So i looked more into the sky transfers issue, and @NoisyVelvet you might really just have to use another port or "update to" DSDA. Literally any other port i'm aware of allows for sky transfers under doom 2 compatibility, prboom+ probably doesn't just because it's so old and abandoned.

I played through the latest versions of the maps I hadn't done demos/feedback for already. Wrote down a few thoughts below.

@Cuppykeks
Banquet of Flames V2:

Here's a demo (not blind) recorded on crispy heretic: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HlPOQcmSk_gF6WEUcuhs2WV0MsWpndlS/view?usp=share_link

I really liked the abundance of bombs here and the ability to approach the map in a variety of ways. The detailing and vibrant colors here are beautiful. The secrets were really satisfying too, especially the wings of wrath.

The ending of the map is so cool! I love the silhouette houses and the floating structure, both the inside and outside of it. Definitely helped give the map a strong sense of narrative, not to mention that it looks just awesome.

I wasn't able to find 2 enemies. I found all the secrets, so you might want to check to make sure that these last two enemies I missed are killable.

Overall, this is a fantastic, short and punchy map! I ended up playing through it 3 times in a row due to me being a dummy and dying at the end to crushers or other things I shouldn't have. But it says something that it was still a joy to play the third time in a row.

More minor suggestions:

There are some places where flying makes the sky look glitched out (didn't show them in the demo). It might be more trouble than it's worth to fix this, though, as you'd have to ensure that the player cannot fly higher than a ceiling with a sky texture in sight.

The chain texture in the doortracks looks kind of odd to me, since it looks like the chain is pushing up the door. But of course, this is more of a personal preference kind of thing.

I see now on your previous post that you intended the HOM at the end, but just mentioning that it seemed like a glitch when I saw it, FWIW.

Cinderblood V2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rvuDMe4F9-VTv65_awujldPk9j4fuPya/view?usp=share_link

I also wasn't able to find 2 enemies in this map, so again you might want to verify that they aren't stuck or anything.

I liked the new secret, but flying does allow the player to reach the edges of the map, which look very off. It might be more trouble than it's worth trying to make them look okay on a map this open, though.

Forgot to mention before that I really like the combined the mist and water vapor where the water meets the lava!

@joe-ilya
Library Theatre V4:

I did record a new demo on crispy heretic, but it unfortunately got desynced somehow. The map still seems great! Anyway, here were just a few thoughts on my more recent playthrough.

Ammo and items felt much more abundant this time. You probably don't need as many tomes as are placed, but I don't think it hurts here to have more than necessary. Overall, I felt gameplay was balanced and fun; I found no issues here.

I noticed this time that the windows to the outside close when you start the final battle at the theater. Really cool detail there! Nice chessboard at the start too.

Minor suggestion:

I like the skylights overall, but some of them look a bit odd because they have too thin of a border. I think they would benefit from having thicker borders if possible, to make the walls/ceilings look like they have some more depth.

I had a partially done map for this sitting around, and I decided to finish it up in the hopes it can get included.

crescent_cliffs.wad

Map Name: Crescent Cliffs
Map Slot: MAP23 (for the MIDI)
Music: whatever was in MAP23 of the resource
Tested with: DSDA Doom 0.25
Difficulties: implemented
Multiplayer: coop starts placed, additional multiplayer monsters and ammo, DM starts placed
Play time: likely 30-45 minutes
Notes: This map leans more on exploration and incidental combat; it's the TNT to Lucky Clover's Plutonia. It still has a few combat setpieces, but everything is more free-flowing and less tightly choreographed.

doom14.png doom13.png doom11.png doom10.png doom09.png doom07.png doom01.png

Yes, I've previously posted screenies of Jumpwad Map03 in Tartar, then captured in DOS, not DOSBox, but tall textures and extended nodes were really half done. I've now made improvements to this and also added loading of DeepSea nodes, so that, say, Map31 of Eviternity, Map09 of Avactor can be loaded, skyscrapers don't have texturing artifacts in Map02 of Jumpwad and in Map03 geometry is correct which was required for this nice little diamond animation. DOSBox I'm using now struggles with more advanced maps, but the target platform for Tartar is native DOS (plain or with Windows 9x), where performance is much better.

