[jkas789]

Me too dude. Gearbox haven't could give less of a fuck to be honest. The community is really keeping alive the game.

[NightFright]

Hard to believe, but PCorf is apparently about to pull a 5-episode Ultimate Doom + Sigil vanilla style megawad out of his ingenious a**. Its title? "2022: A Doom Odyssey", 20 years after his quite remarkable retro megawad bearing the same name (except for the year part, ofc). Like always, most of the music will again be composed by PCorf himself.

It's almost done, too. A first beta can already be downloaded over at Doomworld:
https://www.doomworl...um/topic/131349

[Ninety-Six]

I've been keeping an eye on that project for years. He took a break to make Zone400, and then went right back to the grind.

I'm excited. Pcorf's one of the few reliable mappers out there, who makes solid no frills classic doom gameplay (and some of my favorite music, too). Aro, too. I see Chris Hansen came back from the first ADO as well, though I find his work to be a bit more hit-and-miss.

[NightFright]

Harmony has been added as a new addon for Doom Unity:
https://slayersclub....ailable-harmony

While Harmony had been available before as a standalone mod, this re-release adds two new maps that haven't been available before. Besides that, the original highres sprites have been changed to high quality lowres sprites, there's one new monster, updated weapons, fixed difficulty settings plus widescreen assets.

[Fantinaikos]

Let's do a forecast survey, what could be the next new/old megawad/TC to be ported, improved and officialized?
Stuff which has good chances, I deliberately ignored those TCs which, while excellent, use third part material of course:

Jenesis
Resurgence
Valiant with/or Valiant Vaccineted Edition AKA Valiant Vanilla Edition for mods compatibility
Vanguard
Avacator
Ancient Aliens
Ar Luminae
One of the Plutonia fansequels-fanremakes
One of the TNT fansequels-fanremakes
Possibly all the Doom the Way id Did stuff (wouldn't have much sense porting just the first)
Eviternity
Antaresian Reliquary
Going Down
STRAIN
Memento Mori 1&2
Osiris/Anubis I
Skulldash
Ashes saga

What's your predictions?

[ReaperAA]

Really nice to see Doom Unity still getting support and new addons

Fantinaikos, on 18 October 2022 - 06:03 PM, said:

Let's do a forecast survey, what could be the next new/old megawad/TC to be ported, improved and officialized?
Stuff which has good chances, I deliberately ignored those TCs which, while excellent, use third part material of course:

What's your predictions?

Unfortunately, as much as I would love to see your suggestions get added to the Unity port, a good deal of them require Boom (or even ZDoom as in case of Skulldash and Ashes) source port compatible features that the Unity port doesn't support. Unity port can only support vanilla or limit removing wads. So that leaves your predictions to:

Fantinaikos, on 18 October 2022 - 06:03 PM, said:

One of the Plutonia fansequels-fanremakes
One of the TNT fansequels-fanremakes
Possibly all the Doom the Way id Did stuff (wouldn't have much sense porting just the first)
STRAIN
Memento Mori 1&2
Osiris/Anubis I

Of these, the DTWID stuff has the highest chance of being ported as they only contain Doom assets (or assets from id software's own games) and most of the folks can still be contacted. Then comes the Final Doom sequels as they also have a decent chance of getting ported although in Plutonia 2 and TNT: Devilution's case, their development lasted a long time and even changed hands a few times, so getting permission could be an issue. Regarding Strain, MM 1&2 and Osiris/Anubus, I doubt they would ever get added since they are too old that it might be near impossible to get in contact with all the devs of those projects.

On the other hand I would like to mention some more suggestions of my own that I wish to see added:
- 1000 Lines CP trilogy (Especially the 3rd one, though that one contains a few Heretic/Hexen assets that would need replacing)
- 3 Heures d'agonie trilogy
- Nova 1 and 2 (would have listed Nova 3 as well but that one requires Boom compatibilty)
- Base Ganymede
- Lunar Catastrophe
- Zone 300 and Zone 400
- Akeldama
- Bourgeois Deathmatch

[Ninety-Six]

ReaperAA, on 18 October 2022 - 07:32 PM, said:

Of these, the DTWID stuff has the highest chance of being ported as they only contain Doom assets (or assets from id software's own games) and most of the folks can still be contacted.

Unfortunately, neither are likely to be added anymore as one of the contributors to both projects (Megalyth) died back in July of this year.

ReaperAA, on 18 October 2022 - 07:32 PM, said:

Then comes the Final Doom sequels as they also have a decent chance of getting ported although in Plutonia 2 and TNT: Devilution's case, their development lasted a long time and even changed hands a few times, so getting permission could be an issue.

