E1M1
- All the monsters in the trench are now +ambush, so they don't move until you're down there. On easy the zombieman even faces away from the start.
- More monster blockers added to prevent invisi-blocks jumping into the starting room trench or down from the cliffs in the outdoor area.
E2M7
- Armour bonuses still floating on sector 599. They now adorn the side pillars instead.
- The minigun is comically easy to miss - pretty much every passage into that area is designed for you to look the other way or overshoot it jumping in there, and you might go through the next 80% of the map before having any reason to go back into that part of the room. Its platform has been moved to the lower area, with the upper platform being ostensibly a shotgun but the shotgun guy now standing there took it.
E3M4
- Stealth worm 16 stuck on overlapping ledge.
- Changed the St. Pete's cross into a sealed-off fireblu portal.
- Extended the stairs up from that long bridge so that it's more obvious from a distance at low resolution that those are legit stairs up and you're actually expected to backtrack that way.
- Redecorated the exit room.
E3M5
- Jump down into painlord courtyard in the west would be invisi-blocked by said painlords. Monster blocking line added to keep the way down clear. Moved the tree out of the way too, for good measure.
- Addressed #996.
E3M9
- Fixed numerous tutti-frutti textures and unstraightened some unintentional fake-contrasts in some organic areas.
E4M2
- Got rid of the flat bleed trick in that slime tunnel. It's just a big steady spotlight now - and it doesn't mitigate any nukage damage.
- The secret exit room multiplayer contingency entrance is now opened immediately after the trap-bars are triggered. The trap-bars themselves are no longer crushing, preventing a possible immobilization softlock.
- Said multi-contingency entrance area is remodeled to make it clear it has been jump-proofed.
- Aligned hex textures in secret exit room.
E4M9
- Flagged line 1765 as monster blocking. It's possible for a monster, while that platform is descending, to step right onto that window ledge and get stuck there as the platform continues its movement.
- Added glass to the sides of sector 230 to prevent the player from falling in under certain circumstances.
Map02
- Changed the multi-wallpart elevator so that the middle is the "rungs" that the side "pulleys" are lifting up the platform against.
Map04
- Numerous cosmetic fixes to the starting area.
Map05
- A couple lines on the edge of the stream used the surrounding brown rock instead of the zimmer brown.
- Made the helipad symmetrical and made it look more weathered, including adding a small tree where there would once have been a light.
Map11
- The walk line to open the yellow door switch is now south of the minigun, so those who "know" how it works (without knowing the exact location of the line) don't have to go all the way up to the door to intentionally trigger it.
- Removed some hard-only monsters from the eastern branch, removing some matribites and octaminators and replacing one of the former with a formerly easy-only trilobite and one of the latter with a stealth worm.
- The dock area is now opened up by the same switch that lowers the two platforms, which are now lowered permanently.
- The red skull shootable switches are now located so high up that it's impossible to gamble on a stray SSG shot hitting them from below.
- Addressed #996 in some small gaps in the final arena.
Map23
- Moved all health bonuses around the broken teleporter to look less like mushrooms.
Map26
- Blue skull door trim was misaligned, obscuring the shape of the horns.
- Zombieman 130 stuck inside a monster blocking line.
- Moved all health bonuses around the starting area corpse to look less like mushrooms.
Map29
- Addressed #996.
Map32
- Added a way to climb out of the lava pit.
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!
My edit of Magnolia's edit of Korp's original bottle sprite. I think this strikes the correct balance of sharing the same symbolism as the other non-Special health pickups while diegetically looking like something fundamentally different enough to justify the different behaviour.
Turns out it's a perfectly functional word for this purpose in Spanish.
The English "device" double entendre, however, is apparently untranslatable. (Please correct me if I am wrong on this.)
The way the part of the sprite right under the flames was evenly lit made it feel like something other than a light source.
I tried making the top of the central column lit on either side but it didn't look right at all so it's a third flame now.
New track "Oxidine" by Korp (based loosely on Jute's previous E1M6 track) slotted for E1M6 replacing "Panic" by Ajanddino.
New track "Hidden Between Spades" by Korp slotted for E1M9.
"Derelict" by continuum.mid moved from E1M9 to E1M7.
"Sewers" by Discoholic and Blastfrog moved from E1M7 to Map12, replacing BobFromReboot's untitled track.
Rationale for posterity:
I really appreciate how Korp managed to take the old E1M6 track and rework it into something that slaps. The current track, while functional and not derivative in a way that would require its replacement, is still very reminiscent of Doom's rock/metal tracks in a way the rest of FD E1's music is not, which just makes the resemblances stick out even more.
