Closes#1327.
Brief summary:
- the bland description feels really out of place with its straightforward description against "Outpost Outbreak" and "Event Horizon".
- nothing in this episode looks like a "military lab".
- what it *does* have is an overgrown-ruins theme with a bunch of AGM tech overlaid on it.
- the old E2M1 even was explicitly named as "ruins".
E1M7: There was some talk about reverting to "Viral Research" but the viral waste being kept in open air pits seemed no more plausible than this building being a "transportation bay". "Materials" was evocative of something that would probably stay put if left alone. (Probably.)
E3M2: There never was anything added to this level that actually resembled a temple, though there are plenty of tunnels and things evocative of heat. There's also machinery suggesting some kind of power generation, and "Heate Tunnels" seemed oddly bathetic and understandably replaced.
DM22: Fixed inconsistent capitalization.
Map02: This level didn't really resemble a lab, let alone multiple of them. It was originally named "Jade Tumult" but that name doesn't fit this cluster at all; another name with the same initials was suggested, with "Janus" for the two-faced appearance of the starting area and "Terminal" for the big end teleporter (and cluster finale).
Map24: This is a dark, tight, claustrophobic map with narrow doorways and a very uneven floor, and in no way resembles something that can be called a "loading bay". It does, however, contain an odd arrangement of teleporters that does not appear to serve any practical purpose.
Map25: "Red Works" seemed still too reminiscent of id "Bloodfalls". "Surreality" was initially suggested by Uni but I disagreed because I always associated that name with the old E2M1, so we agreed to split the difference by naming it after a famous surrealist painting that involved melting and impossible machines.
Map29: "Last Stand" is not a stand, nor last. There's nothing about the flow of the level that would suggest anyone's doing a "last stand" here. The most prominent thing about it is the vast expanse of lava that some of the architecture is melting into. "Lake of Fire" was rejected as too doomily biblical.
The long latinate verbs were getting to me. They are now "put on" for armour, "took" for health and "picked up" for ammo.
I think Map11 is the only map in both IWADs that distinguishes skeleton keys from passcards, so it's always the colour that's the most important distinction. There's no way in English to sound natural to put the adjective last, so it has to be in the beginning.
Similarly, "bullet clip" is now "some bullets" so the ammo type name is at the very end like all the other ammo pickup messages.
The 1% pickups are similarly rephrased so the words "health" and "armor" come first rather than second-last. If people find the exclamation points annoying for such a frequent message I can delete them but they feel right to me ingame, at least in chocolate where I can only see one line at a time.
The current Freedoom key messages are already a big improvement over id but they would still benefit from having the required colour stated at the forefront. The "object" language was always offputting and distracting (in game terms it usually makes me think of actors/things not map geometry) so I've omitted it; "for this door" can also be omitted in my view but there's probably some distinction that some map out there actually needs made.
The earnest "Never give up!" seems to be more in line of Freedoom's overall vibe than the more laconic, Doom-like "Not dead yet!".
Removed "small" from pickup messages as it was making the resulting string of text the same size as the large.
Use exclamation mark for mega-armour - something that completely instantly maxes out a stat like that merits it!
Continuation of #1091. Closes#1096. Hopefully addresses #992, subject to better terms from an actual Spanish speaker.
Corresponding changes have been added to Spanish translation using machine translation. All reasonable efforts have been used to try to vet the output so it actually makes sense but it will need an actual Spanish-speaking reader; I've got an alternate version that *only* does the obvious fixes (but will not address #992) if this turns out to be irredeemably bad.
**Obvious Fixes**
- Converts a few stray CxMy references.
- Updates some screenshots that still showed old assets.
- Fixes a lot of miscopypasted alt text.
- Does not claim DBSG to be "twice" as powerful.
- Adds Handgun pickup sprite.
**Terminology**
- Addresses #1096 by restoring abstract references to health and armour.
- Adds distinction between "refill" and "boost" for health.
- Gives pickup messages a distinct verb for each class of item being picked up.
**Clarifications**
- Much more explicitly describes certain monster and weapon behaviour, avoiding excess kayfabe where it may produce misleading descriptions.
- Makes the deceased name appear as the first element in all obituaries, and uses the same term for the "same" weapon where a monster is using an equivalent to a player weapon.
- Rewords some obituaries to better match the Freedoom monsters rather than the id ones.
- Emphasizes that the misconception is that Freedoom is *only* about providing a gratis IWAD, to better avoid the unintentional reading that it is a misconception that Freedoom is being provided gratis.
