A lot of visual details tend to get lost on them when you can't see them up close in vanilla (can't look down).
Also some maps targeting id actually use specific things about these offsets...
> 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.
PASG HUD sprites are Blastfrog's originals with significant modifications.
DBSG HUD sprites are Fredrik's originals with not *as* significant modifications but I believe the wires are new. (Did Rei do those?)
PASG pickup sprite is my edit of the current one. (Removed the stock because the guns give a lesser sense of recoil now, and the pump animation makes way more sense if you assume the gun is not shouldered; also I didn't feel like adding a stock to the DBSG pickup for consistency.)
DBSG pickup sprite is my edit of Z86's original.
[Undead003's old sound from way back in 2015](c48644582c) never got used because of a typo.
This is that sound, cut off and faded to match the pain elemental's death animation duration and mixed with the hatchling attack and a slowed-down DSBAREXP.
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.
When I first started up Map19 with music for the first time in ages I thought the MIDI had glitched somehow and the instrumentation fell back on "Acoustic Grand" the way a lot of things did when I was younger. When I checked the MIDI it still sounded like it was supposed to be something else and the composer forgot to set the instrument, or it's a *really* experimental thing that frankly doesn't really fit a game - or at least not something that is not itself an extremely experimental abstract concept level which Map19 is not.
After some experimentation tremolo strings stood out by a fairly large margin as the best option.
* levels: more minor fixes.
E1M2
- Hide all outdoor inaccessible areas and monster warp closet lines.
- Fix some texture alignments in the blue key room.
E1M3
- Untag 1-sided walk trigger line 821.
- Make the western secret dead end room look less like id E1M3. (Not touching the specific powerups that are also from id just yet.)
E1M9
- Retexture the edges of that ragged hole in the wall revealing the tekwall underneath, now that the rounded-corners STARG textures no longer work like that.
- The stairs just beyond that corridor are also redone, to avoid that perfect line of ickwall bullet holes.
Map28
- The way out of the blood pits in the huge marble skull face courtyard is now much easier to find, rather than being a de facto secret.
* levels: minor fixes.
Map11
Replaced that fake door near the red skull with a drop tunnel.
Map12
A few random texture fixes, especially around the south end of sector 147.
I've seen multiple Youtube videos recently that talk about Freedoom as
though the "free" part in the name refers to price. It's an
understandable misconception but it deserves to be corrected. Let's add
a short section to the manual to discuss this.
The skull that was here before was kind of a joke from the early days of the project, when it was the only skull graphic we had and used it everywhere to ridiculous extremes. Here I've replaced it with a shrunk-down version of the M_SKULL graphic used on the main menu, with some minor tweaks (the skull looks sadder than the menu one).
The new sprite is two pixels taller than the old one.
The original graphic was derived from a scan of a CD-ROM that I scaled down, aeons ago at the start of the project, and it isn't very good. I decided to try my hand at some pixel art and make a new one. I think the end result isn't too bad.
Take it down from "actually physically painful" to "blaring" - the song is more singing to you (if still aggressively) than shouting at you.
Help bring out some of the harmonics and the bass riffs.
* levels: one more texture fix on that Map17 ramp.
* levels: one more minor Map17 METAL2 alignment.
On the ledge to the right of the yellow door - the seam of the texture actually should not follow the ledge of the path, but continue the tiling pattern.
* levels: fix map03 start room texture.
See PR for screenshots, this one was really hard to see before the new METAL2 textures.
* levels: relocate e3m3 secret missile launcher.
Where it was positioned it was possible to grab it - even sometimes see it in vanilla - before that door even opens.
* levels: move e3m3 start arena hanging corpses.
They're supposed to be hanging from the bottom of the wooden rim, but sometimes vanilla errs in favour of sticking the actor to the higher ceiling in ambiguous rounding-error situations. The centre of each of these actors is now totally unambiguously inside the wooden rim sector.
* levels: address #1053.
* levels: address #1053 properly.
Also un-merge a bunch of sectors because it turns out blocking sounds from certain areas is actually kinda important.
* levels: fix Map31 BFG.
