> Skag was not in the same angles as the destination of the stop, also the door for it was removed.
> Reworked the west room making it more simple and real part of the action room.
> Main outside room was decreased.
> Removed unnecessary details on the map and enforced the theme in other rooms as well.
> Rebalanced the weapon placement.
- If you miss that *one* shellbox accessible from the start, the entire first 1/3 of the map becomes exponentially, inappropriately more difficult. While it is fairly visible once you're down that corridor, you basically have no other reason to go there if you don't have the yellow key, so if you're distracted the first time you see that area (or perhaps you miss it altogether) you might not think to visit it again until you have the yellow key. A small trail of armour bonuses visible from around the corner has been added.
- Moved the tripod gate opening switch a bit so that the surrounding textures align and the fake contrast doesn't make it stick out like a sore thumb.
- The tripod fight sucks. It'd be an amazing arena fight if this were Phase 2 and you had the SSG in those tight quarters, but (a) without the SSG it takes *way* too long and (b) since that door opens permanently like that and there's no wall to follow away from it, the tripod spends 95% of its time blocking your entrance into the arena. Now it's an instant-raise ambush jumpscare - which gives you a moment to take evasive action since it won't start shooting until you're well inside the room unless you intentionally back out.
- That all said, that tripod fight as is is *still* completely inappropriate for just the 5th map in the episode. Compare the equivalent in Map27, where you not only have the SSG and possibly the SKAG, and way more ammo either way, but the entire area is *much* more open and you can easily retreat to a spot where the tripod takes several seconds to reach you instead of one second. The monster blocking line has now been unflagged and you are now able to lure it out into the hall; even if it never leaves that juncture just outside the door, at least it gives you a lot more space and time to work with.
- Made the soul sphere secret just a little bit easier to find with the fake contrast, because expecting the player to figure that a *misaligned rock texture* is a secret when everybody accidentally misaligns rock textures everywhere else is totally unfair.
- The green T room with the teleporter leading to the red slime maze now has a door leading to the hallway going into the final arena, which opens at the same time that said arena does. This should cut back on some backtracking without disrupting gameplay too much.
- Gave the two corridors by the start different marbfaces.
- The cross on the platform by the blue key looks a bit janky even if we weren't trying to get rid of the real-world religious imagery here. It is now a glowing infinity symbol.
- Tekwalled up the back side of that weird not-door to the southwest.
- Mixed up some of that BRICK9 with some BRICK8 where things seemed adequately unexposed to the elements. Split up an over-1024 linedef in the process.
- Flipped a bunch of "ingrown" linedefs.
Fixed the mismatched lighting under the switch room rising pillars.
Simplified some of the light gradients to help reduce some visplanes. The ledge on the east side of the horseshoe is no longer lit.
The newly lit door next to the ledge now has a similar light texture trim to the other lit areas.
The four serp platforms never needed blocking lines of any sort, let alone totally impassible. They are now unflagged for blocking anything.
The nearby soulsphere secret has 2 flicker sectors sharing a common apparent light source that go out of sync. This has been simplified.
Removed some useless linedefs that seemed to be leftovers from when this map had more detail sectors.
Fixed the mismatched flat below the bars in front of the exit.
This map has been notorious for being difficult to navigate. It's actually really clever in its layout but it's also a little too clever about trying to surprise the player by putting important things in places the flow of the map would naturally direct the player away from. There's no real curing this but at least the signposting could be better:
- The raised screens in the starting loop area now align with the bricks and can't be climbed by accident.
- The two big remote-only doors near the start now have different textures since BIGDOOR1 implies a directly usable door literally everywhere else. They also have those pump-piston thingamabobs that show they're affected by those switches.
- Made the courtyard secret a little easier to find (if not actually figure out), and made its panel different from the starting area one because that confusion after you teleport is fun only once. Lower unpegged those doortraks as well.
- Raised the window railings so they're more clearly not intended to let you run out.
- Brightened the area around that door with the underpillars since the flow of the horseshoe makes it very, very easy to run past and not notice until it's too late.