**Organization**
- Makes new sections for keys and the general introduction to how items work.
- Moves the colorblind section to right after the new key section.
**Putative Target Audience**
- Adds an explanation of what a source port is.
- Adds the "press Enter a bunch of times to start the game without reading anything" trick.
- Adds a warning about Chocolate Doom's savegame buffer overflow emulation.
- Adds a detailed tutorial walking the player through a live example of every type of ingame interaction.
- Rewrites all the controls-related help to presuppose a modern, post-WASD boomer shooter paradigm, doing away with the previous-century assumptions that you only had turn and forward/back and lateral movement was an unusual extra.
> The massive brutes collapse onto the ground, falling apart bit by bit. The starport is yours.
Semi-iconic stylized shot of the tripods dying on either side of the lift, the plasma room blue thing opening as a gate, revealing... something...
> You kick the corpse in anger, and it feels good. You kick it again, and a remote falls out. You press the button, and the ground gives way to reveal a teleporter.
Pan from the visibly smoking technospider corpse amidst the scorches and bullet holes to reveal a new teleporter. Animation types out "TO BE CONTINUED..."
> The ship rumbles as she wakes up; you think of Earth as she lifts off.
A serpentipede shakes its fist at the Double Impact starry sky, now covered by the smoky star-capped column of the departing rocket.
This started as an attempt to think through how to make the last stretch of E4M8 look a little more like the inside of a spaceship, when it occurred to me that it's very possible to end up with a lot of monsters still alive inside what appears on the map to be the body of the spaceship - so what happens with them? How do you relax with them banging down the door the whole way home?
This describes them fleeing the ship in the immediate aftermath of hitting the exit switch.
- make weird twitchy alien pod thing implied to be consumed by guy stranded on alien world.
- expected: players infer this is some alien critter that has no direct terrestrial taxonomic parallel.
- actual: incessant complaints that the plant has no roots.
Maybe it was a mistake to shy away from more explicit language in the pickup messages.
Did a bunch of other pickup messages to match.
I'm open to suggestions or corrections. I will consider editing the sprite if someone really can't get over "polyp" with no tentacles.
* levels: new e2m1.
Starting area by Xindage, cave area and monsters/items by me.
* levels: add secret minigun to new E1M2.
* levels: fix e2m1 fan texture.
Just noticed that mixup in nful2's screenshot.
Not sure how that got changed.
* levels: split E2M1 air/water screens.
Ideally we'd have two more TSCRN1 graphics to fill out COMPUTE4 (and maybe PLANETS?) but let's get it looking right with what we have now.
* Update CREDITS
* sprites: polaric upgrade; sprite offset fix.
The current pickup sprite looks pretty much exactly like what one might expect from drawing fanart of the id plasma rifle from memory. I've changed what I could while still remaining consistent with (and hopefully becoming more consistent with) the HUD sprite.
Since the gun shoots straight forwards I've also made the flash symmetrical - along with the projectile itself (but not *too* symmetrical). This does help address #932 a bit, but if anyone's got a better design I'm all eyes.
The blue flare along the top "spine" of the gun looked a bit janky on the left so I've smoothed it out a bit. The blue also lingers a bit in the B frame.
With all the ongoing news a lot of FPS player types will be following about artillery logistics in the IRL war, the use of "cannon" referring to this short handheld PDW is aging even more poorly than Doom's "clip". The best word I can think of as a substitute happens to result in an acronym I think we might as well lean into.
I've also adjusted some other projectile sprite offsets - my last attempt at fixing them actually placed the sprites a little too high.
* sprites: smooth out some jank left by paletting.
* sprites: do polaric flash as well.
* levels: E1M9 adjustments.
Central room monster closet doors are no longer upper unpegged.
Changed central room stairs to use a different texture because STEP4 was tutti-fruttiing again.
Added some aesthetic improvements: the subject matter of the recycling.
Replaced the lift with stairs leading to the rocket launcher to avoid the pinkie jump block.
Tried to use the same door texture for all doors that are only remotely opened.
Used a more see-through barrier for the corner guys in the middle room, after an incident where I spent way too long and eventually resorted to IDDT to find a single zombieman - interesting challenge but probably inappropriate given the way the rest of this map works.
Fixed a bunch of miscellaneous texture issues.
* levels: move Armory name+mus to E1M5; rename E1M9.
The spooky sountrack simply does not work for a shoot-'em-up level like that.