"Derelict" has always only marginally worked for E1M9 (or rather it doesn't work, but still works better for it than the current E1M5). The dark, brooding ominous track works *much* better for the antepenultimate level, while the low-key funky riff of "Sewers" works much better for the cluster starter warming up after the intermission text than either "Derelict" or the current Map12 track.
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.
Added a rear sight notch.
Made a bigger flash based on the minigun, scaled in proportion to how much space the (imputed) barrel of each weapon view takes up on the screen.
Adjusted the offsets so there isn't quite as much movement with the trigger pull - that weird whole-arm jerk was a mistake from id that we need not emulate, and reducing the movement helps bring out the way the slide actually moves back in the C frame.
Adjusted the shape of the hand so there wasn't that awkward sudden perfectly straight line down the thumb side.
Made the light fade out after each shot instead of just blinking.
Adjusted the minigun's offsets to better center it.
That corridor that got the big reshape was originally using the dark grey flat large brick pattern, with lights inside it.
I can't risk the lights but the darker ceiling definitely looks better.
Also fixed some other textures here and there.
- Centered the edge rivet of every one of those green panels, then moved all of their alignments down by one pixel to fully hide the bottom rivets.
- Marked the smaller yellow door from both sides as a yellow door.
- Changed the fronts of the shiny steps to an aquatext pipe similar to the bronze/brown ones on the other side of this area.
- Fixed the misaligned textures on the big train gates.
- Extended the corridor in front of the main yellow door and made it open instead of a dead end, then extended the windowed building by the tracks to the southwest. This cuts off the view from the corner to the northeast where all that HOM is. Since there's nothing back there for the player and most of the activity is going to be eastwards, the technospiders that spawn in hard generally will not get stuck, though the player does have quite a bit more cover. (Meanwhile, opening up that corridor makes this fight a lot less claustrophobic.)
- Added yellow key indicator on both sides of the main yellow door.
- Simplified the geometry of the northern corridor leading out into the southwest crate area.
- The green panels used to have a big SUPPORT3 section where they touched the lifts. Only some of these remain and they look like accidents. Replaced all of them with warning stripes.
- Made the crates on the southwest near the elevator full height again. There does not appear to be any visplane issue resulting from this.
Map25
- The eastern door of the first hub has a gap large enough that going there will always force you to touch the hurtfloor. I can see the rationale in theory for making this visually distinct, but frankly I never even noticed the difference until getting hurt just now while testing it. That door now has the same platform in front of it as its western counterpart and is marked with skull poles instead.
- On the topic of marking the doors, both shells are now by the door leading to the SSG and both health refills are by the door leading to the surge.
- The stairs leading down to the painlord ambush no longer have anything to the right that can snag you as you try to sweep up all the bonuses (which are now placed slightly closer to the edge of each step so you can't accidentally jump over them).
- The switch lowering the red key now has the player facing the red key. It's nowhere near as visible as I'd like but it's better than before. The same switch also opens the rescue suit closets.
Map12
- Added a secret behind the train. Just a little guy hangin' out.
E1M3
- Floaty health boosts near sector 74.
Map12
- Moved corpse 653 out of being exactly on the lift boundary.
- Miscellaneous texture alignment fixes.
- Many, many attempts to address #996.
Map14
- Moved armour boosts inside minigun secret door into the chamber itself.
Map15
- Thickened the lowering panel with the pump shotgun to prevent possible grabbing through the wall.
Map17
- Floaty shotgun on pillow.
Map18
- Floaty missiles around launcher.
- Floaty clip 100.
- Addressed #996 in the courtyards.
Map19
- Restored the original shape of the lower platforms and added the catwalk only as a narrow pipe.
Map21
- Disambiguated "sinky" ripsaw position.
- Deleted sectors representing the pillars around the soul sphere platform as there was no reason not to use 1-sided lines here.
Map27
- Floaty diagonal armour boosts around red key pillar.
E2M9
- Floating gibs 139 by teleporter pad.
- Lots of tutti-frutti around the teleporter pad to the east of the floating gibs. ~~Never point a COMPUTE2 at a map you are not willing to destroy.~~
E4M2
- Fixed some textures in the cross room and the secret exit room.
Map01
- Moved minigun 70 deeper into the alcove. It wasn't actually floaty but it looked bad there anyway.
Map09
- Floating serpentipede corpse. in red cracked area.
Map11
- Floating health boosts 715 and 719.
Map19
- Moved the shellboxes and backpack to match the stairs.
- That is not a jumping puzzle, but a game of luck whether you take damage from the slime on your way to the northwest platforms. It's now a thin continuous catwalk and all of that slime does 10% if you somehow fall into it anyway.
