[DisgustedGrunt]

Radar, on 09 September 2019 - 09:50 AM, said:

I've always seen the Master Levels as being to Doom what Duke Zone 2 and Duke Extreme are to Duke. I never wasted more than 10 minutes with any of these packs.

Yep.

[Lunick]

Annoyingly, two of the Master Level maps can't be cleared in co-op if everyone dies due to how the maps are made. I believe it was Black Tower and one of the Titan maps.

[NightFright]

Putrid Pete, on 10 September 2019 - 10:55 AM, said:

Do you start each map with a pistol or do your weapons carry over? Also, could you please provide a link to it if it isn't much trouble? Thanks.

It's pistol start for each map since it's like one level per episode, after that you go back to the menu.

I have attached the menu mod below - without the maps, of course. To get it fully working, please follow these instructions:

Spoiler

1) Unzip master_kit.zip to hard drive
2) Copy all Master Levels wads to "maps" subdir
3) Open teeth.wad (e.g. with SLADE), split included maps and save them as:
- teeth1.wad: Contains MAP31 (all entries from "MAP31" until and including "BLOCKMAP" before MAP32 entry)
- teeth2.wad: Contains MAP32 (all entries from "MAP32" until and including "BLOCKMAP")
4) Zip all files again so you end up with something like master.zip or master.pk3
5) Load in GZDoom, e.g. gzdoom.exe -iwad doom2.wad -file master.pk3

[Putrid Pete]

Thanks again, that actually worked pretty well! I also liked the addition of the master levels logo to the menu.

[NightFright]

Thanks a lot! Well, it wasn't easy to get this one in, but I wanted something to make it look somewhat "official". Maybe there are better solutions, but it does the trick and I wanted to go for a minimalist approach. There's still stuff like Zippy's Master Levels Menu Interface, but for me that's overdone. I just needed a way to launch each map individually, but still kinda sorted by author, and this approach does just that.

[Putrid Pete]

Today I completed my run of TNT: Evilution in UV while only saving at the start of maps. I was stuck for a few days on Map27: Mount Pain. That last room with the archvile, mancubus, 2 revenants and a chaingunner was giving me hell. They are positioned in angles that are really unfavorable for you and there's basically no cover you can take to fully protect yourself. I usually got there kinda low on health most of the tries so I was getting killed there all the time. Once I had a better run and made it there with health to spare I was able to finally beat it. Last map took me a few tries too, mostly cause I forgot you are supposed to shoot rockets into The Icon of Sin just below the usual spot you fire them at in Doom II. Overall, I like the "chill" approach TNT has going when compared to Plutonia, it feels very similar to Doom II's campaign. Well, maybe a tad more challenging but not by much.

Started to tackle Plutonia and the jump in difficulty can be jarring, specially for the type of run I'm going. I think I've already died more than half the times I died in TNT in just the first 10 levels of Plutonia. I really like the level design here despite the occasional death trap, but visually and thematically Plutonia tends to feel a bit samey for me. Too much brown doesn't bother me in Quake, but here it gets a bit old.

I gotta say that I've taken quite a liking for Crispy Doom. PrBoom+ is pretty good for accuracy and higher resolutions, but for some reason I find myself firing up CD more despite only supporting inferior resolutions. I'm a fan of the simplicity of the port. I just wish music wads would loop properly, but at least you can set up music packs for each game. The github page lists 16:9 widescreen support as a milestone for version 5.7, so that will be neat. I don't mind playing at 4:3 but if I can get a full use of my monitor, then I'm down.

[Loke]

[FistMarine]

Speaking of Master Levels, I haven't played them in years, so I don't remember most of them and how hard they were but I definitely remember that TEETH gave me a lot of trouble (fuck the ambush at the start of the level, that alone is the reason this map is so damn hard) and I remember last year I said I was going to play them sometime but I've got sidetracked into other things and I will eventually do them, along with replaying Ultimate Doom and Doom 2, this time starting each level from a pistol start because I feel like I want to do them again and want an extra challenge (and yes I will still do them in original DOS EXE). When that will happen, I don't know. I haven't forgotten either about Final Doom, No Rest For The Living, SIGIL and the cool wads made by the community and so on.

As for recommending source ports, I have some recommendations and I know I sounded so far like I am sort of purist due to the fact I played last year Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 in DOSBox and will continue doing so. It is true, I prefer to play certain types of wads in certain source ports, at least since the last couple of years. The original Doom games (Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom, Master Levels) as well as classic megawads such as Memento Mori 1 & 2, Icarus, Requiem and so on (mostly 90s wads), I prefer to play in original DOS exe for the intended experience. In some cases (such as 2000s and 2010s vanilla compatible projects, example: Doom The Way ID Did), I use either Chocolate Doom or Crispy Doom, so I don't have to worry about the original DOS exe limits, while the game retains the original Doom feeling. This includes being able to save the game in a large level without crashing the game (I don't have the patience of completing a long level without saving) and easily loading mods that required merging with iwad and other old weird methods of installing the mods by modifying exe and iwad, which I'm not a fan of. I don't like the game files being modified, so using a source port is a must for certain older wads that involved modifying the game files.