- The "door" pillars on the central switch hub are now opened by nearby switches instead of being directly used. As pillars they are coded very similarly to the remote-open pillars everywhere else and it's always this off-putting and demoralizing distraction to have to remember that they are not. The keyless door also gets the same treatment for consistency.
- The door leading to the teleporter out of the switch hub is now opened by the keyless switch, ensuring that you have to have done this at least once before you can proceed without backtracking.
- Exit bars are explicitly marked as needing the red key.
Prompted by the discussion [here](https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/pull/1314#issuecomment-1923782305). After a couple runs it seems the big issue is the huge traffic jam after you hit that switch making avoiding the tripod much less feasible than it is on any other non-E2M8 level that has one.
- Changed the red switch arena to make it a bit more cyberdemon-fight-friendly. The switch is now flush against the surrounding wall so even if you run right into it to hit it you won't get stuck in an alcove. The space on the sides of the big green pillars has been expanded. The red skull pillar has been moved so you can move around it on every side. We also have 20 more rockets because hey why not.
-Lines 939 and 946, the two very ends of the red rock corridor leading into the red switch, are now marked as sound-blocking. This prevents the small horde in the star courtyard from creating a traffic jam blocking the player's escape even longer.
- Lines 931, 962 and 963 are also sound blocking. If you can manage to take on the tripod staying entirely within the "arena" part, after the initial wave of serps you can pretty much solo it.
- Added more texture variety to that arena (different marbles, more tekwall, etc.) and gave that very lonely serpentipede up there some friends.
- Made a couple doors look a bit better (taking some cues from the E3M5 doors) and added visible lights to the tentacle-star-side of the main red door to explain why it's lit.
- Prettied up the bridge courtyard a bit. Hopefully the stairs are a bit more visible now.
- Raised the hatchling fireplace so that you can't get inside without jumping. Reshaped a good deal of the rest of the room to get it to work.
- Moved those four shellboxes so it's not so easy to run into all of them at once.
- Restored the old rising-from-the-lava effect on the final painlord.
- Skewed some orthogonal lines in rocky areas to avoid unwanted fake contrast.
- Added exit signs as it's not universal for all levels that sky floor necessarily exits.
The less-safe stuff that I dared not suggest in #1289. (It's always a little scary to touch anything involving the lines of a sinking-stone sector that's attached to anything else.)
Checked with Visplane Explorer before uploading.
- The crumbling land has more linedefs now. The oddly straight geometric shapes especially around the SSG never sat well with me.
- The torches around the jump teleporter are green again, fitting the original theme of the map where they were all green. I'm guessing the red was intended to better telegraph that this is a special thing the player is expected to reach, so the platform itself has been retextured as to distinguish it from the surrounding rock formations.
- Gave the serps near the cloak secret more room to move.
- Moved the cloak powerup a little bit deeper inside the secret sector while expanding the wall to make sure there are no pickups from the other side.
- Realigned the metal textures inside the doors in the starting hub.
- Set the remaining 3 sectors in that teleporting window to the blood pool to non-damaging.
- Aligned the elevator and exit window heights with the wood textures.
- Used MARBLE2 for the backs of the face panels.
- Resculpted the crumbling SKAG path to make it look a little bit more convincingly like broken pieces of a path.
- Widened the butt end of the southeast arrow so it looks less like someone drew it with a shaky hand.
- Addressed #996.
- Adjusted the minigunner hut.
-- Main door switch is now slightly better lit, and is on the bright side of the fake contrast, while the teleport switch is hidden in the door-side corner on the dark side of the fake contrast. They're both visible objects at vanilla eye level. Textures are adjusted so it's a gradual fade of the bloodrust towards the cleanness of the switches rather than an obvious texture mismatch.
-- The doors are fully repeatable and fast when opened from outside, and their tops are lowered just a little bit (mostly to match the wood texture) - you should be noticing the minigunners just in time for the doors to close.
-- The minigunners are marked as ambush for good measure.
