Kyle873's Doom RPG Mod [0.10.0 Beta]

[VicRattlehead]

-There seems to be no reason to use purple aura over pink aura. - At make level, the Pink Aura will give you both pretty fast health regen plus drain enemies HP when you attack, a good way to get back HP fast if you're really low (especially if you invest in Vitality to increase max HP)

I think you misunderstand me, I am not questioning the usefulness of the pink aura but the purple aura. The pink aura's HP regen rate beats the purple aura's HP regen rate even if the latter is maxed out, let alone when it is at lower levels. Having it regen EP doesn't make up for it since it costs EP to use it, you might as well make it just cost less EP. It doesn't even regen enough EP to make up for how much more EP it costs over the pink aura when it's at higher levels.

In my experience, the Vitalization stat seemed pretty useless since health bonuses increase health up to a very high amount past your max health. Even if you make the stat also slightly increase HP regen rate (Regeneration stat should no doubt still be the primary stat when increasing regen rate), its usefulness would still be in question since with pickups that give huge health bonuses like the soulsphere and especially the megasphere, the player can remain far past his max health for a long time where regen doesn't apply. I was thinking maybe you can limit the amount bonuses/powerups increase your health depending on your max health (maybe +100 or x2 of max health) but I'm not sure if that's possible. If that were possible and you're willing to make that change, then keep in mind that megaspheres would become less valuable for low Vit characters (still very useful since they fully repair armor).

I don't know if there's a limitation with item drops but I'm guessing there is. Otherwise you wouldn't have imps drop the same amount and value of items as higher level enemies such as barons and archviles do and you wouldn't make enemies that drop ammo drop nothing else. I see no reason why Mancubi shouldn't drop any items though. Oh wait, they do drop an item sometimes, a rocket to the face. I assume you meant to make them drop "rocketammo" and not "rocket". Wouldn't it be more fitting to have Revenants drop rockets though?

What is the yellow yin yang symbol and its number in the stats menu for?
Okay, I realize now that the number next to the yellow yin yang symbol indicates how many points above 100 is the current stat cap.

Allowing to use powerups to extend time of active powerups may have caused a problem. With the invulnerability and invisibility charges, it's possible that they can be activated and have their duration extended by their weaker sphere counterparts. I can't seem to extend the time of the infrared and radsuit powerups though. Also, do you intend to restrict the time sphere as an instant use item? I can see the rationale behind that, I'm just asking. Buying/picking up several at once nullifies all but one of them though. Again, I can understand if you want to only limit the time sphere to having only one at a time, but the player can just buy a time sphere, leave the menu to pick it up, then buy another one and it will add to time of the powerup.

HUD/interface
-There might not be room for more descriptions in the skill menu, but how about adding descriptions for the items in the buy menu?
-Different sounds for health item use and health item pickup. Same thing with armor items. Sometimes I get confused in the heat of battle and wonder if I picked up an item or if someone damaged me greatly enough to make me auto use an item.
-Indicate the current cap for each stat in the stats menu.
-I thought of suggesting to display the amount you have for each item in the buy menu then I remembered that you have to pick up the items after you buy them so it might only end up confusing to buy items and not see the number immediately go up. Just throwing it out there just in case you have a better idea how to do this.
-Allow access to the shop via the menu. For people who are never in a hurry to buy items and don't want to bind or fumble about an extra button.
-When it comes to changing the text color of items in the buy menu to white when you can afford them, it doesn't take their discounted price into account. (e.g. Stat token is discounted to 19750, you have 22000 credits, it's still color red since the original price of the stat token is 25000)
-Mega token ambient noise is pretty muted compared to the other tokens.
-Check the arrows that show up when scrolling through the inventory items, the arrow that points to the left shows up on the other side of the screen.

Accessories
Why are there three rows when we can only carry one of each badge type? Could there possibly be more types of accessories planned? Apparently there are, didn't check the previous posts well enough, sorry.
-If you intend on limiting the player to carrying/equipping one of each badge type, then you shouldn't allow the player to buy additional badges of the same types he already has.
-The effects of badges remain when you sell them while they're still equipped.
-Regeneration and Capacity badges have the same color/appearance. Actually, they don't. But the difference in color between the two badges is very subtle.
-Most of the badge icons are misaligned with the boxes in the accessories menu.