When comes to a much smoother experience for playing vanilla, limit-removing, Boom and MBF compatible wads, I recommend both Eternity Engine and PrBoom-Plus. Eternity is an advanced Doom source port that combines the original Doom compatibility with editing and gameplay enhancements (sort of a cross between vanilla and ZDoom, except without losing any of original Doom compatibility). It also supports Master Levels and No Rest For The Living as episodes for Doom 2 if you configure the path to them. When you select Master Levels, it will show you this menu and allow you to select any wad:

Spoiler

I think it is very handy, it allows you to play the levels without having to mess with the command line parameters or exit the game and start again. Of course you still have to pistol start the levels but I don't think it's that bad to be honest. The levels were originally meant to be played from pistol start and I think most Doomers can do the levels just fine.

I also find Eternity to be a very underrated port. I wish more people used it, especially for the recently released SIGIL which supports it as 5th episode in menu (Eternity has its own MAPINFO support, which supports more episodes in the menu). It even has nearly finished Heretic support (the next version should support it fully) and I'm sure Hexen and Strife will also be supported one day. It would be nice to have a non-zdoom source port that supports all the Doom engine games, that way people have a middle ground between vanilla and ZDoom, for the other Doom engine games. The only downside of Eternity Engine is that it has no compatibility levels (it has a compatibility menu for changing certain behaviors but most people wouldn't know what exactly to change in case of a problematic level) and some levels may not work correctly, for example UAC_DEAD.WAD (Doomsday of UAC). I remember years ago I played it on Eternity and got stuck, because it relied on old Tag 666 behavior that was working on old Doom versions, which was changed in Ultimate Doom. And since Eternity only emulates Ultimate Doom's behavior, you get stuck. Thankfully there is a solution below...

PrBoom-Plus is a very popular Doom source port that has very high accuracy with original Doom and can play pretty much any vanilla/limit-removing/boom/MBF wad, as long as you set the right compatibility level (usually the text file that comes with the wad specifies the right -complevel command) and it is extremely popular among Doom speedrunners. I was initially turned off by this port because of the default settings with the wrong aspect ratio with squished status bar but after messing with the settings and managing to make it look exactly like original Doom, the port just became one of my favorites. Much like Eternity, it runs pretty smooth. I highly recommend it and it is a lot more stable than Crispy Doom, IMO.

For the popular ZDoom and GZDoom ports, I only use them when playing a ZDoom/GZDoom wad or when the author of mod recommends it.

Anyway speaking of SIGIL, version 1.2 just got released:
https://www.romerogames.ie/si6il

[Putrid Pete]

RunningDuke, on 22 September 2019 - 12:58 PM, said:

cool post

Thanks for the headsup, now I'll have to replay Ultimate Doom + SIGIL again

Regarding the source port situation, I currently have 5 source ports installed for Doom: GZDoom, Zandronum, PrBoom+, Crispy Doom (and Chocolate Doom, but I hardly ever use it) and the Eternity Engine. Here's what I use them for:

Crispy Doom is what I would consider my 'main' port. I play primarily here because I like the vanilla feel with the 4:3 aspect ratio and the more crisp look over Chocolate. Like I said in my post earlier, just the simplicity of it is a real draw to me. I found out that it works pretty well with ZDL and so I use that to manage and launch the games. It works great for sigil, nrftl and mods. I also use the (no longer supported) variants for it, Crispy Heretic, Hexen and Strife.

PrBoom+ I use for when I want a similar vanilla feel like in CD but higher resolution. It's also pretty good for recording videos in better quality of your vanilla runs/demos.

Zandronum for playing online with my sis and friends.

GZDoom I use for more modern mods that are either incompatible with CD or PrBoom+ or don't work well with them. I usually fire it up for mods that completely change the gameplay around and turn doom into other things. I also use it for playing doom as sort of unofficial remaster. I usually use wadsmoosh to combine all doom content into one file and add certain visual enhancements to it. I also use it to run Heretic, Hexen and Strife in modern resolutions if I feel like going that route.

Eternity Engine, I' ll admit, is one that I kinda just have there awaiting more support for it. My main interest is the heretic, hexen and strife support if it ever gets that. I want a port that is accurate and can support those games. Personally I don't bend over backwards for accuracy, but I like to have it as a readily available option. I'm happy with the Crispy variants but there are days that I want to play them in high resolutions and with accuracy, so in that regard EE is very promising, and I' m definitely keeping an eye on it. It makes me very happy to hear they are close to Heretic support. I'm a big Raven Software fan and to have a high resolution, vanilla experience of their games will be so cool. Strife is an underrated little gem that I enjoy playing frequently and so I hope it is supported too.

