E1M1
The main goals here are to make things actually easy on easy skill, and to make the lower route actually a viable starting choice instead of a shitty gotcha (or, more charitably, an extra challenge). Tested by using only keyboard in Chocolate while trying to avoid moving and turning at the same time.
- In the courtyard room, there is now in easy a dead shotgunguy and a shotgun, right by the door.
- Removed the soulsphere in the starting corridor. Sorry, it's just too much especially given the *second* one outside, and it really doesn't help mitigate...
- In accordance with the above, removed pinky no. 244 and serpentipede 241 from easy skill. An ambush being totally surrounded by 3 serps at once is not exactly an E1M1 easy mode sort of encounter!
- The easy-only shotgun in the southern route is now moved to where those two shotgun shell pickups are above the lift, rather than requiring the trick jump.
- Pinky 214 has been moved somewhere where it's less likely to be hit by a stray bullet from below and alerted prematurely.
- One of the starting medikits has been moved to the door after the lowering pillars, swapping places with the stimpack.
- Southwestern blue key corridor had a lone pinkie on easy. Added two zombiemen instead.
- Removed easy-only shotgun from said corridor. Zombieman 88 is now on easy as well.
- Removed shotgunguy 96 from easy skill.
- Removed zombieman 176 from easy skill and added an easy-only zombieman behind the door.
- More attempts to fix#996.
Map09
- Added a couple health boosts on top of that crate that needs to be moved away, to remind the player that they might need to revisit that spot later.
- Changed the texture on the door leading into the lava pit since the new one doesn't really work with it.
E3M2
- The lava *is* the light source down there. It should be *brighter* in the confined tunnels not darker.
- Added a little catwalk to reward players who can make the (non-straferun-required) trick jump across the bridge.
Map11
- Major bugfix: softlock when entering yellow key room from the blue key branch. Added some walk lines so that wall can be opened up from below as well as by that switch above.
- The earlier lift is no longer time-sensitive but just a matter of lowering and raising.
- Similar with the lift going from the security checkpoint down into the lab area - the remote switch simply opens up the lift, which then acts more like a conventional step-lift.
E1M1
- First door switch sector needed to be 72 units high to avoid tutti-frutti effects.
- Removed fake contrasts on corner "AGM" pillar.
- Removed secret flag on that crate you can jump onto, after feedback by various people.
[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.
Generally there should be nothing *necessary to finish a level* that requires any of:
- straferunning;
- extremely sensitive timing that could softlock you if you're on keyboard, lagging in multiplayer or have motor issues;
- checking only for a sound cue that something has happened;
- remembering how to distinguish two visually nearly identical areas; or
- backtracking to a previous area on the map that you had previously been given no reason to revisit.
I haven't caught all of them by any stretch of the imagination but it's a start.
Also some regular minor fixes.
E1M9
- Fixed some textures around the big blue-trimmed lift and removed an extraneous use line that triggered a faraway lift for no reason.
- The red key bridge lowerable section is now textured differently from the rest of the bridge.
E3M5
- Teleporter platform to get back up to the catwalk from the northeastern blood maze is now clearly marked as having a switch, as it is a mandatory progression rather than a secret.
E4M8
- Got rid of some fake contrasts on the noodles at the start.
- Added a radsuit for the northwest switch. While it is possible to avoid damage even without straferun, unless you've got a tic counter display and can time it to the damage interval this is basically RNG.
- The water flat on top of the lowering wall in the east was very, very noticeable. The switch is now stepped on instead of hit. (Not too sure if the secret isn't *too* obscure now...)
- Removed asymmetrical doortrak on the slime bridge on the southeastern piston switch.
- The linedefs of said slime bridge pit are flipped so a deathmatch opponent trying to grab the berserk in there is not magically immune to rocket blasts. (see #996)
- Realigned the four pistons by the gate to the starship. They also reveal moving parts when activated - not nearly as good as the crushers on the original DI, but better than nothing.
- Made the southern walls use PLAT1 to make it more obvious that those walls will lower later (with the added bonus that they match the four pistons).
- The southern light bronze area now has a strip to guide the player towards the switch in case they lose track of their direction while fighting monsters and forget to explore inside that area, as well as to better distinguish it from the southeast.
