16/05/2012-17/05/2012 @03:20:37 ^05:03:15

Invasion of the Damned

A replacement episode 1 for Freedoom, consisting of vanilla-compatible maps, made because the author believes Freedoom should be a vanilla project despite it having been a Boom project since day one. (This occasionally gets debated on the forums, always with the same outcome.)

E1M1, E1M2, E1M4 and E1M7 are the corresponding maps from Freedoom, possibly modified for vanilla limits. The most interesting is the first, as a vanilla conversion of Freedoom's E1M1, a map which was originally made to show off nearly all of Boom's more exotic features. So, it loses quite a lot in the conversion, but is not bad despite the removals. It's also worth noting E1M7 is completely unbalanced from a pistol start, but the original in Freedoom suffers from that too.

The remainder save for E1M8 are taken from maps on /idgames with appropriately permissive licences ("you may do what you want with this map", etc.) Several of them I have played before and indeed posted on this site.* However, somehow in the compilation process E1M6 was broken and is more or less unbeatable (a floor in front of the exit door was lowered 64 units, creating an invisible pit you can't get out of, covering a large area which must be traversed repeatedly.)

E1M8 is the only map made solely by the author. It is a straight remake of Doom's E1M8 that has more or less identical gameplay and a very similar but slightly smaller layout. (Room of demons and barrels with lift up to computer map, corridor, red-walled lift up to two barons - no spectres though - lowering walls, sector type 11 exit) I have to note this wouldn't get accepted into Freedoom today due to being too similar to the original.

Honestly, with the bugs I can't really recommend this as-is. On the other hand Freedoom itself is full of broken, half-finished maps, obvious placeholders, and almost identical remakes of stuff from the original game, so perhaps it's a parody...**

* I distinctly remember E1M5 (power station), have no memory of E1M6 (outpost) even having played it before which means I must have only played it once or something, and I don't think I ever touched E1M9 before.

** Note to moderators: this is a joke. I help maintain the thing, I should be allowed to make fun!

Mordeth, revisited

It was 15 years old a couple of months ago and is still an amazing piece of work. It seems like a source port PWAD with all the modifications it pulls off, but came out nearly a year before anyone outside of id even saw the code. How the author worked out some of the tricks is beyond me and even now I had to take the wad apart to figure out how the disappearing fog works (although in hindsight I should have known, I think.) However:

The worst part is that the version on /idgames is still the one stuck in the early 1997 pre-source-ports era. The version for source ports on mordeth.doomworld.com is a broken link. If you want a version that works in modern engines, put the filename "mfb97dsf", from the download page, into a search engine. Although having to search around was far more preferable to my memories of using 3ddownloads.

Preview of Jenesis, based entirely off MAP01

Nicely detailed, with a good progression and glimpses of unreached parts of the level, but disjoint. Map splits into individual rooms/areas which don't have much bearing on one another, you work through one and move on to the next. Manages to be deceptively hard: doesn't seem too bad until suddenly you realise you have no health and/or ammunition and should have been playing a lot more carefully.

Monster placement can be irritating: the author likes plutonia-style far-off chaingunners, for instance. At one point there are a bunch on a ledge above your line of fire and too far away for the autoaim without charging straight towards them (I admit this part was frustrating because it killed me after 20 minutes careful play. I cynically noted that it would have been trivialised by using an engine with mouselook.)

The wad seems to have been roundly praised by the community, but that rarely says much. Hopefully it will feature less disjointness and less death-by-a-thousand-cuts later on.

05/05/2012 @15:24:47 ^15:58:05

Paste bins

Features I look for in a paste bin, roughly in descending order of desirability

  1. command line interface
  2. finite expiry time
  3. clean interface

The first is absolutely essential; if I have to faff with a web interface, I'm not going to use it. A clean interface is necessary so you can paste patches at people and they can just pipe the url into patch or git apply or whatever. As for finite expiry time, the nature of the medium for which the paste bin concept was invented is inherently ephemeral, so too should be the pastes.

pastebin.com

Has (1) if you bother to figure out the necessary scripting. Great at (2), you can even have things that expire after 10 minutes.

Fails (3) completely, the page you get back is covered in garbage, flash applets, social networking, you name it, you get back 12k+ of html+javascript (not including page requisites - images, css, adverts, etc.) for a 4 byte paste (although you can stick "?raw=" into the URL you get back in an appropriate place)

sprunge.us

Almost perfect, (1) is implicit and the main page tells you how to use curl to do it in one line, for (3) it couldn't be cleaner (you get plain text by default but it will do syntax highlighting if you append things to the url)

Unfortunately though it has no support for (2) and I hate the idea of my random pastes hanging around for ever.

30/04/2012 @21:42:09 ^02:27:00

Pallace Skorn

This is a single-map wad set in a kind of jungle temple. It replaces a couple of the monsters and weapons. The imp becomes a kind of green lizard thing that throws green fire at you and the chaingunner becomes a commando with an uzi. You can get this uzi which is more or less a sped-up version of the chaingun, but unfortunately an off-centre weapon, hard to aim with. The pistol gains a silencer, although it does not affect its behaviour, just its look and sound. Some of the sound effects (the imp replacement's wake and death sounds) are in .wav format. They don't work properly in engines that don't support playing .wavs directly (such as the engine the text file claims is required...)

The architecture is quite simple with even natural rock areas being quite angular, and there isn't much in the way of clever lighting. The wad adds quite a lot of new textures, which are fine but didn't sort of make you go "wow" or anything. It's basically like something out of 1996; indeed it all added up to being vaguely reminiscent of All Hell Breaks Loose. A cut-down version, obviously.

The uzi (chaingun replacement) is arguably too fast; it renders most monsters incapable of returning fire. It certainly does use up ammunition at quite a rate, you have to watch you don't hold the fire button down any longer than necessary. The map ending, in which you fight a cyberdemon in quite a cramped chamber under the temple, is rather trivialised by the weapon immobilizing the monster. (The level ends when it dies, bear that in mind if you want to go hunt for items/secrets before you fight it.) However, the imp replacement is harder to kill than the original, and its projectiles move much faster; the chaingunner replacement, although weaker, has its highly sped-up weapon, and can eat your health up very quickly.