Oh, and I use VirtualMIDISynth with all my ports. The soundfont depends on my mood, but usually go for a SC-55, SC-88 Pro, and Yamaha DB50XG. That last one mostly due to nostalgia as it was the card my uncle had in his gaming computer back in the days that I used for playing a lot of games as a kid.

[NightFright]

Keep your eyes open for Doom Zero which is scheduled for release on Sep 30:

https://www.doomworl...ars-of-doom-ii/

I played the demo two years ago and it was quite promising. If you like vanilla gameplay and you are in need of something to play in order to celebrate Doom II's 25th anniversary, this is definitely a solid option.

[Cherno]

I spent some time working on my Future Noir project.

[Zaxx]

Haha, you based the enemy sprites on Kingpin? That's awesome.

[DisgustedGrunt]

Ugh.

[Zaxx]

Haha, if you win something in the giveaways on the Slayers Club you get a message like this along with the stuff they send ya (sorry for the bad quality, my phone has... issues):

Man, their marketing is really maxing out the fan service narrative.

[Never Forgotten]

Saw Doom: Annihilation...................................................... no. Bad acting, bad guns, bad demons, bad zombies, bad lead, bad BFG, bad Hell, bad cgi, bad writing, bad everything.... they also fucked up big time:

Spoiler

They find the Doomguy's decapitated body...

[Cherno]

Zaxx, on 30 September 2019 - 08:21 PM, said:

Haha, you based the enemy sprites on Kingpin? That's awesome.

One of the first Doom mods I attempted was a Kingpin TC. There's a video of it on my YT channel as well.

[Sledgehammer]

Wait what? Doom Annihilation is out? I guess they decided not to show it in Japan or at least not promoting this trainwreck.

[Zaxx]

It's a direct-to-video movie, there won't be any theatrical release. I watched it a few days ago and honestly this movie is mostly bad because the budget was 2 cents. You can feel that there was a genuine effort in making something fun for the fans: there are a lot of references to the games, big and small so it's obvious that the people who worked on this know their Doom quite well. The acting is pretty bad overall but there are some nice moments, for example the guy playing Betruger provides some very solid B acting and that's fun. Amy Manson is pretty cool as "Doomgirl" too, it's just that she's clearly a bit miscast, she doesn't have the badass factor so it looks like they settled for the one person they could afford who can act. The script is not bad, it's just very-very standard stuff with nothing really interesting going on, "not great, not terrible".

But of course the lack of a proper budget mostly ruins the mediocrity and even the parts they seemingly blew the budget on look cheap. Like this is a pretty cool reference to the original cover art:

But this is the best the movie can look and it's just not enough. Overall I don't think it's a travesty, I didn't hate it but I didn't have much fun watching it either. It's a typical movie that just doesn't have anything going for it so at the end you're just like "oh well, I felt absolutely nothing, let's not watch this ever again." I really don't understand why this film exists, you can't even hate watch it, really. Maybe it's a way to hold onto the license but Doom is hot shit right now and this clearly could have been something better with a proper budget.

[NightFright]

Maybe they wanted to do this one because many fans complained about the first Doom movie not having enough connections to the games. Anyway, what I have seen and read so far tells me they should have used the cast of the first movie again, with similar budget, but better script and a story more faithful to "Doom lore".

It's understandable that you can't have top-notch special effects in a D2D production, but if it looks even worse than in any average sci-fi TV show, with actors that should either take a few more years of acting lessons or do something entirely else, you just shouldn't go through with it at all.

[Outtagum]

Zaxx, on 03 October 2019 - 12:48 AM, said:

You can feel that there was a genuine effort in making something fun for the fans:

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Zaxx]

Yeah, I don't like if they turn male heroes into females either but I think here it made sense. In a low budget film like this there is simply no way to do justice to Doomguy and with the place the character is at now (a mute, "mythical" Jason Voorhees like force of nature deleting everything that stands in his way) he may not even work as a protagonist in a movie.

For example if I was to make a Doom movie I'd include Doomguy but he would be a tool to be used in stopping the demon invasion and not the protagonist because that's the way to keep him mysterious really. My main characters would basically run from the demons most of the time and they'd eventually figure out that there's this dude on the base who's single handedly deleting barons so a large part of their survival would be figuring out what Doomguy is and what he wants to do. It would be like "look, they are afraid of him, how can we help him get to Hell and stop this".

And really it's a truth that the current "woke crowd" doesn't like to admit but when it comes to horror movies women were always the first choice for directors because they just work better. It's easier to transfer fear to the audience through the eyes of a woman because there's a bigger range of emotions you can show and they are physically weaker than men and that's why people like Jamie Lee Curtis have careers. For example that's why the Harry Mason like character of the Silent Hill movie is just doing some detective shit on the side while her wife is in all the scary stuff.

