Smooth Weapons Enhanced - Dae's Edition (13/11/24)

[Daedalus]

Update:

+Added CVAR for stronger Chaingun (buffs its rate of fire to match Doom 64s Chaingun).
+Added CVAR to make the SSG gib monsters at close range.
+Added CVAR to make Chainsaw, Rocket Launcher and BFG always gib monsters (best used with gore mods).
+Cleaned up feature menu formatting a little more.
+Messed with Plasma Rifle firing animation again (it was still bugging me, feels more satisfying visually now).
+Fixed a minor issue on the Super Shotgun with Responsive Weapons enabled (it delayed the weapon kick animation right after firing making it look weird, moved the 3 tic delay to the kick end point to make it more natrual looking).

I didn't test it thoroughly but there should be no issues, hopefully.

EDIT: Reuploaded, was a lil issue with the HQ wep sound on the SSG.

[Vault]

works fantastically!
I was expecting the plasma rifle fire animation to be more "spasmatic" to match its fire rate, but half speed (kind of hard to tell) works surprisingly well also.

[CacoTwoShoes]

+Added CVAR for stronger Chaingun (buffs its rate of fire to match Doom 64s Chaingun).

This greatly improves a tactic that I use against small groups of 2-4 revenants or arachnotrons ambushing me in tight spaces. Normally I would fire the chaingun at one of them while maneuvering around the target in such a way that it stays between myself and its buds as a kind of improvised cover. The rev and arachno's high pain chance prevents them from firing at me, and the rest of the gang can't hit me because I'm hiding behind their mate (though they absolutely will roast their buddy's ass). D64 rate of fire for the chaingun almost prevents revs and arachnos from even moving when pelted with bullets, which makes this hostage shield tactic even more efficient and I've been having some great fun with it lately!

The inevitable backside is that when I'm using the faster-firing chaingun to provide suppressive fire while approaching revs / arachnos / whatever from a large distance with little to no cover, I run out of ammo more quickly so I have less time to react, and using suppressive fire against the beefier enemies like mancubi is now less effective because finishing them off for good with the chaingun costs too much ammo, thus suboptimal, and I still have less time to reach them and whip out the SSG than I would normally have with the slower vanilla chaingun.

All in all, it doesn't feel like the faster firing chaingun makes the game exactly easier, but it sure makes certain situations less tedious while forcing the player to act quicker. They really shouldn't have made the chaingun that slow in vanilla Doom.

+Messed with Plasma Rifle firing animation again (it was still bugging me, feels more satisfying visually now).
+Fixed a minor issue on the Super Shotgun with Responsive Weapons enabled (it delayed the weapon kick animation right after firing making it look weird, moved the 3 tic delay to the kick end point to make it more natrual looking).

Yeah both the SSG and PL now feel, how do I put it, more psychovisually responsive now. The visual feedback is better, thus more fun.

+Added CVAR to make the SSG gib monsters at close range.
+Added CVAR to make Chainsaw, Rocket Launcher and BFG always gib monsters (best used with gore mods).

Thank you, this feels amazing.

Even without a gore mod, this has proved helpful in an unusual way. Recently I've been doing a bunch of blind pistol starts. Many maps are designed in a way that the player is encouraged to use RL against groups of lower tier enemies with rather few rockets behind their belt instead of saving up on them. Like walking into a close-quarters trap that unleashes a pack of imps providing mobile cover to a bunch of shotgun or minigun zombies that make short work of you before you are able to deal with the imps with just the shotgun and/or chaingun.

The more violent and satisfying vanilla gibbing worked as an incentive to actively use RL against mixed zombie/imp crowds and my skill has improved. I realized that I've been irrationally saving up on rockets contrary to map design.

I'm also in the process of combatting the bad habit of switching from SSG to just the normal shotty in similar circumstances because at point blank, a well placed SSG shot easily takes out two or even three lower tier enemies at a much better time cost than picking them out one by one. SSG gibbing at short range provides a nice visual incentive to teach the player this tactic. Now I can see that religiously switching to the standard shotgun every time you see a group of low-tier enemies can be just as bad of a practice as never touching after getting hold of the SSG--both approaches are tactically poor. This isn't a problem with lots of shotgun shells lying around, but pistol starts on higher difficulties often make you starve for shotgun ammo early into a level. Preferring the normal shotgun used to be my knee jerk reaction but abusing it left me with fewer shells than I would have if were smart with the SSG at close range. The fun of watching imps getting gibbed by the SSG very quickly turned into teaching myself an important lesson.

