[Danukem]

Kenny mckormick, on Nov 10 2009, 02:26 PM, said:

Cool,i just finished the episode (du to Sleeping-in-School) and i've really love it..Gameplay maybe need some readjustements,but good in general for me...Most of monster shoot projectile,that the player can avoid,and make this TC different,and its now possible to place a lot of monster..(for me duke nukem original solo is boring sometime,cause most of monster shoot bullet)...

Just a few thing...

1.Yes this guys is too powerfull,maybe give him a single projectile,or make them more close each other,and with lesser damage...
2.The last boss is very easy if you have pow,you just have to shoot him with chaingun,and he will be on fire for the time where you must find it,and the flames make him easy to see and shoot...and anyways,if you have enough chaingun ammo,the fire will kill him...
3.I'm not sure,but i think the "sound bug" quand be fixed by pressing "game pause"
4.I've a good CPU,3go RAM,XP,9500 nvidia...Everything is ok,i don't get lag on this mod execepted when...I shoot with BFG when there is a lot of monster (in hell freeze over) there is a big lag du to the number of blood and other thing who spawn...

Thanks for your comments.

1. He's just an edited pigcop with a different projectile that really isn't very damaging (unless you are playing on the hardest difficulty like Captain Awesome, which is supposed to be difficult).

2. Yes, he can be very easy. He can also be very hard if you don't have POW or if you use the wrong tactics. I've learned my lesson about making bosses harder just because there is an easy way to beat them. I could make him resistant to fire but I think I'd better not -- I'm sure the more common complaint will be that he's too hard.

3. That's useful to know, if true (I'll check later).

4. Yeah there's one part with a huge number of monsters that you can BFG, and it's also snowing at the same time. Believe it or not I reduced the jibs spawned from BFGd monsters already.

[Danukem]

Headless_Horseman, on Nov 10 2009, 02:48 PM, said:

There's one thing that I cannot understand : the frozen level is supposed to be a secret or not ? 'Cause when I finished the second level I was taken back to the Nexus...
Another thing : it's possible to make some of the cosmetic graphic effects optional ? The snow on the frozen level is a killer for my FPS...

Edit : regarding the warp back to the Nexus, it happened with the old Cons, I still have to re-play the game with the updates.

There has NEVER been a point in the game's development where you would get warped back to Nexus before completing the snow level. I have no idea why that happened to you. If anything weird like that happens, make sure you have done a clean install of the game into its own folder (not in a folder with other Duke related stuff) in case there is some kind of file conflict.

[Kenny mckormick]

2.For the last boss,and the player,i think you should set a maximum "stack time" to the fire and cold and other thing like that...(a short time for the last boss is really necessary i think)

4.Well i don't see one reason for lying...maybe just spawn some ash?Hard to realize cause you don't have the art part,but maybe the solution...and more original afterall...

Oh it's possible to have the smg with a secret?Or it's for future episode?

[TerminX]

Hilarious bug: http://wiki.eduke32.com/crap/egam2.rar

[Danukem]

TX, on Nov 10 2009, 04:50 PM, said:

Hilarious bug: http://wiki.eduke32.com/crap/egam2.rar

I guess he likes his fish tender.

[TerminX]

I played this a bunch more today. More thoughts:

The bleeding needs to go. It's really anti-climatic when you kill a boss or mini-boss and then look down and notice that you have only 15 health left but will be bleeding for the next 30 seconds. One particular point of note is the cyberdemon mini-boss... I got hit ONCE by splash damage and I was forced to reload, because the damage taken plus the bleeding exceeded my health altogether. I started with 80 health. Even if I had 100 or even 110, this still would have happened. The boss was easy as shit, but the bleeding just made it artificially "difficult" in the most annoying way possible unfortunately. I thought the character in the TC was still Duke Nukem, but for some reason he bleeds even more than any woman I've ever known.

Health packs and potions need to be worth more in general. There are large sequences in the gameplay where if you make a mistake and get hit by something, you are completely screwed because the most health you get after killing several monsters is 30 or so points from several of those red potions laying around (if you're lucky enough to find any). I understand that "pow" alleviates this somewhat, but if "pow" is the only way to get health in a lot of circumstances it should absolutely not decrease when you get shot. Getting hit should not take your health AND your ability to heal at the same time. It almost seems like the levels may have been balanced for weaker enemies, but then you added "pow", realized how easy it made the game in the state it was in and jacked up the damage and health on everything to compensate.

Also, another bug: hold down alt fire with the rocket launcher and then switch weapons without releasing it. The queued rockets will remain on the screen and will fire as soon as you switch back to the rocket launcher. This probably has abuse potential in multiplayer. I dunno if any of your updates fix this one yet, since my savegame is from a previous version.

