'Harmony Compatible' now available!

This is bound to raise all the harmony for all kind of Doomers on the forum. *ahem* Lame pun notwithstanding, congrats on the release!

Harmony kicked ass, I just wish it wasn't so short, played it in 2014.

Since 2014 a few new maps were added.

The original 2009 Zdoom release has 11 maps.

The 2022 Bethesda release has 2 extra maps [map12 and 13. Map14 is the Credit map]

Harmony Compatible has all the previous maps plus a bonus map [map15], designed for Deathmatch but can also be played as a short single player map.

Playing Deathmatch mode also adds hours of fun :-)

Hell yeah, congrats on the release!

My standalone/DOS edition is now up as well!

Nice to have Harmony as a DOS compatible! This is a really cool game!

Nice! Grats on release!

Awesome work there, making Harmony perfect on most ports, and now also as a fully standalone game on DOS :)

Tried this out, was a bit surprised that the pistol now has limited ammo -- I guess there's no way to make a Quake II style self-recharging energy pistol via DeHackEd?

Also it looks like there are no lumps for some of the extra menu items, I played in MBF204 but they're used in PrBoom/Plus and some other ports too IIRC:

Also is it me, or does the title screen use the 1:1 pixel ratio?

It looks a bit stretched in DOSBox:

Gonna check this out when I get the time!

@MrFlibble

* The original Zdoom release (2009) had infinite ammo for the pistol. For several other ports it is not possible to have infinite ammo in slot#2. (It is possible in vanilla if you use slot#1, but it would be counter-intuitive to have the pistol there). So for the 2022 Bethesda release I changed it to normal bullets. 

* Every port has its own quirks and resources. I added menu graphics for PrBoom+, but there are bound to be other (future) graphics missing. The goal was to make Harmony Compatible work well with most, if not all, limit removing ports. It does, so can accept it :-) Making one version that is it perfect for every port is an impossible task. 

* Results vary depending on the port you use and its setting. Some ports stretch the pixels, others don't. It is impossible to make it work correctly every time. Unless you make it port-specific, which is the opposite of what I was aiming for :-) 

I've quickly thrown together the missing lumps for MBF (I really recommend that one over BOOM 2.02, not in the least because BOOM does not show the ENDOOM screen):

harextra.zip

There are more extra lumps for other ports as it seems (judging by what can be found in Freed∞m IWADs), but I've not bothered with that for now.

2 hours ago, t.v. said:

Some ports stretch the pixels, others don't. It is impossible to make it work correctly every time.

I see where you're coming from, but I've always assumed that Doom is one of the games where image correction to the 4:3 aspect ratio is the accepted standard.

Besides, the main menu/title screen art is so good it's a bit of a shame to have it distorted.

Oh, and I nearly forgot, it looks like the ON and OFF lumps that go with the MESSAGES: option have a vertical offset of -3 instead of 0, appearing not aligned with the MESSAGES: part (you can see that in my screenshot above).

Ive always wanted to cross this off my list of wads, as im generally a fan of TV's work (I think Revolution was the second megawad I ever played, after Vilecore), now is the ideal time to make a go at it. The fact Harmony is more of its own game than Doom has made it harder to approach in the past, but yeah, its always been on my list.

On 11/8/2023 at 1:43 PM, t.v. said:

@MrFlibble

* The original Zdoom release (2009) had infinite ammo for the pistol. For several other ports it is not possible to have infinite ammo in slot#2. (It is possible in vanilla if you use slot#1, but it would be counter-intuitive to have the pistol there). So for the 2022 Bethesda release I changed it to normal bullets.

I don't think that's entirely correct. As far as I know, in vanilla doom melee weapons never use ammo, and bullet/projectile weapons always use ammo regardless of the slot, even when choosing the ammo type incorrectly labeled as "infinite" by Dehacked. You can still have an infinite ammo projectile... but only by sacrificing the BFG ball, and changing the "BFG ammo use" from 40 to 0. So probably not worth it.

Overall, I found the new pistol very enjoyable and useful with its power and accuracy. The only thing that bugs me is... the early levels now seem to have a whole bunch of extra cell ammo pickups, long before you ever get a cell weapon. Were you planning to make the pistol use cell ammo before changing your mind? Seems like a pretty good idea.

Here's some more thoughts I have about the new release... (with spoilers)

I didn't have time to thoroughly replay every map, but I just noticed that this one door on MAP02 is now visually barred from one side. That's promising! I imagine there may be more good tweaks across the first 11 maps that I missed.

The new SFX are a mixed bag. Most of them are good, but the pistol and shotgun sound a bit underwhelming, the switch is oddly gross-sounding, and the fast doors are the worst offenders - why do they rustle like paper when opening, and clang like a hammer hitting an anvil (making an impact sound too early, too) when closing?

All in all, a very nice re-release that gives Harmony some well-deserved extra love! I remember playing it for the first time after getting it on DVD with the CD-Action magazine. Despite some familiar elements, it took me a while it's using the Doom engine at all, let alone with vanilla map format from the very start! A real masterpiece. The gameplay side of things wasn't always as good as the other elements, but I could say the same about... most non-Doom FPS games, really. So it's hard to complain.

Quote

...You can still have an infinite ammo projectile... but only by sacrificing the BFG ball, and changing the "BFG ammo use" from 40 to 0. So probably not worth it.

It is more complicated than I wrote, but I don't want to check it right now :-)      
Changing 'BFG ammo use' will cause problems in Unity port. It HAS to be 40. 
Also changing the amount of bullets the player starts with, will make the game unstable. It has to be 50! I learned that the hard way. The game crashed 70% of the time for no obvious reason. It took me weeks to figure out what caused it. 

