Wednesday, May 18, 2011

HERCULINE'S DOOM UPGRADE: Final Release

"Final release? Yeah, we've heard that one before..."


No... really. This is it. Just to prove it, I've uploaded it to the DoomWorld id Games Archives where it should appear in the next batch of "latest files" and become a permanent part of Doom history. Until then, it can be downloaded through the following links, which also will be a permanent part of the blog's sidebar:

HERCULINE'S DOOM UPGRADE

WITHOUT MUSIC: 15 MB

WITH MUSIC: 106 MB

I've decided to release two separate versions because everyone's tastes in game music varies and also because some people might simply want the smaller file. Only the version without the music has been uploaded to the Archives; this should circumvent any copyright concerns regarding the Aubrey Hodges PSX music, plus I had a difficult enough time getting the smaller of the two files to go through the FTP anyway.

If you've downloaded a previous version of the mod, you'll want to delete that and get one of the final versions. Several new weapons and monsters have been added and several bugs regarding sprites with similar or even identical names have been fixed. I never figured out how to get the Armor Shards to be of benefit above 200% or how to prevent the Soulsphere from being picked up when it's not needed, but everything else seems to be working perfectly so I'm calling it a done deal.

Also, if you have a previous version your old game saves will most likely not work with the new final versions. Sorry about that, but there's really no way to get around it.

It should also be noted that the mod will not work with any previously saved "vanilla" games. My mod replaces ALL the default weapons except for the fists and the pistol, so if you load a previously saved game your weapons won't be in your inventory!

MOD DESCRIPTION

Herculine's Doom Upgrade is a mod for GZDoom that uses custom spawners to randomize monsters and items. Many new ones are added and have been carefully selected and placed to present new and unexpected challenges while attempting to maintain a semblance of the original difficulty intended by any given map's author as well as to maintain the original atmosphere of the games. New weapons have also been added in an attempt to maintain these balances but also have been chosen to fit the original atmosphere.

Here are a few of the new things you can expect to see:


These aren't just recolored versions of the original monsters. I've carefully chosen the new creatures on the basis that they not only fit the original atmosphere of the game, but also that they possess some new attacks and unique behaviors that add fresh and unexpected challenges to the game. It should also be noted that I've done my best to preserve our ability to use the tried-and-true trick of getting those big bad-ass monsters to kill each other for us. Each class of monsters has been assigned a species type that should* keep them from attacking other monsters of the same species and yet still allow infighting to occur between monsters from different classes. *(I say should because this is supposed to work in theory, but I have observed an instance or two where the monsters just didn't seem to care.)



As a result of randomizing monster and item spawns, difficulty can potentially be erratic. Overall difficulty is usually slightly higher. If you're having too tough a time of it, you can try restarting the level to get a different set of random spawns. However, I've modified a few things in an attempt to prevent the average map from becoming impossible when using my mod. As mentioned in the previous post, one of these modifications was an increase to DoomGuy's ammo carrying capacity. I've also added some new and interesting power-ups (like the ability to freeze time for a few seconds) that should help even the odds even if you're not a Doom veteran, but like everything else I've chosen for this mod I've done so with the intention of making our Doom experience more enjoyable rather than ridiculously unbalanced.



The new weapons also have all been chosen with balance in mind. Some weapons, like the Necrovision MG40 (an uber-chaingun) might at first seem like they give you an unfair advantage (it fires so rapidly you could cut grass with it and it similarly cuts down some of the toughest of the new demons) but once you note how rapidly they consume ammo or, in the case of some of the energy weapons, that they can have a backlash that makes them almost suicidal to use, you'll tend to save these big guns for only the more desperate emergencies. Some of these weapons also have the potential to be rare since they are only dropped by randomly-spawning enemies.


This mod likely will not work with any mod that replaces the existing monsters, weapons or items. This mod will work with any Doom IWAD and should work with most custom megaWADs and levels, but may not work with heavily scripted ones.



SPECIAL THANKS

The various contributors to Realm667's Beastiary, Armory, Item Store and Prop Stop. This mod is in no way an attempt to take credit for anyone else's excellent work. A full list of credits can be found in texts both included separately with this WAD and also integrated into the WAD itself.