For this reason, I still advocate for some toggleable kind of extra visual feedback for the plasma rifle. A lot of maps want you to use it against imps and shotgunners early into a level and long before you stumble upon a BFG. Their underwhelming standard death anims (compared to how badass the contiunous stream of plasma looks) kinda goads the player into saving up on cells which is clearly wrong when pistol starting on a lot of maps. More violent looking plasma deaths could potentially incentivize the player into giving the plasma rifle more love, less greed.

Beautiful Doom offers an option to make plasma- and BFG-cooked enemies get charred and smoking (apparently by applying a dynamic filter with zero actual edits to a monster's sprite set, thus wad-agnostic and universal).

The obvious cons are 1. this looks too gimmicky and not vanilla-like, thus kinda out of scope of this mod and 2. running a script on every corpse that applies a visual filter then spawns multiple smoke particles can be bad for FPS in situations where the CPU is nearly choking on complex level geometry while the player is fighting a horde of enemies. Agent_Ash has a video showcasing the use of GZDoom's native particle system to alleviate CPU load in such circumstances, but the overhead is still very much there. Probably not gonna be good for slaughter wads of any sort, and nowadays almost any wad has at least a few slaughter-flavored sections here and there.

Speaking of pistol starting, I've also come up with an idea of how to improve the pistol without making it too much of a cheat. Taking the wrong turn on a pistol start (with no clear hints from the map maker) often ends me up having cleaned a few rooms with just the pistol and shotgun because the chaingun was waiting for me on a different path (damn you, non-linearity!). In such cases, I use the pistol A LOT, espescially when I'm playing on UV and oftentimes run out of shells. Taking mobs down with the pistol feels tedious, and playing with any sort of "pistol fires much faster and/or hits harder" mod can feel a bit cheatish.

So my idea for the pistol is to add a "panic firing mode" that reacts differently to how the player interacts with the left mouse button:

1. Continuously holding LMB results in the pistol firing pretty much how it does in vanilla, with long pauses between the shots and very little inaccuracy, possibly none at all if "Accurate Pistol" is On.

2. Hitting LMB in a quick succession allows the player to fire much faster than the pistol would normally allow, but at the cost of the accuracy of each consequent shot depending on how much time has passed since the previous one. Longer pauses between the shots give more accuracy to each individual shot while slamming the trigger like crazy lets you plant a bunch of bullets into an encroaching pinky in a leap of faith kind of way, but won't let you snipe stuff from afar nor use the pistol as a makeshift chaingun replacement.

Since pressing a button multiple times in a row can feel quite tedious, this would naturally discourage the player from panic firing unless, well, having to panic fire in a literal sense. The dynamic penalty on accuracy, on the other hand, would incentivize the player to either prefer the slow continuous regular fire or play the little game of pacing multiple LMB presses in such a way that the accuracy stays sufficient for the distance to the target.

I think a feature like this would add to the pistol's distinct character of the player's starting weapon that is also his last resort early into a level, and make it more useful in this role while preserving as much vanilla feel as possible. Plain "Stronger/faster pistol" mods really don't cut it in terms of fun. Saying this after getting my ass kicked too many times on UV + Pistol Start: On. Previously I've been too lazy to reset my inventory / reload a level via a console command, then I discovered this mod, now I really like pistol starting but wish there were a bit more to the pistol itself.

[CacoTwoShoes]

/EDIT/ I can no longer view neither the post I was replying to, nor my initial reply. I tried logging out or viewing the thread in a private tab, nothing helped so I'm confused an re-posting it just in case. I can perfectly see the below repost, though, so I'm not really sure what has just happened.

+Added CVAR for stronger Chaingun (buffs its rate of fire to match Doom 64s Chaingun).