Besides TNTD not being finished yet, both it and TNT:R borrow some graphics from Duke 3D and would need replacements as well.

ReaperAA, on 18 October 2022 - 07:32 PM, said:

Zone 300 and Zone 400

Zone400 has an entire chapter's worth of Heretic/Hexen assets (It's a PCorf wad). 300 is still safe though IIRC.


I also wish the recent Solar Struggle was a candidate (as it's limit-removing) but it uses a texture pack with a lot of borrowed assets.

[Fantinaikos]

Not excluded that some can be a new entry with some direct targeted changes, with Revolution they did it (and in this regard a PWAD was made to bring those changes to DOS version, with some little reverts to the MIDI pack alterations).

About Memento Mori 1&2, STRAIN and Osiris, they already exist in a more functional and refined form into the excellent Compendium, that also contains Revolution as well. A shame that the Compendium never got updated since his first release.

But there I've noticed some old glories to consider for Unity.

Perdition's Gate (BTW take also a look to the sequel Perdition's Gate: Resurgence project that seem halted since 2019)
Hell to Pay
Requiem
Icarus: Alien Vanguard (with ICAR2015 and Icarumem single map for completeness)
All Hell is Breaking Loose

Icarus and Requiem would be the most likely, at least one of two members of involved teams must be around still around to contact, TeamTNT for Requiem in particular. Talking of All Hell is Breaking Loose, I don't know if Joel Huenink is avilable.

For what reguard Perdition's Gate and Hell To Pay, the rights were of Wizard Works Software, they can raintrace and ask whoever holds them now. Atari supposedly, despite they closed the Minneapolis office (not that the relations with ID Software was that good though, since their EULA violations).

Well, these are partial conversions anyway, on the side of Total Conversions, how many based on vanilla that not requires Boom/Zdoom/GZdoom are remained? Bethesda/ID probably sees Hacx more as a different game than a mod, and Aliens TC or Army of Darkness TC have other kind of copyright problems.

[Ninety-Six]

Fantinaikos, on 19 October 2022 - 05:54 PM, said:

Not excluded that some can be a new entry with some direct targeted changes, with Revolution they did it

Revolution was already DOS-compatible though.

Fantinaikos, on 19 October 2022 - 05:54 PM, said:

About Memento Mori 1&2, STRAIN and Osiris, they already exist in a more functional and refined form into the excellent Compendium, that also contains Revolution as well. A shame that the Compendium never got updated since his first release.

Again the problem is more about copyright and being able to contact every individual member who made those. The MMs in particular had many authors, most of which are unreachable now.

Fantinaikos, on 19 October 2022 - 05:54 PM, said:

Perdition's Gate (BTW take also a look to the sequel Perdition's Gate: Resurgence project that seem halted since 2019)

PG:R is still in active development. Just jump to the end of the thread; Jaws continues to give updates on the state of the project.

Fantinaikos, on 19 October 2022 - 05:54 PM, said:

For what reguard Perdition's Gate and Hell To Pay, the rights were of Wizard Works Software, they can raintrace and ask whoever holds them now.

Chances are they're held by a non-gaming 3rd party entity, and I doubt id is willing to fork over the money to buy these two expansions that are 1.) Still pretty obscure even within the niche sphere of retro FPS, and 2.) weren't exactly authorized to begin with (even though PG was supposed to be a part of Final Doom but Tom was too slow to present it to them).

[Ninety-Six]

I've been on a kick of gameplay mods lately. I'm looking for some recommendations.

More specifically, I'm interested in....what would the word be... "Simple" doesn't quite fit it. But something that still ultimately results in running around shooting demons more or less. As an example of things I'm not quite interested in at this time would be mods like Terrorists or that one Wolfenstein one that turned all the enemies into Nazis.

To be clear, I have nothing against those mods, and they can be fun. But over the course of a megawad or even the vanilla game, as the scenery inevitably turns more demonic and hellish, those sorts of enemies really start to look out of place and begin to take me out of the experience.

I'm also not interested in pure power fantasy mods like Russian Overkill or crazy randomizers like Aeons of Death or Colorful Hell (randomizers are still fine by themselves, but I'm hoping more for "controlled chaos" randomizers like MetaDoom and the like).