Converting the Dehacked from the Zdoom version (2009) to work with the Unity Port was a big challenge.  
These are the main reasons: 

1: Like I stated above, Unity seems to have its own quirks. 
2: I didn't use Dehacked since 2009 and never used it with vanilla restrictions. When you use Dehacked for vanilla Doom you cannot give an Action to a State that originally did not have an Action. When I made the Dehacked in 2009 I gave States that originally did not have 'Action'. This worked fine in Zdoom, but not Unity. For a long time I didn't realize this and was frustrated why my Dehacked from 2009 didn't work.  
3: When Unity port runs into a problem, it crashes without a specific message, making it difficult to figure out what the cause was. 
When I made the Dehacked for Scientist (2023), I started from the ground up. So I could make a change and then test it. If it crashed I knew it was because of the last line I changed. But with Harmony I started with a big incompatible 'black box' Dehacked and had to find the bugs in between. It didn't help that some bugs 'only' crashed the game X% of the time, so testing was tedious. 

Eventually I decided to keep the weapons closer to the original Doom to avoid/solve issues. 
For the pistol this meant it had to use bullets instead of infinite/ cells. Indeed the cells in the earlier maps were originally intended for the 'energy pistol'.  

In the last phase Xaser did an amazing job with the Dehacked an fixed a lot of things to improve the project.  

SFX:
The SFX for the Bethesda release (2022) were made by Chad Mossholder: the Sound designer at id Software. I still cannot believe he took the time to do this.

There is no way my sounds can reach his level, but I did my best :-).    

Map15:
Indeed the visible word 'Back' on the poster was no accident. The symbol on the aircraft is also subtle reference.
Originally I was going to call the map 'Back', but I went with 'Rematch' because it refers to Deathmatch as well. 

'Omissions':  
- Echidna still has her secondary attack. First she fires 2 Seekers and then bullets.
I could have used the Keen-effect on the Echidna, but I thought it would be cool/ more original to have her drop a key instead. Like a gimmick. You don't see that often in vanilla mods. 
- The Centaur in 2009 fired a mine and then a grenade. In 2022 I removed the mines. Mines are technically possible, but they were too annoying. The player should be able to run around without getting paranoid about stepping on a mine. In a game it feels OK to be shot down by a monster, but there is no honor in dying by a mine. 
- The flies above the Beastling looked weird in low resolution, so they had to go. I re-introduced them in Harmony Compatible (2023) above pre-placed corpses though.  

Played through this whole thing in one sitting, love just about everything about it. My favorite aspect is all the vanilla tricks, not sure if this was in the OG ZDoom release, but it makes it more impressive to me personally. Prolly a top 10 wad for me. Thank you :)

How much did that pistol was using bullets now change the maps/balance as compared to the original? I am curious if a source port implementing infinite ammo for pistol specifically for Harmony Compatible would make sense with current state of the maps, etc?..

Like in OG Doom, the pistol is rarely used after you obtain a better weapon. So I don't think the pistol had much effect on the balance. I added the knife to give the player an 'infinite' ammo weapon in case of dire emergency. So a better way to look at it is: the infinite energy pistol (Neutron Pistol) was replaced with the combination of the pistol and the knife.

I think removing the grenades had more impact on gameplay. In vanilla (/Unity port) the number of different projectiles is very limited so I had to sacrifice the grenade. Instead I got to add its bigger brother: the Cluster Grenade. It was supposed to fall to the ground like a grenade, but I thought it looked cool when it was floating :-P

Oh, I see. So I take that as pistol ammo addition was more of a refinement than a limitation in the end, even if it was prompted for by a limitation in the first place, and that it should not be looked at outside of the whole player arsenal.

I decided to make a custom version of MBF to run Harmony Compatible in DOS with a few small improvements. This is based on gerwin's Maintenance release 2.04 with improved sound code by @ludicrous_peridot, and uses miniwad as the dummy IWAD to make the game stand-alone without the need to modify HarmonyC.wad from the original release (thanks to @brightentayle for making me aware of the miniwad's existence!):

• hcdos102.zip - binary package, only needs HarmonyC.wad to run
• hcd102_s.zip - source code

Apart from merging the improved sound code and modified Allegro library routines courtesy of @ludicrous_peridot, which should make OPL music sound better (DMXOPL v1.11 included and loaded by default), I only made a few cosmetic changes.

First off, I felt it to be a moral obligation to restore the original Harmony 1.1 HUD font, which I gather had to be changed for compatibility's sake in HarmonyC.wad:

The menus now use a font colour scheme similar that in the original Harmony 1.1, with varied background patterns:

The same also goes for MBF's dynamic help screen:

Additionally, the minimized HUD now uses correct colours too:

I also restored the original par times from Harmony 1.1, except for the new maps that don't seem to have custom par times. But I just copied the par time from MAP11 for them.

As a bonus, you can use the included HCOMPAT.WAD to restore the HUD font in other ports, like Crispy Doom (haven't tested it with anything else yet).

Somewhat embarrassingly, it turned out that I actually had not set @ludicrous_peridot's modified Allegro library to support MIDI secondary instruments when I first compiled it. This is fixed now, and I have updated the download links in the post above.

Another update! To take full advantage of @ludicrous_peridot's Allegro modifications, I used MIDI2MUS to convert the soundtrack to MUS format, which is currently the only one supported to play secondary instruments, and packed them into HCOMPAT.WAD. The OPL3 music now sounds even better, and quite close to the MPU-401 version when coupled with DMXOPL v1.11.

The updated download links are in the previous post above.

I never used MBF, but I'll give it a try once I have some more free time :-)