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Convex posted:I like monster condo tbh, that level always felt very cosy I remember, when I was very new to FPSes, finding out about the -warp command line option and typing -warp 27, imagining that the level would be far in but not too brutal. And then it turned out to be Monster Condo, which kicked my keyboard-only rear end all morning and blew my mind. I genuinely thinking jumping that far ahead (at the time I was stuck around Tricks & Traps) encouraged me a lot to power through the rest of the game, and I’ve never forgotten the melody to Waiting for Romero to Play since.
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Sep 22, 2023 21:42
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Reinstalled Turok and been playing that a bit. The thing that stands out to me still, since I played a bit of it before, is how odd movement feels. It's not even bad or anything, you can pick up a general feel for it real quick (though I occasionally launch myself off a ledge), but it's a very distinct feel from like, Quake or Unreal.
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Sep 22, 2023 21:54
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catlord posted:Reinstalled Turok and been playing that a bit. The thing that stands out to me still, since I played a bit of it before, is how odd movement feels. It's not even bad or anything, you can pick up a general feel for it real quick (though I occasionally launch myself off a ledge), but it's a very distinct feel from like, Quake or Unreal. There's gotta be a name for this, Goldeneye and Turok had similar feels, where strafing and running forwards at the same time made you move faster. But I think the kex stuff has a very slight difference in movement I can't really figure out, I could slip into some weird places in Turok 1 and 2 remasters that I couldn't in the originals.
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Sep 22, 2023 23:13
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Hasturtium posted:I remember, when I was very new to FPSes, finding out about the -warp command line option and typing -warp 27, imagining that the level would be far in but not too brutal. And then it turned out to be Monster Condo, which kicked my keyboard-only rear end all morning and blew my mind. I genuinely thinking jumping that far ahead (at the time I was stuck around Tricks & Traps) encouraged me a lot to power through the rest of the game, and I’ve never forgotten the melody to Waiting for Romero to Play since. pretty much  , lolactually i did map 31 first because i didn't believe my friend who said it had the first and last levels of wolfenstein 3d episode 1 as secrets and it let you kill commander keen four times
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Sep 22, 2023 23:25
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Convex posted:pretty much That does sound like a great playground rumour. "My uncle who works at DOOM said...."
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Sep 22, 2023 23:38
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Doom & Doom II dominated my PC when I was a wee lad, but I think its unsatisfyingly abstract representations of actual places--factories, bases, cities, etc.--are the reason I latched so firmly onto literally anything more recognizable of a lived-in place in other games. The vending machines in Blake Stone! The glass windows in ROTT! And of course everything about Duke Nukem 3D--the toilets most of all. I still really like the abstract nature of a lot of dooms levels, a lot more than a lot of "realistic" level maps that just play like poo poo. It didn't work for the city levels, but for the mars and hell levels these weird labyrinths I thought had a great surreal look that just added to the atmosphere. Hells taking over, it should feel like a weird nightmare.
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Sep 22, 2023 23:45
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Convex posted:pretty much I was such a scrub that I didn’t even know about Wolfenstein, so I was just running through killing nazis and wondering why they were screaming lovely German, or a terrible Jerry Lewis-as-nutty-professor impression. It is fun to look back and realize that a prior version of you was sweet, well-meaning, and a complete twerp.
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Sep 22, 2023 23:59
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dr_rat posted:I still really like the abstract nature of a lot of dooms levels, a lot more than a lot of "realistic" level maps that just play like poo poo. It didn't work for the city levels, but for the mars and hell levels these weird labyrinths I thought had a great surreal look that just added to the atmosphere. Hells taking over, it should feel like a weird nightmare. Fond memories of picking up one of those "TEN THOUSAND LEVELS ON ONE CD!" unofficial packs and playing a bunch of recreations of people's schools, houses, and libraries and realizing they were all poo poo to play, to a one.