This greatly improves a tactic that I use against small groups of 2-4 revenants or arachnotrons ambushing me in tight spaces. Normally I would fire the chaingun at one of them while maneuvering around the target in such a way that it stays between myself and its buds as a kind of improvised cover. The rev and arachno's high pain chance prevents them from firing at me, and the rest of the gang can't hit me because I'm hiding behind their mate (though they absolutely will roast their buddy's ass). D64 rate of fire for the chaingun almost prevents revs and arachnos from even moving when pelted with bullets, which makes this hostage shield tactic even more efficient and I've been having some great fun with it lately!

The inevitable backside is that when I'm using the faster-firing chaingun to provide suppressive fire while approaching revs / arachnos / whatever from a large distance with little to no cover, I run out of ammo more quickly so I have less time to react, and using suppressive fire against the beefier enemies like mancubi is now less effective because finishing them off for good with the chaingun costs too much ammo, thus suboptimal, and I still have less time to reach them and whip out the SSG than I would normally have with the slower vanilla chaingun.

All in all, it doesn't feel like the faster firing chaingun makes the game exactly easier, but it sure makes certain situations less tedious while forcing the player to act quicker. They really shouldn't have made the chaingun that slow in vanilla Doom.

+Messed with Plasma Rifle firing animation again (it was still bugging me, feels more satisfying visually now).
+Fixed a minor issue on the Super Shotgun with Responsive Weapons enabled (it delayed the weapon kick animation right after firing making it look weird, moved the 3 tic delay to the kick end point to make it more natrual looking).

Yeah both the SSG and PL now feel, how do I put it, more psychovisually responsive now. The visual feedback is better, thus more fun.

+Added CVAR to make the SSG gib monsters at close range.
+Added CVAR to make Chainsaw, Rocket Launcher and BFG always gib monsters (best used with gore mods).

Thank you, this feels amazing.

Even without a gore mod, this has proved helpful in an unusual way. Recently I've been doing a bunch of blind pistol starts. Many maps are designed in a way that the player is encouraged to use RL against groups of lower tier enemies with rather few rockets behind their belt instead of saving up on them. Like walking into a close-quarters trap that unleashes a pack of imps providing mobile cover to a bunch of shotgun or minigun zombies that make short work of you before you are able to deal with the imps with just the shotgun and/or chaingun.

The more violent and satisfying vanilla gibbing worked as an incentive to actively use RL against mixed zombie/imp crowds and my skill has improved. I realized that I've been irrationally saving up on rockets contrary to map design.

I'm also in the process of combatting the bad habit of switching from SSG to just the normal shotty in similar circumstances because at point blank, a well placed SSG shot easily takes out two or even three lower tier enemies at a much better time cost than picking them out one by one. SSG gibbing at short range provides a nice visual incentive to teach the player this tactic. Now I can see that religiously switching to the standard shotgun every time you see a group of low-tier enemies can be just as bad of a practice as never touching it after getting hold of the SSG--both approaches are tactically poor. This isn't a problem with lots of shotgun shells lying around, but pistol starts on higher difficulties often make you starve for shotgun ammo early into a level. Preferring the normal shotgun used to be my knee jerk reaction but abusing it left me with fewer shells than I would have if were smart with the SSG at close range. The fun of watching imps getting gibbed by the SSG very quickly turned into teaching myself an important lesson.

For this reason, I still advocate for some toggleable kind of extra visual feedback for the plasma rifle. A lot of maps want you to use it against imps and shotgunners early into a level and long before you stumble upon a BFG. Their underwhelming standard death anims (compared to how badass the contiunous stream of plasma looks) kinda goads the player into saving up on cells which is clearly wrong when pistol starting on a lot of maps. More violent looking plasma deaths could potentially incentivize the player towards giving the plasma rifle more love, less greed.

Beautiful Doom offers an option to make plasma- and BFG-cooked enemies get charred and smoking (apparently by applying a dynamic filter with zero actual edits to a monster's sprite set, thus wad-agnostic and universal).

