cq75

True, the RNG itself is predictable enough for demos and TAS, but (based on player feedback) I'm not sure the RNG is predictable enough for a player to anticipate the RNG, in real time, on their first playthrough. Personally I'd like to make more maps that are very hard, but don't require repeated playthroughs.

I'll list a few of the ideas I've had over the years, most of them have caveats but hopefully it'll help. - One way you can increase difficulty is to focus on how much distance, on average, is allowed between the player and the monsters during a fight. If you shape the rooms and place the enemies in a way that the distance between enemies when fighting is generally rather short (I'd guess something like 3-5 feet) almost any fight will become very hard, even just a handful of imps (depending on what weapons / ammo you have). The only downside of this sort of difficulty is that can make the game more RNG based, because the monster movements are not deterministic (case in point, my old wad, hardweps). The RNG aspect might be unique to Doom (Serious Sam might pull this sort of thing off better), I wish I knew a way to work around it. - As others have mentioned, removing armor makes the game less forgiving, and so does reducing ammo. Reducing health pickups does too, though be careful -- some stressful running around at 3 health can be fun, but if the player spends the whole game being one hidden chaingunner shot away from death they'll probably quit, so I'd recommend having at least some health in the map. - In addition to that, you could also put the ammo that a player needs to finish a fight in the room where the monsters are coming from (so that they are forced to dash their way in (alerting even more monsters), dash out, and repeat while they are still trying to fight their way out of the first horde (be sure the ammo in the next room is very clearly visible, to avoid the need for players to memorize the map). This trick can make the players feel like they are surrounded and it will make it so that there is no easy way to hang back and snipe monsters, and it also defeats the old "Wolf3D Cheese" tactics of running into a room, shooting, closing the door, and then waiting for the monsters to walk up. The downside of ammo starvation in general is that the game could quickly become almost impossible with a slight aiming error, and monster paths and damage aren't deterministic so it also makes it more RNG based as well. I recommend leaving at least something like 1 or 2 additional clips / shells / rockets to account for random damage. - Having the player rely on hard to use weapons like the RL instead of a shotgun/SSG/Chaingun as a primary weapon at close range has its benefits, but it assumes that the player can predict the movement of monsters, in some cases this can work but you have to be reasonable with it and avoid assuming that monsters will move in some exact way. - Custom / tweaked monsters can do a lot. With even a minor tweak like having monsters not drop ammo or changing firing rate, health, or damage, you can really affect the game if you do it carefully (e.g., Doom 64 style lost souls).

Another idea, do you only do Boom compatible maps? If not, do you think it would be worth attempting a TAS run of an invasion map by yourself? Maybe look through some maps in Armageddon Invasion and Alpha/Delta invasion [1] [2], most of them are kind of long but maybe one or two would work? Note: You'll need skulltag_data.pk3 for those.

Can you beat MAP01-MAP03 of my wad using TAS? Maybe on Nightmare if UV is too easy? UV is beatable without TAS but just barely (takes a lot of practice and a bit of luck). It would be really cool to see a TAS run, maybe a no damage run if possible. http://ifocserv.net/ftp/Random/HardWeps_r3.wad

Thanks for the links guys, I didn't realize doomwiki.org had such good reference pages. I replied to the topic again with some links http://www.chexquest.org/index.php?topic=5307.msg195497#new Also there's been quite a few attempts at Chex community projects, most of them don't last, unfortunately.... it would be awesome to have a good sized map pack for Chex though.

Does Scared count? http://www.brackeen.com/scared/ It's a java game, it was hosted on a few websites a long time ago

Couple things I want to mention real quick 1. I'm tired of high pitched, screechy imp sounds 2. I don't really care for the weapon sounds either 3. Just wondering, how many of you guys like "press a button to melee kill/do a fatality", and what do you like about it? I always just ignored melee "finisher" moves. 4. The techbase map looks to me like a better lit Doom 3 2.0, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I hope there's more varied environments. the hell video looked okay. 5. I'm very surprised to see the shotgun doesn't need reloading (like Wrack's shotgun), and they don't seem to need iron sights. 6. What they did to the chainsaw seems to have made an already pretty worthless weapon into a deathtrap, assuming you're stuck in place when you're using it. 7. Is there a reason why most of the monsters are greyish? 8. Nitpick: The old door opening sound seems to play longer than the door is actually opening

I quit using Microsoft Office unless I had to after Office 2003, I use Libreoffice now. I use Office 2010 at work, though. I'm getting tired of hearing Microsoft saying that people will get used to their half baked UI ideas (e.g., Windows 8, the ribbon interface), I used Office 2010 for 3 years, almost every day, and I still am far less efficient with it than Office 2003, and it takes up more screen space (minimizing the tabs only works if the tab names are descriptive of what's in them, I can't remember what's in "Home" and what isn't). I know it probably helps sales to make the new version of Windows / Office look different than the old version, I'm pretty sure this combined with limited competition in office / "let's copy apple/google" is the reason why these changes get suggested, and why they stick with them, not to make the software actually easier to use. Autodesk put the ribbon in autocad, I'm guessing to try to make Autocad easier to learn, but yet for me coming from no experience at all with CAD tools, I immediately had an easier time learning Autocad with the menu bars (hovering over every icon to figure out what it does is slow), and I eventually settled in to manually typing commands.

I'm doing coding work which is a priority, I haven't done much mapping. However, as far as mapping goes as of a while ago: Single Player / Coop: Very, very slow for me to make, I'm trying to get away from extreme difficulty as the main draw of the maps, I think I'd like to put more exploration and nonlinearity in. I have a few things I started a while back for non-Doom 2 maps. Duel: I've made probably 50 of these over the years, I'm out of ideas for right now. DM: I could do more DM work again, but I'd probably want to do it with a different theme, maybe with a different weapon set (there's some weapon mods out there that might be fun to experiment with) CTF: To be honest I'm not sure what people want

I like it, I think the first time I happened to actually be able to listen to it without the sound effects drowning it out was when I was drawing/testing MAP30 of fastdm. I wish I would have turned the music up years ago.

I've got a few notes on MAP08 I'd like to mention Minor thing: In the cave leading to the lift in the area behind the yellow key door I recommend making that cave look a little different from the other caves to make it clearer that it's the one with the lift. The first time I played this I hit the switch and I wasn't sure what it did, I didn't hear the lift, so I thought it did something in that twisty trail to the RL area. I also recommend brightening up the lift sector so it's easier to tell if it's raised or lowered quickly, since the area is brownish looking when it's lowered and brownish when it's raised.

It looks like they can't really figure out how low res they really want to go, random parts of the levels have several inch thick pixels but other parts have far better texture quality. Sometimes the level geometry is too sharp, sometimes the textures are solid color, sometimes they're not, I'd like to say I know what they're going for here but I'm really not sure. It kind of looks like a bizarre Doom 3 mod.

I really hope he puts that on github or something so that somebody can port it to Linux. Then I can run it on GNUStep and then this odd daydream of mine will be complete heh

True but I'd personally think it would be funny if you could prove the game wrong if you were good enough to fight through a group of monsters designed to kill you and escape to the bonus level.