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Sep 23, 2023 00:50
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Fond memories of picking up one of those "TEN THOUSAND LEVELS ON ONE CD!" unofficial packs and playing a bunch of recreations of people's schools, houses, and libraries and realizing they were all poo poo to play, to a one. DUKE!ZONE had a really good school level and also had a badass NASCAR deathmatch map
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Sep 23, 2023 00:52
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The school level was scaled up so Duke is like the size of a 4th grader lmao
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Sep 23, 2023 00:53
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Hasturtium posted:I was such a scrub that I didn’t even know about Wolfenstein, so I was just running through killing nazis and wondering why they were screaming lovely German, or a terrible Jerry Lewis-as-nutty-professor impression. It is fun to look back and realize that a prior version of you was sweet, well-meaning, and a complete twerp. Somehow not alarmed or tipped off by all the swastikas
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Sep 23, 2023 01:05
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Milo and POTUS posted:Somehow not alarmed or tipped off by all the swastikas "The architecture, the decor... those militant right angle enthusiasts must be up to their old tricks again!"
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Sep 23, 2023 01:12
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Fond memories of picking up one of those "TEN THOUSAND LEVELS ON ONE CD!" unofficial packs and playing a bunch of recreations of people's schools, houses, and libraries and realizing they were all poo poo to play, to a one. I'd forgotten about those. They just downloaded a bunch of poo poo off of early web sites and/or bbses, and then burned them to a disk, sometimes also packaged them into a box, and they actually got sold in retail outlets. I doubt they even got permission from the authors either. Standards were way lower back then.
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Sep 23, 2023 01:16
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I wonder how many Wolf3D levels exist in total, with all of those unofficial level packs included.
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Sep 23, 2023 01:41
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HolyKrap posted:There's gotta be a name for this, Goldeneye and Turok had similar feels, where strafing and running forwards at the same time made you move faster. But I think the kex stuff has a very slight difference in movement I can't really figure out, I could slip into some weird places in Turok 1 and 2 remasters that I couldn't in the originals. I mean, doesn't strafing and running forwards at the same time make you move faster in Doom, Quake, and Build engine games? I do that all the time when playing those. I think the weirdness we're thinking about has something to do with the way the camera moves, possibly something done because of the N64 and its controller? Plus I think it gives you a bit more grace wrt ledges and slipping off than we're used to and it tricks us real good into playing fast and loose with pits.
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Sep 23, 2023 01:42
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dr_rat posted:I still really like the abstract nature of a lot of dooms levels, a lot more than a lot of "realistic" level maps that just play like poo poo. It didn't work for the city levels, but for the mars and hell levels these weird labyrinths I thought had a great surreal look that just added to the atmosphere. Hells taking over, it should feel like a weird nightmare. This definitely ties into the praise Civvie gives to the good Build Engine games and how they handle level design, the balance they often achieved between "this feels like a real place" and "this is a fun level"
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Sep 23, 2023 02:09
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catlord posted:I mean, doesn't strafing and running forwards at the same time make you move faster in Doom, Quake, and Build engine games? I do that all the time when playing those. I think the weirdness we're thinking about has something to do with the way the camera moves, possibly something done because of the N64 and its controller? Plus I think it gives you a bit more grace wrt ledges and slipping off than we're used to and it tricks us real good into playing fast and loose with pits. I guess, maybe to a lesser extent depending on what version you're playing. Happens in Goldsrc as well if you're running against walls, or strafing up ladders. Not sure what you mean about how the camera moves, are you playing with a controller? Or maybe it's the turn bobbing and strafe rolling options. Turning in those games felt really smooth You can type showcollision in the console to see how forgiving some of those jumps are
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Sep 23, 2023 02:13
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HolyKrap posted:I guess, maybe to a lesser extent depending on what version you're playing. Happens in Goldsrc as well if you're running against walls, or strafing up ladders. Not sure what you mean about how the camera moves, are you playing with a controller? Or maybe it's the turn bobbing and strafe rolling options. Turning in those games felt really smooth No, no controller, but probably the turn bobbing and strafe rolling options. Just looking around feels quite different from looking around in Quake. Like I said, I don't know what it is, and it feels weird but not like, wrong. showcollision in general sounds good at the point I'm at, it's that big jumping puzzle over a bottomless pit in the Ancient City (hey, gently caress those guys that drop down onto a pillar when you're halfway through the jump to it), I think my problem is I assume it's going to be bad, it's not as bad as I think because of the collision, and then I get sloppy and die.