Moved it slightly closer to the teleorter pad so it's less possible to jump over it entirely by mistake, and aligned the textures in there.
* levels: more map31 adjustments.
- Re-merged the doorway sectors so any single gunshot will alarm all tripods.
- Some more texture fixes, replacing a few ceilings that didn't tile properly.
- More adjustments to the squeeze-past chamber, mostly just for texture alignment purposes.
- Made *all* the gore in the switch room point to the switch with the red card.
- Shortened the supersecret door switch so the gargoyle wouldn't repeat like that.
* levels: bring map31 secret closer, but conceal it.
* levels: fix e2m1 easy hot start.
* levels: misc. E3M1 improvements.
Un-doomified the start:
- Hell Keep: start outdoors, touch freaky flesh thing, fight imps, find red brick gate, grab ammo boxes by door, hit red brick skull switch, receive immediate cacodemon.
- Land of the Lost: start outdoors, no freaky flesh thing, fight serpentipedes, find red brick gate, grab ammo boxes by door, hit red brick skull switch, receive immediate trilobite.
- Newer, Better Land of the Lost: start outdoors, fight serpentipedes, find red brick building, *shoot* freaky flesh thing, reveal corridor with ammo boxes and *slightly* less immediate trilobite.
Replaced candelabras with evil eyes for the shooting messaging.
Made exit teleporter lines monster blocking.
It is impossible to get through that mandatory northwest area without taking damage from the hurtfloor. Added a catwalk. All the health bonuses are on that catwalk now.
Made the lowering rock wall use the same grey floor as the surrounding area. Now all red surfaces you can reach without jumping are hurtfloors. Its trigger is now the instant-move lowest-ceiling trick so you can't race over to watch it move.
Two stimpacks are now medikits, while the number of medikits in the exit room are reduced to one. This increases the total health by 5 points (in addition to the 5 for losing the obligatory damagefloor) while reducing the likelihood of the player running into the exit room and (unintentionally) turning what should be a dynamic fight around the map into a chokepoint slog.
Broke all the fake contrast orthogonal lines in the ribbed pillars.
* levels: minor e2m4 fixes.
Berserk pack secret sector was too narrow and could sometimes lets you grab the items without triggering the secret. That closet is now deepened (and slightly redecorated to make up for the new blank space).
The area around the waterfall was too dark compared to everything around it. Its light is now all 144 except right next to the light of the silver arch.
The horizontal trim on the silver arches now go all the way around.
* levels: minor E3 improvements.
E3M1
After some discusssion on Discord it was agreed that the trilobite should not be visible until the player has discovered the berserk. The first trilobite is now outside of that hall, its back to the player looking at the berserk, and the hall has some sound blocker lines so it doesn't react if you try to plink at the worms (despite the berserk being right there).
I've also done a bit of redecorating to the front steps since we no longer need the evil eyes: the entire stairway is lined with candles and the eyes/ candelabras are replaced with blood fountains (as too many lights here would imply an area much brighter than what we're dealing with).
E3M3
The starting area lavafall had an unintentional fake contrast. This lavafall is now made more complex, with intentional fake contrasts.
* levels: final E2M4 touchups by Xindage.
* levels: make map06 exit pad line monster blocking.
Also unmerge the sectors on two sides of a door that was causing some monsters to wake prematurely.
* levels: fix textures by map11 warehouse counter.
that new METAL2 sure makes a lot of things more visible...
See discussion in #1049.
If RW33_5 really is extraneous we can still get rid of it; otherwise it is now METAL9.
I've also taken the liberty of moving one of my recent textures.cfg additions to their proper place in the "Custom textures using resources of freedoom" section.
Originally meant to address #1070.
Redid green armor secret. The ugly (and alternative-sequence-breaking) railings are gone, and instead of SR50+luck you have to find the way up to a much higher platform.
Allowed jumping from the semifinal puzzle platform into the guard tower areas because there was nothing showing you could not. It doesn't actually achieve anything besides letting you grab the ammo from the zombies inside.
Flipped a bunch of linedefs to address #996.
Also add a switch for that platform-gate since its non-orthogonal shape and large size can't help but signal that it is expected to be remote-lowered.
