More Testing And Tweaking

I've just put the finishing touches on what I believe might be the final version of the randomizer mod, but I'm still going to test it some more before I etch anything in stone.

As stated in the previous post, I've fixed the conflict between the two Terrors without having to remove either one from the mod. I've also removed a couple of monsters that seemed redundant; I'm trying to use only new monsters that actually have something unique in their behavior and attacks instead of simply recolored versions of the old ones. But I've also added a couple of new ones, including the Tesla Coil. I've moved the Void Imp and Phase Imp to the same rank as the Revenants because their marine-seeking projectiles and shifting to and from visibility makes them fit that difficulty level more so than that of the other Imps. Also in the interest of keeping things balanced rather than insanely difficult, I tweaked some of the spawn ratios of the new power-ups so hopefully they will be seen more often.

I'm not going to post any screenshots or make any official announcements until I feel I've thoroughly tested this, however the updated version can be downloaded here:

Herculines Doom Upgrade

One final note for tonight: if you (and you know who you are) have been using the previous version of the mod and want to update to this one, you might want to make a backup of the file first. There's a 50/50 chance that you could either start in the middle of a game after overwriting the file with the new one and everything will be fine OR one of the monsters that I've since removed might have spawned in the level you're playing and thus the game won't allow you to load your saved game. Sorry about that, but such is the nature of experimentation and testing I'm afraid.

UPDATE:

I don't want my name to become synonymous with various profanity, so please keep in mind that it is in fact a RANDOMIZER.

I just spent about an hour trying to get myself out of a pretty desperate situation in one of Gene Bird's maps called WASTE PROCESSING (if I recall correctly, the map was included in one of the famous COMMUNITY CHEST megaWADs). One of the creatures I've included in the mod is called Death Incarnate; it's a variation of the Revenant that attacks with virtually unavoidable laser beams. It can be taken down with two or three blasts from the Super Shotgun, but about every 60 seconds after that it resurrects itself. One Death Incarnate is pretty easy to handle; just lure it back to some earlier part of the map, kill it there and maybe it won't be able to find its way back to you. Another trick is to get it to die in a doorway so that when the door closes it turns the corpse to goo that can't self-resurrect. Anyway, in the map I mentioned there were like a dozen or more of these bastards spread throughout the level, and at one point I found myself with just 1% health with these self-resurrecting monsters stalking me. I was able to eventually finish the map, but whew...


So once I had cleared the map, I decided I'd best open my mod with an editor and change the frequency with which these things would spawn. This works on a 10 to 1 ratio, i.e. if I give a creature a value of 1 it should only appear 10% of the time. Turns out I had already set the Death Incarnate to 1 before I had ever loaded the map. The value can't be set any lower.

So what this all means is that on some maps you may get a good roll of the dice while on others you may very well get screwed. But then that's really part of the fun of this mod, I think, and the whole point of it.

I recommend using the autosaver mod I mentioned a while back, and if you're playing a megaWAD or one of the IWADs save before you hit the switch or whatever at the end of one map so that if the randomizer totally screws you on the next map you can come back and reload it and get a different roll of the dice. I'm doing the best I can to balance the ratios in the mod, but still randomness can be a bitch...