SamsaraHold Resurrection + Enhancer

[Untitled]

Well, at this point, while development's stopped, I'm now willing to hear out feature requests (and these can be big requests, small requests, all sorts of things) for 0.12, because 0.12 isn't really going anywhere for a little while, so I might as well ask people to see if there's a to-do list.
Feature requests are things I have up on the board for "These are things I'm seriously considering". Feature Discussions are for "I'm not sure I'm going to do this, but we can totally talk about it".
Format is:
-Request (Requester Name) [Status]
FEATURE REQUESTS:
-Swap around map orders so I can do some really neat things with some of the maps (what maps are being changed is kept secret). (Untitled) [Finished]
-Fix archivecvar stuff (Untitled, WaTaKiD) [Fixed]
-Fix STR16 being completely impossible at 8+ players (Untitled, Tehvappy50) [Fixed]
-Voting System to enter new maps, preventing them from being started early (bunch of people) [Improbable]
-Fix Balance (Everyone) [Attempting]
-Fix packets (Everyone) [Impossible]
-Fix server randomly breaking (Everyone) [impossible]
-Strifecaleb (Ijon Tichy) [Never]
-Bombwall (Ijon Tichy) [Never]
FEATURE DISCUSSIONS:
-Add new monsters to the roster! (Untitled + a few others) [Considering, but I'm not sure]
-Add new maps to the roster! (Lots of people) [Guys, help me out here, I can't map]
-Database Player Statistics Tracking (Drakeman1234) [What the hell is a ACS]
-Addons? (Bunch of people) [Probably Not]
-Rebalancing from the ground up - Reimaging the Paradigm (Bruiserdaemon) [In Discussion]

[Ijon Tichy]

STRIFEGUY AND CALEB

alternately bring bombwall back, that was gr8

[Untitled]

Actually, at this point, with the stage where it's at (as in, relatively functional and not making me throw my face into my keyboard), this thread is pretty much open discussion for Stronghold related things - mostly because this is the only thread that really deals with Stronghold - and of course, for samsarahold related things (see my feature request post 2 posts ago).

[EnsaladaDeTomate]

What about space seal from Corridor 7?

I would love to see him in.

Also, i wonder if d64guy & katarn are joining too?

[Untitled]

What about space seal from Corridor 7?

I would love to see him in.

Also, i wonder if d64guy & katarn are joining too?

New characters in general are really hazy, since the amount of work required to make a functionally working new hero is enormous, so I can't, as of right now, really promise anything, but here's the rundown of why not, design wise (coding is terrible with this codebase, but I'm used to that by now):

Space Seal (C7): If my memory serves me correct, that hero was made for ZDoom only, back in the 0.26 days (darn Zandronum's lack of features). Also, I know nothing about the game whatsoever, so I can't in good nature put him in.

Doom 64 Guy (Doom 64): The problem he suffers from is that he's a pointless hero - We have Doomguy.

Kyle Katarn: This is actually the one hero I'd really really consider putting in - I've played Dark Forces (and all of its sequels), and I sort know what I'm doing with it. The reason why it's off the to-do list is for entirely different reasons: The Kyle Katarn addon is still in the alpha stage, and has several problems I'd like to get resolved first.

Still though, thanks for posting - I'd much rather have people posting on this thread rather than people coming on to the server and telling me "omg why no caleb/omg fix everything/omg whatever I want a thing".

I wish I was joking about Caleb. I'm not.

[Untitled]

Alright, so now that I'm done with the school term, development is officially actually restarting!

And again, discussion is allowed - and encouraged - here, so feel free to request stuff; I can add it to the request log.

[bruiserdaemon]

Ahem... just so to ask, but how do i play this? do i have to load both samsara and stronghold? There's no instruction...

[Drakeman1234]

Ahem... just so to ask, but how do i play this? do i have to load both samsara and stronghold? There's no instruction...

Load Stronghold, then Samsara, then the Samsarahold files.

[bruiserdaemon]

Ok just loaded with only a few yellow messages on the startup which i couldn't read anyway. I thought there be more monsters and a few new tweaks too!...

[Drakeman1234]

The only suggestion I can hand you guys is to make use of Zandronum 1.3's new code hooks for saving persistant stats through the authorization server.

[Untitled]

Ahem... just so to ask, but how do i play this? do i have to load both samsara and stronghold? There's no instruction...

Yeah, it's not entirely clear, load the stronghold files, then the samsarahold core file, then the code file. Added it to the OP.

Or, you know, join a server. Multiplayer samsarahold is so much more fun than single player samsarahold. At least until the packets arrive.

Ok just loaded with only a few yellow messages on the startup which i couldn't read anyway. I thought there be more monsters and a few new tweaks too!...