Snarboo for his randomizer which inspired me and taught me how to do this.

Graf Zahl and the DRD Team for GZDoom.

Aubrey Hodges for the best Doom music ever. Elbryan42 and Doom Depot for the music WAD.

Everyone who follows the blog here and has supported this project. THANK YOU!

UPDATE: 05-21-2011

After proudly posting that this would be the final ever release of the mod, I've played through the entirety of Doom II on Ultra-Violence with it and did not notice any issues... except for two little things:

I never saw any stimpacks or the green armor vest. Not once. I was always getting the new medipack and the ArmorSphere instead.

Being a sort-of hard-core Doomer who generally makes things more difficult on myself rather than easier, these issues nagged at me and as I was playing I was continually trying to adjust the spawn rates of these items, but with no apparent effect. This puzzled me because I had gone so far as to make it so that the items should only have had a 1-in-10 chance of spawning something different.

Finally I realized that the problem was in that I had given the stimpack a chance of spawning a medikit and that the medikit spawns were then automatically producing the new medipacks. Even so, according to the math there still should have been some spawns of the lesser items rather than nothing but the more powerful items. Apparently the spawn spawning a spawn confuses the game engine somehow, and no level of tweaking the spawn ratios will fix it.

The only solution I could come up with was to totally eliminate any randomness for the stimpacks and green armor. However, I'm not going to upload a new version of the mod containing these changes because it's not likely that most people are going to complain about too much health lying around, and also because a new version would invalidate the saved games using previous versions since two spawners have been totally eliminated from the list.

If anyone who has been using the mod truly wants the new version in which these changes have been made, contact me and I'll be glad to send you a copy. Besides, who knows? Maybe I'll find some other new things to add to the game and at some point release a newer version anyway...

20 comments:

  1. Decisions, decisions...

    So I finally go and check into Aubrey Hodges' work, and find that yes, I like it! So, I've grabbed your new file with music, and made a run to the Doom Depot and grabbed the files for Doom 1 and 2.

    Now to figure out how to configure GZDoom to run all this extra stuff...

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  2. I highly recommend using the front-end launcher ZDL3.1a:

    http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~chiry/doom/zdl/

    With that you can load as many files as you want, even without taking them out of the .zip files. It's pretty easy to use IMHO. Just when you first set it up you'll need to point it to your IWADs.

    And you know, you'll only need those music WADs from Doom Depot when you're not using my mod, right? (Though loading them all together likely wouldn't hurt anything anyway...)

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  3. I have ZDL3.1a, and to hurt your head, it completely baffles me. If it had some instructions on setting it up, I could figure it out. I have zero experience configuring sourceports and all that.

    Having said that, I just had an idea. And most people get nervous when that happens... ;)

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  4. @Druuler:

    I'll send you an e-mail...:)

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  5. Ok, first bug report. Having gotten everything to install on my end (thanks again), I started playing Doom2 on the Dead Simple map. I am right at the begining. All the weapons I had except the super-shotgun are gone. I had the super-shotgun equipped when I started the level.

    I can pick up the weapons on the level, but there is no indication on the HUD they are in my inventory, nor can I equip them.

    I tried using both HERC_UPs, and playing again with out either to verify the problem's possible origin.

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  6. I find that rather odd. I'm currently playing through Doom II with the mod and have made it to MAP15 with no issues.

    Did you use a cheat to skip to that level? Did you load the game from a saved game?

    Since my mod replaces ALL the default weapons except your fists and the pistol, it's not going to work with any previously-saved games. Your weapons won't be there of course!

    I'd better edit the blog with that info before I get a flood of bug reports, eh?

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  7. Yep, right at the start of a save game. I just got into the level, saved and exited, using it as a jump off point to using your mod. So that gets filed under D'oh!

    Since I'm not that far into the game, I will just start a new one and see what happens.

    Pilot: Now, let's try that again.
    Nervous Scientist: Yes, this time, no oops!

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  8. Sorry about all that. I really didn't make it to be interchangeable, did I?

    Actually, when I originally started testing the new replacement weapons I had difficulty getting the old ones to "stay" in the game in their default weapon slots, so I simply replaced most of them.

