Doom Sourceport Review : Autodoom

 Okay... We are now going to briefly do a series of sourceport reviews... This is the first and will be the only one done this month...  I am picking this particular one first to highlight one of the best doom community achievements ever... Namely, Autodoom...

Autodoom as a modded Eternity Based Sourceport that uses a bot to try to beat the map by itself, without player input. It mimicks the player, has a system of pre-generated bot nodes it uses to navigate any map on the fly, and for the most part can beat many of the "normal" (aka not ultra hard) maps it gets put in, provided you play it on easy..  It is not really good at Ultraviolence yet, but hopefully that will change soon.

How this bot is trained is a mystery to me, but the guy who made this thing did such a good thing with this that it destroys all other bots for doom by miles...  I tried several zdoom bots, as zdoom mods don't work in this port, and many of them simply could not navigate a simple randomly generated map or even the original doom maps.  And many of the above mentioned zdoom bots (I tried Zcajun, Doombot, TDBots and Zetabot) simply could not handle a randomizer mod and died a lot in the beginning of the first map..

This bot CREAMS its way through the same map and many others, provided you play on easy and use a dehacked patch... The one I provided makes the doom weapons faster,  makes it so you start with 150 health, and makes it easier...  But doesn't make it insanely easy either... It's not superwep.deh but it is less difficult to beat a map. With this dehacked patch, this bot destroys maps... I saw it pistol 2 revenants to death at the start of  a map, failing to die, when its health dropped below 40.  I saw it kick hell knight ASS in the next map and fight hordes of them with a chaingun and nothing else... This thing pwns enemies with plasma and the chaingun, as it's aim is perfect... It's knowledge of the map is also perfect, knowing where every secret is without having to research that crap.  It often maxes levels on the first try.

It does have a few downsides. The first is that this bot is an eternity based bot. It simply will NOT lead ANY zdoom mod. None work, not even omgwpns that supposedly works in eternity, works in this. I  got lucky and found a patch that adds in custom enemies/weapons in the place of original ones that works in vanilla and it works here well, but it sucks that this thing wasn't coded based on lzdoom or something better like that.

Another downside is based on this bots struggles with randomly generated maps. A lot of the time it beats them... But there are things it can't do and those things annoy me. Sometimes a pickup is put on the end of a narrow bridge with lava on either side... This messes up the bot and the bot falls in and can't get out 100% of the time.  It also messes up with lifts a lot and god forbid it runs into switch triggered elevators that require keys. It will obsessively flip ALL switches on these elevators till the elevator fucks up and blocks the player 90% of the time... It aso messes up randomly on top of that and can't jump across chasms in any map... So forget about it doing map02 or map11 of doom 2 due to that... Besides these issues, it is amazing...

Doom Mod Review(s) : dehacked attack/dehacked defense

 Randomizer mods are everywhere... And a lot of them are not that good... Many borrow the same enemies from other mods or realm667...  Many use hexen/heretic enemies.... Many simply don't have high quality enemies and weapons in them...

Luckily good ones exist... Thanks to the author of dehacked defense and dehacked attack we now can enjoy randomizer mods with dehacked patch enemies in them.. Dehacked Patch enemies found in wads such as strain, obtic, valiant, eviternity, etc... These dehacked patch enemies make their way into the mod dehacked attack... And dehacked patch weapons are now part of a similar made mod called dehacked defense, both made by the same person...

Dehacked attack comes with randomized enemies from various sources, not limited to the 4 ones listed above... Many dehacked enemies exist in megawads, and thanks to the author of dehacked attack we can play against these enemies in a randomizer mod now...  The option exists to enable or disable enemies from any source you want, so lets say you want to get rid of strain enemies, you can.  However, I found that that really is annoying, as obtic enemies come pre-disabled... I suggest you turn them on...  Similar options exist for weapons... There is also the feature to "level scale" the placement of new enemies and weapons by what map number you are playing, so that harder enemies are guaranteed to show up later in a mapset...  This feature is fun but I usually turn it off for max challenge... 

