14/12/2010 @11:32:40 ^12:36:44
It was Doom's birthday the other day and for once I felt like doing a few things and posting them on Doomworld.
PrBoom patches
I took some screenshots of stuff I've put into PrBoom recently and posted them in the gargantuan screenshots thread.
Ammo empty/full patch posted by another user on the PrBoom mailing lists. Blue numbers mean the weapon is full, brown ones mean it's empty, i.e., can't be fired. That means zero ammo for most weapons, but less than 2 for the super shotgun and less than BFGCELLS for the BFG (in the picture I have BFGCELLS/2 cells)
Backgroundless fullscreen menus so you can still see a demo or whatever running if you open one of Boom's fullscreen menus. An ancient feature request. I've had the patches for almost as long. Now I've made it optional so if you think it makes the game unreadable you can turn backgrounds back on (they default to being on, you have to turn them off yourself)
UTF-8 ENDOOM When you quit the original DOS game it would dump a screenful of data into VGA memory as like a credits screen. PrBoom had this system that translated the screen into ANSI escape sequences to set the colours, but it never worked very well with printing codepage 437 graphics. However on modern linux terminals UTF-8 works well and all of CP437 is a subset of unicode, so I just translated it. I also rewrote the colour handling because it was messy. Other engines will actually pop up a box and draw the thing themselves, but I don't like that because I don't like boxes popping up after I press the quit button!
Bugger This
I modified a sandbox and came up with something I called Bugger This.
It runs on MAP30. The idea is you press 8 tiny switches around the edge of a giant ring of blood 16000 units across. What's stopping you are hundreds of boss brain monster spawners throwing in monsters from the edge of the ring (just in front of where the buttons are, naturally)
The air is rapidly filled with flying spawn cubes and after about a minute or so there will be thousands of monsters charging towards you. It's hilarious. I can't press more than 4 buttons, but that's okay because on lower skill levels that's as many as you need.
It is more or less unplayable but what do you expect, it's a speedmap. Well, sort of. I had the program that made the main part already. I just had to make the extra mechanism that allows you to exit the map, which still took a couple of hours because of Yadex (you know what it's like)
This was for a thread about making a really hard speedmap. The name is inspired by what I imagine people will say when they try to play it, of course.
Personal note (you can ignore this part)
When I was new to the game, having played through it a couple of times, and just getting into its internal workings (around the point of "DEVELOPING AN INTEREST") one thing I tried repeatedly to do was make a giant level full of spawn spots so I could just run around and shoot things until I got bored. I was constantly thwarted, both by crappy wad editors and my own lack of knowledge when trying to write a program to generate the thing; and while I did manage to make a map, it was never even remotely satisfactory. (Of course part of that was due to game engine bugs which have since been fixed.) Anyway time went on and I forgot about it as I found "proper" new levels on the internet, and started working on the game engine itself, and so forth.
Then a few weeks ago when, while messing with friendly monsters, I made a sandbox that was full of spawn spots and monster spawners. As I ran around it I realised I had at last created the perfect spawn spots level. Not only that I could recreate it trivially by tweaking the parameters of the program. Somehow I'd achieved a years-old ambition without even realising it.
Bugger This pretty much is that level I always wanted to create, augmented a bit so you can actually finish it. Not bad eh?