It works better for E1M9 now that there's actually something ominous implicitly lurking in there.
* dehacked: rename E1M9 and E1M5.
* dehacked: update E1M9/5 par times.
* delete misplaced dehacked.txt
The messages hadn't been checked for length. Fortunately caught relatively early because the only string that shows up in vanilla (and thus would cause a crash) is also one of the longest ones.
I've also amended two things in the text itself:
1. big burly violent guy who's all about freedom and blaming scientists for things is...... not something that's aged well. And when a corporation is involved you know it's the investors pushing for the bad thing and not the actual researchers on the ground.
2. that other quit message literally reads like you're goading someone into suicide IRL, in the current environment where everybody's depressed and a lot of us have lost important people to plague or war or medical neglect or workplace accidents or violent bigotry or any combination thereof. I've taken the liberty to rephrase it so the emphasis is on what I think was intended.
Threw in a replacement for "exit to DOS" as well.
C3 restructured and C5 rewritten by @shinobody with edits by me, C6 loosely based on @shinobody's rewrite that had interpreted the map as a barracks instead.
"deep into its territory" deserves to be its own line, especially to help emphasize the line I'm making these changes to include.
I also keep wanting to say "armies", plural, for some reason. Which at least works to explain all the infighting...
Someone just quoted the "no human has ever survived here" unprompted on Discord. If it's that memorable let's keep it.
"Man" for this in the two thousand twenty third year of the common era was still a bit cringe though.
Reposting #868 because that was way too many commits.
The current ones have lots of sentence fragments that are somehow austere in tone while still having lots of unnecessary words - a combination that doesn't exactly flow too well. This is an attempt to rewrite a lot of them while trying to keep all the critical elements of each.
A lot of the "it doesn't matter, who cares" / "oh. a trap. AGAIN." talk also felt like it would pull the reader out of the game, however in-character it was clearly intended. (I understand it's inspired by "where's your fat reward and ticket home" from Doom E1 but if you look at all the other id intermission texts things are much more triumphant and hopeful in tone - D2's "There must be a way to close it on the other side. What do you care if you've got to go through Hell to get to it?" is more bravado than despair.)
Replaced some things that create expectations of specific things to be found in the very next map but aren't there - the Map06-7 lift (you start on a teleporter pad), the Map11-12 platform bolts (you start just inside the door), the "massive doors" of the Military Labs (you start on the end teleporter immediately after E1M8), etc..
"Dissipitates" isn't exactly release-quality standard diction.
Some lines were rearranged so that natural sentence and phrase breaks coincide with line breaks - everything has been tested on Chocolate, it seems we do have more room to work with than the previous writers seem to have thought. (If someone out there *specifically intended* to make sure the sentences spill over into the next line in the absence of a paragraph break I'm willing to listen to reasoned argument about it.)
I have, of course, left the iconic final three lines of Phase Two untouched.
You're not really infiltrating anything with this powerup (GZDoom weirdness notwithstanding); meanwhile, it's generally assumed in the story that the monsters will have some idea that you're around somewhere and they should be shooting in your general inferred direction. Most of them can probably locate you by sound or even smell or possibly even psychically, but they won't have the precision of being able to see you.
There's no real need to qualify the invisibility in this context, and given the options available under the letter I the need for this specfic word is practically a functional requirement.
Makes the verbs consistent, gets rid of all references to spheres, gives terms to all powerups that line up with their corresponding IDBEHOLD cheats*, and hopefully reduces the bathos of the health-adding spheres a bit.
Also makes the nightmare skill level warning a little more accurate and explicit, instead of sounding like it's just the standard advanced user mode.
*It turns out the options on the idbehold cheat message also need to be abbreviated as the current one is cut off, so we can't really do the "letter = " stuff.
* sprites: new armour pickups.
At this point they're not really just "vests" anymore so I've changed the pickup message as well.
* sprites: darken armor pickup shadows.
The darkest bits were far too light, making the sprites look floaty and billboardy compared to typical (Free)Doom assets.
DM21 typo; DM12 use the most neutral version of that abbreviation.
Map11: it is neither infinite nor a plain. Inasmuch as it's a misleading name it's arguably a great name for a map that's basically a ceaseless parade of misleading gotchas (fake doors, switches requiring multiple backtracks to find out what you need to do to progress, secret areas that kill you, etc.) but it just feels like this name used to be for a different map (maybe a followup to the immediately preceding Outlands) and no one bothered to update it.
Someone who actually enjoys this map please feel free to suggest a different name.