If you want a randomizer mod for Doom that has stuff not found in any other randomizer mod, these 2 mods are definitely a good choice to play. One issue however, that I had, is that these mods are hard as hell.. On easy, it felt like ultra violence... I died a lot in early maps and got lucky and beat a map03 that had tons of hell knights in it... It got really frustrating... besides that I can't even say anything is wrong with these mods... Download them and play them because honestly, no one is playing these mods on youtube and that needs to change. Part of the problem is that modded playthroughs are not preferred over vanilla ones due to the retarded vanilla obsession people have, and the other problem is that most modded playthroughs use crappy mainstream'/popular mods like complex doom/lca/ClusterFuck/Brutal Doom/Project Brutality and others.. People need to play OTHER mods... This one needs to be played more by people who play modded playthroughs as NO playthroughs exist for it on youtube... It's a shame, such a mod had plenty of time to gather playthroughs as it was released last year, but apparently the doom fans would rather play shit mods like brutal doom. 

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..

A new doom 2 mod was just made by me and released... Behold.... OPDOOM!

Intro

 Now that the new obsidian is out and it turned out to be great, with it's new prefabs and subway train halways, I decided to do a mod that is designed to help make really hard obsidian generated maps be more fun...

I've been playing a LOT of randomly generated slaughtermaps made with the new obsidian... They are fun as hell...   To make them even more fun was my goal.... So I took an old mod of mine called Generic Monster Randomizer and added a bunch of new features on top of it and made something I call OPDOOM...

About Opdoom

OPDOOM is a randomizer mod, a rebalancer mod, and RPG mod in one.  It rebalances Doom to be EASIER not harder unlike 99% of the badly done rebalancing mods out there...  This goes well with randomly generated slaughtermaps that spam 10-20+ hellknights/revenants/barons/cacodemons, etc per fight like slaughterwads made with obsidian tend to do.... 

To rebalance it, it does several new things...

-Introduce a RPG system where max health/damage resistance and movement speed are upgradeable...
-Makes the enemies have 0.5x hitpoints
-gives most of the guns in it badass, OP secondary fires (minus like 10 guns)

Such as:

Shotgun - Triple burst
Chaingun - Shotgun firing chaingun mode
SuperShotgun - Double Blast
Rocket launcher - Rapid Fire Blast
Plasma Rifle - Minigun Speed BFG fire mode (!)
BFG - Rapid fire mode
Autogun - Armor Peircing Rounds
Egosmasher - Quad Shotgun
AA12  - Quad Shotgun
Uber Minigun - Shotgun firing minigun mode (!)
Zombieman Rifle - Armor Piercing Rounds (more powerful than even the SSG (!))
Plasma Repeater - Three round burst

the following weapons do NOT have altfires

Tactical Shotgun
Explosive SSG
Sniper Rifle
Plasma Stream Gun
Flamethrower
Fist
Chainsaw
Pistol

To make it even more OP the following feature has been added, RPG elements...

Every time you kill enemies you get XP and level up eventually... By binding buy selected item and select item to buy to keys, you can use select item to buy multiple times till any of the following things
appears:

Max Health upgrade
Damage Resistance Upgrade
Movement Speed Upgrade

Then you can hit the buy selected item to buy that upgrade... Money (given out as you level up) is used to purchase these upgrades... Every 5 minutes a display of your money, level, and stats are printed...

You can also buy health, armor, ammo and powerups as  well..

Due to a weird bug I decided to NOT fix, your money doesn't stop at 0 it goes below it and you go into debt... When this happens, there is a  player damage penalty that happens every minute... I found though that if you spam tons of points into buying upgrades for your stats and pounded the crap out of damage resistance, this penalty is useless at actually hurting you, so don't be afraid to spam tons of money to make yourself ULTRA OP!


There are 5 skills you can use...

Heal
Armor Repair
Weapon firerate boost
Health Regen
Damage Increase

Each of these gets unlocked every 2 levels... Make sure to use these, as it makes the game much better..
Bind these to keys in options...

With the secondary fires of guns used only, and lots of points put into stats, I found that this actually BLOWS THE SMITHEREENS out of russian overkill for being the most OP mod for doom...  And throw in Obsidian slaughtermaps and you get INFINITE playability....

Installation instructions...

Download the self extractor here and unzip it into your doom 2 folder. Install Gzdoom... Several things are included... OpDoom and a patched version of the latest beta release of obsidian with some critical bugs fixed by me. Due to this don't use ANY obsidian builds on the obsidian site past beta 19.... Just use mine... There may be missing textures in some rare maps.. But that is rare...

Making an obsidian slaughtermap:

Go to your doom2 folder and find the obsidian folder and run the obsidian.exe there...