Also: if you watch the movie you'll see that Amy Manson is not there to do the woke shit, they just wanted to rip off the Ripley character from Alien.

[Never Forgotten]

But in a movie the Doomguy doesn't have to be a silent protagonist. Sure, he can be a man of few words, but at the end of the day, it's a movie. Doomguy was silent in the games to better help you feel like you're the Doomguy. I would prefer a movie that takes the Doomguy and makes a character out of him, then one that focuses on characters I don't want to watch, as they try to get help from the character I do want to watch.

[Zaxx]

They tried doing that with Karl Urban in the first movie and you know, I love Karl Urban but it didn't work for me. He was not Doomguy so I'd say treating him like how for example the Halloween films treat Michael Myers would be better.

I do agree that for such a movie to work you need a good plot and good characters though.

[Never Forgotten]

Zaxx, on 04 October 2019 - 07:17 AM, said:

They tried doing that with Karl Urban in the first movie and you know, I love Karl Urban but it didn't work for me. He was not Doomguy so I'd say treating him like how for example the Halloween films treat Michael Myers would be better.

I do agree that for such a movie to work you need a good plot and good characters though.

Dredd. That right there proves Doomguy could work. Dredd's personality is exactly how I'd imagine a talking Doomguy wouldbe. Besides, no one wants to watch a movie where your protagonist is a side character. That'd be like having a Duke Nukem movie that focuses on the EDF characters instead. With Doom, people want to see the Doomguy rip and tear, not get teased. Look at the reaction to Godzilla when he was barely shown. Fans were in uproar over it. Look at King of the Monsters, which mostly put Godzilla center stage, fans adored the movie. People want to see their favorite charactersdo what they do best, not some new characters whose only purpose is to pad the run time and attempt to help us forget the main character.

[PsychoGoatee]

Dredd is a great example of a character who keeps his words short and sweet. Funny coincidence that Urban did play a Doom guy before. A fully silent protagonist is always an interesting idea though, Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe being a cool fully silent character. I don't think Doomguy would need to be fully silent in an adaptation though.

I guess if much of the movie is him alone with the demons, a bit like the last act of the movie Alien, he'd mostly be silent just be default of not having people to talk to. To really split hairs here, I imagine Doomguy's personality being a little different from Judge Dredd's. He looks a bit crazy at times, maybe a little like Ash from Evil Dead he's kind of going loopy from the unimaginable situation.

[Zaxx]

Never Forgotten, on 04 October 2019 - 08:10 AM, said:

With Doom, people want to see the Doomguy rip and tear, not get teased.

That's my point though: you want to see Doomguy, not some dude playing Doomguy. Doomguy is supposed to be the avatar of the player in Doom and that should stay true in a movie too: you don't get into who he is, you keep him silent, you don't even take off his helmet because then he can still be whatever you imagine him to be. To me Doomguy is the guy I play as in the videogames, I want to see him in a movie, not an adaptation of him.

As for being a side character and all: Jason Voorhees is a side character in all the Friday the 13th movies yet he is still what the franchise is all about (well, not counting the first movie of course). A similarily structured Doom movie would be all about Doomguy, for example a movie based on Doom 2016 would still have to start with an introductory scene where he gets trapped in the sarcophagus at Kadingir Sanctum and then of course he has to wake up around the 30-40 minute mark and dominate the action scenes from then on. I think that would be more than enough screen time.

[Jimmy]

There's no reason to make a film based off of Doom in the first place. It's a fool's errand.

[Zaxx]

Jim Rockford, on 04 October 2019 - 12:53 PM, said:

There's no reason to make a film based off of Doom in the first place. It's a fool's errand.

Hey, the only thing Event Horizon was missing was the Doom license (and considering that Paul W.S. Anderson was a giant nerd back in the day and that he even used one sound effect from Doom... yeah, that's a Doom movie ). Anything can happen.

[NightFright]

Event Horizon is indeed a quite decent sci-fi horror movie. It's missing a real Doomguy, a BFG and the actual Mars setting, but other than that, it has a pretty creepy atmosphere which I would expect in a Doom movie.

I mean, it doesn't take that much to make a decent flick out of this. Take a group of marines, send them to Mars to investigate a distress call, let them experience creepy shit on the surface, starting slowly, then intensifying, some jumpscares until pure survival mode towards the end, with a badass Cyberdemon/BFG fight as a finale. With properly scripted dialogues, good actors and convincing special effects. Too bad there's probably not going to be a third attempt to get it right.

[PikaCommando]

Will the people who pre-ordered it from the Bethesda EU Merch store receive the pre-order doot skin/shotgun skin/bonus map and Doom 64?