As an example of what I am looking for, currently my two favorite gameplay mods are D4V and Brutal Doom (not for the gore but for the accelerated "Razor's Edge" kind of gameplay where everything dies faster, including you. Greatly increases the pace of the game and makes some of the sloggier fights more fun). What I'm looking for doesn't have to be that extensive, for instance I'm also a fan of Final Doomer (though I wish I had some new enemies to fight against). I'm ultimately looking for an experience that is reasonably balanced in some way, either with vanilla difficulty or something that would scale with harder mapsets.


Mapsets themselves are tertiary unless they combo really well (or are literally built around them, i.e. Final Doomer). Right now I'm more interested in Monster + Weapon mod synergies (or all-in-ones like D4V and BD).


I don't know why I got on this kick all of a sudden, especially seeing as I never used to put my foot in too deep with gameplay mods. But I am and am flying blind now.

[ReaperAA]

Ninety-Six, on 22 October 2022 - 10:26 AM, said:

As an example of what I am looking for, currently my two favorite gameplay mods are D4V and Brutal Doom (not for the gore but for the accelerated "Razor's Edge" kind of gameplay where everything dies faster, including you. Greatly increases the pace of the game and makes some of the sloggier fights more fun). What I'm looking for doesn't have to be that extensive, for instance I'm also a fan of Final Doomer (though I wish I had some new enemies to fight against). I'm ultimately looking for an experience that is reasonably balanced in some way, either with vanilla difficulty or something that would scale with harder mapsets.

There is also Supercharge and Minicharge. (the latter is a lite boom compatible version of the former). They both speed up the gameplay by making some of the weapons (like shotgun and chaingun equivalents) faster and introduce instant weapon switching.

On the side of mapsets, the 1000 Lines 3 CP is a 32 map megawad that also makes changes to weapons like the instant switching, faster shotgun and faster + more accurate assault rifle (chaingun replacement). And also contains a couple of new glass cannon type enemies.

And lastly, there also Overboard which is 6 + 6 map wad. It doesn't contain any new gameplay changes, but has a NG+ concept where the first 6 maps are regular maps and the next 6 are the alternate and harder versions of the same 6 maps. It might interest you that it is made by Mouldy, who made Going Down.

[Ninety-Six]

ReaperAA, on 24 October 2022 - 04:34 AM, said:

There is also Supercharge and Minicharge. (the latter is a lite boom compatible version of the former). They both speed up the gameplay by making some of the weapons (like shotgun and chaingun equivalents) faster and introduce instant weapon switching.

On the side of mapsets, the 1000 Lines 3 CP is a 32 map megawad that also makes changes to weapons like the instant switching, faster shotgun and faster + more accurate assault rifle (chaingun replacement). And also contains a couple of new glass cannon type enemies.

Good start, I suppose. Thanks.

ReaperAA, on 24 October 2022 - 04:34 AM, said:

And lastly, there also Overboard which is 6 + 6 map wad. It doesn't contain any new gameplay changes, but has a NG+ concept where the first 6 maps are regular maps and the next 6 are the alternate and harder versions of the same 6 maps. It might interest you that it is made by Mouldy, who made Going Down.

Yeah, I heard about that, as well as its author. I'll get around to it before too long; he's one of the few mappers I trust. With a handful of exceptions, the vast majority of his content is the good kind of difficult. The kind that you could theoretically beat on your first try. It's extremely unlikely, but you are given all the tools you need, and more importantly, a humanly possible time to react to sudden traps. Vast majority of the time, if you die, it's your own fault. Even outside of just Going Down his material is pretty consistently like this.

So yeah Overboard is on my list. I'll probably get to it once I've got this gameplay mod hankering out of my system. I want to play that vanilla first.

[Morpheus Kitami]

I remember having a lot of fun with Real Guns Hardcore and Complex Doom, but both really up the difficulty level, especially the later. Also, I remember the DoomRL mod was neat but I didn't play that much of it for some reason.

[NightFright]

Final version of "2022: A Doom Odyssey" has just been released. 50 levels for Ultimate Doom. It even replaces the fifth episode slot (= Sigil).

[Malgon]

Mick Gordon has made a lengthy statement in regards to his work on Doom Eternal:

https://medium.com/@...al-5f98266b27ce

This one's a very long read, and is in response to the open letter made by Marty Stratton on Reddit in 2020:

https://www.reddit.c...st_open_letter/

It definitely doesn't paint a flattering light of how it was handled, but I guess we'll never know for sure what really happened. Read both and decide for yourself where the truth lies.

[Aristotle Gumball]

I mean that article leaves little to doubt. He proved most of his claims, like the lie about the contract for the OST. Marty seems like a sociopath.

