Angelic Aviary v1.3 (Eviternity II edition, new angels) Updated 12/29/23)

[openroadracer]

There have to be Western properties you can use for inspiration for voices, right? So why not at least try to make an English voice pack for them? Please.

[CherubCorps]

There have to be Western properties you can use for inspiration for voices, right? So why not at least try to make an English voice pack for them? Please.

Sorry man. There's two reasons I can't do this.

1: It's an insane amount of work: Each angel has 6 to 30 different voice clips and they are 22 different angels. I would need a minimum of 200 new voice clips for an English version.

2: I don't want the player to understand what the angels are saying: As soon as you know what a character is saying, it becomes repetitive (To me at least). One of the reasons I chose Japanese is because I don't understand the language and I don't think most people playing the mod understand it (I could be wrong about this). In a perfect world where I have voice actors, I would have the angels to speak in solfege (Doh-reh-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-doh) so that you can get emotions from them, but it's still gibberish. Kind of like Simlish from the Sims where you get the emotions and the character, but it's not real words.

Beyond people requesting this feature, part of adding this feature has been self reflection. In the same way the angel's voices can grate on people, I noticed certain voices from other doom mods annoy me to the point where I can't play them. Much like the art, voices and sound effects can make or break a mod for some people. A lot of work when into the voices and sounds (On average, most angels have 20 different voice clips not counting attack sounds), but it's a feature I'm will to remove if it will provide a better experience for the player.

I hope it does.

[openroadracer]

There have to be Western properties you can use for inspiration for voices, right? So why not at least try to make an English voice pack for them? Please.

Sorry man. There's two reasons I can't do this.

1: It's an insane amount of work: Each angel has 6 to 30 different voice clips and they are 22 different angels. I would need a minimum of 200 new voice clips for an English version.

2: I don't want the player to understand what the angels are saying: As soon as you know what a character is saying, it becomes repetitive (To me at least). One of the reasons I chose Japanese is because I don't understand the language and I don't think most people playing the mod understand it (I could be wrong about this). In a perfect world where I have voice actors, I would have the angels to speak in solfege (Doh-reh-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-doh) so that you can get emotions from them, but it's still gibberish. Kind of like Simlish from the Sims where you get the emotions and the character, but it's not real words.

Beyond people requesting this feature, part of adding this feature has been self reflection. In the same way the angel's voices can grate on people, I noticed certain voices from other doom mods annoy me to the point where I can't play them. Much like the art, voices and sound effects can make or break a mod for some people. A lot of work when into the voices and sounds (On average, most angels have 20 different voice clips not counting attack sounds), but it's a feature I'm will to remove if it will provide a better experience for the player.

I hope it does.

To me, no voices would be a worse experience than annoying voices, and I imagine I'm not alone. And I personally would like to be able to understand them, instead of gibberish.

[fakemai]

To me, no voices would be a worse experience than annoying voices, and I imagine I'm not alone. And I personally would like to be able to understand them, instead of gibberish.

I'm not the target for mute options with a higher tolerance for cutesy voices, but yeah, full muting can be seen via Corruption Cards and it's not only awful trying to locate small/mobile enemies that are quiet, they're dull as dishwater to kill. Hoping it doesn't mean that and they'll still giggle and scream. Generally though I would agree with the author not to speak a real language. As-is I pick up enough to know it's random Japanese lines (and if fluently would likely despise it as much as redundant English one-liners) but it's easy enough to pretend it's AngelSpeak.

[CherubCorps]

So turning off the angel's voices will not render them completely mute. All of their non-voiced sound effects will still be in place (Attack sounds, bullets, movement sounds, non vocal death sounds). In addition, their lines of dialounge will be replaced with distinct sound effects so that you can recognizes when the angel is alerted if they're in the arena and when they die.

[MFG38]

I happened to try this out with Eviternity and MAP04 started lagging to Hell and back. With the weather effects enabled, GZDoom was rendering up to 40k+ sprites at once, which I believe to be the primary cause of the lagging. I benchmarked Eviternity by itself against it with the mod loaded and the sprite count was far less ludicrous - highest number I seemed to be hitting was ~800. Disabling the weather effects made the mod much more playable, and I won't pretend to know what could cause such a huge discrepancy in the number of sprites being rendered when this mod appears fairly simplistic, but it might be something worth looking into.

