I was grossly overthinking the issue of needing to prevent the player from proactively maneuvering before the action begins. Someone who's played the start a couple times would be able to do that anyway.
E3M1: Rearranged the two "spinal columns" inside the first entrance. The chamber is larger and the columns are not perfectly octagonal (both to align the textures and to get rid of the fake contrast) and one of them is significantly larger than the other.
E3M6: replacing the (not even working right, you could see the floor moving) flat bleed rising painlord with one that warps into that spot. Changed the textures inside the hatchling fireplace so you're seeing fire everywhere from the inside.
E3M7: Slapped some textures onto the otherwise flat bleeding temporary monster blocker. The difference is barely noticeable even if you're deliberately looking for it.
This is the same solution I've proposed to address #920 and was planning on posting this only after some resolution was reached about that, but others have confirmed this does look way cooler than the original exit sign so here we go.
Map20: Just added textures to the lava jump and made the sectors thinner. No one's going to see them outside of deathmatch without noclipping anyway.
Will just leave the hole in the red arena ceiling where it is - players don't look up anyway.
The little red button in the closed-off brown metal area also uses flat bleeding (which frankly I'd taken as precedent to let me do this with the other stuff at all). Turns out it's perfectly visible with the light reduced to the surrounding area so I have done that (and also added some downwards movement of said button).
Map29: Moved the spectres out of LOS.
The only big pack available now is on the "outdoor" revenant platform.
You still get a total of 280 in singleplayer, which is still way more than you need but at least not enough to kill every enemy with the plasma rifle alone.
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.
Changing armors to match the new color scheme.
Basic armor is yellow (since no armor is green and big armor is red)
Also reshaded the new red armor shards to look nicer.
Addresses #916 by moving the entire starting corridor out of LOS with the monsters and moving all the player starts accordingly.
I've also recessed the doors in both those western corridors just to make them look a little more plausible.
**E1M2**
Addressed #916. Instead of having those three goons face you differently on hard, you just get more enemies (also facing away from you) in that room.
**Map10**
Addressed #916. I'm doing these two maps just because they were already updated recently so we might as well go all the way.
**Map11**
Addressed #916.
Made the colour door stripes go all the way down, because we can't fucking look up in vanilla and the things are invisible when you're right up at the door in question.
Lowered the switches just beyond the red door to eye level.
**Map26**
The bridge switch was a bit hard to find. It's been moved to the panel next to the pantry.
At some point I'd somehow forgotten to deal with ceilings, resulting in misaligned and mismatched stuff everywhere. Hopefully it's all been dealt with now.
Added some details to the grey tunnel and made the green torch in the wood tunnel present in single/coop as a light source.
"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.
* levels: map02 tweaks.
The yellow door appears to open by splitting itself into 3 parts, then moving only the middle part leaving the sides behind. This is now fixed so that the entire door moves.
Touched up the texture alignment above the exit door and replaced the floor on top of the monitor thingy blocking direct fire from the serpentipedes in front of the yellow door.
The little drops into the water area near the start can be cheesed by staying in the lit areas behind the monster blocking lines. This seems to be unintended behaviour so I've added new blocking lines that are exactly the size of the player.
The big drop past the red and blue doors needs something to stop the pinkies from blocking the player's initial drop. They're all set to +ambush now.
The exit sign has been given the flat-bleed treatment as Map01 and Map26, but this time I've actually kept the lower floor within monster step height. (I'd fix it for Map01 but it turns out the monsters step around it without issue.)
* levels: more misc. fixes.
**Map03**
The green corridor had some texture alignment and mismatched flat issues; the switch door was overcomplicated for what it was doing and didn't even look better than just using a simple wall switch texture. The corridor itself had a shadow across the middle that had nothing casting it; it has been removed.
Gave the curved terminal wall light grey flats to not stick out as much.
**Map21**
The cage bars along the walls of the lava border corridor should be impassable.
**Map26**
It's possible if you're careful to grab the super shotgun without triggering the lowering panel, causing the player to be potentially lost without any further indication they should move towards the alcove. Since I want to keep this as a foreshadowing of what is possible with stealing the key from the necromancer, there's now also an armour bonus a little further in.
The rising pit was too easy to jump into before it was finished, ruining the effect. I've packed everything closer together and moved one of the hard spectres into the corner outside the pit. The northern bit of the room is also expanded to let the worms move that way.
If you look at the C/D sprites, you'll see:
- the back of the gun
- the barrel shroud
- the notch thingy in the middle of the barrel shroud
- the raised tapered thingy holding the front sight post
If you look at the A sprite, you'll see:
- the back of the gun
- the notch thingy
- the back of what appears to be a large straight thing *flaring outwards and forwards* from the barrel
- what could, in this context, either be the raised tapered thingy holding the front sight post, or a continuation of the flare-out part of the barrel shroud/flash hider
Hopefully this edit makes it a bit more clear where the barrel shroud part actually is, and feels more like a gun than an indistinct sequence of metal cylinders.
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.
After seeing that screenshot with the building with that side entirely in featureless grey I had a Reaction and started this.
I've also made some impassable lines visible for the benefit of jumpers. Basically anything where the bottom of the window is less than 64 units from the floor is jumpable and needs to be indicated as impassable. The training centre theme suggested liberal use of thrown-heavy-object-proof chain link fence.
I'm sorry but there is no rational explanation for those featureless polished silver walls in the outside-adjacent parts of that giant nukage chamber/pool. They're algae-ridden cement now.
Rest of the map is great. Love how it gives the actual vibe of a huge athletic training centre without going into awkwardly specific detail. Besides the shaped columns on that big window wall (and maybe visibility of attackers in the courtyard) there should be no changes that can potentially affect gameplay.
Addresses #904. Defines the SUPPORT2 texture as though the SUPPORT2 patch were always 64 pixels tall.
A few pixels on the patch itself have been adjusted to get rid of a slightly visible seam, but the full patch height of 72 is unchanged.
* levels: adjust map25 start puzzle.
Attempt to address #902. Also simplifies the surrounding sectors by making the actual lift sector no longer share lines with the surrounding walls.
* levels: make map25 starting wrong switch optional.
Also let it be flipped back and forth uselessly.
The newly revealed door had mismatching textures and the brick texture above it was visibly misaligned. (The latter wasn't new but is more visible with the door there)
I've also moved the computer banks in the blue key room to make the gaps between them and the room walls unequivocally narrower than the player's hitbox (they had been 32 before, which always made me wonder every time I came into this room if they were supposed to be squeezed through - the distraction got really tiring after a while).
