Category: doom

Technical Hurdles With Other Realm.wad

It’s inevitable in any creative project that things will fail and you’ll have to redo them.

After a long & busy period at work, I found time to load up my WIP megawad and get reacquainted with the levels. I found out that tweaks to gzdoom’s lighting engine have made the experience inconsistent and sometimes unplayable. All of these screenshots are set to the same level of brightness, they’re just using different light rendering modes.

Luckily DECORATE has a function that allows you to force a certain light modes. Sector lighting is now set to dark all the time but I’m not having much luck getting the levels back to their old aesthetic.

Doom: Other Realm.wad

Here’s some screenshots of a long-term wad/megawad project I’ve been working on that’s tentatively being called The Other Realm. It’s an atmospheric / horror themed wad that celebrates the concept of Quake 1.

After playing Quake I really felt like there was a lot of unused potential. The atmosphere was fantastic and the textures, despite the limited palette, really brought out the Lovecraftian gothic atmosphere. The next time I was in Doombuilder, I decided to load up the Quake texture set to build a Quake room. I’d only ever made original Doom map format maps, so I went a little more ambitious and made a UDMF format map. That let me add some slopes, and then I decided that I needed one or two sprite replacements to suit the mood. Before I knew it, I was knee deep in a project that existed partly to celebrate Quake but mostly to teach myself DECORATE. It’s been a slow journey. I’m still inexperienced and learning as I go. It’s currently a gzdoom-exclusive level pack, 3 levels in so far.

The lighting has been a problem. Quake textures don’t look good in Doom’s normal bright lighting, and every gzdoom sourceport update that tweaks the rendering completely messes the visuals. It hasn’t helped that I didn’t discover dynamic lights until I was 3 levels in (and to be honest, my experiences with mods with lots of DL isn’t great). Everything is carefully crafted sector-based lighting. To help ensure the mod looks the same for everyone, I’ve set it to force dark sector lighting but there’s still plenty of graphical work to get done.

High Noon Drifter Fan Art

terminusest13:

A wonderful take on Basilissa as done by my friend Fran. He likes the idea of her having a human form to disguise herself on Earth, alongside her actual demon form.

As always, his art is magnificent in every way. The linework is crisp, the designs are awesome, and I love the way he did the fire hair! Thank you very much!

(As originally posted on Tumblr by TerminusEst13) I’m continually blown away by the amazing creativity in fan communities.

Doom: High Noon Drifter


“High Noon Drifter is a GZDoom weaponset where you play as a gunslinger that’s stuck around for a little longer than the end of the wild west era. The weapons and overall tone is relatively low-tech, complimenting more natural-style mapsets for roaming around castles, ruins, and other assorted gothic setpieces. You make use of some ordinary guns that any joe could scrounge up, a handful of antiquated pieces, and a couple dark artifacts in a quest to dispense frontier justice to an ethereal threat.

If you’ve been craving a “Weird West” sort of weaponset, or even more of an adventurer-type rather than a soldier using military tech, hopefully this’ll be up your alley.”
– TerminusEst13

I finally got round to playing High Noon Drifter for Doom. Cowboys are awesome so it stands to reason that a weird west cowboy mod should kick a lot of ass.

I initially loaded it up with Strange Aeons (hoping to emulate the creator’s very cool gameplay footage) but at first the mod didn’t gel for me. Maybe it was just that some SA weapons like the crossbow and AK47 remained in the game, or maybe it was just the need to get used to the quirks of the new items, but I just didn’t get into it (I’ve since learned that a compatibility patch is needed for Strange Aeons).

I then tried it with JCPC, the Japanese Community Project, and that time it turned out quite awesomely. I had a lot of fun and will be going back to it later today. The weapons feel good to use, but the movement is where it’s at. It’s pretty satisfying to slide all over the place and let loose with dual SMGs or a quad-coach gun. I’m already a third of the way through JCPC and I think that High Noon + JCPC is going to be one of those really memorable playthroughs, like my D4D + Scythe game.

High Noon Drifter is one of, or maybe the first, Zscript enabled gameplay mods for Doom. This allows it to  do some extra cool stuff not usually possible in existing modding languages for Doom. It also makes HND a gzdoom only mod for the foreseeable future. So what has this incredible scripting potential been used for? Well, in High Noon Drifter, the power and potential of Zscript has been used to let you take off and throw your hat at enemies. Yes. It really has that TerminusEst feel to it.

Of course there’s other Zscript shennigans going on – you can also throw a boomerang to pull items to you and use a cursed skull to transform into a giant fire-breathing demon waifu. Very fitting for JCPC.

Basically, after some initial stumbling, High Noon Drifter turned out to be pretty satisfying to play.

Forum topic and download are here.

Doom: High Noon Drifter

(Originally posted on Tumblr by TerminusEst13)

High Noon Drifter is getting closer and closer to release, with only a small handful of things left to do.
So with that, I’ve distributed a couple builds out for folks to test and share their thoughts on, and I’ve also been doing some serious playtesting of it. And there’s been one mapset that I think has fit wonderfully.

This is a run-through of Strange Aeons, Episode 1, with High Noon Drifter on UV. I don’t really go for many secrets or 100% completion, and many of the weapons are still unshown, but hopefully you enjoy nonetheless.

