Project Ideas

[Spottswoode]

I was thinking of developing a sort of Zandronum Enemy Territory mod. Teams would be Marines and Zombies, maybe with some special marine classes and some upper tier monster classes (imps, demons, etc.) with score unlocks. Classes would be standard ET kind of stuff, Marine, Sniper Marine, Zombie, Sniper Zombie, etc. Maps would consist of bases, objectives, and cap points with forward teles at the bases that are activated when the bases are capped. Scoring would be done in the ET way, or through set scoring through the Server variables.

[Ænima]

I had a Doom:ET idea a while back too, but it would be a LOT of fucking work. :/

[Powerman]

http://www.funsted.com/gag/2471 That picture, turned into an enemy (like actual sprites, not just the picture) would be a great scary beast to go fight.

[Impact]

I was wondering, would it be possible to make animations in flash and have them as cutscenes in a doom mod? That would be awesome, have a storylined mappack with extra oomf

[one_Two]

I was wondering, would it be possible to make animations in flash and have them as cutscenes in a doom mod? That would be awesome, have a storylined mappack with extra oomf

If you exported as .gif from flash and animdef'd it maybe.

[Ænima]

I was wondering, would it be possible to make animations in flash and have them as cutscenes in a doom mod? That would be awesome, have a storylined mappack with extra oomf

If you exported as .gif from flash and animdef'd it maybe.

Hello 200MB+ filesize.

[one_Two]

I was wondering, would it be possible to make animations in flash and have them as cutscenes in a doom mod? That would be awesome, have a storylined mappack with extra oomf

If you exported as .gif from flash and animdef'd it maybe.

Hello 200MB+ filesize.

Hello epic cut scene!

[Ænima]

I was wondering, would it be possible to make animations in flash and have them as cutscenes in a doom mod? That would be awesome, have a storylined mappack with extra oomf

If you exported as .gif from flash and animdef'd it maybe.

Hello 200MB+ filesize.

Hello epic cut scene!

• Assuming you use 1 frame per tic, that's 35fps. For a 30-second cutscene, that's 1050 frames. That's also assuming that you don't try to attempt MP4-like compression, which removes identical frames and just plays them with a longer duration, but that would be a BITCH to script since you can no longer just use a looping delay(1) and you'd have to remember each frame that you lengthened. And there's around 1000 of them. Good luck.
• You'd also need an audio track to accompany that "video". But you can just compress that into OGG, so that's only another 3MB probably. No biggie.
• The animation would probably be choppy (especially on slower machines) because of the time needed to load each 800x600 pic. Using a smaller res would of course help and would also reduce filesize. But translating a crisp Flash video into 320x200 is gonna look like shit.
• I spent too much time writing this post.
• LET'S PLAY FNF

So yeah. An ingame "video" would be totally worth it.

[one_Two]

Yeah man I was joking. Although didn't zdoom used to allow playing .avi's or something stupid like that?

[Ænima]

Yeah man I was joking. Although didn't zdoom used to allow playing .avi's or something stupid like that?

It allowed only .WMV's, i think. Which is almost as bad as the method I described before because WMV's are huge.

[CloudFlash]

I have an idea for a LMS mod. It would go like that:
Map is a big square stage with no walls, poison floor and instant kill pit in the middle and outside of its borders. At the beginning of the round, one of the players is chosen to be 'train'. He starts dropping health bonuses when he walks, and he gets damaged only when he stays still. Rest of players have to follow the 'train' in order to get health bonuses before they expire or someone else steals them. If they don't get bonuses, poison floor kills them. If they fall down into instant kill pit, they die. If 'train' falls down while few players are still alive, then everyone gets healed and a new 'train' is chosen.
If only 'train' and one other player are left alive, then ACS script activates. Said script basically tries to kill the 'train' by things that are supposed to cause him to fall outside of the 'stage' into the instant kill pit, like boosting his speed, jerking him to the left/right, causing him to slide on the floor like if it was ice, turning him 90 degrees to the left, changing the point of view few times, etc.
If player dies, 'train' scores. If 'train' dies, player scores.
Rinse, repeat.