@kvsari You can ignore those. The sprites are from the Heretic sprite fixing project. I might actually remove those, at least for the time, since it is pretty annoying to see every time the editor is opened. The errors that show up is one of the reasons I went ahead and merged the resource WADs.

Does anyone want NPC textures? If you want to write a lot of text but don't want to align each letter then use c.eev.ee/doom-text-generator/ to generate your words as a single graphic and include it with your map when you need it. They'll be from here. Feel free to look for anything else you want from that pack as well.

Also MUSINFO works with Crispy Heretic so we can have more than 1 episode with unique music so problem solved there!

Another picture from the same WAD :S

alt text

Chaingun, easy. It's DPS is low, ammo capacity is low, and to me it's always been an odd choice to give a marine a chaingun over a battle rifle. Maybe because T2 came out a couple of years before Doom was released? IDK The only reason I use it is sniping or a low shotgun ammo situation. It and the pistol need better DPS options, like dual wielding pistols, and a high RoF less accurate SMG and similar RoF but more accurate Carbine as replacements in the 4 slot. But yea, finding a freakin' chaingun and then realizing it's only capable of ever so slightly more damage per second than a pump shotgun, while that shotgun gives you way more damage from a full ammo pool, that's a real letdown moment.

Edited because I don't proofread well.

Important info regarding the Firemace:

Heretic's Firemace only has a "~75%" chance of spawning in total at one of several Firemace spawn points placed on the map. Even then you can only place a maximum of 7 spots for the mace to spawn. When the MaceSpotCount reaches 8 the game has an error. In deathmatch, the firemace will always appear, but there will still be only one on the map.

So the Firemace weapon pick up doesn't work the same as the others as it's not guaranteed to spawn in, even if you only have 1 Firemace spawn. It's coded this way to be a rare weapon as with the Tome of Power it kills all non-boss enemies in one shot being extremely powerful.

Thank you to @SilverMiner, @lobo, and @zedonk for the information.

Testing a bit I'm not sure just how random it is which mace will spawn out of several 😵

Map 33, 34 and 35 to hold overflow maps for all ports, and xINFO to provide access to them in modern day ports

32 midis from Windows, the link is in the video's description:
https://youtu.be/tCeJ3CKbxMM

Here's some of my favorite wads that left such a strong impression on me you can see their influence in my stuff to some degree or another depending on map:

Sunder - Every map has the progression, ambience, scale and music of a final showdown, something that inspires me greatly. Going to Hell - WIP megawad that never got finished that i'd describe as "BTSX E1 without the cookie cutter level design". Paradise - Has combat, aesthetics and music that inspire me like nothing else. To me it almost felt like playing a whole new game. Lost Civilization - Gigantic explorational lush levels that make you feel like you're in a real place, without sacrificing the fun of gameplay. Hurt - This is the only one of these that is one single map, and despite that it feels like something special. Even from looking at the screenshots you can tell that.

There's many others i'd recommend like TNT Revilution and Eviternity, but i think those above are on a whole other level. They felt like whole unique experiences for me.

@dmslr 😑 it's not really bad, but i think there will be better places.

Well so far I'm loving it! I like how you made some modifications but kept it really vanilla, its awesome!

For me, Death's Bells was unlike all the other tracks back when all I had was the four Doom IWADs. All these rock midis, spooky midis, then there was this one midi unlike all the rest that was just plain enchanting and powerful, and also situated on Wormhole, one of the most atmospheric maps. I remember that my PC at the time had a specifc soundcard in it that made that midi really awesome, and source ports and upgraded PCs later on never captured the original feel.

There was also a neat remix of it on OC Remix that was...haunting.

Into the Beast's Belly is notable for being loud and a perfect action map midi, and it fits the final map so damn well, to the point that when I was working on TNT2 with Kyka, I asked Bucket to make a track that used the opening notes of it as a callback, as at that point in time, the first map of TNT2 started in front of the dead broken IoS from Last Call. This was lost in translation in Revilution, when we inherited that midi, but Jaws threw out my plan of also starting at the IoS (We were going to make it start at the blue-eyed IoS seen in the BOSSBACK for Evilution), but ive heard that the opening notes of Beasts Belly energise most players and get them in the mood for TNT, so I definitely did SOMETHING right asking for that!

