thats the worst aspect of q3 gameplay: aim > tactic (which getting near your enemy certainly is part of)

funny, i liked the d3 sg, tho you have a point bout just spreading too much to require ANY aim :) 

you would need to create or emphasise a penetration value for the type of object being hit.

A shotgun blast will knock quail out of the sky from 100 yards of course, but it isn't nearly as effective used against reinforced glass (ie. your typical junkyard BMW) at the same range.

BTW, thanks, Lunaran. The mod made a boring afternoon a bit more interesting. 

why does doom3 crash when i load byzantine from the mod menu? 

The byzantine dll is for version 1.1 of the exe and you're running the unpatched version. 

hehe, i only patch games when i play online or if they don't work right at first. :P

thanks. :) 

418. anyone beat that? 

It's probably because of your small penis. :/ 

What settings, a preset or custom? 

just post on the polycount forums once you have some funky level content ready.

Ah, true, I could always try that. Still, I won't mark it as a sure bet until a model is done.

I do think the Byzantine [shotgun] is much better, but I can't see it being a "reliable fallback" as is. The much more effective MG takes that honour, because it's faster at killing pretty much everything.

True, but you'll not get as many bullets as shells. Other weapons will always be better, but the shotgun ideally would almost never be something you wouldn't want to switch to. (if that made sense.) I'm having a go with a slightly wider shotgun spread and a slightly weaker MG to see how it feels to play up the accuracy tradeoff a bit more.



Getting close enough to your target to do something is a rather tactical thing - in Quake3 when your target is moving quickly and unpredictably. With loping monsters it becomes a dry exercise. Shotgun's staying more or less as is simply because I found it unfuriating to stand ten feet from an approaching fat zombie pounding away at him with the shotgun and watching every pellet go past him.

418. anyone beat that?

You are teh king. Now, try it on g_skill 3. :D

Actually, I never really touched the nightmare settings (aside from reducing the 350% damage modifier), so the ticking-health and soul cube combo are both as they were. It actually makes for quite an interesting round of DMSP.

One more thing: bombadier imps (er, the red ones). The splash damage of their attack pushes the player around far more than that of any other monster

Noted, agreed with, and fixed. Trites knock you around pretty hard too, so I've brought that down as well.

Shamb> I do see what you mean about damage feeling less serious now. I still don't like the idea of losing control of my own crosshair when I need it most, but I'm going to have a go with the double-vision feedback reeeenabled to see if I can strike a happy medium of painful-feeling pain that doesn't ruin your aim. 

I refuse to play *ANY* game where you can't have your crosshair set firm. Visual damage feedback like screen going red and stuff like that I can tolerate, but if I can't have my POV standing still while I am being attacked that game immideately gets the delete. 

Guess you didn't play Doom3 then.

You suck. 

I didn't play past the part in the very beginning where you get to follow a security bot due to hardware issues, correct. I guess I won't be playing it when I solve those hardware issues then. Is there REALLY no console variable of some kind to disable screen going all bollocks when hit? 

but then you get no feedback whatsoever. You could try 0.2 or so.

and jago, calm yourself, the crosshair's not going anywhere. Doublevision is something else entirely. 

Archviles will heal nearby monsters, opting for the one that has lost the most points, accompanied by a big obvious effect.

Shotgun spread up 2�, number of pellets up by 2. Still feels the same at the midranges but extremely close up it makes the difference between three shells and two, or two and one.

Machinegun firing rate restored, dmg/sec proportionately lower. Clip is now 60.

Chaingun spread reduced a tad. Sounds better as well.

Bombardier push reduced a lot.

GL damage reduced from 175 to 150, firing delay from 200ms to 40, and clip size down to 4.

Archvile melee damage up to 20, from 12.

Trite health is unchanged as it hardly reduces their feasiblity as a horde monster.

Contemplating: crosshair with dynamic outer radius to illustrate spread. Nice but not necessary. 

Monsters per Minute: 15
Total Monsters at once: 5

Everything else was left alone. I shall try on skill 3, see how that goes. 

Same link as above, but if you can't be bothered to scroll all the hell back up, here's the url:

[ http://www.lunaran.com/files/byzantine/byzdmspalpha.zip ]

Give the second version a whirl, and let me know if I've managed to make an overall improvement. A lot of what was said in the thread was acted on, so I hope I've managed to please all of you at least a little. :) 

Still like it.
But I believe it can get old fast... without new maps.
So post on how to make maps for this so someone can start making new little arenas to play in. Good stuff so far, it seems a little bit tougher to me becaus I HATE those damn archviles, and with the healing abilities it really makes it difficult to kill off a Hell Knight. 

