Comments - Xterra

Is this just fantasy?

Hey friend, I found out a way to make it to where direct hits from the Cryo Launcher will shatter frozen targets. It's a bit wasteful on ammo (that's two grenades each...) but it works. It helps in sustained fire.

I'd have the splash do it too, but with the way Doom works, it just results in ice corpses immediately shattering.

That's by design.

It's a class-specific weapon for the Gunslinger-- the class-specific weapons will only appear in gameplay if you use the Classy Bastards addon (qszx-cb.wad); they *do not* show up in gameplay otherwise, they can't be acquired or dropped, and I'm fairly sure you can't even pick 'em up if you summon 'em via the console. Same goes for other weapons like the Heavy AR, the Gatling, the AMR, the Crossbow, etc.

The code and assets are all in the base mod file, by necessity; the addon simply enables them in gameplay. Leave off the addon, and the game will always start you with the "standard" shotgun/pistol/50 green armor loadout for quicker startup.

(EDIT: I named the wrong class. The Cowboy gets a *lever-action rifle*, not the revolver.)

Yeah-- the classes only modify your starting inventory, but are otherwise identical in movement, damage resistances, etc.

You can play without them loaded if you leave off the Classy Bastards addon file, of course; you'll start every run with the "Standard" shotgun/pistol/50 green armor loadout if you do so.

I've got that one handy, so I'll have a look.

Likely something to do with the spawners getting jacked up somewhere-- it happens occasionally and I've no idea how to fix it without completely screwing up the spawners.

Specifically, what levelset was this?

Oh Christ, that'll be another thing to fix in 9.1. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
In testing, this is also a problem with the revolver, and likely a couple other weapons. I will be ferreting those out ASAP.

Yeah, that'd be an extreme palaver to do, and a bit too complicated for the mod's gameplay loop. There are hotkeys for each and every weapon (and I mean ALL of them) you can bind in the control options menu; those can be usable as a stop-gap for now.

What I'm thinking of doing is a universal kick that does about the same damage as a punch, would get a boost from berserk packs, and packs knockback-- but *would not* drop the goodies that slot-1 melees drop. I have found myself wanting the option too; the trouble is slotting it into the gameplay loop and working out the code...and dealing with the tedium of implementation.

To explain a bit, the way the grenade toss on altfire works is that each and every weapon has (and HAS to have) a codeblock which has the player toss a frag; the only things changing are the gun sprites that the code calls for (and where the sprites are drawn onscreen for separate frames of the animation, because some guns are bigger than others). I suspect a kick would handle similarly and could be adapted from the grenade code, but I still would have to copy it to all 100 weapons, one-by-one.

It's certainly on the list of things to try, and wholly possible to be a change added to 9.1 alongside the finished monster writeups.

You can shoot enemies with any given non-ice weapon to shatter them, if you'd like. I've been thinking of putting in a melee kick at some point.

I'm not too sure I could speed up the shatter cycle, and making them incorporeal would render them unshootable as well. I'll look into the options, though.

Glad you like the mod!

Yeah, 4.10 is good. It's just 4.9 that's busted.

Sentiment's appreciated, friend. Working on version 9.0, hopefully releasing it before year's end.

What version of the engine are you using, and also what IWAD?

That's what LZDoom's for. LZ 3.8 uses OpenGL 3.0 rendering and maintains rough parity with GZ up to about the 4.2 branch. I'm already kinda pushing it keeping 3.6 compatibility, and I develop the mod on whatever version's currently available, and my rig is a laptop from 2013. Running the mod on hardware from before 2010 is...basically begging for locking yourself off from practically any GZ mod made in the past five years or so that uses any ZScriot whatsoever...which is growing in number by the day. Plus, I'm a one-man developer doing this mod for free on a free engine. I'm not an engine dev. GZDoom is not the Source engine; it's meant to run on recent hardware. I myself am kinda on the outskirts of compatibility, and I'm well aware of such.

I can't bend over backwards and basically strip out half my mod's functionality, A/V and gameplay tech just for compatibility's sake, especially when there's an engine fork that keeps the legacy renderer, mooting your issue.

This mod is not meant to run on Zandronum. Like, at all. It's singleplayer.

I...have no words. I tried so, so hard to clearly spell out what this mod requires, and yet you go and do that.
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Cripes, I'm starting to lose faith in humanity. Before you complain at me next time, please at least try to run the mod in the minimum specified engines? Please? It'd literally take only a few minutes, and you can find mouse-driven GZ launchers that do the same things that Doom Legacy does for level-selection. And as I've stated elsewhere, there IS a fork of GZ, LZDoom, that still runs the legacy GL 3.x renderer. Try that one, then get back to me (if you still give a damn).

That particular error message is related to ZScript code the mod requires to function. I cannot downgrade it. Most other mods containing ZScript will give you a similar error. Update your engine; it requires GZ 3.6 or newer. Preferably the latest version. It's in bold text on the mod page, too; it is not me "forcing" you to update, it's you consciously ignoring version requirements that *I spelled out as clearly as possible on the mod landing page*. Mind you, I can run the latest engine on a ten-year-old laptop, so you frankly have little excuse to NOT update outside of maybe DRLA or REALLY outdated hardware or something else like that.