[Kyle873]

-There seems to be no reason to use purple aura over pink aura. - At make level, the Pink Aura will give you both pretty fast health regen plus drain enemies HP when you attack, a good way to get back HP fast if you're really low (especially if you invest in Vitality to increase max HP)

I think you misunderstand me, I am not questioning the usefulness of the pink aura but the purple aura. The pink aura's HP regen rate beats the purple aura's HP regen rate even if the latter is maxed out, let alone when it is at lower levels. Having it regen EP doesn't make up for it since it costs EP to use it, you might as well make it just cost less EP. It doesn't even regen enough EP to make up for how much more EP it costs over the pink aura when it's at higher levels.

Good point, I may need to add some sort of extra bonuses and/or re-think the mechanics of the Purple Aura.

In my experience, the Vitalization stat seemed pretty useless since health bonuses increase health up to a very high amount past your max health. Even if you make the stat also slightly increase HP regen rate (Regeneration stat should no doubt still be the primary stat when increasing regen rate), its usefulness would still be in question since with pickups that give huge health bonuses like the soulsphere and especially the megasphere, the player can remain far past his max health for a long time where regen doesn't apply. I was thinking maybe you can limit the amount bonuses/powerups increase your health depending on your max health (maybe +100 or x2 of max health) but I'm not sure if that's possible. If that were possible and you're willing to make that change, then keep in mind that megaspheres would become less valuable for low Vit characters (still very useful since they fully repair armor).

Unfortunately, that is impossible since DECORATE has no way to know what your current max health is. I may nerf the Megasphere down to +100 HP and +100 currently worn armor. It did quite a bit before. it was +1000 HP, 1000 White Armor, 4 backpacks worth of ammo and 1000 Credits, but looking back now that's ridiculously OP.

Also, health/armor bonuses adding 5 instead of 1 each is a leftover from back in the 0.5 alpha days, I wasn't sure how it was going to effect balance so I left it in, but it sounds like they're too abundant in maps and that I should bring them back down to 1.

I don't know if there's a limitation with item drops but I'm guessing there is. Otherwise you wouldn't have imps drop the same amount and value of items as higher level enemies such as barons and archviles do and you wouldn't make enemies that drop ammo drop nothing else. I see no reason why Mancubi shouldn't drop any items though. Oh wait, they do drop an item sometimes, a rocket to the face. I assume you meant to make them drop "rocketammo" and not "rocket". Wouldn't it be more fitting to have Revenants drop rockets though?

No limitation, just wasn't (and still aren't) 100% sure what I want each enemy to drop yet. The way I have it setup now is that all enemies will drop a root "spawner" which will spawn anything from credits, EP, used armor and other spawners for creating much rarer items such as tokens, runes and accessories. You're right though, I did goof with rocket not being rocketammo, and I moved the drop from mancubi to revenants. Also not sure if anybody noticed, but the arachnatrons can now also drop cell ammo as well. I made the mistake of not making some monsters that I've given custom drops to also not spawn the default root dropper, so that was why some enemies never dropped credits/armor/etc.

What is the yellow yin yang symbol and its number in the stats menu for?
Okay, I realize now that the number next to the yellow yin yang symbol indicates how many points above 100 is the current stat cap.

That is correct, up to a maximum of 100 stat cap tokens can be held to boost stats up to the hard maximum of 200. Here's some food for thought though, I never actually tested the idea of SELLING those tokens...

Allowing to use powerups to extend time of active powerups may have caused a problem. With the invulnerability and invisibility charges, it's possible that they can be activated and have their duration extended by their weaker sphere counterparts. I can't seem to extend the time of the infrared and radsuit powerups though. Also, do you intend to restrict the time sphere as an instant use item? I can see the rationale behind that, I'm just asking. Buying/picking up several at once nullifies all but one of them though. Again, I can understand if you want to only limit the time sphere to having only one at a time, but the player can just buy a time sphere, leave the menu to pick it up, then buy another one and it will add to time of the powerup.

I can't do much about lesser items increasing the timer, since the lesser/greater versions both use the respective Power* base actor class for their abilities. It's either the old behavior of resetting the timer, or now with increasing the timer.

Completely forgot about the rad suit and infrared, fixed them.