The healing bit that the Arch Viles do now is annoying as heck, if not understandable. I think it's a cool and all, but it makes the difficult as hell to talk down Barons.

More feedback to come. 

Well, the .script that's included is fully commented, and you can open the .map and look at that for an example.

But I'll be nice and explain anyway:
o Build map.
o Place entities you want to act as spawnpoints (I used target_nulls but any entity will actually work), and set their angle. Make a trigger_relay (or anything really) named "monsterSpawn" and target it to all of your spawns, and nothing else.
o Place items. Items are hidden at map load and shown in batches at the same interval as the monster rank increases, so decide what you want shown when. Set "respawn" to the number of seconds between spawns on each item. Items you don't set to respawn will act like normal SP items and disappear forever once picked up. In my map, health, ammo, shards, and the RA (being the last one) respawn, and weapons and YA/GA do not.
o Create trigger_relays named archiver0 through archiver7. These should target the items. All items targeted by archiver0 will be revealed when you push the big button, and 1-7 will all spawn at the respective interval marks. Any items not targetted will never be hidden, but ideally any items you want as 'starters' should be spawned at warmup by archiver0.
o Put a dummy trite, imp, and hellknight in the map somewhere, and set "hide 1." They will cue the compiler to create the appropriate AAS files.
o Put byzdmsp.gui on a gui object somewhere, set its name to "dmspcontrol".
o Create two "speaker"s named buzzer and buzzer2. The first will play at every rank increase, and the second will play when monsterCount is reached (which you won't hear without a finite monsterCount).
o Place a trigger_relay named monsterKill and set "call byzdmsp::monsterKill". Otherwise the script won't know when a monster is killed and will stop after monsterCap monsters are spawned.
o Set "call byzdmsp::main" on worldspawn and add a player start.
o Profit.

A few notes:
o Presets are not map specific, but I will update the .zip with an altered map and byzdmsp.script so that they can be. I'll post here with info about how that works once I do so.
o If you place weapons that aren't in Byzantine you won't get far. The PG/RL/BFG haven't been balanced for the new gameplay, and with the GL using the PG model there'd probably be confusion even if I took the time to reenable/rebalance them. There is also the chainsaw and pistol, the former being untested but probably fun and the latter being rather useless under the circumstances.
o Monster mix is hard-coded in the script. I considered adding a zombie-rush mode but taking the time to create a nice well-rounded zombie set and balance it would take time that I'd be better off spending on getting the maps started and/or doing any of the ten jillion things I needed to have done by the end of November, so you're stuck with my set.
o You can take the script, modify it, and apply it to a regular D3 map if you want to create a DMSP independent of Byzantine (if you really want to play that dumb game :) ), but the item spawns will not work. Hidden items in Doom3 can still be picked up, and it's only through a Byz code change that they're skipped until the script unhides them. If you try this anyway, please credit me.
o If you don't place the two speakers the script terminates because it can't find them. I'll also fix that and post here about it when the new zip is up. 

i dunno how much you changed it, but the shotgun feels much more powerful now and generally more effective. i liked that a lot.

agree with prod -- the archviles are evil when combined with powerful monsters like hellknights. i think in a regular sp map it wouldn't be as big a deal, but in an arena combat like this, it is. :D

so far, i like pretty much all the changes. 

I reduced the heal frequency on archviles. I guess that's about it then.

/me starts mapping

I updated the zip with a modified script and map. Here's how it works if you wanna make your own.

Set the following keys on monsterSpawn:
preset1_monsterCount, preset1_monsterRate, preset1_monsterCap, preset1_delay
Self explanatory. There are corresponding preset2's. These define the presets on easy skill. Set the following keys to set how much each one is increased per difficulty level:
monsterCountSkill, monsterRateSkill, monsterCapSkill, delaySkill
These can be zero or negative. (So, on nightmare, all the presets are increased by 3 * these four keys.)

Set the "warmup" key to # of seconds the warmup should last.

Lastly, buzzer and buzzer2 are now named rankBuzzer and endBuzzer for clarity, and won't stop the script if they're missing.

wheeeeeeeeeeeee 

Sorry for the lack of feedback the last few days.
Work is busy with the December rush and these 15 hour days don't leave me much time to muck around on the net. Pretty much all my quibbles seem to be sorted now anyway. 

Is this project still alive? 

Kinda.

Look, over there! 

...this is going to be CF2 right? ;)