[BETA] Doomania Royal [16.05.29]

[doomista]

Hi guys, after some time developing this I finally can say that major part of the mod is finished and playable. And what it is?
A Doomania Royal, mod inspired by a game Shootmania Storm by Nadeo. It's a LMS multiplayer mod which drastically changes the gameplay, weapons, rules and point system. It basically isn't compatible with anything else but it's own mappack. Mappack is currently in indev state, it currently has a three maps, but only one of them is in final release quality (map02). But enough talking, let's have a look on some gameplay footage:

phpBB [media]

If you're interested, here's a download link(12.5MB, gdrive, I will link to the moddb as soon as it will be approved).
In the archive there's a mappack (dmania_maps.wad), a mod itself (doomania_beta.wad), server config file used by myself for testing (dmania.cfg) and a tactical guide (tactical.txt).

1. HUD
Your HUD is divided into three sections. To see the new HUD, you have to set your HUD display settings to Fullscreen.
The top section shows your health. It's divided into two bars. Second bar can be refilled by standing on the healing pad.
Left section shows your ammo. It's divided into four section. Each weapon has a different ammo consumption. Ammo is automatically refilled by a currently wielded weapon.
Right section shows your stamina. By setting the sprint key at the bottom of Zandronum key bindings, you can activate sprint that last as long as there's some stamina. Stamina is automatically refilled when sprint is not used.

2. Weapons
Rocket Launcher - the default weapon. Shoots slow red projectiles not affected by gravity. Damages one health bar on impact. Uses a single ammo bar. Slow ammo regen. Crosshair is a simple cross.

Plasma - the sniping weapon. You can have this weapon by standing on the plasma pad. Fires a single ray killing anything in it's way, piercing through players. Consumes four ammo bars. Fast ammo regen. Crosshair is X-like.

Nucleus - the grenade launcher. You can have this weapon when being in interiors or underground passages. Fires a grenade that does not bounce, is affected by gravity and explodes after short period of time when laying on the ground. Consumes two ammo bars. Fast ammo regen. Crosshair is circular.

3. Special pads
Healing pad - white rectangular pad on the ground. Staying on it will start refilling a missing health bar. One has to stay on this pad till full recovery, otherwise healing is wasted. You cannot jump while being on this pad.

Plasma pad - grey pad on the ground. Staying on it grants a Plasma. You cannot jump while being on this pad.

Offzone pad - grey pad on the ground in the center of the map. Also comes with the offzone pillar. Standing on this pad will fill the offzone pillar meter. After filling it, tornado is activated. Tornado will kill anybody who touches it and it's constantly making the map smaller and smaller.

Jump pad - small black structure that thrusts the player upwards when player runs over it.

4. Point system
If you're using provided config file, the score limit is set to 30. Player can raise his score by killing, activating offzone and surviving the round. Each kill gives one point, each activation gives three points and each survival gives five points. After reaching the score limit, the result table is shown for 9 seconds and then the map is exited normally.

If you like the mod and want to make a map for it, please let me know (PM, mail, anything), I will create something like a mapping guide.

NOTES:
Max number of players is 8.
Yeah, I know there's some other Shootmania inspired mod for zandro, but I never saw it released and it's also a completely different gamemode.
I couldn't test it in "real" environment. I could only test it with one friend and six bots on the local network, but we connected via doomseeker (which should act like a real net connection, not a local one).

[Combinebobnt]

Make sure the pad system is extremely easy to use so mapping is in term easy to do (or converting other maps).

If you could bother to make the pads into little decorate objects (although nucleus would be much harder I guess), you could even just write acs patches for existing mapsets and place them. Skullbag did this; it used to only work on its own maps with point zones, but ijon tichy or someone converted the zones into a decorate object, and now it works with all ctf packs.

EDIT: oh yea I would just merge the core and the mappack, 12mb isn't big enough to warrant splitting them.

