not meant to be Garfield clones!

Next up, I guess try to find a way of making the SoS primary attack work the same way.

[MartinHowe]

OK, time for some screenshots! (Warning: very long spoiler section)

---

Fire and Blood - Molecular Disruptor (pt 1)



Fire and Blood - Molecular Disruptor (pt 2)






Blood and Guts - Neutron Degenerator






Heart of Ice - Heart of Heresy (primary attack shown)






Magnum Force - Magnum Handgun




Slug It To Them - Slug Firing Shotgun




Take The Shot - Sniper Rifle (non sniping mode shown)




Smashing Fun - Hammer of Hatred




And now for the REAL big flexing guns!


Behold - the Quantum Disentangler: Feel the Power! (pt 1)



Behold - the Quantum Disentangler: Feel the Power! (pt 2)





And, as always, the best is saved till last!

The Atomic Cannon in Action

Whew! Took a while to gather and post all those - now back to work on the mod itself

[DBThanatos]

Long time I didnt update the version I have of this mod.

The weapons seems to work (almost) perfectly, and I saw some very interesting stuff here.

Random Thoughts:
-The flamethrower should fire the it's fire ( ) a bit more to the right, because right now is centered but the weapon is not.
-The Shell casings looks too big for me.
-I learned in the hard way that one shouldnt be running foward when using the Heart of Heresy
-The Bible of Blasphemy always lag my PC when using the primary fire
-Also, the cat in that weapon is fun! (it isnt Johnson, is it?), if you want another Black cat set of sprites, here (at the bottom of the page) is a M&M black cat.
-Perhaps the clipboard of chaos should be placed more to the left of the screen, because as is now, you cant see a thing. Also, a more exaggerated movement when "firing" the weapon would be nice.
-The BFGs are pretty interesting, but at least in my PC, isnt a great idea to have the puffs replaced as the smooth particles (Im obviously talking about GZDOOM) and use any of those weapons. Awesome lag!!

That's all for now. Nice


DBT

[MartinHowe]

Thanks for your opinion; nice to know it's mostly good!


The following issues are outright bugs or at least need looking at:

• Flamethrower fire should be launched a bit more to the right, because right now is centred but the weapon is not.
• Shell casings sizes need looking at; at least some of them seem too big.
• Bible of Blasphemy always lags some PCs when using the primary fire.
• Clipboard of Chaos should be placed more to the left of the screen, because as is now, you cant see a thing.
• Clipboard of Chaos could benefit from a more exaggerated movement when "firing".
• Atomic Cannon detonation lags just about every PC there is.

Please be assured that I do keep a "known bugs and issues" list and I'll add these to it.


Suicide by Heart of Heresy

I learned the hard way that one shouldn't be running forward when using the Heart of Heresy

Yes, playing with the Power of the Gods/Devils isn't something to be done lightly Actually, if you've been following this thread fully, you will by now know that the Black Magic primary attacks now work the same way as the Weapons of Mass Destruction (the "BFG"s) and as I said earlier:

Please remember the previous warnings concerning confined spaces; you don't fire a rocket launcher right next to a monster or near a wall, nor run towards the rocket and catch it up - treat these WMD with the same respect!

Also "the cat in that weapon is fun!"
Everybody here knows I cats and am on the committee (and webmaster) of two cat showing clubs, one in particular dedicated to (mostly) black cats; I started Doom modding with this piece of madness; then when I was developing the Butchery (another WIP of mine, but a long way from completion) I basically did a piss-take of Spaceballs - The Movie - you know, "Black Cat(tm) Premium Toilet Paper", "Black Cat(tm) Patented Demon Food", etc. I also have for a long time been an admirer of Lee Killough putting dogs in MBF with realistic "dog behaviour" as "player helpers", or what would later be called "friendly monsters". The rest is history

No the cat isn't Johnson I did think later of the M&M cat, but it doesn't have all the necessary frames. My cat is a recoloured and cleaned up "Mr Jones" from Michael Gummelt's Aliens Doom 3 - Aliens vs Predator. This guy was so good, he eventually gave up on Doom modding because Raven hired him to work on HeXen II - lucky bastard It was just a really silly but real cool joke; remember this was the days of DeHackEd, no DECORATE: basically he turned the Yellow Key into a non-hostile monster and you have to "rescue" the cat to be able to open a crucial door in the game; if you're a cold-hearted "company" man and leave the cat to die or even shoot him, the aliens get you!

It's just so psychedelic, it just has to be seen to be believed -- troopers shooting aliens, aliens attacking predators and vice versa, and in all that blood and guts, there's a ginger cat running around trilling "meow", "meow"; never mind the alien, I nearly burst my guts laughing at this piece of insanity; I just had to outdo it in my own mod


Regarding the "BFG" puffs:

The BFGs are pretty interesting, but at least in my PC, isn't a great idea to have the puffs replaced as the smooth particles (I'm obviously talking about GZDOOM) and use any of those weapons.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean that flag in puffs where they can optionally be replaced by particles? I've no idea how that works for puffs that replace the "puff" sprites with actual things like flames. If not, then what do you mean?