[NightFright]

Ofc it's a pretty subjective view of the events, but it really looks like id made quite a few dick moves here, and not small ones. Kinda makes Eternal look bad in retrospective.

[MusicallyInspired]

Marty made quite a few dick moves. Not id. Everyone is now review bombing Doom Eternal on Steam and that is definitely not the way to go. Mick singled out Marty and that was it. The creative team behind Doom Eternal were good people and don't deserve this backlash. And Mick expressly requested everyone not to do this.

I've spoken against Mick in the past with the question of "why isn't he saying anything?" And I feel incredibly stupid now to understand why. Of course he wasn't saying anything. And it wasn't out of pride. I'm just glad he finally told his side. Good on him. And as far as "subjectivity" goes, his response was far more objective than Marty's Reddit post which didn't have any evidence, didn't go into any detail and instead made vague statements disparaging Mick and totally throwing him under the bus. Mick's response has the weight of integrity and a lot more prepared evidence and detailed accounts backing it up. I can't fathom how the man endured this for the past 2 years. I also can't fathom how Marty was so inept and incompetent as to overpromise on so many things throughout the game's development. Unbelievable. He's clearly not fit to run things.

[NightFright]

It's just one WTF after the other in this article. I already thought it cannot be topped off when they used all his music they had rejected before, but then it continues with the OST disaster.

Learned one thing from this: Game soundtrack composer isn't a job for me...

[Aristotle Gumball]

MusicallyInspired, on 10 November 2022 - 12:13 PM, said:

I can't fathom how the man endured this for the past 2 years.

He's ex military apparently. I mean, dude's dealt with aggressive and antagonistic authority figures before I'd imagine. But yeah, I felt bad reading that. Artists get screwed in so many different fields.

[NightFright]

One of the biggest surprises this year that literally came out of nowhere for me:
https://www.doomworl...d-for-doom2exe/

Apparently they managed to convert the old "Knee-Deep in ZDoom" ep.1 replacement for ZDoom to vanilla! That's right, you can now play this with ports like Chocolate Doom, Crispy, Woof... even doom2.exe, if you really want (even though you won't be able to save your game in that case). The project had been floating around more than ten years ago, but then esselfortium gave up on it until picking it up in 2020 again. That cursed pandemic also had its good sides, it seems!

[Phredreeke]

I can't help but find this amusing when people lose their shit over GZDoom "stealing" features from other ports and now a WAD that literally has ZDoom in the name is being converted to run elsewhere

[NightFright]

It's an amazing achievement, though. Maps have a level of detail which hadn't been considered possible in vanilla, like see-through floors that act as fake mirrors. There are still some glitches with a few ports, but an update will take care of that soon.

What I found funny was how some guys complained this wouldn't run on Doom Unity. Hell, there are even ancient vanilla wads from the 90s like Perdition's Gate that wouldn't work with it.

[Phredreeke]

No, people were complaining it wouldn't work with "the most popular port", by which they meant GZDoom. Of course everyone else took it as meaning Doom Unity (because hating GZDoom is as hip on there as hating Blood Fresh Supply is here)

[NightFright]

GZDoom used to be my default port until Woof came along that could run pretty much anything. Now I am only using GZD for maps that still require it. Unity is OK for beginners, but running pwads with it is a gambling game.

[NightFright]

Romero will be streaming tomorrow (Dec 10) at 5 PM ET, showing how he builds a map for Sigil II.

Biggest news about this announcement:
- Sigil II release date has been set to Dec 10, 2023 (Doom's 30th anniversary), so exactly one year from now
- It will be a 9-level episode for Doom II
- This is NOT the megawad we've been expecting all this time, which will apparently be a different project

[NNC]

Great news, still 1 more year of waiting though.

[FistMarine]

Cacowards 2022 are up: https://www.doomworl.../cacowards/2022
Happy 29th anniversary, Doom!