[Klofkac]

This is actually a good idea. I think it could be included in SLMS or IOP instead of making it a separate wad, because its theme is similar to maps in those.

[one_Two]

It'd have to drop a few health packs at a time to stop one person clearing up.

[Lollipop]

Also, doing shit like that to the trainguy would make it plain annoying to play, I would personally just suicide if I'm chosen to be train because of the shit that comes with it :\

[Balrog]

Yeah man I was joking. Although didn't zdoom used to allow playing .avi's or something stupid like that?

It allowed only .WMV's, i think. Which is almost as bad as the method I described before because WMV's are huge.

Actually it could probably swing running other formats, since IIRC it was just a bare call to Windows Media's "play video" function. Still a terrible idea though.

[Fluttershy]

Yeah man I was joking. Although didn't zdoom used to allow playing .avi's or something stupid like that?

It allowed only .WMV's, i think. Which is almost as bad as the method I described before because WMV's are huge.

One of my friends was wanting to try this out, but I warned him that it was a terrible idea, mostly because of the horrid file size of .WMVs, in general. A few short seconds of footage is amplified up to megabytes and megabytes out of nowhere, which would lead to insanely huge .WAD/.PK3/.ZIP files.

Then again, it could be possible sometime to use other formats in later builds, but I'm not certain yet.

-----

As for project ideas in general, I do have something currently being worked on. Rough design, as nothing has been touched with yet. It's nothing special, but just a revision of my EVO HUD, that some of you might have noticed lying around in my signature. I'm not sure about what mods and such it would be well-suited for, as I haven't played online in months, so I don't know if anything has changed during that time.

This is the rough base of the HUD's details so far. With some SBARINFO, and probably ACS codes, the cyan outlines will likely be made translatable to match the player's color. https://www.dropbox.com/s/t8khi4j74qvyh ... .00.48.png

Bonus points if you know what game I based this off of.

[Master O]

I originally posted this in Zandronum General Discussion:

Wouldn't Rune Doom been a great mod to add to Zandronum?

http://zandronum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3726

Quake 2 also has a rune mod, but it's called "Lithium:"

http://quake2lithium.com/

[Hardbash]

Another idea for friendly marines and such, with choosable difficulties with fairly large ranges. Maybe like 'Stupid' will mean they MIGHT handle themselves well vs some cacos, then Mastermind or something along those lines, where they can handle themselves efficiently in a Chillax map wad.

I realize there are marine wads where you can summon them in and they'll fight with ya, but they all usually live in that "YOLO MOTHERFU-ded" style.

If there's already something like that where they can handle themselves adequately in super hard as hell maps (I'm not a very skilled player, okay, I can hardly do ANYTHING in a Chillax game and get somewhere) link me to it thru a PM.

[HexaDoken]

This is virtually impossible since the greatest weapon against endless hordes of enemies is your skill, therefore, making friendly marines that are actually half-decent at fighting would require some AI manipulation.

And Zandronum gives you almost no tools to tinker with AI, sadly.

[Konda]

Yeah, I don't think it's even possible for the AI marines to see the layout in a room they're in, and find a door, etc.
TL;DR In theory it's possible, but it would take a truckload of work and it would lag like shit, so all that work wouldn't pay off.

Maybe it's doable if every tic it fires some invisible projectiles in all directions and notes the time it takes them to hit an obstacle. Or try spawning some invisible actors via ACS in all possible coordinates, starting from the marine's position, until the spawning fails - then it will know where the obstacles are. Either way, that's a lot of processing for just a single marine and would most likely lag the absolute shit out of any server. But as for identifying doors, I think you'd have to modify the map.

And that's just the process of identifynig obstacles in a room an AI marine is in. Identifying projectiles and monster attacks would take even more work. The projectiles would most likely have to be edited in Decorate in order to call an ACS script to assign them a unique TID. Not to mention strategies like ammo consumption control (using different weapons in different situations in order to preserve ammo) and making it take advantage of the BFG9000 splash damage. Or simply finding a route from one part of the map to the other.

So yeah, Zandronum is far from having decent AI control that would enable us to make decent coop bots.