I honestly thought I removed the timesphere from the store, I hadn't really decided whether I wanted it in the game or not and kind of forgot about it a while back. The timesphere had additive time when it shouldn't have, fixed that. Is the blue tint a little much though? I wasn't sure if I wanted it to have any sort of tinting or not.

HUD/interface
-There might not be room for more descriptions in the skill menu, but how about adding descriptions for the items in the buy menu?
-Different sounds for health item use and health item pickup. Same thing with armor items. Sometimes I get confused in the heat of battle and wonder if I picked up an item or if someone damaged me greatly enough to make me auto use an item.
-Indicate the current cap for each stat in the stats menu.
-I thought of suggesting to display the amount you have for each item in the buy menu then I remembered that you have to pick up the items after you buy them so it might only end up confusing to buy items and not see the number immediately go up. Just throwing it out there just in case you have a better idea how to do this.
-Allow access to the shop via the menu. For people who are never in a hurry to buy items and don't want to bind or fumble about an extra button.
-When it comes to changing the text color of items in the buy menu to white when you can afford them, it doesn't take their discounted price into account. (e.g. Stat token is discounted to 19750, you have 22000 credits, it's still color red since the original price of the stat token is 25000)
-Mega token ambient noise is pretty muted compared to the other tokens.
-Check the arrows that show up when scrolling through the inventory items, the arrow that points to the left shows up on the other side of the screen.

- Sure I can do that, I was considering it when I was coding the shop system initially but decided against it. However, that was back when the shop was pretty bare and only sold weapons and ammo. Now there's a lot more that you can buy in it and it might be a better idea now.
- Would love to, I need to find some sounds though. Might get my roommate on that.
- Not a bad idea, but this would require reworking the shop menu code quite a lot.
- Can do.
- Simple oversight in the shop menu code on my part. Should be fixed now.
- I know, they're just placeholder sounds until I make/find new ones.
- Ahh, didn't even notice that. This is because the inventory bar is right against the left side of the HUD, bumped it over a bit, problem solved.

Accessories
Why are there three rows when we can only carry one of each badge type? Could there possibly be more types of accessories planned? Apparently there are, didn't check the previous posts well enough, sorry.
-If you intend on limiting the player to carrying/equipping one of each badge type, then you shouldn't allow the player to buy additional badges of the same types he already has.
-The effects of badges remain when you sell them while they're still equipped.
-Regeneration and Capacity badges have the same color/appearance. Actually, they don't. But the difference in color between the two badges is very subtle.
-Most of the badge icons are misaligned with the boxes in the accessories menu.

- Yeah, that was me thinking ahead to when I add more.
- I can't really fix this. The way it's setup now, it has no idea whether you have the accessory or not because it just drops items at your feet, if I set it up so that it gives you the items directly, it still won't stop it from deducting the price even if you buy an item and it's maxed out, and there's no way to check the maximum amount of an item you can carry via ACS.
- Yeah, I knew about this one and have been trying to think of a way to fix it. Fixed now.
- This is just due to my horrible vision, sorry >_>. I'll see what I can do about it.

If anybody was wondering WHY I chose for the items bought in the shop to spawn at your feet, this is so that if you buy more than the max capacity of an inventory item or ammo, you won't waste your money and the pickup will stay there so you can grab it later if need be.

Update with all the fixes and stuff.

edit:
And I'm still working on that Aura upgrading issue.

Oh, and also, the progression and cost of the healing and armor repair spells are just placeholding, if anybody actually has a good idea on how I should do them, feel free to share.

double edit:
Holy crap, I REALLY BROKE the monster drops, I'm reworking and fixing it now >_>
This should be fixed now.

This problem has been in the last few versions I've released so IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THAT YOU UPDATE!

[jimbob]

I tried the mod for the first time today and have some questions.

Is it normal that my health can go up to 2000 ? Currently it shows 2000 / 204. The armor shows 1000 / 100.


Can i ignore the error messages when launching the mod (+ extras), like these one:

spawn ID 1 refers to hidden class type 'shotgunguy'
editor number 9 refers to hidden class type 'shotgungguy'

or

Warning: ShotgunGuy and ShotgunGuy both have doomednum 9.