After the lights come back on in the blue room the lights in there appear to cast darkness instead of light. A bunch of stuff has been rearranged slightly so that the brightest adjacent sectors to the affected ones are not brighter than these light sectors.
As a side effect, this means that the gradient of the big techpillar light by the entrance is less affected by the in-game shutoff than it used to be. Unless the player has enough minigun ammo to camp there on purpose I don't think it'll affect gameplay for most people.
I've also simplified that room to use much fewer sectors - none of the lines between them were sound blockers and there were no changes in floor height or texture or lighting.
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".
Switch to using the full screenshots in the metainfo files. These URLs should not change.
I've checked them, and I've added a comment that should help with the confusion as a result of their being both PNGs and JPGs. My impression is these should be pulled infrequently such as when flatpak and Linux repo packaging is done each Freedoom release, or Linux distro release.
"Light 'Em Up, Boyz!" by Lola "BlueWorrior" Harvey and Goji replacing "Fun is Infinite at AGM" by continuum.mid
Jute's calm text screen track flowing into the slow intro of this track and then just exploding to start the action...
The "is" keyword is no longer supported, which result in a warning
in "make dist" as well as unintentionally having a "v" in the resulting
ZIP files and directory within those ZIP files.
Keeping the 19 in case someone does only a string search for "mortrixs19" and not "mortrixs".
Got rid of the time stamp in the invitation to update info.
These should now be "forever" URLs linking to image files that can be overwritten with each release without touching these XML files each time.
**Linking to the thumbnails is intentional.** Unlike the full screenshots the shrunken jpegs will always be smaller than pngs for these, so we never need to change the file extension; and there's really no reason for making everyone download huge screenshots with this stuff anyway - they can go to the website for that.
The current website organizes everything so that we have 8 screenshots of each game, numbered 1-4 for Chocolate and 5-8 for GZ. Including screenshots 1, 2, 7 and 8 therefore should give us a fairly representative variety.
It was overwriting the existing id BROVINE2. Both are now available.
All levels have been converted to use BROVINE3 with a script. There are a few spots where BROVINE2 actually looks better but we can presume the brown wall green vine was the original authorial intent since that one has been the only one available since who knows how long, and it's not like we can't update these later anyway.
Also incorporates the Map11 edits from #1318.
Change the sofas to resemble actual sofas instead of flesh, using COMPTILEs with texture offsets to emulate chair legs without having to make new textures.
Restore Ralphis' old E1M1 track as E1M5 - taking Matt's suggestion here into heart: https://github.com/freedoom/freedoom/pull/1292#issuecomment-1913358481_
"The Raging Sun" - although I like it - is quite bland. Ralphis' old E1M1 track is a fast-action-styled track that fits the shooting gallery aspect of E1M5.
Also addressed #996 for the crate area and simplified a bit of geometry (no visual changes, just merging sectors), as well as giving more internally consistent lighting to the basement red key area.
Old green slime bricks preserved as SLIME13A and BRICK13A.
Map11 tweaked slightly to take advantage of both; also fixes the torch light effect in the octaminator zombie ambush and adds a big vent grate to that blank wall.
Unfortunately I overlooked adding this wonderful new monster to
NEWS.adoc for 0.13.0.
The downloadable ZIP files have already been tagged, so I don't think we should mess with them, but there's no reason that NEWS.adoc can't be retroactively made accurate in master for previous releases.
I can update the website with this change once it's merged.
Closes#1122.
Reuse 0.9 and before's rocket launcher sound to make the revenant attack sound more distinct and impactful, allowing it to be heard easier than the quite weak "swoosh" it is currently.
Halved the damage of the damaging floors in the map.
Made the double-barred shotgun platform do no damage.
Made the blood pool in the green marble chamber do no damage.
Moved the torches around the first teleporter to enter the red key arena to make running into it a lot easier.
Replaced the pain lord on the initial lift with a pain bringer on hard, a few serpentipedes on medium, and nothing on easy.
Replaced two of the matribites in the cramped blue key room with trilobites.
Made the blue key platform larger and not lower when you step on it.
Removed the damaging floor in the blue key room.