--- cool super edit so i dont double post

Ok we played some real games on this for you and now you can get real feedback (bots don't give feedback).

• maps need detail
• grenade is terrible, takes forever to explode, doesn't launch far, uses 2 ammo, no obiturary sometimes, no sounds, it's just generally worthless. all the good places i can imagine to use it (like dumping it in the middle), you can't
• railgun fires at some weird offcenter place on screen; I don't even know how you did that, but please fix it.
• the wonderbread confetti that kills people sometimes desyncs online so you die randomly. this is pretty important to fix.
• activating the center node gives how many points? it seems like surviving the round should be worth more than this.
• scoreboard messes up, and at the start of the round it usually just shows a few zeros and no names. also I heard the round start text may cover up the first name
  

oh yea u can prob make this work with 16 players or more, just use smallfont for more than 16

[doomista]

Make sure the pad system is extremely easy to use so mapping is in term easy to do (or converting other maps).

If you could bother to make the pads into little decorate objects (although nucleus would be much harder I guess), you could even just write acs patches for existing mapsets and place them. Skullbag did this; it used to only work on its own maps with point zones, but ijon tichy or someone converted the zones into a decorate object, and now it works with all ctf packs.

All the pads (except the jump pad which is just a linedef with thrust thingZ) are done with Actor enters sector and Actor leaves sector and can be easily copypasted. They can vary in size and shape, so decorate objects would not be a good solution. Also the gameplay is just so specific that converting existing maps to be compatible with this mod seems a bit impossible (you don't have Nucleus and Plasma just from running over the pad, you have it only when you are standing on it).

EDIT: oh yea I would just merge the core and the mappack, 12mb isn't big enough to warrant splitting them.

Good point. I'll do it in the next release, along with a few bugfixes.

[doomista]

Ok we played some real games on this for you and now you can get real feedback (bots don't give feedback).

• maps need detail
• grenade is terrible, takes forever to explode, doesn't launch far, uses 2 ammo, no obiturary sometimes, no sounds, it's just generally worthless. all the good places i can imagine to use it (like dumping it in the middle), you can't
• railgun fires at some weird offcenter place on screen; I don't even know how you did that, but please fix it.
• the wonderbread confetti that kills people sometimes desyncs online so you die randomly. this is pretty important to fix.
• activating the center node gives how many points? it seems like surviving the round should be worth more than this.
• scoreboard messes up, and at the start of the round it usually just shows a few zeros and no names. also I heard the round start text may cover up the first name
  [spoiler][/spoiler]

oh yea u can prob make this work with 16 players or more, just use smallfont for more than 16

> maps need detail
Agree. But I need to somehow prove that more details wouldn't slow the game down. I sometimes spotted all the ammo/stamina regens to be slower, but it's hard to tell wheter I coded it slow or wheter it were just bots.

> grenades
That's something I need help with. Original nucleus isn't affected by gravity, is very very slow, sticks to the walls/floors and explodes after three seconds or earlier if any enemy is in it's proximity. I don't know how to make it sticky to the walls and how to make this proximity mine effect.

> railgun offset
I don't think it's the fault of the railgun. I think it's fault of the crosshair (it's top left corner is aligned with the screen center which is also the origin of railgun). I haven't found a word about crosshair positioning on the Zdoom wiki.

> wonderbread confetti (it should look like a tornado, but that would require 3D models or moving linedefs)
Also something I need help with. It does not desync (i think), it's just unable to render itself at some places. I've tried to make it's logic body as small as possible, make it noclipping, relative to floor, none of it seemed to help.

> scoreboard
I am not really sure what do you mean, it should always print the players that connected before you had. Also about that covering of the text - what screen resolution we're talking about? I'll look at it.

Thanks for your feedback. I've spotted a bug myself (you don't get points for surviving the round when the offzone isn't activated), but this can be easily fixed. Also, as it is written in the Tactical Guide (i hope), activating offzone grants 3 points, surviving grants 5 points.