[VicRattlehead]

I noticed just now that health bonuses replace stimpak pickups. That might be a problem for some maps. In your mod, the greatly increased efficacy of medikit replacements seems to more than make up for the reduction in stimpaks, but some maps may be designed to have many stimpak pickups but very few to no medikit pickups. When you made stimpaks spawn in place of health bonuses they were too abundant, now I find they're too rare. So I think that only the stimpak and the small medikit should spawn in place of stimpaks. Concerning the medikits, the most frequent medikit pickup I find is the large medikit which recovers 100 health, and to me that's like it's raining soulspheres. Greater medikits like the surgery kit seem to spawn quite often as well. I think the lowest level of medikit in your mod (medium medikit -- which already gives a generous 50 health, double of the original Doom medikit) should spawn as the standard with the greater ones spawning rarely.

tl;dr
-Don't make health bonuses spawn in place of stimpaks.
-For both stimpaks and medikits, their lesser counterparts (stimpak and medium medikit respectively) should be the common spawn and their superior counterparts should spawn rarer. The more valuable they are, the rarer they should spawn.

Still about medikits, but neither gameplay related nor important:
-(If you are considering to make the medium medikit the common spawn) It might be off-putting to have the medikit with the custom sprite be the common spawn for the medikit pickup, so consider switching around the graphics and give the medium medikit the original Doom medikit appearance.
-The inventory icon of the extra large medikit is tiny and makes it look smaller than the rest of the medikits.
-Since the small medikit is supposed to be a variant of stimpak, wouldn't it be more fitting to give it a name like large stimpak instead?

Keep in mind that I don't play as high Vit characters, so you might want to check for yourself and ask others if they think that making the super medikits spawn more rarely cripples the way they play.

I think the availability of armor needs adjusting too but I'm hesitant to give more specific feedback for now since it would involve having varying drop rates for the monsters and I'd like to see what's your take on them first since I only started playing this mod.

One other thing, the red pulsating screen you get when you're at low health seems to appear when you're at 10% health. So even if you have 100 health but your max health is 1000, you get the pulsating screen. I can understand if you'd want to keep this behavior, but if you intend on keeping it, it would be nice to see Doomguy's mug also use percentage calculation for consistency. It doesn't match when your screen is flashing red and you hear a heavy pounding heartbeat yet Doomguy is looking perfectly calm.

More stuff about the menus:
-If you try to scroll past the ends of the skill menu or the buy menu with the turn left and turn right keys (as opposed to the strafe left and strafe right keys), you can scroll to a pointless submenu labeled with the current version of the mod.
-Play the error sound when a player attempts to buy a skill with insufficient tokens.

[yoshi314]

i get this with zdoom, trying either doom1 or doom2 iwad:

Code: Select all

Checking cmd-line parameters...
G_ParseMapInfo: Load map definitions.
GScript error, "DoomRPG.pk3:mapinfo.txt" line 90:
GUnknown property 'easykey' found in skill definition

GScript error, "DoomRPG.pk3:mapinfo.txt" line 114:
GUnknown property 'easykey' found in skill definition

S_InitData: Load sound definitions.
Texman.Init: Init texture manager.
ParseTeamInfo: Load team definitions.
LoadActors: Load actor definitions.
GTried to register class 'Zombieman' more than once.
Script error, "DoomRPG.pk3:actors/monsters" line 92:
Invalid state parameter acs_namedexecutealways

any help?

the funny thing is - it works with gzdoom.

[Kyle873]

@jimbob:
You must be using an older version where soul/megaspheres gave you a ridiculous amount of HP, they have been scaled down in the newest version.
Yes, all of that is normal, it's just because of the way things are setup with my randomization, it's safe to ignore.

@yoshi314:
Not sure what's causing that, are you using the latest version of ZDoom?

I noticed just now that health bonuses replace stimpak pickups. That might be a problem for some maps. In your mod, the greatly increased efficacy of medikit replacements seems to more than make up for the reduction in stimpaks, but some maps may be designed to have many stimpak pickups but very few to no medikit pickups. When you made stimpaks spawn in place of health bonuses they were too abundant, now I find they're too rare. So I think that only the stimpak and the small medikit should spawn in place of stimpaks. Concerning the medikits, the most frequent medikit pickup I find is the large medikit which recovers 100 health, and to me that's like it's raining soulspheres. Greater medikits like the surgery kit seem to spawn quite often as well. I think the lowest level of medikit in your mod (medium medikit -- which already gives a generous 50 health, double of the original Doom medikit) should spawn as the standard with the greater ones spawning rarely.

tl;dr
-Don't make health bonuses spawn in place of stimpaks.
-For both stimpaks and medikits, their lesser counterparts (stimpak and medium medikit respectively) should be the common spawn and their superior counterparts should spawn rarer. The more valuable they are, the rarer they should spawn.

