old Doom Mod of mine "Improved Doom" Re-Released....

I made this doom RPG Mod called Improved Doom a long time ago and I think I need to re-release it after playing it again tonight and seeing how much better it is compared to the generic mods... Built from the ashes of a previous Mod by me that was a complete failure, improved doom is mostly a rebalancing mod, designed to be played in super hard maps, ones that throw in huge hordes of difficult enemies...

It is also a monster/enemy replacer mod that randomly replaces enemies and guns with new ones, similar to AEOD, but with the emphasis of Doom friendly ones being used only. That's right, no enemies from other games, only weapons and guns that fit doom well are used in this mod.

I've seen a lot of Randomizer mods and one thing that always bugged me about them is that they always made doom harder, not easier.  Look at mods like Complex Doom, HXRTC, etc... All of them make you take way too much damage.. So for me playing stuff like Alien Vendetta in them is not possible, being a subpar doom player....

I needed something to rebalance the game, add new enemies and weapons and also add in RPG elements as well... Doom RPG+RLA do this but they are again too difficult (especially at higher levels when you take more damage from enemies than at lower levels). I wanted something with similar features to Doom RPG+RLA/HXRTC but balanced for people who aren't great at the game so that They can survive harder mapsets without dying 5-10+ times per level in tough maps that throw hordes of revenants, arachnotrons, hell knights and barons and archviles at the player.

To Rebalance the game, Improved Doom makes a lot of big changes to the game, not limited to:

-Rebalanced Skill levels. No longer do you have a skill setting that encompasses a specific enemy damage factor and enemy count. Enemy counts in skill settings are choseable seperate from the enemy damage. You have the following skill settings due to this:

Easy Enemy Count, Low Damage
Medium Enemy Count, Low Damage
Hard Enemy Count, Low Damage
Easy Enemy Count, Medium Damage
Hard Enemy Count, Medium Damage
Easy Enemy Count, High Damage
Hard Enemy Count, High Damage

-The enemy damage factors for the skill settings are reduced to make it bearable in tough maps.
The first 3 difficulties are pathetically easy and you take only 10% damage. Medium makes you take 30% damage and hard makes you take 50% damage.

-A built in upgrade system allows you to upgrade character abilities at any time, it only requires that you have money (given when you level up - that's right there are levelups like in RPG games in this). You can upgrade your characters Movement Speed (which starts slow), Damage Resistance (which can start low or high, see above), Max Health and Armor. Each upgrade costs a certain amount of money. I found that once I upgraded my players Damage Resistance a lot, even cyberdemons could not easily kill me. This makes the game Potentially way easier but it depends on how you use your upgrades... If you don't put a single point into damage resistance upgrades it will be a challenge, much more difficult than doom in that reguard. But if you put tons of Damage Resistance upgrades onto your player, you will be an absolute god of doom.

-Cyborg Powers... If the last feature didn't make you think this will be piss easy, than this will..

You get cyborg powers as you level up not limited to:

-Cybernetic Movement Boost : Makes you move faster
-Cybernetic Shield : Makes you invulnerable for 30 seconds, by erecting a forcefield around you...
-Cybernetic Healing : Allows you to heal yourself without  the need of medkits. Upgrades for this
can make  this a full heal ability later.
-Cybernetic Flight : Allows you to fly around
-Cybernetic Health Regen : Allows you to slowly regen your health...
-Cybernetic Weapon firerate Increase : Doubles the firerate of all weapons.
-Cybernetic Weapon Damage Increase : Makes you do 4 times as much damage
-Cybernetic Time Freeze : Freezes time for 10 seconds.

You can select which power to use with defined keys in the commands section and use another defined key to use that selected power. Downside is that there is a 30-60 second cooldown period for all powers so you can't use them like crazy. But careful, strategic use of forcefield, damage increase or firerate increase can make maps easier.

-Enemies have less health than mormal. On Easy difficulties (first 4 skill settings), they have 50% heath and on medium skills (next 2 skills) they have 75% of their normal health, and on hard they have 90% of their normal health.

-Insanely overpowered guns...
All of your default weapons are insanely suped up. All shotguns minus the new quadshotgun are semi-automatic now, chaingun is a killing machine, rocket launcher fires way faster, so does the BFG and the plasma does a lot more damage than it used to. Add really overpowered custom weapons to that and you get a kickass arsenal.

Improved doom does random spawning well and it uses a lot of new enemies and guns found on the beastiary but another thing it adds are enemies not found on the beastiary such as Doom 64 enemies and custom ones that are from old megawads dehacked patches but converted to Decorate or custom ones made by me to be difficult.

The mod is mostly finished. I am doing some long term testing in slaughterwads to see if it is bearable for me. Starting with Alien Vendetta. So far I've gotten through maps01-03 of it and died only 2 times thanks to low damage resistance on map01. Maps02-03 I died not once and that was due to me putting tons of points into damage resistance.

Screenshots:

Download it  here

EDIT : New version 4.0 released! This one features magical weapons taken from Eriguns 2.... They are randomly dropped by origuinal doom  and doom 2 demons...