Regarding SIGIL 2, I had a feeling we would get an update about it on Doom's anniversary. I'm sure all the waiting will be worth it, although I didn't expect SIGIL 2 to be only 9 levels long. I assumed that SIGIL 2 will be the full 32-level megawad for Doom 2 but looks like the plans have been changed in the meantime. I'm curious if that full 32-level megawad will be for Doom 2 or even something like Heretic and Hexen. Heck, I'm not surprised if it might be for Quake because I remember reading before that Romero should be doing a Quake project as well. Maybe one day he will also do a project for Duke3D as well, though I haven't seen anyone asking him about that. Or what if the megawad is meant to be HECATOMB? It was meant to be the third game in the Heretic/Hexen series (before they changed it into Hexen 2 and Heretic 2). I'm sure that can be made nowadays using GZDoom if there is enough demand for it. You can read more about Hecatomb here: https://web.archive....ex.php/Hecatomb

Regarding GZDoom, even though I really like ZDoom and GZDoom as source ports for being "good at everything", nowadays I just prefer using them only for projects that actually require them, due to their crappy vanilla accuracy and I don't bother with setting compatibility settings either because for one thing, GZDoom with Doom (Strict) compatibility is not even close compared to the original vanilla behavior seen in DOS/Chocolate. I just prefer to leave the compatibility mode to Default in ZDoom/GZDoom and even enable mouselook, jumping and crouching because there are many projects for (G)ZDoom that require these functions (although some wads disable them through MAPINFO, so you won't "break" the map). I mostly use PrBoom+ for boom compatible projects, while for vanilla and limit-removing, it's between Chocolate, Crispy or even PrBoom+. I haven't used DSDA and Woof too much, while Eternity I have started using less after not playing some vanilla/boom wads correctly, due to lack of compatibility settings. And when comes to the original games and old wads released in the 90s, I just use DOSBox to get the intended experience. This is of course my opinion on all this. Everyone has their own taste in the source port and settings they use.

Oh yeah and haven't posted in a while about my Doom progress over the past months/year, so I will just say since then, I've beaten a couple community megawads (sometimes participated in some events at the DW Megawad club) and I'm currently going (heh) through Going Down megawad in PrBoom+ (UV skill, complevel 9, 100% everything, continuous with saves). I have finished the first 15 maps and got to the first secret level. I have to admit there were some brutal fights in some of the maps and suffered about 21 deaths so far (though only half maps managed to kill me) but damn, I have to admit the level design is simply amazing. The fights are mostly well balanced and fun, although there are also some annoying ambushes that pretty much rely on RNG to survive. I liked the 15th map I completed last evening, which was an arena fight with various monsters firing from many sides and despite sounding very difficult, it wasn't that bad (probably because there are plenty of resources to make it through and that invulnerability secret near beginning), my only two deaths came from eating a cyber's rocket which can easily happen when you get stuck between monsters.

I am also curious what are people's opinions on slaughter maps? I have mixed feelings about them, as I only find some of them fun (such as those inspired by Plutonia's Go 2 It which are always fun) but others (such as those that spam archviles, revenants, cyberdemons, etc while not giving much health/ammo in return) are pretty awful. I'm not trying to start an argument here or anything but I just found them irritating if I happened to stumble upon a badly balanced map when playing a typical community project. I just recommend save-scumming in those cases and you should be able to complete the map after a couple attempts. I also remember Micro Slaughter Community Project I played back in April, which had some really good challenging and fun maps but other maps were just insufferable and required me to savescum to complete them.

One last thing: What are people's opinions on Heretic and Hexen? I personally really like them and wish one day they would get remastered with new official content, maybe Nightdive will remaster them next year or something. Last time I've beaten the original DOS versions of Heretic and Hexen without dying at all (on skill 4). Yes, in Hexen's case, I did with all 3 classes. I'm obviously talking about the original levels/episodes which I find more replayable, I haven't played their expansions since many years ago but I know they were a lot more difficult.

[NightFright]

Slaughter maps are usually too stressful for me. I prefer well-designed levels with interesting architecture, with time to explore and to soak in the atmosphere.

As for Heretic/Hexen: I like Heretic since it's basically a fantasy clone of Doom. Weapons kinda suck unless you use the Tome of Power, though. Otherwise, most monsters are bullet sponges. Setting and general mood is great. A pity it's so hard to mod for this in vanilla since it's lacking proper DEHACKED support from Doom. There are also not so many custom episodes available, rather a bunch of standalone maps.
Hexen is a mixed thing for me. Setting is similar to Heretic, but constantly respawning enemies and the focus on switch puzzles across various hub maps just isn't my cup of tea. That plus there are just four weapons, with the ultimate being too strong for the fighter while rather subpar for all other classes.

[Lunick]

NightFright, on 09 December 2022 - 08:31 AM, said:

[url="https://twitter.com/romero/status/1600982842452119552?s=20&t=3HmJTxKGL1Q2Em2fXsiLFw" ]
Biggest news about this announcement:
- Sigil II release date has been set to Dec 10, 2023 (Doom's 30th anniversary), so exactly one year from now

Ugh, I guess it makes sense as it's just a side project but that's a bit of a wait.