Still about medikits, but neither gameplay related nor important:
-(If you are considering to make the medium medikit the common spawn) It might be off-putting to have the medikit with the custom sprite be the common spawn for the medikit pickup, so consider switching around the graphics and give the medium medikit the original Doom medikit appearance.
-The inventory icon of the extra large medikit is tiny and makes it look smaller than the rest of the medikits.
-Since the small medikit is supposed to be a variant of stimpak, wouldn't it be more fitting to give it a name like large stimpak instead?

Keep in mind that I don't play as high Vit characters, so you might want to check for yourself and ask others if they think that making the super medikits spawn more rarely cripples the way they play.

I think the availability of armor needs adjusting too but I'm hesitant to give more specific feedback for now since it would involve having varying drop rates for the monsters and I'd like to see what's your take on them first since I only started playing this mod.

One other thing, the red pulsating screen you get when you're at low health seems to appear when you're at 10% health. So even if you have 100 health but your max health is 1000, you get the pulsating screen. I can understand if you'd want to keep this behavior, but if you intend on keeping it, it would be nice to see Doomguy's mug also use percentage calculation for consistency. It doesn't match when your screen is flashing red and you hear a heavy pounding heartbeat yet Doomguy is looking perfectly calm.

More stuff about the menus:
-If you try to scroll past the ends of the skill menu or the buy menu with the turn left and turn right keys (as opposed to the strafe left and strafe right keys), you can scroll to a pointless submenu labeled with the current version of the mod.
-Play the error sound when a player attempts to buy a skill with insufficient tokens.

Ok, I've adjusted the rates quite a bit for the health drops now, this should fit more in-line with both what you requested, as well as how I think it should be. on preliminary testing it seems to work pretty good. You won't end up with a rediculous abundance of medical items now and you are hard-pressed to find any of the rarer healing items short of buying them.

Not immediately noticeable, but the fix I made to the monster drops now inherently makes armor drop MUCH LESS, which should hopefully help with the having an abundance of armor problem that I found to be an issue in earlier versions.

I can't make the Doomguy's mug match the max health because SBARINFO's drawmugshot method can't be given the current max health of the player.

I've known about this menu bug for a while, but wasn't sure what exactly was causing it, now that I know, I can fix it.

Update

[Zombieguy]

i get this with zdoom, trying either doom1 or doom2 iwad:

You must use a SVN build of GZDoom.

[Kyle873]

i get this with zdoom, trying either doom1 or doom2 iwad:

You must use a SVN build of GZDoom.

I honestly very rarely test with ZDoom, I've always used GZDoom while developing the mod.

[Zombieguy]

Well, so do I. I personally love to use GZDoom while modding. There's tons more to do with it than just the standard version of ZDoom.

[E.C.S]

I always use Zdoom. And it's working very good (SVN Builds).

[Kyle873]

Small update to give EP pickups their own sound and to fix a ridiculous bug which could cause global variables to conflict, causing all sorts of random nonsense to potentially happen. Also added a timestamp to the log message telling you the version.

[Blue Shadow]

I can't make the Doomguy's mug match the max health because SBARINFO's drawmugshot method can't be given the current max health of the player.

You can use Player.MugShotMaxHealth player property, with its value set to -1.

[Kyle873]

I can't make the Doomguy's mug match the max health because SBARINFO's drawmugshot method can't be given the current max health of the player.

You can use Player.MugShotMaxHealth player property, with its value set to -1.

Ooh thanks, will implement ASAP!
Done.

[-Ghost-]

Would it be possible to add in some sort of mini-boss enemies or something, in keeping with the RPG theme? Maybe stronger versions of each enemy that drop more rare things and give more XP? I don't know if that would affect too many things by adding new enemy types.

[Kyle873]

Would it be possible to add in some sort of mini-boss enemies or something, in keeping with the RPG theme? Maybe stronger versions of each enemy that drop more rare things and give more XP? I don't know if that would affect too many things by adding new enemy types.

I suppose I could do that, I'll chuck it on the list.