Skeletal Doom 1.07d

[Crudux Cruo]

Well basically I would say this just need to break out on its own a little bit to add some spice, and...

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Tactical is not equivalent to slow. i do realize doom's default runspeed is crack like so there absolutely is room to slow down, but i think running at a little more than the walk speed could be good, and half the walk speed or so without actually breaking gameplay too much yet significantly slowing the game down to cause you to think.

PIckups and body searching are neat, but doom depends on auto pickup sometimes, as well as having a lot of items in general. I'd say any bonuses or powerup spheres should auto pick up, but everything else should have to be picked up manually.

Doomguy might not need nor should be able to pick up every weapon on the map, but i went to map 30 and picked up a chaingun and bullets and that pretty much just ate up all my weight limit. that seems excessive. 100 pounds is a lot of weight and generally what a soldier carries around these days, but i just dont see a chaingun and ammo weighing 80 pounds. even if it did, this is a game and so i think doom guy should have the weight to carry a primary, a secondary, and a special.

I honestly couldn't get far enough with the balance and such as it is now to really give it a thorough playthrough like i wanted to, but that's my view on things for now. I'll be sure to playtest more as things are tweaked more and more.

[dex909]

Hello Crudux Cruo, thank you once again for your excellent feedback!

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I will experiment with the speed and try higher velocities to make it feel a bit quicker and responsive. The first versions of this had some items picked up automatically and the bonus was added immediately. After a while I changed it to be a pickup item but left the bonus to be added automatically. The next version will have these bonus items as auto pickups. Specifically the armour and blue health bonusses. This will also help the mod being in line with the design of bonus items in many maps and speed up the pacing a bit as well without harming anything of the original approach.

As for the weight, Doomguy's indeed overburdened too quickly which deducts from the fun. As for the weight of certain items, I went online and checked the weight of a minigun, which had (with a lightweight mod as I imagine the original Doom chaingun) a weight of 19kg. The mod allows 40kg of additional weight, not counting the grappling hook. It would be fine to halve its weight and also go through the ammunition (which I also tried to base on real-life counterparts, which are actually far more heavy than I thought) and reduce the load. I think it's fitting to the concept as well, as this should be more of a middle-ground between vanilla and the more complex tactical mods. It does not need to have realistic projectile weight at the cost of game flow.

Since you are also interested in the reasoning behind the changes and decisions of the mod: my goal would be to make the player choose between one or two of the more "impactful" weapons when exploring maps. A chaingun (with sufficient ammo, not as heavy as it is in 1.03k) should basically occupy and burden the player to a degree where he would have to drop it, if he wants to use a rocket launcher or plasma rifle. Ideal may be to allow for the pistol, one of the shutguns as a base and then either two of the high-powered weapons or one BFG.

I will update the thread with a new version which should be more enjoyable to play around with and test out where this can go. I'm looking forward to further feedback and suggestions from you and anyone interested of course. Thanks!

[dex909]

I've updated Skeletal to version 1.04a:

+ The maximum carry weight has been increased to 50kg.
+ Only the corpses of Zombie- and Shotgunguys, Chaingunguys, Mancubus, Revenants and Arachnotrons (as well as their skeletal counterparts) will be lootable and carry weapons or ammunition.
+ Velocity and handling of the Doomguy has also been tweaked and adjusted for faster and more fluid movement. It actually feels better and the pacing is still in line with my original ideas. (thanks Crudux Cruo)
+ Bonus items such as the armour or health bonus, megasphere, incinvibility etc. are now auto pickups which adds to the flow and makes the gameplay more fluid (thanks Crudux Cruo)
+ Weights of ammo, weapon sand items has been tweaked to further reduce overall load. Together with the additional carry weight this balances the game a bit better and allows for more variety in the carriable arsenal.

[-Ghost-]

Nice idea! I'm always happy to see something still under the same umbrella as something like Hideous Destructor, but not quite as intensive.

[mamaluigisbagel]

Just now coming back to Doom, will try this out when it's available! I always wanted to love HDest, but always felt it was a bit over-complicated for my personal tastes. This seems like it could be a little similar to a HDest-lite experience.

(I'm also a weirdo that likes realism in my Doom.....don't judge me )

[dex909]

It's uploaded, thanks for your interest! However, it's certainly nowhere near an HDest and more of an experiment to explore some of its concepts, combined with various excellent community mods and ideas to create a combination of vanilla Doom gameplay and a few tactical and micro-managing components. Some of it is still in the making so I hope you'll enjoy the updated version

[Alamo985]

I'm thinking of some ideas that could help with your mod. I tested the 1.03j and haven't played the newest one due to my busy university schedule.
1. Make an add-on that restores the original Doomguy speed. I personally don't like the slowness of HDest. Maybe put it in a menu switch somehow...
2. Bullet management for true realism and tactical.
3. Bullet types (Taken straight from Call of Doom mod, both old and new version, and there are a lot of them): 9x19mm, 45ACP, 44 Magnum, 50 Action Express, 12ga, 20ga, PDW (e.g.: FN 5.7x28mm, HK 4.6x30mm, 6.5x25mm CBJ, 5.56x30mm MINSAS, etc.), NATO 5.56x45mm, NATO 7.62x51mm, 5.56x39mm, 7.62x39mm, .338 Lapua Magnum, .30-06 Springfield, etc.
There are many things to come, and I still have some crazy ideas at hand.