- The gate threshold to the southern light bronze area now matches that of the pre-opened southeast.
- There is now actually a threshold where you can tell where the starport ends and the ship begins.
- The two light bronze areas are a bit too similar-looking. Added a few health boosts so the player can spot/be attacked by them and know this is an unexplored area.
Map11
- The lift going down into the yellow key room requires a switch that is out of sight from the lift itself, which is not clearly marked as a lift to begin with. The only real way to realize what's going on if you don't already know about the lift is to locate the sound and immediately turn to investigate before the lift comes back up. I thought this was annoying when I first did my big overhaul of this map, but ultimately left the basic mechanism alone out of an abundance of caution; however, with the recent discussion of accessibility in the proposed changes to the documentation I'm revisiting this. That upper switch now lowers a wall to reveal the lift which is triggered by a walk line.
- The lower far switch on that same lift was actually literally *impossible* to make on keyboard and no straferun (and no vanilla wallbounce exploit), even if I change it to a regular lift instead of fast. This is completely unacceptable for something necessary to progression (rather than an obscure secret). The lower switches are now permanent repeatable floor-lowerers, while the line crossing from the lift into the lower chamber is a permanent repeatable floor-raiser, with the line crossing into the lift from above being a simple lift line.
- Retextured the stairs out of the water in the eastern branch so it's not an unreadable mess of criss-crossing grey lines.
- Realigned the new skull switch texture in the skull room.
Map19
- One of the stealth worms was stuck in a burning barrel.
- Removed monster block flag on line 2083.
- Unmerged and remerged a few identical sectors to better match the intended sound travel.
- Flagged line 281 as a monster blocker. This allows the player to always be able to make the jump onto that bottom stair without being blocked by the octaminator.
- That octaminator is now a pain bringer in easy mode. The far end of that platform path is well outside the maximum vertical autoaim range in vanilla, which means that to actually hit the octaminator without up/down aiming you'd have to be on one of the later platforms - i.e., confined to a relatively narrow area with no cover *against an opponent that has seeker missiles*. The best way to solve this is to charge towards the octaminator as fast and as soon as possible with the SSG, minigun, or ripsaw+prayer to RNGsus that you'll get a good painlock. This is not the kind of tactic the sort of person who *needs* to play on easy will think to do, or could do while also being ready to sidestep if the octaminator fires at the wrong time.
- 347 and 249 are now also monster blockers, and the worms in that slime pit have been moved to the platform just behind the combat slug since they're awakened early on and that's where you'll first encounter them anyway.
- Replaced the teleport pad in the vertical platforming sequence with a lift, to minimize disorientation and going the wrong way. (In retrospect I probably could have just made the teleport destination face the pit you came in from, but the lift worked aesthetically better anyway.)
- A good chunk of that entire platforming area has been moved 8 units to the west so that things would align with the flat grid.
- Lines 307 and 309 are now also monster blockers. The worm that would be trapped between them is now moved further down the route and marked ambush.
Map20
- Removed the useless, misleading skull switch texture on the bars at the start.
- The door leading into the blue key arena needs no blue key; the door leading out needs a blue key. Both are marked with blue-light trim. Removed the blue lights on the first one.
- The lowering wall leading to the teleporter now uses a pipe texture.
- The door leading out of the giant quadruped arena now has a bright flickering light.
- Yellow key is another case of effectively-randomly-mandatory damage. Added a path.
- Same with the lava tunnel on the red key route.
Map25
- The silver lift near the river and shack is now activated by SW1GSTON switch right on the wall at eye level, rather than counterintuitively and invisibly recessed into additional sectors.
- The painlord ambush lift is now accessible after the encounter. A small health refill has been added there for easy and medium.
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.
Also editing the BFG room in Map11 to use evil eyes again because neither this nor any id-like skull rock could have possibly matched anything in that room.
* textures: add GRAYRED and GRAYWIDE.
Also address #48 with respect to GRAYRED.
* textures: add AQPIPE06-7 and BROWN4.
The latter is called "BIGDOR6A" as the alternative BIGDOOR6.