[William Gee]

Captain Awesome, on Nov 10 2009, 01:37 PM, said:

I'm playing on Its a Good Day to Die, and I really have got to agree with TX. My main buff is the Shotgun Sargent Hell Knight though. Seriously overpowered.

Play on a lower difficulty setting. Attack strengths increase with every setting.

@ TX, do you use the health seeds? POW isn't the only way to heal yourself. For instance in the first boss battle there are many health seeds, they add around 10-15 health each, you can just pop underwater and up your health in safty. + some of the enemies drop +5 health vials.

As for bleeding, I tried to cover it up by adding armour everywhere, I never liked it myself, DT decreased the amount of bleeding par the difficulty settings, (MORE BLEEDING ON HARDER SETTINGS) No bleeding on the easyst n so on. So I don't notice it so much now, (I mainly play on come get some) and If I do bleed there is always the seeds. but I understand if people don't like it.

I don't think there needs to be a increase in health at all, what setting are you playing on?

Its just a bad idea for a person who hasn't played this before to be starting on the harder settings, they are there for extra difficulty once you know the levels and game.

[TerminX]

Playing on come get some. I've used the health seeds, but they don't do you much good when you came into the arena with low health and have had to use them all before the battle has even started. I think just getting rid of the bleeding and toning the afflictions down a bit would go a long way towards making this a lot more fun. Unfortunately, some of the enemies occasionally dropping a vial of +5 health doesn't help much when just getting hit once rapes you for 25 health and another 15 or so from the bleeding.

It just seems like it would be better if the medkits that give +10 health gave +15 or +20, the life seeds gave +20 instead of +15, et cetera, but again that's because the bleeding rapes you for so much health as it is. Adjusting item values would probably not be necessary at all if the bleeding was removed.

[William Gee]

I think Dan is going to adjust the bleeding.

But I really recommend to anybody struggling in the game, to just play on a lower difficulty. Other people are finding the game too easy.

[Danukem]

TX, on Nov 10 2009, 10:06 PM, said:

I played this a bunch more today. More thoughts:

The bleeding needs to go. It's really anti-climatic when you kill a boss or mini-boss and then look down and notice that you have only 15 health left but will be bleeding for the next 30 seconds. One particular point of note is the cyberdemon mini-boss... I got hit ONCE by splash damage and I was forced to reload, because the damage taken plus the bleeding exceeded my health altogether. I started with 80 health. Even if I had 100 or even 110, this still would have happened. The boss was easy as shit, but the bleeding just made it artificially "difficult" in the most annoying way possible unfortunately. I thought the character in the TC was still Duke Nukem, but for some reason he bleeds even more than any woman I've ever known.

Health packs and potions need to be worth more in general. There are large sequences in the gameplay where if you make a mistake and get hit by something, you are completely screwed because the most health you get after killing several monsters is 30 or so points from several of those red potions laying around (if you're lucky enough to find any). I understand that "pow" alleviates this somewhat, but if "pow" is the only way to get health in a lot of circumstances it should absolutely not decrease when you get shot. Getting hit should not take your health AND your ability to heal at the same time. It almost seems like the levels may have been balanced for weaker enemies, but then you added "pow", realized how easy it made the game in the state it was in and jacked up the damage and health on everything to compensate.

Also, another bug: hold down alt fire with the rocket launcher and then switch weapons without releasing it. The queued rockets will remain on the screen and will fire as soon as you switch back to the rocket launcher. This probably has abuse potential in multiplayer. I dunno if any of your updates fix this one yet, since my savegame is from a previous version.

I'll change the bleeding so it is only caused by melee attacks (hits from the axe demon, etc.) I'm not doing that because the bleeding is too difficult, but because that seems to make more sense in this kind of game. Since getting hit by melee is pretty rare, that should eliminate the annoyance.

The amount of damage caused by attacks increases with difficulty. Imo there is plenty of health, but if it doesn't seem like enough then people should use an easier skill level until they learn the maps better.

The rocket launcher bug sounds kind of cool, but I guess I'll fix it.

EDIT: By the way, there are +10 and +30 heath packs in this TC, just like in Duke. But there aren't many of them in the maps. There are a few in level 2 and some in level 3.

[Spiker]

Since my playthrough has been discovered I decided to post it sooner:) So far there is 6 parts which is about an hour of watching. More to come soon Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=aHTVt6m7K-M


Request to DeeperThought: Do not decrease the difficulty at least on the 4th skill otherwise it will suck. It's not even close to hell difficulty in Diablo, where you could die with just one hit having full health (sometimes even your own hit).