@Cuppykeks said in Stupid things in maps that bother you:

Wait what's the pushback against UV? Do they put an inaccessible monster on UV only or is it something even weirder?

Stuff like the drama over Magnolia, with Ribbiks sabotaging his own wad and making you submit demos of HMP to get the un-cut version, as well as offering bonus maps to the first lucky people, due to his longstanding grudge against 'UV only', then there was the weird conversation on DW where a bunch of elite modders were plotting ways to screw over UV max players, whole thing just really comes across as exceptionally rude to me. Like, why be so weirdly hostile to your userbase? I just dont get it. Maxing out the items, kills and secrets has been part of the game for almost 30 years, and people have been playing on UV for almost as long.

On other subjects; one thing I forgot to mention was widescreen stuff. We live in 2022, in an age where pretty much every TV and monitor you'll ever see is 16:9 minimum. Even Doom and Strife's official rereleases have everything in 16:9 now. It baffles me that 99% of the Doom community hasnt adapted, and that some of the bigger ports like Eternity STILL dont support widescreen, when the 'shitty Unity port' does. It makes me a tad grumpy that even with the widescreen asset thread and the IWADs all being nicely WSed on GZDoom courtesy of Nash, people arent budging in the slightest. Is it really so hard to start your new assets in widescreen THEN reduce them to 4:3 for older ports? You futureproof it that way.

Yes, im picky and cantankerous, I know 😛 Its one of many side effects of working in a video game industry firsthand, changes how you look at modding. Theres a level of efficeincy and forward thinking you get used to, at least, where I worked.

@KUBA18i Super late to respond to this (I think I hesitated from trying to check the credits error way back when) but yeah thank you for playing and for the review! Glad you found my puzzle map very palatable!

@Devalaous Yeah, I agree, an IOS ending is lame and underwhelming after playing 29 maps, IOS's place nowadays, if any, should only be in the middle of the set as a mid-boss.

I know the project is over, but I really wanna say this because I didn't have time to do it earlier - this was a really awesome idea for a project and I wish I could have contributed. It reminds me of this old map, and honestly, maybe it's better I couldn't contribute, because I probably would have made something in a similar style in order to troll people 😄

A new release of RZDoom (3.2.0)

This is a rather small update.

Reverted to FMODEX for audio from FMOD Studio due to Studio's lack of support of various audio backends and channels that were causing issues.

EDGE-Classic 1.32 is now up on the project page, as we had a couple more things to clean up, including a bug with the secret percentage counter that I introduced with the 1.31 generalized secret fix (the original problem was fixed, but only the first secret you found would count towards the total). There's incidentally a couple of new features that are geared towards making game menus more dynamic and not relying on original hardcoded values. This will be fleshed out more as we progress towards version 1.4

CHANGELOG for EDGE-Classic 1.32 (since EDGE-Classic 1.31) Bugs fixed A recently introduced bug which caused the Secrets Found % to not increment after finding the first one. player.use_inventory() consuming item without running the associated script if the script was already running Changed hardcoded finish/par time widths to prevent custom fonts from being clipped at 4:3 resolutions "Read This!" menu item missing for Doom. General Improvements

DDFSTYLE: Menu items that are images instead of fonts will now also apply the font colormap setting in that menu's
style entry (if defined)

DDFSTYLE: CURSOR.FORCE_OFFSETS=<boolean> - When set to true, will honor cursor image's offsets even if they cause misalignment with
menu entries. Default value is false

New Features

COALHUDS: new commands

hud.rts_isactive(tag): Returns 1 if the script "tag" is currently enabled, 0 if disabled. hud.rts_enable(name): Will execute RTS script with matching tag, if one exists. This replaces previous COAL command "player.rts_enable_tagged(name)" which should be considered deprecated.

DDFSTYLE: new text style - SELECTED

Uses all parameters that regular style font entries use (SELECTED.FONT, SELECTED.SCALE, etc) Will only apply to the currently selected/highlighted menu item If not defined, will fall back to previous behavior for backwards compatibility