The obvious cons are 1. this looks too gimmicky and not vanilla-like, thus kinda out of scope of this mod and 2. running a script on every corpse that applies a visual filter then spawns multiple smoke particles can be bad for FPS in situations where the CPU is nearly choking on complex level geometry while the player is fighting a horde of enemies. Agent_Ash has a video showcasing the use of GZDoom's native particle system to alleviate CPU load in such circumstances, but the overhead is still very much there. Probably not gonna be good for slaughter wads of any sort, and nowadays almost any wad has at least a few slaughter-flavored sections here and there.

Speaking of pistol starting, I've also come up with an idea of how to improve the pistol without making it too much of a cheat. Taking the wrong turn on a pistol start (with no clear hints from the map maker) often ends up with me having cleaned a few rooms with just the pistol and shotgun because the chaingun was waiting for me on a different path (damn you, non-linearity!). In such cases, I use the pistol A LOT, espescially when I'm playing on UV and oftentimes run out of shells. Taking mobs down with the pistol feels tedious, and playing with any sort of "pistol fires much faster and/or hits harder" mod can feel a bit cheatish.

So my idea for the pistol is to add a "panic firing mode" that reacts differently to how the player interacts with the left mouse button:

1. Continuously holding down LMB results in the pistol firing pretty much how it does in vanilla, with long pauses between the shots and very little inaccuracy, possibly none at all if "Accurate Pistol" is On.

2. Hitting LMB multiple times in a quick succession allows the player to fire much faster than the pistol would normally allow, but at the cost of the accuracy of each consequent shot depending on how much time has passed since the previous one. Longer pauses between the shots give more accuracy to each individual shot while slamming the trigger like crazy lets you plant a bunch of bullets into an encroaching pinky in a leap of faith kind of way, but won't let you snipe stuff from afar nor use the pistol as a makeshift chaingun replacement.

Since pressing a button multiple times in a row can feel quite tedious, this would naturally discourage the player from panic firing unless, well, having to panic fire in a literal sense. The dynamic penalty on accuracy, on the other hand, would incentivize the player to either prefer the slow continuous regular fire or play the little game of pacing multiple LMB presses in such a way that the accuracy stays sufficient for the distance to the target.

I think a feature like this would add to the pistol's distinct character of the player's starting weapon that is also his last resort early into a level, and make it more useful in this role while preserving as much vanilla feel as possible. Plain "Stronger/faster pistol" mods really don't cut it in terms of fun. Saying this after getting my ass kicked too many times on UV + Pistol Start: On. Previously I've been too lazy to reset my inventory / reload a level via a console command, then I discovered this mod, now I really like pistol starting but wish there were a bit more to the pistol itself.

[Daedalus]

/EDIT/ I can no longer view neither the post I was replying to, nor my initial reply.

I'm not too sure whats going on, but my reply has disappeared also. I noticed another users response vanished earlier in the thread but has come back, something weird happening.

-snip-

I'm glad you like the changes.

As for the plasma death effects, originally I was going to add a bunch of other toggleable effects like bullet tracers and explosion eye candy. Whenever I get around to it I'll look into wep specific deathstates as long as I can keep it as lite as possible. As for the Pistol suggestion, if I were to do anything with that, #2 would probably be the better choice minus the accuracy debuff. The pistol is already weak as is I don't think it'll be any much of a difference compared to the buff chaingun toggle, obviously I'll restrict it from firing as fast as that though, heh.

[Velonex]

Hi there, found this mod from your latest youtube channel and totally love it. I do however wonder if you can add back in the little glove graphics you would see towards the bottom of the ssg sprite when you remove the hud for your classic Super Shotgun option? I understand its small but really goes a long way for authenticity.

[Daedalus]

I do however wonder if you can add back in the little glove graphics you would see towards the bottom of the ssg sprite when you remove the hud for your classic Super Shotgun option?

Done, link in OP.

+Restored true classic Super Shotgun idle appearance for the CVAR toggle, works with black glove toggle also (I even left the stray brown pixel on the left barrel for further authenticity!).

[Velonex]

the legendary brown pixel haha. An evil of "authenticity".

