Spie812

Look at what you've done to me.

Eternity is one of my favorite ports. However, much like any other, there are some features that I feel are missing or could be done better. Most of these are small features that I don't think would be very difficult to implement, though I admittedly don't have a feel for that sort of thing. I have wanted these features in Eternity for some time, but somehow they have not manifested themselves through the power of waiting and vaguely hoping. I figured that I may as well throw my wishlist out into the open for consideration. Kill totals that take into account arch-vile revives and monsters spawned from scripts. Cubic Worlds is an example of an Eternity WAD that does the latter. I guess scripts mean that traditional kill counts are potentially impossible to calculate in advance, but increasing the monster total once a script spawns enemies could be enough. Make the -vanilla parameter persistent. Currently, the option is reset when the player starts a new game or IDCLEVs. I believe this is due to -vanilla being primarily designed for demo recording, but it would be nice to have for casual play as well. In a similar vein, quick toggles for various compatibility settings. Obviously, I don't expect Eternity to have full complevel support. However, an option to quickly switch the various compatibility settings to an equivalent of, say, GZDoom's Boom (strict) would be very nice. Search $DOOMWADDIR for WADs to load. The Eternity wiki claims that Eternity searches $DOOMWADDIR for IWADs, but this does not seem to be the case for PWADs. -pistolstart, or an equivalent setting. This is probably also possible through modding.

i've made it through Map13 on UV. I had to abandon my "save at keys only" rule pretty quickly but I'm still having a good time. This has been a great set so far, very high quality on average, and avoiding the more boring and frustrating parts of the inspirations. I like most of the gameplay changes (cyberdemons are mean enough without fast rockets) and every map has had something interesting to remember it by. Great work all around. Very brief (~1 line) comments on each map so far:

I disagree very strongly on the ugliness. I absolutely love Hell Revealed's unique aesthetic. I have heard the term "broad brush" used for those who can draw large areas using just a few lines and sectors. Well, I think Donner and Niv have the broadest brush I've seen. So many of HR's large locales stick firmly, unforgettably, in my mind. How I wish I could create something so memorable with so little. Maybe I should do one of those those n*100 lines things and shoot for size, I dunno. I think an underappreciated part of Hell Revealed is its playfulness. Even the text file immediately clues you into how you shouldn't be taking these maps very seriously. They want you to revel in the absurdity of what's going on. The results can be mixed, but the highs are so good that I can almost forgive the existence of Map20. This silliness is something that Kama Sutra doubled down on with its gimmicky maps and doomcute design, and something that HR2 almost missed completely.

Alright, so I played through this. The video shows my first successful run on Ultra Violence. The demo is attached, including a second demo for my FDA, which ends at the elevator trap. First off, the hell theme is well done and the level makes great use of stock textures. It's a lot of brown on more brown, but almost every brown texture is represented, keeping things interesting. The architecture is great and the lighting is well-used. Good points all around. I had a little bit of trouble with navigation at first. The level's progression is mostly switch based and there were quite a few switches where the effect was not immediately obvious. Pair that with a lot of side areas and it's easy to get turned around. It never took me long to find the right path myself, but I could imagine a hypothetical other player getting confused. Apart from that, I like the map's progression a lot. The level starts with open areas and somewhat scarce resources, with shotgunners chipping away at your limited health. Then at the halfway point we move into smaller indoor areas with stronger enemies and cramped fights. It's a good change. I feel like the second half leans pretty hard into the revenant/chaingunner/archvile combo for its difficulty, but I also think that it ends before getting too repetitive. Ammo for the power weapons is at a premium, forcing the player to save them for the most difficult fights. You don't even get the SSG until the difficulty spike, I like that. However, since the plasma gun is right at the beginning, I feel like a player could blow all their cells before realizing that those were really best kept for later. That's not an issue but it's something that I felt like I should note. I also played through once on HNTR. I appreciate the addition of extra bullets and shells since there are fewer zombies to keep your ammo count up. I have seen maps neglect this so the thought is nice. Most of the archviles are gone, but I feel like at least one should still be present at the finale. Overall, I think this is a good map with a fun escalation from light attrition to tough close-quarters brawls. g28-demos.zip

I feel like the Hell Revealed style is such a rare school of map these days. This looks like exactly the kind of thing that I was secretly hoping for. Okay, this has a Resistance is Futile tribute. I'm sold.

Much like the slightly earlier UAC_DEAD, the classic 1994 wad Galaxia has the player escaping in a stylish spaceship. I'm not sure about the utility of computer terminals on the outside, but I approve of the spider-like landing gear. In a very similar vein, the 10 Sectors standout MAP25 ends its long trek of incredible floor/ceiling height change abuse with another escape craft. Those boosters are made of midtextures! Abandoning escape craft for... entrance craft (?) we have Phobos: Anomaly Reborn starting off with quite the crash landing. It looks like you've made yourself a door, so you better get to it, there's hours of tedium interspersed with Boom effects waiting across the threshold.

Not Doom, but I was once upset with Heretic's fullscreen HUD. It only shows health and artifacts, neglecting certain minor things like how much ammo you have, how much armor, or which keys. (Of course, vanilla Doom's doesn't show anything...) So I patched the HUD-drawing function in Crispy Heretic to be actually playable. A simple fix, but very welcome.

I randomly came across this concrete/marble texture theme and it kinda rules.

I'm still good to go! Let's play some Doom!

Come on modern id, you're the ones who called your game "Doom" rather than something sensible like "Doom 4." Why is it the original that has to be branded with a date in parentheses? I guess it doesn't really matter. Besides, I got the BFG edition for free, which is pretty sweet.

I'd recommend Mushihimesama. Now, it is 1000% a bullet hell game, but the Steam release does an excellent job with difficulty. You have three difficulties: original, maniac, and ultra, roughly corresponding to a hard standard shmup, a bullet hell, then a Cave game, but then there's Novice mode, which provides easier versions of each. This totals six difficulty levels ranging from "my first shmup" to, well, a Cave game. There's also several alternate modes that provide their own difficulty spreads. Aside from all that, Mushihimesama is a fantastic game with a great setting, great music, great levels, memorable bosses, etc. One of my favorite games.

Eh, sed allows me to be case insensitive for .MID files. $() does look nicer though.

The best option on Windows is probably to use the VirtualMidiSynth GUI. On my system I use this beautiful horrible midi conversion bash script. #!/bin/sh out=$(echo "$1" | sed 's/\.mid$/.mp3/i') timidity -EFreverb=d --quiet=3 -Ow -o - "$1" | lame --quiet -b 192k - "$out"

I'll join the Atari 2600 crew here. Space Invaders on the 2600 was released in 1978 and is still a good time, especially if you can bring along a second player who tolerates your old video game bullshit.