[Someonewhoplaysdoom]

It looks similar to more survival oriented mods like HDestructor or Scavver's Paradise. Even if is mostly a compilation of comunity mods, the tactical orientation that it shows so far could be exploited more on that way, that gives a lot of complexity in exchange of powerful resourses to defend yourself.

Im more a Doom casual player and usually I don't touch alpha versions of mods so I don't think I will play this for now, but I could suggest some tips:

- If you're working with slowing the gameplay, you could give something that counters the slower movement on some extent. That is probably to be important on maps that feature some sort of platforming sections.
- If you're going to introduce some micromanagement of ammo and weapons, you could counterbalance with generally buffing the general power of the weapons. So it wouldn't became unfair cheking and getting the ammo for weapons that probably can't stomp well some enemies.
- For the weight mechanics, you should consider to balance the general weight of weapons so players doesn't get stuck with a reduced arsenal, but allowing them to carry a balanced amount of equipment.

It looks interesting anyway, I always thought that mods that change the gameplay mechanics are more interesting that powerfantasy wads.

[Shatter-Thought[V-4]]

I keep getting this error randomly as I play, it seems to happen in the midst of combat as I damage enemies.


I can't get the logfile command to work properly, so I wrote down the first and second lines of the error report.
VM Execution aborted:Array acess out of bounds.Size = 6, current index = 6
Called from criticalShotsHandler.worldthingdamaged at s_main.pk3:zscript/Crits.zc, line 319

[dex909]

@Alamo985: Thanks for your ideas!

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I like the idea of having an option for the speed! However, it would interfere a bit with my idea of a score, that should at least be somewhat comparable between playthroughs of maps in the end. I also made it faster and more fluid in the recent version, it should feel better with that. You can also use the grappling hook for a boost when you just want to get from a to b without fighting too much.

Bullet management is interesting as well if I can get it manageable ingame quite "quickly" with just the usual keys like use, reload or push to keep away from more menus etc.

For something like bullet types etc. I would recommend Hideous Destructor since that kind of depth is extremely neat but would be a bit too much in the complex direction for this mod. The current micromanaging that's in there is just at the border of being a bit tedious but still fun in a way so I'd like to continue working with that.

@Someonewhoplaysdoom: Thank you for the feedback!

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I added a grappling hook to counter the slower movement speed which will get you accross gaps and give you a boost if you want to travel more quickly around a map.

As for the power of the weapons, so far I use the headshots, which deal a lot more damage, as a means to balance difficulty. I disabled critical hit damage as of now (because of its inherent randomness) but this might be a possibility as well. Ideally I use the original balance of the weapons and monsters and do not go overboard with the power of the weapons or weakness of enemies.

It's also a good idea to balance weapons/equipment a bit differently with more focus on the items. I'll keep this in mind as well.

Powerfantasy mods have their place in Doom just as well and are (in principle) the most natural kind of modification for it in my eyes. I also like to explore the more detailed and tactical ideas very much, however, hence the concepts of this mod

@Shatter-Thought[V-4]: What other mods do you currently have installed/what's in the same folder? For some people the issue seems to be a mod/file that is interferring with the critical hits component, a modified version of the original crits mod and therefore incompatible.

[Marisa the Magician]

Oh this looks pretty interesting, I'll be keeping an eye on it.

[-Ghost-]

I actually got that same critical hit error and crashed as well, just running the mod files; though I did a drag n' drop on the GzDoom EXE, so maybe they were out of order? I usually use ZDL, was going to give that a try next, since I was just doing a quick test first.

[dex909]

Thanks for the bug reports! Hmm, the order should not matter at all.

Edit: I uploaded version 1.04b in an attempt to prevent any further crashes regarding crits.zc reported by some.

@-Ghost- and Shatter-Thought[V-4]: I'd be interested to hear if you still experience any errors with version 1.04b

I also recommend to use the the autoexec.cfg for the right headbob settings. If you choose not to use the preset configuration, you will have to manually set "movebob" to "0.01" either in the console or your own config. Otherwise the vanilla headbob is making everything feel too bouncy. The nashgore and nashdecals as well as the universal AI and vignette effect are purely optional, you can also your own versions of those mods but those are highly recommended.

[Doomguy914]

I think there might be an error in the download link right now. It's requiring me to sign in to google drive in order to get to the file, which I am not doing.

[-Ghost-]

Same; I'd suggest maybe Mega or something as a good filehost where you don't have to mess with permissions.