Finally, several people have noticed their computers lagging when detonating a Nuclear Warhead, cursing somebody with a Black Magic primary attack, or firing a Weapon of Mass Destruction. This is a fair point, so I'll say a few words here.

The BM/WMD/NUKE are weapons that really do push the limits of DECORATE. The NUKE uses hundreds of projectiles with overlapping sizes and sprites in order to produce the "cloud of expanding evil hell fire" effect and this really really lags all but the most powerful machines. The WMD and BM, except the Sceptre of Sacrilege, all use wide-area hitscan attacks to detect the targets and custom puff actors that do the damage. Finally, the SoS cannot use hitscan as poison gas should not affect barrels; it's silly that missile explosions can tell if they hit a bleedable actor or a barrel/decoration, but hitscan puffs cannot; I did put in a feature request/code-submission about it, but if you've been following the feature requests forum at all, you'll be aware that DECORATE feature requests are not a priority for Randy and Graf right now.

Worse still, Graf has admitted that even DoomScript won't be powerful enough by itself to fix some of these problems completely; the reason is that they involve making modifications to some of the engine's very deep-level internal codepointers or their callbacks (functions in the source code whose names start "P_" instead of "A_" are internal engine primitives, such as block iterators) that are simply too processor-intensive to be done in anything except native machine code (x86 or whatever), so cannot be scripted in byte code the way ACS is and DoomScript will be.

Therefore, while I will obviously be trying to improve their performance, we will just have to accept that the special effects of these weapons really really push the limits of what is possible with ZDoom engine and some compromises are inevitable Best I can offer is: have fun with them as they are and hope that some day ZDoom will be powerful enough to make these weapons exactly the way I would like to.

Now go kill some demons, damn it

[Unknown_Assassin]

I finally got a little time to played this wad. So far, I'm liking it.

The problems I have are:
-The BFG kills you. I am not sure, if this is intentional. If it is, then TBH, I don't really see a point for this weapon other than to suicide yourself.
-The Alt fire for the Bible Blasphemy seems a bit underpowered compared to the other 9 slot weapons. It has a weaker attack, and you lose more ammo and health.

A question I'm pondering is that alot of these weapons seems to be over-powered (not that I have a problem with this).

[MartinHowe]

I finally got a little time to played this wad. So far, I'm liking it.

Cool

The BFG kills you

Assuming you mean the Quantum Disentangler (slot 7 tertiary), this was a common problem in earlier revisions - please make sure that you have the latest. It certainly wasn't intentional; hey, why would it be? Please also read through my (long) reply to DBT (immediately above your message), if ya haven't already

The Alt fire for the Bible Blasphemy seems a bit underpowered compared to the other 9 slot weapons. It has a weaker attack, and you lose more ammo and health.

<EDIT: Changes in red>
I've not noticed this myself, so please can you give a detailed description of what you expect vs what you get? The reason I ask is because unlike the other weapons and the Black Magic weapon primary attacks, the Black Magic weapon secondary attacks do not have a "progression of power" within their weapon slot; they are all about as powerful as each other -- or at least are meant to be -- and all are designed to behave in a similar way:

• Primary fire is a curse...
• ...costs a random number (between 5 and 20) health points...
• ...causes almost immediate area damage:
  • Bible of Blasphemy - Burning ("fire from heaven")
  • Sceptre of Sacrilege - Choking ("choked by the weight of their sins")
  • Heart of Heresy - Freezing ("frozen in terror of the retribution to come")
• Secondary (Alt) fire is an incantation...
• ...costs a random number (between 5 and 10) health points
• ...plus a random number (between 5 and 60) mana from heaven
• ...summons a random number (between 1 and 3) of something unholy to do your bidding:
  • Bible of Blasphemy - black cat zombies that attack your enemies
  • ...they keep going until they're killed
  • ...if they run out of visible/audible enemies they get bored -- like real cats
  • ...if they get bored they randomly lick, purr, tail-lash, etc. -- like real cats
  • Sceptre of Sacrilege - evil spirits that that attack your enemies
  • ...unkillable but last for a few minutes only
  • ...this is a deliberate approximation of the WraithVerge from HeXen
  • Heart of Heresy - resurrects dead monsters that attack your enemies
  • ...they keep going until they're killed
  • ...each "resurrector seed" has a one-in-four chance of spawning an A L I E N from the resurrected monster:
    • Cool chestburster with explosive death of the monster it bursts from
    • Rattles/hisses at you on birth, just like Kane's did
    • Gives a final "hiss of defiance" at you before going off to kill your enemies
    • Randomly chooses "slash with claws" and "bite-with-inner-jaw" attack

A question I'm pondering is that a lot of these weapons seems to be over-powered

Indeed and there is a reason for it feeling like this. For the different weapon slot groups to be clearly differentiated, they (a) have to behave in different ways and (b) have to have a clear progression of power up the scale; it's no good if all the player thinks is "this is really a re-skinned <whatever>" every time they see a particular weapon. Also, some of the "BFG" effects are just too cool to leave out, despite being over-the-top for use in normal DOOM levels

So you - and me - have all been testing or having fun with this using IDKFA, probably on standard id Software maps, due to the lack of a test map, partly because I haven't had time to make one yet and partly because of the lack of a freeware map editor that doesn't have real problems with Windows Vista. In particular, the Nuclear Warhead is just like it's inspiration in SW in that it really really needs to be restricted to maps specifically designed for it; the standard Doom levels and most user-made WADs are simply just too small and/or cluttered to use it properly.