Yeah, lots of warnings, but I'm not going to fix what's not broken.
There's a couple new monsters - satyrs are in a lot of maps now, and there's some custom bosses. I might as well add that to the discussion post.

Tweaks - oh yes, lots and lots of tweaks, most of them you won't notice until you get to Tier 4. Then it will become apparent how nasty samsarahold truly is. Also, if you try replaying missions, good luck. You're gonna need it.

[bruiserdaemon]

Ok i played it with parias on nightmare and it is really violent, good job! Only thing i don't like so far: why do sentry guns stop firing at all from time to time? They become completely useless until they decide to reactivate for some reason... parias should have a base 2 armor like in hexen, duke should have more health ( he's duke after all ), blazckowitz is too weak otherwise good job!

[Drakeman1234]

parias should have a base 2 armor like in hexen, duke should have more health ( he's duke after all ), blazckowitz is too weak otherwise good job!

Parias: Maybe.

Duke: Yes. He is duke. Do you know what Duke is? Duke, is a glass cannon. He's fragile as hell. He does *not* need more health. He's not supposed to tank all the damage.

B.J: B.J's job is to do one of the following, in SamsaraHold:

1. Use his pinpoint-accuracy weapons to nail the stronger enemies to make it easier for allies.

2. Use the Spear of Destiny to provide momentary area denial.

That's it. Although the chaingun can mow down a few legions, the fact that it sucks up so much ammo will require you to prioritize. Also, the rocket launcher BJ uses penetrates enemies.

Also, again to the maker of SamsaraHold, consider the recording of persistant player stats, pleeeeease!

[bruiserdaemon]

Played again, there needs to be some better balancement in overall difficulty of the levels, some are plain easy and with the powerups they are absolutely a piece of cake, while some others are difficult even with all the powerups... my suggestion so far is to tweak down some power ups and/or the amount you can carry of them, but also tweak down some of the nastiest waves ( specially those with the hades elemental ). Unless you like that kind of gameplay where you can die in a flash or mow down hordes of enemies in a flash as well thanks to power ups ( if you live those 2-3 seconds to shoot your weap )... maybe you should add more to the survivability of players, add some kind of permanent armor like in hexen but put more enemies in as well ( and add some 5 more seconds between waves plz ). That should be perfect.

[Untitled]

Ok i played it with parias on nightmare and it is really violent, good job! Only thing i don't like so far: why do sentry guns stop firing at all from time to time? They become completely useless until they decide to reactivate for some reason... parias should have a base 2 armor like in hexen, duke should have more health ( he's duke after all ), blazckowitz is too weak otherwise good job!

That's monster AI being notoriously unreliable online - They have MinMissileChance 0, +MISSILEMORE and +MISSILEEVENMORE. I don't know what else to give them!

Nightmare mode in general is a joke - to put it in perspective, we've never gotten farther than Tier 2 on Nightmare, and this is from a team that's experienced, well coordinated, and knows the maps.

Parias in general is a complete mess; he's hard to use due to the melee-like nature of his weapons (so, all things equal, spam the serpent staff like there's no tomorrow), but he does a lot of damage - and actually, he does have a tiny bit of extra damage reduction - but only against specific enemies. Also, the wraithverge is pretty much the best weapon in the game, so he has that.

Duke is intentionally fragile - but all of his explosives force radius damage on bosses, so essentially he makes bosses equally fragile.

If anything, BJ is the strongest hero by a good notch above everyone else - He has a chaingun that single-handedly dominates everything in the slot, and his Slot V has +RIPPER, which puts it at a completely ridiculous level. In addition to that, his Slot VII is pretty much area denial to monsters.

Also, again to the maker of SamsaraHold, consider the recording of persistant player stats, pleeeeease!

It's in the feature list in [Thinking], because honestly, I should do it - it's more figuring out how to get the ACS working, because samsarahold is completely awful codebase where everything is crashing and oh my god was the ACS always this terrible how did I actually not throw my computer at a wall.

Played again, there needs to be some better balancement in overall difficulty of the levels, some are plain easy and with the powerups they are absolutely a piece of cake, while some others are difficult even with all the powerups... my suggestion so far is to tweak down some power ups and/or the amount you can carry of them, but also tweak down some of the nastiest waves ( specially those with the hades elemental ). Unless you like that kind of gameplay where you can die in a flash or mow down hordes of enemies in a flash as well thanks to power ups ( if you live those 2-3 seconds to shoot your weap )... maybe you should add more to the survivability of players, add some kind of permanent armor like in hexen but put more enemies in as well ( and add some 5 more seconds between waves plz ). That should be perfect.

Yeah, some of the "Hard" stuff is "BS" stuff and yeah, the balance in general could use a good tune-up.