- Moved the lowering wall switch to the left so you're not stuck trying to hit it from a step above.
Map20
- All 3 rockets in the blue key arena were floaty.
- At least 1 floaty armour bonus in the red button brown room.
- Expanded the red key column to better ensure the player will cross that line when picking it up.
Map23
- Floaty health boost 265.
Map25
- Sector 59 now completely unambiguously houses two hatchlings.
- Floaty armour and medikit in the square floor halls.
- Floaty medikits by the yellow key.
- "Sinky" health refill on the newly accessible painlord lift.
Map28
- The candles on the western skull piles are all moved closer to their respective ledges to avoid floating to the ledge above them. These sectors have also been merged and the bloody part now uses the new flat.
- Floaty health refill 313. It is now in exactly the same spot as the sphere that appears instead on easy.
Map29
- Moved the *potentially* floaty stealth worms in the dark pit building away from the moving platform.
Many of these found thanks to Inuk's new floating-item-bug script!
E1M1
- Replaced the health boosts in the exit to the upper cave with a trail leading into the cave, to let the player know right away that this is not a decorative area. (It's not even counted as a secret!)
E1M7
- Shells no. 174 was floating on that bit of wire connecting the two computer banks around it.
E2M7
- Floaty armour boosts 57 and 62.
E2M9
- Floaty anti-nukage supplies 102 and 132. Moved 133 as well just in case.
E3M3
- Floaty candle in sector 232. All moved for symmetry.
E3M8
- Replaced one hanging gore actor. See #941.
- Made the panel behind that replaced gore actor a marble face.
E4M2
- Armour boosts on east side of bridge were close enough to be subject to the floating bug, stopped only by the impassable line.
E4M9
- Light no. 117 submerged illusion pit was smaller than the light hitbox and the wrong shape.
- Floaty serpentipede no. 236.
after seeing how it looks with #1098 and checking id it appears that i can't legitimately ask for a rw14_1 that's just a darkened version of the proposed new rw18_3. The questionable fake lighting effect has been removed.
Also make that window outdoor bit to the west a bit less subtle, if for no better reason than the "parallax scrolling" helps make that section of the hallway stand out even more.
This was initially nothing more than moving the player start to some place where you can just run straight down the hill without turning and not get invisi-blocked by the landing pad light.
Ended up with a bit of environmental storytelling about a trilobite who was tasked with replacing a battery on the facility's above-ground telecommunications tower at the edge of the forest and died mid-task under mysterious circumstances.
The landing pad lights have been moved to a more conventional set of corners.
- Restored the extended platform into the hallway out from the hub.
- Adjusted the contents of the two hub side rooms.
- The minigun in hard is provided by a minigunner teleporting in late into the map progression, wandering in the way the player had come, as though by accident. There are no other minigunners on this map under any other circumstances.
Map20
- Down switch added to the upper side of the big pipe lift, in case the stealth worms are in the way.
- The lift in the small brown cave area is lengthened (and the upper catwalk widened) to lessen the chances of the worms getting stuck.
Map23
- Teleporter room stimpack is now a medikit, if we're going to allow the possibility of having to flee a combination of arbitrarily wandering necromancers and shotgunners.
Map24
- Ripsaw is now a minigun outside of hard. I believe this ripsaw had been added back when FD did not have to consider that the ripsaw is much more unreliable in vanilla against something as big as a trilobite. Given the near-complete arsenal from Map23 making this encounter extremely lopsided versus pistol start, this is probably an unduly conservative change.
- Adjusted some of the tekgreen textures so you didn't see that blue window half buried in the floor.
- Extended the ledges to let you walk all the way around the red key slime pit.
- Adjusted the lighting and markings on the door in the long corridor leading back into the main hub.
- Moved some vertices in the green rock hall to avoid unsightly unintentional fake contrasts.
- Made a bunch of switches eye height for the player.
- Realigned the big bricks in the southeast reuins.
- The room to the second switch in the southeast ruins is now marked by an analogous appearance to the first switch, missing only the gargoyle itself. Trails of armour bonuses are also added to get the player to check that area, because the pain bringer does not ever acquire line of sight without the player actually committing to going that way.
- The pads that actually let you advance have different glyphs.
- Got rid of the fake contrasts in the exit room.
- Exit room necromancers are reduced to 1 on medium and 0 on easy.
Map29
- Blue key pillar was doing damage. At first I thought it was a bug, but it turns out it was intentional. Bug found between chair and keyboard of whoever did this (almost certainly me if I recall).
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...