On a similar note, I would like in the far future to include a "Black Helicopter" artefact as a player class, just like 'Weasel and DuduKrazy are making mechs and ground-attack aircraft; such extreme weapons really really need to use levels that are designed for them. Really FLEXING HUGE levels. If you have DN3D and ever played "Battlefield III" map - the one with about ten thousand monsters, dozens of bosses and a spaceship that beams you up if you win - you'll know what I mean by this

For a weapon mod of this breadth (30 weapons is a lot for one pack), the "given to you all at once on a silver plate" mode is fine for the 'Plutonia's and 'Hell Revealed's, but it's really intended as a resource for mappers; a good mapper will either use only the weapons appropriate to his/her theme or else will make the real high power weapons difficult to find and exist only with just enough ammo to do the job.

When the mod is released, I'll make sure there is a demo map with it.

<EDIT: Changes in red>
@DBT: I've found out why the BoB primary fire lags - I forgot to make the flame actors descendants of the BulletPuff class! Fixed for the next updated.

[MartinHowe]

Update (See page 1):

2008.01.08
+Found a way to make ALIEN turn and face you when snarling his greeting
-Fixed the Black Magic/Weapons of Mass Destruction lagging
+Much improved Sceptre of Sacrilege primary attack (it's really gross )

I look forward to more comments...

[chronoteeth]

Could ya please put those pics inside spoilers please?

[Unknown_Assassin]

Assuming you mean the Quantum Disentangler (slot 7 tertiary), this was a common problem in earlier revisions - please make sure that you have the latest. It certainly wasn't intentional; hey, why would it be? Please also read through my (long) reply to DBT (immediately above your message), if ya haven't already

Hmm...I downloaded your current build on page 1.

<EDIT: Changes in red>
I've not noticed this myself, so please can you give a detailed description of what you expect vs what you get? The reason I ask is because unlike the other weapons and the Black Magic weapon primary attacks, the Black Magic weapon secondary attacks do not have a "progression of power" within their weapon slot; they are all about as powerful as each other -- or at least are meant to be -- and all are designed to behave in a similar way:

I expected the cats to do a great deal of damage, but apparently the Cyberdemon tends to rip them to smithereens pretty easily. The other slot 9 weapons and the primary fire of the Bible Blasphemy (if I can remember) does 1 hit kill to the Cyberdemon. Since that happens, it is worth more to use the other attacks on slot 9 weapon other than the alt fire of the Bible Blasphemy because you lost about the same health (I assume) when using the other weapons. Therefore, the alternative attack seems underpowered. I probably lost 15-20 health summoning cats that failed to kill a Cyberdemon compared to 5-10 health loss killing a Cyberdemon with another weapon.

[MartinHowe]

@chronoteeth:
Spoiler tags done!


@Unknown_Assassin:
Do you mean the Quantum Disentangler is killing you even if you do not fire it right into a nearby wall or run into the blast area and "catch up with" the explosion? If so, please could you PM me a demo (please state which IWAD and use ZDoom revision r691 (here), so we're singing from the same hymn sheet)?


Sorry about the cats! In fact, in general, I haven't got the power balance of the BM weapons right yet
None of the BM weapon primaries should be able to always instantly kill anything bigger than a Baron or Vile; have to look into that


I guess that the problem with the cat is that they were originally meant to be slightly larger and more powerful, but otherwise "normal", cats and not true "demon" cats; in the same way, if you use the HoH to resurrect dead monsters, they come back no more powerful that they originally were. In that respect, the SoS altfire is more powerful, but balanced by the fact that the cats, resurrected Zombies and the other thing fight until dead, whereas the evil spirits are limited to a couple of minutes. I really envisioned the BM altfires as distraction weapons, rather than an immediate form of attack; they're meant to take the heat off you for a bit while you battle the bosses or else use them, for example, to clear a room that has a switch in it.


Thinking about it, the primary fire modes ought to have a power increase and heath cost increase and so should the secondaries; I'll mull it over for a while. What may happen soon is the damage types of the BoB-1 and SoS-1 should be swapped, partly for that reason, and partly so that it's easier to remember which does what - that is, for each position in the slot (1,2,3) a WMD should do roughly a more powerful version of the corresponding BM weapon. (BoB and ND should both do gore/blood/gibs, SoS and MD should both do fire/explosion, HoH and QD should both do ice/disintegrate).