Hades elementals are funny, because they actually aren't all that bad until AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA DEATH BY INSTAGIB LIGHTNING (does not actually gib). Yeah, I have to admit they're kind of nasty. The trick to hades elementals is: Watch. Make sure you always know where they are, and nothing they throw at you will actually cause that much trouble (the lightning moves really slowly). Being blindsided by one, however has a good chance of complete death. And get good at it, because god damn pyrodemons will really test you on that in tier 6.

Most of the things that can bring you 200/200 to 0/0 in a couple seconds are bosses, those you simply have to dodge - But they aren't that common until Tier 6. The monsters than can bring you 100-0 in a couple seconds are, well, a lot, but check the pads constantly - armor is very common.

Just for quick reference, cyberdemons are pretty much the measuring stick for boss design - generic, easy to compare to, but generally pretty boss-like.

Items are, well, to be fair, meant to be your tools of beating the game - in fact, I can confirm several maps are 100% impossible without powerup use. When things are easy, don't use them - Save them for maps you know are hard.

The much bigger issue is that balance actually isn't intuitive at all - I have to do a lot of guessing, because I'm one player - and this game has to handle up to 8, which is 7 more than my offline testing can handle. Some maps will completely crush your hopes and dreams in single player - everything in tier 4 comes to mind - but get a lot more manageable in 4-8 players. And doing advanced scaling to have balance that actually works perfectly is pretty much impossible both from a design and from a coding perspective.

The biggest thing I could say is see if you can get a group together - 4 players is about the optimal balance spot for samsarahold. If I have nothing to do, I'll throw up the server tomorrow (0.11g, because the 0.12 alpha isn't anywhere close to done).

TL;DR: I try, but things happen.

[bruiserdaemon]

I noticed you pumped up some levels by adding waves or more monsters to the waves, the final level of tier 5 is awesome! But many others you didn't touch at all feel way too easy and need to be pumped up, i can beat them alone on nightmare with parias and the powerups without problems. Anyway good job so far, this is a great improvement to stronghold doom.

[Untitled]

I noticed you pumped up some levels by adding waves or more monsters to the waves, the final level of tier 5 is awesome! But many others you didn't touch at all feel way too easy and need to be pumped up, i can beat them alone on nightmare with parias and the powerups without problems. Anyway good job so far, this is a great improvement to stronghold doom.

Here's the basic rundown:
Tier 1 is easy (except for occasional bs losses because they're all deadline missions except M5)
Tier 2 is harder and really encourages multiplayer (all of the missions except M5 have multiple entrances and more or less need multiple people). T2M5 might need a buff; but eh, I don't want to hose over players that quickly.
Tier 3 continues that trend, with generally chaotic maps and tougher monster compositions, and introduces the first real onslaught of boss monsters (T3M1 has demolishers, T3M2 has bruisers, T3M3 Pyros, T3M4 Terms, T3M5 ahahahahah).
T3M5 is kind of special, because it's the first "Total slaughter" - it's meant to be hard, and it definitely can be, especially with multiple players.
Tier 4 is pretty much the multiplayer mandatory tier - all five missions will have 3 or more entrances by the end of the mission.
Overmind is rebalanced and redone fully - it's now meant for multiplayer, and is a lot harder to "cheese" (That is, finish it in 30 seconds via Quad+Invuln)
Tier 5 is, well, Tier 5. T5M1 and T5M2, ok, they can be kind of completely forgettable, but T5M3 and T5M4 are something else, and T5M5 - heh, that's still probably my favorite mission in the entire game.
Tier 6 is basically the "screw you now" tier. Aside from T6M1, everything in there is kind of really nasty, and T6M8 will be the death of many (it's intentionally a very difficult mission).
And if you get to the final mission, good luck. You're gonna need it.

The thing is I can only really do so much when I need to account that this is most commonly played with multiple people.

---

Now is a good a time as any to announce that SamsaraHold development is officially restarting!

[Drakeman1234]

Now is a good a time as any to announce that SamsaraHold development is officially restarting!

Yay!

[bruiserdaemon]

One last suggestion by me... wolfenstein 3d weapons are way, way cooler on the jaguar and snes port than those on the original pc, as well as Duke's weapons are on the nintendo 64 conversion. Maybe you can add them?

[Untitled]

One last suggestion by me... wolfenstein 3d weapons are way, way cooler on the jaguar and snes port than those on the original pc, as well as Duke's weapons are on the nintendo 64 conversion. Just some screenshots here

[Screenshots Omitted from Quote]

Maybe you can add them?

You're better off coming to #Anakeion (irc.zandronum.com, channel #Anakeion) and asking the Samsara folks that; it's not really my thing to worry about aesthetics.