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Sep 23, 2023 02:23
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drrockso20 posted:This definitely ties into the praise Civvie gives to the good Build Engine games and how they handle level design, the balance they often achieved between "this feels like a real place" and "this is a fun level" "Cartoon pseudo-realism" is such a good way of summarizing it, where it looks like it could be a place that exists, but the mapper never puts realism above the gameplay. Personally tho, I've always thought of it as "naturalistic" level design due to the emphasis being more on having the level flow organically from one part to the next, since having the flow come to a halt, whether due to too much realism or simple bad level design, is more likely to break immersion and draw attention to the game's artifice than anything else.
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Sep 23, 2023 02:32
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catlord posted:No, no controller, but probably the turn bobbing and strafe rolling options. Just looking around feels quite different from looking around in Quake. Like I said, I don't know what it is, and it feels weird but not like, wrong. Yeah if you play around with showcollision you can see how that works out when you land juuuust a little off the edge and hit the orange wall sector. You'll slide right down to your death. I dunno if that's exactly how they were on the N64 versions, but if you make maps in the remasters, you have to draw the nav mesh in manually. It's such a hassle  If you don't angle the vertices correctly you're guaranteed to either get an error message or create some unexpected places to get stuck/die in.
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Sep 23, 2023 02:50
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HolyKrap posted:Yeah if you play around with showcollision you can see how that works out when you land juuuust a little off the edge and hit the orange wall sector. You'll slide right down to your death. Oof. HolyKrap posted:If you don't angle the vertices correctly you're guaranteed to either get an error message or create some unexpected places to get stuck/die in. Ah, the ol' Build Engine Special.
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Sep 23, 2023 03:14
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catlord posted:Ah, the ol' Build Engine Special. The Build Engine Special is merging vertices causing a cascading wave of invisible corruption across the entire map.
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Sep 23, 2023 03:40
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John Murdoch posted:I wonder how many Wolf3D levels exist in total, with all of those unofficial level packs included. Less than you would think. Some years ago when generative AI was starting to become a thing I tried using a GAN to generate Wolf 3D levels. I downloaded every level I could find. I believe my dataset ended up being around 5,000 levels but that has some caveats: - I filtered out the pure poo poo that I didn’t want it to train on - I did not include modern TCs that used a different level format - That number is also after augmentation (rotating & mirroring levels to increase the data set size) There are way, way more Doom levels in existence than Wolf 3D levels. Doom was a much more popular game and it included support for user-made levels out of the box. My generator didn’t work at all, by the way. I was learning everything about ML from scratch so I had no idea how to tune anything. While I was wrapping it up some people at an Italian university beat me to the idea but they used Doom instead. Exact same idea I was trying to do, but they have to normalize the Doom maps into a similar shape first. Every Wolf 3D map is 64x64 tiles so it’s a much better fit for this concept, although ultimately I think this GAN approach is awful for this (there just aren’t enough levels to train on, for one thing). Their results aren’t very impressive either.
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Sep 23, 2023 03:44
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david_a posted:Less than you would think. I mean, even just the official releases have too many drat levels to ever want to see them all so  I fully expected Doom to have vastly more.
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Sep 23, 2023 03:55
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As Turbo Overkill progresses, I find myself really enjoying how much mileage they get out of the arsenal. Like, everything feels good to use; everything remains relevant; you've got the tried-and-true classic FPS loadout but almost everything gets a little twist to it that keeps things feeling fresh. They did a great job with it. EDIT: Also it's been out for a few years, but I just noticed that Julianne Moore's dress in one of the Kingsman movies is something I really need more of in my life for reasons this thread might appreciate: 
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Sep 23, 2023 04:08
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Also it's been out for a few years, but I just noticed that Julianne Moore's dress in one of the Kingsman movies is something I really need more of in my life for reasons this thread might appreciate: lol
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Sep 23, 2023 04:26
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david_a posted:Less than you would think. A big thing is also just, how do you make an interesting Wolf 3D level? Like it's possible, particularly knife starting and playing around with resource management and what not, but it seems like it's much harder as you have so many less mechanics to play around with, and after you've played through a few dozen levels, well you've played through all the core mechanics a lot and probably starting to get bored of them. It's much harder to actually make something new that isn't just making your map into a picture people will only see if they look at it in a map editor.
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Sep 23, 2023 04:41
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david_a posted:lol
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Sep 23, 2023 08:52
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Someone animate it
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Sep 23, 2023 09:21
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DoombatINC posted:"The architecture, the decor... those militant right angle enthusiasts must be up to their old tricks again!" This made me laugh out loud. I absolutely knew they were nazis but I’d only heard about Wolfenstein and never tried it, so I was wandering around going, “what the gently caress IS this” over and over again. The cyberdemon in MAP32 was probably the first time I screamed in fear playing an FPS, so that was nice.