[Jimmy]

William Gee, on Nov 11 2009, 01:33 AM, said:

Play on a lower difficulty setting. Attack strengths increase with every setting.

That doesn't solve the problem of them being overpowered.

[Mblackwell]

Spiker, on Nov 11 2009, 03:01 AM, said:

Request to DeeperThought: Do not decrease the difficulty at least on the 4th skill otherwise it will suck. It's not even close to hell difficulty in Diablo, where you could die with just one hit having full health (sometimes even your own hit).

Slightly an aside, but when I was younger I loved really difficult games where the game was obviously cheating and unfair as it was a challenge to overcome. Now that I'm older I just want to play the damned game. If I die in a game in a very obvious way because my skill just wasn't up to it then I don't mind, but if I die because there's 5K surprise un-dodge-able life draining objects coming at me that's not so fun these days. It's frustrating and makes me want to spend my time elsewhere, especially since I don't have time to play the same area for hours over and over and memorize every detail.

[Mblackwell]

TX, on Nov 11 2009, 12:06 AM, said:

The bleeding needs to go. It's really anti-climatic when you kill a boss or mini-boss and then look down and notice that you have only 15 health left but will be bleeding for the next 30 seconds. One particular point of note is the cyberdemon mini-boss... I got hit ONCE by splash damage and I was forced to reload, because the damage taken plus the bleeding exceeded my health altogether. I started with 80 health. Even if I had 100 or even 110, this still would have happened. The boss was easy as shit, but the bleeding just made it artificially "difficult" in the most annoying way possible unfortunately. I thought the character in the TC was still Duke Nukem, but for some reason he bleeds even more than any woman I've ever known.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=Usd4z9rxbys

[William Gee]

Quote

That doesn't solve the problem of them being overpowered. rolleyes.gif

They would have a weaker attack strength, that makes them less powerful, so yes it does.

[TerminX]

It's not challenging enough on skill 2, even as-is. Skill 2 is too easy, and skill 3 is currently too annoying. It's not the attack strength, it's the bullshit aftereffect that's the problem.

Btw, the rocket bug is worse than I thought. You if you have alt-fire held while switching back to the rocket launcher, it loads another batch of rockets on top of the ones that were loaded when you changed in the first place. If you do it enough times you can totally fire a ton of rockets at once. And if the counter overflows, the launcher just keeps firing rockets indefinitely until you reload the game.

[Headless_Horseman]

On the "difficulty" of the WGR2 : the first time I've played it (skill 2) I thought "Damn, why it's so fucking hard ? And where are the damned medipack ?".
Now I'm replaying it the second time (still on skill 2) and it a totally different story : knowing the levels a bit, being able to use the weapons in their full extenct and, above all, storing the POW for the bosses really makes you enjoying the game fully.
I agree, some of the bleeding / cursing / poison status are a true pain in the arse, but I don't think they spoil the game too much. Perhaps a tweaking not too drasting would be that if you gain life, the bleeding stops.

P.S. : the fucked up texture count when you load a save-state is related to the Eduke version that comes with WGR2, right ?

[Carl Winslow]

I like how after fighting the dragon boss it suddenly spawns 50 more smaller ones as punishment for doing a good job. Great game design there! It's also great that you have to know basically the entire level structure beforehand or you get raped even on the lowest difficulty! It's also VERY ENJOYABLE to fight bosses that you have to time hits on that also spawns several other enemies that require explosive weaponry to kill permanently, all swarming around the boss and you (and flying bombs, don't forget that!) in order to keep you from actually hitting anything! DON'T FORGET, GIVING A BOSS A ROCKET SHOTGUN THAT PULVERIZES ALL YOUR ARMOR AND HALF YOUR HEALTH IS GOOD GAME DESIGN!

I haven't finished this yet, that's the crazy part! I have to stop a few hours after each session so I don't get totally frustrated at it!

[TerminX]

Btw, to anyone worried that the game might be too easy after the bleeding nerf, I think the damage percentages of the different skill levels are being re-weighted to compensate.

Oh, got another bug for you DT... the double barrel shotgun's selection sound plays when you press the key, whether you have it or not. At first I thought it was just clicking to say I didn't have the weapon, but nothing else does it so it looks like a bug.

Edit: I'm playing a fixed version I got from DT now, and it's a lot less annoying so far!

[TerminX]

Yeah, this is definitely much better. The damage done in skill 3 is now 100% as skill 4 was previously, skill 4 is now 125% normal damage instead of 100%, and skills 1 and 2 do 50% and 75% normal damage, respectively. It seems like you still take about the same damage overall, but the damage is done up front instead of by bleeding for 15 seconds after the fact. It's a huge improvement.