[Daedalus]

Another lil update:

+Included vanilla Chaingun muzzle flashes in its animation.
+Added left handed CVAR toggles for Shotgun, Super Shotgun and Plasma Rifle.

DL in OP.

[Nilex]

This looks lit AF!

I was actually searching for DEHEXTRA version but I'm glad to have stumbled upon this because it feels even better than valiant NightFright's effort. In particular the fixes to RL, PR and BFG to get them in line with vanilla timings, as well as many options provided within the mod itself! Do those fixes mean that in the NF's version some weapons have different fire rates than in vanilla under some circumstances? That would be a no-no for me, and would defo make me switch over to your camp lol.

[Daedalus]

-snip-

Happy you like it!

The differences are very minor and you wouldn't notice or even feel them normally unless you're looking or know, but the fixes are as true to vanilla as possible (assuming the wiki definitions are correct and I haven't overlooked anything, at least) but with the extra eye candy.

[CacoTwoShoes]

A tiny (non-)issue: loading the mod on top of Spectacle Creep spawns the pistol hand in the main menu cutscene, aiming at yourself, the Doomguy, in the distance. Apparently the mod loads an actual map to serve as the background.

Chaingun muzzle flash looks really nice and flashy with all the empty frames tucked in between, but might it possibly pose a health danger to epileptic people? Perhaps a more solid looking flash like in Doom Comic 3.0 could be an option? I mean the normal firing mode, not the alt one, with a full smooth fade-in/fade-out flash cycle.

Would you entertain the idea of a companion mod that would add Vanilla+ blood effects? I would suggest Tempered Arms as a base. It has a very nice modified blood drop effect (both the sprite and the physics behind it) that looks and works much like vanilla Doom though looks a bit better and doesn't fall perfectly downwards but rather follows a semi-ballistic trajectory. The way I imagine it to possibly work as a generic Doom mod:

1. Hitscan attacks each spawn a single blood drop exactly at the point of connection with the hitbox, much like vanilla.

2. Killing an enemy with hitscan weapons, fists, chainsaw, or the rocket launcher spawns a few blood drops departing in random directions (see how Tempered Arms handles violent deaths, it does have this effect too).

3. Direct hits from RL that don't immediately kill still spawn multiple blood drops, too, but splash damage from RL doesn't (helpful for visually telling between direct and indirect rocket hits at a distance, you know what I mean if you ever fired RL at a living wall of Cacos)

4. Dead monsters falling down spawn an additional cascade of blood drops upon landing (mostly intended for Cacos to make their deaths feel more satisfying and physical), this mechanic is already in Nashgore.

5. Blood drops despawn / "soak in" with a basic splash animation once they hit the ground (a popular choice among mod makers seems to be the tiny blood splash anim ripped from Duke3D -- it kinda looks a tad more visceral than the basic single-frame one in vanilla Doom; Tempered Arms seems to employ a unique blood spash anim of its own)

The goal of such a mod would be to make attacks and deaths feel more physical without much visual clutter, actor replacement, or extra actors with CPU-taxing math attached to them, like all the carnage in your average modern gore mod. My personal issue with mods like Nashgore is that no matter how much/little blood I set with the slider, the associated effects still remain probabilistic in nature i.e. at lower values, a hitscan attack may spawn anywhere between 0 and 2 blood squirts that don't necessarily originate from the actual collision point. The individual puffs tend to look big yet vanish in the thin air instead of falling and hitting the ground, too.

This kinda invalidates a very important mechanic involving vanilla blood, especially when playing without crosshairs: it lets you see how many pellets in a blast, or bullets in a burst, actually hit the target, and quickly evaluate the scatter. This further helps to control the distance to the target while circle-strafing or otherwise maneuvering.

A few wayward gore squirts on death that don't leave any marks on the ground could also serve as a performance-friendly, monster-agnostic alternative to a full-fledged gore mod: with it, you would no longer have to have a dedicated gibbing anim or a modded-in "physical" gibbing mechanic for every monster. Moreover, the number of gore squirts on death could be dependent on the amound of damage taken and weapon type, e.g. a Caco killed by a rocket right in its face could sprinkle a lot more than, say, an imp obliterated by a distant shotgun blast.