Plus, they run better, and there are features in newer engine versions that ZX takes full advantage of. If you refuse to update, that's on you; I cannot make the mod feasibly work with an engine that is by now nearly a full version number out-of-date. If you're worried about performance, you can try LZDoom's last version, which ZX is also certified to run on.

I don't mean to be rude, quite honestly, but when you're accusing me of deliberately breaking compatibility with an older pet version of the engine that would cripple critical features of the mod and would unacceptably hamper functionality otherwise, I'm liable to get a bit surly. Besides, I didn't ever say this mod was aiming to be Zandro-compatible. This mod's meant primarily for *singleplayer* and also, when I said "GZ 3.6+ or LZ 3.8+", I meant "GZ 3.6+ or LZ 3.8+". That doesn't mean Zandronum, that doesn't mean ZD 2.8, that doesn't mean Doomsday, that doesn't mean GZ 3.2.

In other words: RTFM, and don't make me tap the sign.

I'm thinking of making nail ammo a bit less generous in terms of pickups (they were nerfed a bit in this update anyway), but yeah, generally you're supposed to have a decent amount of most ammo available at a given time unless the player is incredibly wasteful with it; the exception is superweapons, as they chew through their ammo, usually of rarer varieties (cells, cores, Argent...) and do so quickly.

Even with the generous ammo distribution, it's still usually a bad idea to use a slot-9 or slot-0 weapon as a main because you'll run dry on ammo at a critical time, unless you've got the powerups or pickups handy to mitigate that.

Oh, one thing I also wanna note: the gameplay balance is such that powerups are *generally* not required. They're there if you need them, and generally pretty strong-- hell, I even finagled it to where, if you've got one active, it will *stay* active on a level transition. ZX is a gameplay-above-all mod for that reason and others.

Yeah, ammo's on the generous side, especially with melee ammo drops being a thing. This is by design-- some weapons use *a lot* of common ammo fast, like, say, the minigun, the Perforator, the Shockhammer, the Autocannon, etc.

The difficulty lies not in ammo starvation, but in trying to keep yourself alive. You usually have to worry more about health and armor than ammo. I'm not taking the Doom Eternal/Turok approach.

If the player dies to lack of ammo, it's their own fault most of the time, barring the mapset doing the starvation. The melee ammo drops, Ammo Forges and MegaPacks are an attempt at mitigating that.

Lovely to hear. And yeah, another update will come later this year, hopefully. A relatively-mild one, mind.

Danke. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Thanks! Version 8.1 will be posted soon.

And as of the upcoming v8.1, that number rises up to a cool *one hundred*.

It's great to see the Mac port of Wolf3D get some love after all these years.

One minor thing-- it doesn't seem the old cheat codes work. I'm typing "wowzers", "burger", "groan", etc. and no response.

You planning on putting those in a subsequent release?

Thanks! I hope you have fun.

Are you loading the base mod first or last? For the addons to work, the base file must be loaded first.

Yeah, I didn't test the mod with Obaddon, just plain old OBLIGE. I wouldn't doubt that the scripting might be dicking up the mod's workings, but if there's, say, custom waterfalls, custom animated flats or custom switches that conflict with the base game's stuff? *THAT* will certainly screw around with the mod.

And...sadly, I don't think that I could inoculate against that without some pretty extensive patching.

I have to disagree; the inability to kill the monster with ballistic weapons and its speed results in a monster that, if encountered in some early levels, is effectively unkillable unless you lure it to a barrel or tank the explosion-- which, with the damage it seems to be dealing, can instakill a player at 100 health. You can't get a weapon that kills one of those monsters in Doom 1, for instance, until the chaingun secret in E1M2. Certain mapsets would be even worse about this.

If the monster were, say, a rare replacement for a pinky demon and slower-moving, that might be a touch better overall.

In short: if you can encounter it before you can feasibly kill it without a very ill-advised tactic (seriously, the gauntlet is an emergency weapon at best in my experience), it's unfair. The enemy isn't broken, per se; just needs more workshopping to get going right.

Yeah...honestly, any enemy that's *meant* to **** off a player and basically instakill them is a bad enemy.

E1M1, on easy. One of those bastards was one of the first guys I saw. Boom. Dead.

I would suggest getting rid of the enemy entirely or de-bullshitting it, because that is, IMO, RNG-enforced trial-and-error gameplay...not to mention a detriment to the mod.

It's...honestly bad game design on the order of the level "Silhouette Sunset" from Golden Souls 2.

That would be one loooooong video. As of v8.0, there's 66 weapons available to everyone, not to mention the 19 class-exclusives in Classier Bastards, for a grand total of 85.
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Maybe one'a these days I'll get something like that up and runnin' for y'all.

Why, thank you!

Huh... I've also done the same with OBLIGE wads, and got no such error. That is quite strange.

I'll have to look further into this, but for now I cannot replicate your issue. Same IWAD, same mod, same kinda RNG'd-up levelset, autoloads disabled...and nothin'.

I haven't the slightest clue what would be causing that, as OBLIGE mapsets don't screw with the textures, and for *sure* they shouldn't eff with the animation definitions.