EDIT : Version 4.5 released with a new eating and sleeping system included... Now you have to eat and sleep to survive in improved doom...  Just like in Fallout new vegas... Also diseases are part of it now... Make sure to heal yourself and then cure diseases when you get diseased.... Your health determines if you catch diseases... The lower the health, the more severe the disease you get is....

Doom Mod : Generic rpg, released...

 Here is a little rpg mod for zandronum/lzdoom/gzdoom.... It has a levelup system where you get credits per level up and a buy sell system to buy items and upgrades, plus skills... It works like this...

As you level up you get credits and every 2 levelups you unlock a skill... The total amount of skills is 5...you need to bind keys to use the skills and the buy sell system... I bind the skills to f1-f5 and bind selet item to buy to q and buy selected item to e..

While in the game just hit q to cycle through items to buy.... Stat uprades are available also... Hit e to buy the selected item or stat upgrade...

Download link is here:   
https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZOcYkVZtosefRe8qOjS3KsAyM9yzVJ7NfBV

Should work with any other mod, provided you load it after said mod...

Doom mod Review(s) : "Death and Decay" and "Doom Atmosfear"

 I have 2 doom mod reviews for you guys today.... I am reviewing the Doom rpg mod "Death and Decay" and the weather mod "Doom Atmosfear"....  Both of these mods require zandronum and for the best results with the first mod, you should download a zandronum 3.1 srable build... Not an alpha or a zandronum 3.0 release...

Death and Decay is an RPG mod for Zandronum... It features the usual things an rpg mod has, levelups, stats, perks (no skills this time), and some other RPG-Esque features... On top of that it has a ton of new guns for you to use, plus a lot of new enemies to fight....

The catch? This mod gives you a lot of guns but makes you pay money you earn by killing enemies to get most of the realy good ones...  The guns are pricey, at 4500-5500 dollars per gun, and that means you have to specialize...

The levelup system is setup so that a menu controls how you allocate points to stats and perks and allows you to buy and sell... This menu is mouse driven and is quite clunky... You have to hover your mouse pointer EXACTLY over the stat to increase it and the same thing is true for perks.... To make things worse it doesn't pause the game... Which to me is fucking stupid.... So make sure to clear out the final room of a level before allocating stats/perks points! That's so enemies don't actually shoot you while updating your character...

To make things more interesting, enemies do tons of damage in this mod. This mod is HARD... It's a lot harder than doom rpg/rla which you can cheeze by putting tons of points into max health... It's harder than Nameless RPG lite/DRRPG due to the fact that that has the same thing in common with Doom RPG/RLA....  And due to this and  one gamebreaking bug which I will get into later, you might want to play this with a bot mod and run a botmatch in zandronum....

The enemies seem well designed... A lot of them come from recognizible sources but there are a lot of original ones, including reskinned heretic/hexen enemies..  This makes sense, as the game has magical weapons in it that you can purchase...  It has a lot of new enemies though and many of them are not from the realm667 beastiary and this makes it fresh.... Same thing is true for guns... it has a LOT of new guns and some of them are quite nice... The new shotgun is based on one from terminator : future shock and is quite well done...  It also has an explosive shotgun, but that thing is a bitch to get... It has an auto shotgun but you have to purchase it..  You will need it later on, as levelups cause enemy choices and enemy difficulty to ramp up with you as they level scale with your level..  By the time you are at level 9 or so you will start to encounter very deadly foes and you will need better gun by then so make sure to purchase something powerful like an autoshotgun by then...

The one gamebreaking bug is what keeps this mod from being a great mod... Whenever you resurrect to make things easier after countlessly dying due to  the insane enemy difficulty even on easy, you end up running into random crashes with "corrupt zlib stream" errors...  I had no issues with this mod in a botmatch so this means you might want to try this in skirmish mode instead with spawn in place or in a coop game as it's meant to be played... I played it with tdbots and the universal compatibility patch for mods that mod has andd that seemed to not have issues so far, so keep that in mind.

The other Mod I am reviewing is called "Doom Atmosfear" and is a rain/wind/time of day mod for zandronum... This mod puts in those features and does so really well.. The rain effects are fantastic and you get hexen like thunder in doom...  The wind effects are also really well done.. The day night cycle is quite nicely done... This mod is a good fit to play with the previous mod due to the lack of compatibility issues...  I play both mods together and have no issues... Only issue is that you start at night time sometimes and it is dark as hell and the software mode flashlight sucks... Best to play in opengl, unlike me, who has a PC that opengl breaks with hardware lockups...  I got around the first issue by typing "dt_sethour 7" in the console to fix that... I used that as a makeshift sleeping system.. The other issue is not something I can do much about...

Anyway, if you like multiplayer doom, check these mods out! I would like to see more playthroughs of the first mod done... On youtube, very little people are playing anything good with this mod... They are playing tiny 10 minute videos on one map, or badly done videos of them being slaughtered in harder mapssets.. This mod is not good for harder mapsets, wish someone would do a full COOP stream of doom 2 or obaddon/obsidian maps or something easy in to show off the whole mod being played like it's intended.. It would help me a lot, so please, if you play zandronum, consider my request..