NON-FREE LUMPS IN THE DATA WAD
I wanted to clear this out from my PrBoom todo file but I think it is of historical interest (to me, anyway.) So why not put it here... Slightly edited for clarity, with notes added in smaller text.
mentioned by debian/bad_menu_lumps.txt
A file in Debian's PrBoom source package; you can view it online here. It also mentions several lumps left over from PrBoom v2.3 which I didn't list. The graphics lumps are considered non-free because they are derived from the original game data. Although id tend to turn a blind eye towards people reusing modified IWAD stuff in PWADs, it's not technically free (as in software.)
Used in options menu:
- M_GENERL - title of general menu
- M_SETUP - title of setup menu
Used in options/setup menu:
- M_AUTO - title of automap menu
- M_KEYBND - title of key bindings menu
- M_CHAT - title of chat strings menu
- M_COMPAT - title of compatibility options menu
- M_ENEM - title of enemies menu
- M_MESS - title of messages menu (colour of HUD messages etc)
- M_STAT - title of status bar options menu
- M_WEAP - title of weapons menu
Used in mouse sensitivity menu:
Used as title of credits screen:
The engine can now cope with any or all of the above lumps being missing from the data wad. For each menu if any of the lumps it needs are missing, it will draw the entire menu in smallfont instead. This seemed like an acceptable workaround (to me, anyway.)
mbf helper dog sprites
- DOGS* - use the freedoom demon, suitably modified?
MBF used sprites from Wolfenstein 3D for its helper dogs. The obvious thing to do was pinch resources from Freedoom to use as a replacement, and that's exactly what I ended up doing. Now hopefully I can remove the compile-time option to build the game without dogs again... (I tried to do so before, but they asked to have it put back in...)
Okay I finally managed to get 100% kills starting each level from scratch on this thing and so I should post about it I guess. Plus I have to do at least one entry a month no matter how half-arsed it is. Vanguard is a 13-level Doom2 pwad that won a bunch of awards this year. It is in three mini-episodes of 5, 5, and 2 levels respectively, themes being ancient stone ruins, grey techbases, and hell temples/caverns. Then there is a final bonus thing that's based off some old NES boxing game as far as I can tell.
good stuff
the map design is nice, the texturing is especially good, I think. It has a kind of running theme of tufts of grass sticking up from the ground, using small middle textures on two-sided lines.
the gameplay is solid if a little uneven.
not so good stuff
Yeah the real reason I write these things is to pick holes in good wads.
the difficulty curve is really quite strange. The last level of each mini episode is hard, fair enough, but the third map ("Thirteen Angry Archviles") is noticably harder than anything else up to map10, the finale of the techbases episode. It likes to drop pairs of archviles on you in cramped conditions surrounded by resurrectable corpses.
actual slaughtery bits are not as hard as the tighter parts such as map04 or the previously-mentioned map03, due to being overloaded with health or ammo or there being obvious exploits. e.g. map10 where I teleported out of the south red key section and killed most of the monsters from the traps by firing rockets into the wall above where they all clustered.
top-heaviness: e.g.
- Map05 is one of those maps where everything wakes up at the start because it's wide open, and if you survive the initial battle the rest of the level is quite empty.
- Map07, the first fight is much harder than the second, as the cyberdemon sitting on the exit just kills half the mancubi before dying itself, leaving you with much less to do.
- Map09, another with an anticlimactic final confrontation since the cyberdemons do most of the work for you and you can just hide in the bunker until they've cleared the field.
Finally, the wad is badly packaged. I wondered why it was 34MB, since that is huge for a pwad. It appears the author simply merged a bunch of huge texture packs into his wad and didn't even bother to eliminate duplicates.
conclusion
I think you should definitely play this if you haven't already. The best wads to post about, though, are the good ones that have holes, because it's somehow much easier to write about them.
Two maps requiring the Plutonia IWAD. From the text file:
An attempt to create difficult, non-linear maps in the plutonia visual style, without going the slaughterfest route.
Very successful attempt. The layouts are excellent and the architecture is clean and well-constructed without being overdetailed. Difficulty is maintained by there always being something that can shoot at you from some long way away no matter where you are currently standing, or you're locked in some small room with something nasty, that sort of thing.
In map01 I would have liked to have been able to get the backpack earlier. Map02 I don't think I ever managed to quite finish even on HNTR, due to constantly getting sniped by monsters a long way off. Oh well.
A replacement map32 for Doom2, by the author of the above. Was apparently his first map, not that you'd guess. Much more of a slaughter wad. Most but not all of the map is composed of rock platforms over a lava lake, somewhat reminiscent of Hell Revealed map24 or Kama Sutra map28, but smaller.