[Danukem]

Colon Semicolon, on Nov 11 2009, 01:47 PM, said:

I like how after fighting the dragon boss it suddenly spawns 50 more smaller ones as punishment for doing a good job. Great game design there! It's also great that you have to know basically the entire level structure beforehand or you get raped even on the lowest difficulty! It's also VERY ENJOYABLE to fight bosses that you have to time hits on that also spawns several other enemies that require explosive weaponry to kill permanently, all swarming around the boss and you (and flying bombs, don't forget that!) in order to keep you from actually hitting anything! DON'T FORGET, GIVING A BOSS A ROCKET SHOTGUN THAT PULVERIZES ALL YOUR ARMOR AND HALF YOUR HEALTH IS GOOD GAME DESIGN!

I haven't finished this yet, that's the crazy part! I have to stop a few hours after each session so I don't get totally frustrated at it!

If you want to be taken seriously, don't make gross exaggerations and use sarcasm. For example: there is a dragon miniboss, but it is followed by four smaller dragons, not 50. If you are really getting raped on the lowest difficulty, then I would love to see a movie of that on YouTube. Then we'll see what you are actually doing. I guess it wouldn't hurt to make the second big boss not spawn so many minions. It can get annoying when you're trying to time your shots on him and there are rage heads blowing up in your face. Although just yesterday I beat that level as a user map (that's starting the level with no equipment or stored gold) on Come Get Some and managed to beat the boss with a comfortable amount of health to spare, even though my framerate was cut in half by recording a movie of it: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=xVz9UBXKou0

Also, you can see earlier in that video that I'm getting hit quite hard by the cyberdemon with explosive shotgun, and it is isn't taking off anywhere close to "ALL YOUR ARMOR AND HALF YOUR HEALTH", despite playing on Come Get Some.

[Spiker]

I just hope the bleeding wasn't removed entirely. BTW part 7 of my playthrough is ready to watch, part 8 should be available after an hour or so. Not that much to go

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=9dq4bYusSmU

[TerminX]

It wasn't removed entirely, but it was nerfed so that you only bleed from melee attacks instead of from everything.

That reminds me... since the damage was increased, the percentage of the damage that gets turned into bleeding should probably decrease. With the adjustments made you bleed a bit too much from melee attacks now.

Maybe the bleeding could be sped up as well? Bleed the same amount of health, but once every half second instead of once every second or something.

And how about checking the player's health when calculating the bleeding counter and not increasing the counter any further if it already exceeds the current health?

[Spiker]

I don't see why it should be faster, if it's slower you have more time to use a seed of life or some medpack to stop it (the vials don't work)


EDIT: I can see that bleeding is not necessary with most ranged attacks but those guys with shotguns really should have it IMO. And don't forget that you don't bleed if you wear armor.

[Jimmy]

William Gee, on Nov 11 2009, 12:37 PM, said:

They would have a weaker attack strength, that makes them less powerful, so yes it does.

Do you realise how dumb that sounds? The game itself isn't that hard, however, the shotgun guys are (or possibly were) grossly overpowered. Everybody else did a fair amount of damage.

[Sebastian]

What part of attack strength doesn't get through to you? Stop acting like such a tard all the time - sincerely.

[Danukem]

What CA should have said is that the shotgun guys do too much damage relative to the other enemies. I don't agree with that, but I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.

I'm currently testing some code with significant balance tweaks. The hardest level is still hard (maybe a little harder than before, but not in a cheap way), and the other difficulties are more smoothed out. I'll probably post the code later tonight, if anyone is interested.

[Jimmy]

Thank you, Dan. I can't believe two people could be so incredibly dense when what I said was entirely obvious.

[TerminX]

Spiker, on Nov 11 2009, 02:54 PM, said:

I don't see why it should be faster, if it's slower you have more time to use a seed of life or some medpack to stop it (the vials don't work)


EDIT: I can see that bleeding is not necessary with most ranged attacks but those guys with shotguns really should have it IMO. And don't forget that you don't bleed if you wear armor.

Hell no, the shotgun guys should not make the player bleed. This was one of the biggest problems in the original version--if bleeding when getting shot is to be the case, every monster in the game had better bleed to death after getting hit just like I did. The current version (the last I got from DT) is just about perfect.

[William Gee]

DeeperThought, on Nov 11 2009, 05:09 PM, said:

What CA should have said is that the shotgun guys do too much damage relative to the other enemies. I don't agree with that, but I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.

I don't agree either, they are just weak pigcops, 90% of them are 1 shot kills.