TerminusEst

I’m really looking forward to playing this. The new abilities look super fun.

Tomorrow’s War: DOOM

An army list I wrote for use in Tomorrow’s War. If you’ve bought a box of Maelstrom’s Edge, this’ll let you use the Epirian models (hopefully converted!) as Doom marines.

I nearly wrote accompanying rules for demons, but I started work on FRAG and have concentrated on that. Please note that these rules haven’t actually been tested on a table yet

United States Space Marine Corps (Doom Marines) Platoon
Troop Quality: d10-d12
Morale: d12
Confidence: High
Tech Level 2+
Armour: Light (1d)
Supply Level: Abundant

Special Qualities: Close Combat Monsters, Hard-to-Kill (d6), Old School, Pain Resistant

 Platoon Organisation
           1 Command Squad (5 marines)
                       Officer
                       NCO
                       x2 Engineer (breaching tools, drone interface, communications equipment)
                       Medic

           1-3 Marine Squad (10 marines)
                       Squad Leader
                       Support weapon user
                       x2 Fireteam
                                   Fireteam leader
                                   Support weapon user
                                   x2 Marine

Marines are armed with battle rifles and pistols. Squad leaders may use pistols or shotguns. Support weapon users may equip chainguns, rocket launchers, plasma rifles, or the fearsome BFG 9000.

The command squad may split and join other squads.

One marine per fireteam may add an underslung grenade launcher to their battle rifle, giving +1FP dice per attack.

Options
Mega-Armour: May upgrade the command squad to defence 2d.
Heroic: By default the Lt and and ‘Sarge’ are TQ d12. Up to 3 non-command staff may also be upgraded to TQ d12; these units may equip non-standard equipment such as shotguns, super shotguns and/or chainsaws.

Wargear
Pistol (TL2 TST pistol, AP1)
Battle Rifle (TL2 TST rifle, AP1)
Shotgun (TL2 TST shotgun, AP1)
Super Shotgun (TL2, TST shotgun, AP2, cannot attack outside of  Optimum Range)
Chaingun (TL2, medium support weapon, AP3 / AT 1 (L),  Intimidating)
Rocket Launcher (TL2, medium support weapon, AP3 / AT 2 (M),  Intimidating)
Plasma Rifle (TL3, ESW, light support weapon, AP2 / AT 2 (L),  Intimidating)
BFG 9000 (TL3 ESW, heavy support weapon, AP4 / AT 3 (M),  Intimidating)
Chainsaw (TL2 close combat weapon +1d)

Support Drones (non-canon)
All drones are controlled by marine engineers who operate them remotely via their command uplinks.

If left without a controller marine drones will enter sentry mode. Nearby marines can ‘claim’ uncontrolled drones by entering base contact with them. The drone will then join the marine fireteam as an escort, adding to team firepower.

Marine engineers with command uplinks can activate them remotely from anywhere on the board. The engineer and his bots benefit from the grid.

Spider Drone – TL2 dumb bot. (TQ d8 unless controlled)

Heli Drone – TL2 dumb bot, ignores terrain due to hover movement (TQ d8 unless controlled)

Light Warmech – TL2 smart bot (TQ d8, fixed morale d10)

Heavy Warmech – TL2 smart bot (TQ d8, fixed morale d10)

Heavy Warmechs count as Power Armour in addition to being a smart bot. This adds the following rules to the usual smart bot rules:

Intimidating to non-power armoured troopers.
Enhanced strength (count all weapons as one class lower than usual for movement)
Possesses close combat weapon
Close Assault Monster
Contributes a full initiative dice as if an armoured vehicle

Drone Wargear
Drone support gun (TL2, TST, AP2)
Light Mech Rail Rifle (TL2, ABW, light support weapon, AP2, AT2 [L])
Light Mech Flamethrower (TL2, flame-thrower)
Heavy Mech MMG (TL2, TST, medium support weapon, AP2)
Heavy Mech Autocannon (TL2, TST, medium support weapon, AP2 AT2 [L])
Heavy Mech Energy Cannon (TL3, ESW, medium support weapon, AP3, AP2[M])
Heavy Mech Shoulder rockets (TL2, medium support weapon, AP3, AT3[M])
Heavy Mech Shoulder multi-missiles (TL2, light support weapon, AP3, AT2[L])

Energy Support Weapon Rules:
Team Firing: Ignore 1d of infantry target’s armour or cover.
Split Fire / Weapon Team Effects: +1FP, -1 to reaction tests (all), ignore 1d of target armour/cover (TL2+), ignore a additional die of target cover / armour (TL3)

Personality – The Doom Slayer (Doom 4)
d12/d12, high confidence, armour 3d (TL3), abundant supply

Special Qualities: Advanced Life Support, Close Combat Monster, Dreadful, Hard-to-Kill (d8), Intimidating, Jump Infantry, Pain Resistant, Old School

TL3 Power Armour: Intimidating to non-power armoured troopers, enhanced strength (count all weapons as one class lower than usual for movement), close combat weapons, contributes a full initiative dice as if an armoured vehicle.

Counts as a two model team in close combat (for the purposes of determining outnumbering and close combat attacks). Since the Doom Slayer counts as a two model team armed with close combat weapons and possessing the Close Combat Monster quality, he rolls 5d12 in close combat.