[CherubCorps]

I happened to try this out with Eviternity and MAP04 started lagging to Hell and back. With the weather effects enabled, GZDoom was rendering up to 40k+ sprites at once, which I believe to be the primary cause of the lagging. I benchmarked Eviternity by itself against it with the mod loaded and the sprite count was far less ludicrous - highest number I seemed to be hitting was ~800. Disabling the weather effects made the mod much more playable, and I won't pretend to know what could cause such a huge discrepancy in the number of sprites being rendered when this mod appears fairly simplistic, but it might be something worth looking into.

Weather effects? What other mod(s) are you playing this with. Aviary's probably not the culprit.

[MFG38]

Weather effects? What other mod(s) are you playing this with. Aviary's probably not the culprit.

Wasn't loading any other mods, just Eviternity and this. The weather effects are built into the mapset. And if this mod specifically causes such a thing as to make the engine render 50-100 times the number of sprites it does without it, then it 100% is the culprit.

[CherubCorps]

I have no clue what could be causing the lag. It doesn't make sense why it would render 40k sprites, this has never happened before and there's nothing in the code that should cause that to occur. I just tested it with GZdoom and Eviternity level 4 and it runs fine. Maybe it's the version of GZdoom or one of the video setting.

[MFG38]

Funnily enough, the GZDoom version does seem to hold some significance. I was running the mod with 4.8.2 when I tried it out yesterday - just ran a quick benchmark on 4.7.1 and that didn't have any problems with the same setup. Sprite count at its highest was around 1,200 judging by the renderstats.

My only question now is, what sort of quirk in GZDoom 4.8.2 would cause such an insane upshot in the number of sprites being rendered and the consequent lag?

[fakemai]

I can't reproduce your particular issue on either of my setups on 4.8.2. The sprite counts are reasonable, Eviternity loaded first or last. Assuming it's MAP04 Regicide, you absolutely positive you aren't autoloading anything by mistake? Rename your INI file temporarily and see if it's some setting you toggled, and if all else fails redownload GZDoom. Otherwise what kind of setup, and maybe try asking in the tech support forum.

[CherubCorps]

Funnily enough, the GZDoom version does seem to hold some significance. I was running the mod with 4.8.2 when I tried it out yesterday - just ran a quick benchmark on 4.7.1 and that didn't have any problems with the same setup. Sprite count at its highest was around 1,200 judging by the renderstats.

My only question now is, what sort of quirk in GZDoom 4.8.2 would cause such an insane upshot in the number of sprites being rendered and the consequent lag?

I saw the video on Twitch. I think the problem was with OBS or the program you were using to stream with. Throughout the video, there were framedrops, it just happened to hit really hard at the end of the stream (Maybe you were running out of memory).

Programs like OBS eat up tons of memory and will slow down a CPU exponentially.

[MFG38]

you absolutely positive you aren't autoloading anything by mistake?

100%. Literally the only thing in my autoload is a little wad that does nothing but replace the DSSECRET sound. Of all potential causes, that's the least likely.

I saw the video on Twitch. I think the problem was with OBS or the program you were using to stream with. Throughout the video, there were framedrops, it just happened to hit really hard at the end of the stream (Maybe you were running out of memory).

The on-stream frame drops are just a side effect of my Wi-Fi being kind of a POS, but rest assured those particular frame drops weren't happening just in the video but actually in-game. You can clearly see me typing "stat renderstats" in the console and the metrics showing that the game is indeed rendering almost 35,000 sprites at once. A quick test run off-stream yielded the same result. I'm inclined to believe it's not an issue of my system running out of memory either. I bought it brand new only just over a year ago and it has 16GB of RAM. If I can stream Dark Souls Remastered completely lag-free for three and a half hours, then surely neither "inadequate" RAM nor OBS is the problem.

EDIT: Okay, so after filing a bug report regarding this, Marisa was able to figure out what was causing it. Link to the explanation: viewtopic.php?p=1228537#p1228537

[CherubCorps]

Yeah. I got Marisa's report. Thank you for finding this.

[ArkyonVeil]

Hi, I loved the mod, plenty of fun and it really makes fight play very differently. Though I have a bit of a complaint.

When I played 1000 Line 3, there were some areas that were absolutely bursting at the seams with Afrodites, I know that the shtick is if you kill them in their stoning state they get brought back. But in a huge fight with huge numbers where they're mixed with other high priority angels, it pratically forces cheaty behavior, it's like a caco cloud that you can't shoot, it got so bad at points that at some point I had piles of statues on top of each other. It's impossible to get rid of them. Maybe there should be a resurrection limit?

Great work anyhow, still loved it.