    I already see it coming: a lot of people aren't going to like that and start posting comments about how stupid and broken the mod is...

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  9. Ok, started fresh and *giggles* I love it right off the bat *giggles* Twin-bladed Chainsaw! Let's get some more meat!!! Muwahahahahhaha!

    *ahem* Sorry about that ;)

    The visual changes are great as well. The resolution differences make the changes stand out nicely. Thank you for this :)

    Now the only problem I forsee is Doom taking up time I should be allocating to my FO3 project O.o

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  10. @Druuler:

    I wish I could take credit for your game looking better now, but I can't. That's all Graf Zahl and his GZDoom. That's why it's my favorite sourceport... that and the versatility of its launchers. Doomsday looks good too, but I can never seem to get its front-end to do everything I want it to.

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  11. You know, reading this blog of yours, Ms. Neko, has shown me just how engrossed I've gotten in Gamebryo over the years -- that my m4d sk1llz aren't video-game wide.

    I've been reading your tech notes, as it were, on the creation of your mega-randomizer here, and... I have no idea what half of it means.

    I think I know how the rest of you feel when I start droning on about my scripting ideas, and general insane theories on the FO3/NV AI.

    Still. From looking at the pretty, pretty, screenshots; I have to say this looks like a bangup job of a mod -- though I'm sure the philistine dogs at DOOMWorld will hate it and say it's a copy of eight other mods (but 2/10 for trying).

    I also have to toss in a damn you: you've made me seriously consider digging out my discs and giving it a go.

    ReplyDelete
  12. @NOS:

    Actually, working on a script for FO3 and a DECORATE lump for GZDoom really aren't that much different; it's just a crazy-looking text document. A small example:

    CacoSpawner : RandomSpawner replaces Cacodemon
    {
    DropItem "NewCaco" 255 2
    DropItem "NewStealthCaco" 255 1
    DropItem "Agathodemon" 255 1
    DropItem "Cacolich" 255 2
    DropItem "CrackoDemon" 255 1
    DropItem "CacolanternClone" 255 2
    DropItem "Poe" 255 1
    }

    Just like in a Gamebryo script, little things like quotation marks and brackets are all extremely important and a simple typo can screw your whole project and take a whole day to track down. Of course I've just shown a very small example here; the code strings for creatures are much longer. The DECORATE lump for this project ended up being a total of 13217 lines.

    But, when all is said and done, I'm sure comparing the two would be much like comparing spoken languages. "Gee, you speak Japanese now, so you should be able to speak Chinese too." So while I suppose I've learned some stuff working on this, it's still likely to be a while before I'll be writing any impressive Gamebryo scripts...

    And go ahead and dust off those discs; I dare you. The PyroDemon will surely give you a warm welcome back...

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  13. Yeah, but the languages are different; and I had enough trouble picking up the one. Not sure I want to embark on another.

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  14. Ack! Programming language! My eyes! Wait, that looks vaguely familiar...

    @Nos: Join the Doomside...we have Big Fracking Guns ;)

    One of us! One of us!

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  15. Well, not to quibble over detail; but it would be a return more so than a conversion.

    After all, I played the original DOOM back in the day; installed from the stately 3.5" floppy and run on an 80286 -- along with pretty much every other FPS put out by ID and/or 3d Realms/Apogee.

    The only thing really holding me back is I'd miss many of the things I've gotten used to in the interim: mouse-look, sights/scopes, jumping, supporting NPCs.

    That, and after wasting more hours than I care to admit in Duke3d, all other FPSs of the era seem bland by comparison.

    Still, it is tempting.

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  16. HA!

    With GZDoom you can jump, crouch and mouselook! Granted, the original maps weren't designed for that so in some cases that can be cheating, and with mouselook if you're at certain angles the monsters go flat, but still it's better than nothing at all I suppose...

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  17. You can? *scratches head* Where did I put that FRM?

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  18. Flip through the in-game options menu. There's all kinds of good stuff in there, including the open GL settings.

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  19. *shakes head* I don't seem to have these problems with newer games, just the older ones with more obvious solutions :P

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