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Sep 23, 2023 12:58
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I played a lot of the Wolf 3D shareware when I was little. The theme song was super catchy and I would often hum it at school and other places. It was only decades later I learned the song is loving Horst-Wessel-Lied…
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Sep 23, 2023 13:46
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david_a posted:I played a lot of the Wolf 3D shareware when I was little. The theme song was super catchy and I would often hum it at school and other places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9RAZxNdCk8
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Sep 23, 2023 13:48
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Hasturtium posted:This made me laugh out loud. I absolutely knew they were nazis but I’d only heard about Wolfenstein and never tried it, so I was wandering around going, “what the gently caress IS this” over and over again. The cyberdemon in MAP32 was probably the first time I screamed in fear playing an FPS, so that was nice. "GUTEN TAG!" 
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Sep 23, 2023 18:39
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Doctor Bishop posted:"GUTEN TAG!" drat, beat me to it. So, over in BSS there's a thread about Wizard Magazine, the comics magazine, and this popped up in the August '95 issue, down at the news roundup at the bottom: Why was Entity comics selling a comic packaged with Corridor 7, if anybody here knows? I wasn't really expecting Corridor 7 to get mention like, anywhere.
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Sep 23, 2023 20:08
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One of my favorite development stories is how the Goldeneye developers built the levels as accurately as possible and prioritized making them real spaces - and then hurriedly threw in objectives at the last minute.
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Sep 23, 2023 20:18
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Copper Vein posted:I've hooked a Roland SC-55 up to my PC again, and now I don't wanna play anything that doesn't have a MIDI soundtrack. sup fellow Sound Canvas goon, I mostly use an SC-88 but I also have a 55mkII   I hate how much midi on Linux sucks, I have to fiddle with pa-loopback and helvum every time I want to play a game on Linux with midi, and even that doesn't work if it uses SDL midi instead of the low-level ALSA interface.
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Sep 23, 2023 21:35
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dr_rat posted:A big thing is also just, how do you make an interesting Wolf 3D level? Like it's possible, particularly knife starting and playing around with resource management and what not, but it seems like it's much harder as you have so many less mechanics to play around with, and after you've played through a few dozen levels, well you've played through all the core mechanics a lot and probably starting to get bored of them. It's much harder to actually make something new that isn't just making your map into a picture people will only see if they look at it in a map editor. A lot of it is putting pressure on the player and making them move. A good Wolf3D level allows guards to circulate around and approach the player from more than one angle. Example from my own work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOfHUikUClE (this is a version optimized for my "Wolfenstein Cosmetic Upgrade" visual mod but the original version of this map set was made for the original DOS version and the level design is identical) E: an even more aggressive example from my map "Zugzwang" (literally "compulsion to move" in German) from the ECWolf community set Mungfunger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YodZ_OHNcI Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Sep 23, 2023 |
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Sep 23, 2023 21:46
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Finished the Quake II remaster. I'd never played the N64 levels before - they are interesting in a way, with several areas copied more or less directly from the main campaign and the two expansions, but really boring to play. The penultimate level looks pretty cool though. OTOH Call of the Machine is very fun. I was surprised how different the gameplay feels, even though the levels are using the same weapons and enemies. The base game never really throws swarms of enemies at you, but here there are abundant opportunities to really go nuts with the chaingun, or to actually make use of the splash damage from grenades/rockets.
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Sep 23, 2023 22:24
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Also it's been out for a few years, but I just noticed that Julianne Moore's dress in one of the Kingsman movies is something I really need more of in my life for reasons this thread might appreciate: who wore it better? 
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Sep 23, 2023 22:41
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Nostalgamus posted:The base game never really throws swarms of enemies at you, but here there are abundant opportunities to really go nuts with the chaingun, or to actually make use of the splash damage from grenades/rockets. Agreed. There are a couple sections where they give you a bfg and then surprise, 30 low level enemies rush you. A few of the encounters were really fun and interesting, but I didn't love having to pistol start every chapter (I get why it's like that, but still the least fun part of the game) and how some chapters just didn't bother with like half the armory and 2/3 of the powerups.
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