If using some other version of obsidian like the latest stable (beta 19) version set the following settings:

Click the triangle above quantity and change it to progressive
Set upper bound to 8.00
Set lower bound to 2.0
Set strength to 12
Set ramp up to 1.5
Set Monster Variety Jumpstart to Tougher

Change theme, level length and game to what you want, although you might want to not generate
maps for doom 1 with this or Final Doom as they are buggier than doom 2.

Have Fun...

Screenshots...

This is probably my second to last post here... Or my last.. We will see if this is my last.... That is up in the air... This blog is struggling now... So I just wanted to release this... A lot of my mods have been deleted off the internet thanks to to me losing the files after I decided ot clean up my pcloud to host backups only... But this remains at least.. Have fun!

What Games work well with Doom Styled Slaughtermaps? Lets find out...

 Ever Since Slaughtermaps have been made for doom 2, I've been wondering what other games could support such horde combat intensive maps...  When Making them for Wolf3d and Heretic I wondered if slaughtermaps were even something these 2 games could even do...

Slaughtermaps, Maps with enormous counts of bard enemies per room (30-500), interest me. I've played a whole lot of them since I played alien vendetta in 1999...  Soon afterward I played scythe 2, hell revealed, sunder and others... I never was really good at them, till I started playing them with mods like doom : the roguelike arsenal, and nameless rpg lite combined, but I always liked them...

Since I have the massive partial conversion mod called samsara : reincarnation mod installed, and it lets you play as different characters from other games, complete with weapons and enemies, I decided to use it combined with my texture replacers to test  to see, just what games work with slaughtermaps and what don't...

I randomly generated an 11 map slaughtermap levelset with the obsidian doom map generator and played it with samsara : reincarnation using various players and played them with the texture packs  I made. this is the result...

The answers will shock you...

Lets start with the obvious 3 everyone should assume work with slaughtermaps, but don't.... 

Duke Nukem 3d:

This one you think would work well with slaughtermaps but it doesn't at all. See, when you play obsidian generated maps with huge hordes of enemies with this, it tends to throw BOATLOADS of protector drones at you... This makes it almost impossible to not be shrunk, and your embarassing death quota rises up to around 100%.... It is absolutely NOT compatible with slaughtermaps, and is the worst offender of all the games samsara has..

Shadow Warrior:

This one you would think is good for slaughtermaps...  Despite the character being a total badass, he is NOT a powerful character, so deaths are plentiful.... His weapons are great, but he simply cannot handle hordes of monsters like the doomguy can...

Quake 2:

This one is a shock... Absolutely no way in hell could the quake 2 marine handle hordes of monsters. He died a lot in the early maps, which makes him weak as hell.. He hasn't even gotten to the later, harder maps yet...  And there he will get pwned.... It's just a matter of time.

Now onto the mid range, games that can just barely handle a slaughtermap...

Wolfenstein 3d:

Suprisingly, BJ Blazcowics is not a bad character for slaughtermaps in the wolf3d universe. Thats' because He mostly fights weak pushover nazis...  He  doesn't fight hard enemies for the most part. And when He does, he usually barely survives... He dies a little bit, but even he handled a hard slaughtermap level well...

Quake 1 :

The quake guy is not that bad at slaughtermaps, provided he gets lucky... He survived a tough map with some deaths but not a lot... None of the enemies were really strong or deadly... Some were but he could handle them... There was the issue of him running out of ammo though.. He had to use the super shotgun a lot, and that weapon in quake is weak.... 

Now onto games that can PWN slaughtermaps. Suprisingly there isn't a lot...

Heretic/Hexen :

Due to the fact the heretic enemies are not much harder than the doom ones, corvus actually kicks ass in slajughtermaps... He wiped the floor with the harder maps...  It was a shock, thinking that heretic has limited ammo and health, and to me would be harder than doom. But it definitely is in favor of him..

Doom 

This one is obvious. Combine the strong weapons, BFG, and great powerups with a strong fast moving character and you get a flawless victory!

Now onto the sore loosers, games that flat out SUCK for slaughtermaps, and should NOT be played with them whatsoever...

Blake Stone:

In Samsata, Blake Stone is the second worst game to play slaughtermaps with ... Don't do it... The enemies do TONS of damage, and the weapons are weak. Absolutely no way blake stone can handle even the easier maps...

Half Life :

This game to me had always been very hard...  I seriously doubt it could handle slaughtermaps. The enemies do tons of damage... The guns are weak.. The health is limited... I never bothered testing this because I assumed it would fail outright...