SDQ is pretty much in its final form. I don't plan on adding or removing too many monsters or weapons or making any significant gameplay changes. What I want to do is make sure the game is fun. Fun being the difficult thing and the most important thing. These are the questions I plan on addressing:
Does the difficulty cvar scale nicely? Are increasing levels actually more difficult or just drudgery?
Does every monster have a more or less equal chance of killing me? (monster balance)
Are there any monsters I absolutely dread/hate? (There should be some)
If I give the player one weapon set, will he be able to survive any monster set? (weapon balance)
Are end level bosses hard to kill and will they kill me?
E.g., some things I've noticed:
you can functionally freeze the bosses if you lay down turrets. the monsters are too busy trying to do their pain animations to actually attack the player, at least that's what i think the problem is. also maybe i should increase their health because of such turret-reliance or limit the turrets somehow.
the mega enforcer doesn't attack that often
the duke boss is basically a one hit killer
wolfenstein monsters are pretty lame. very small, not very threatening. they'll prob be removed. i dont know how to manipulate sprites. maybe they could move faster and hit harder.
some maps need adjustment. usually more detail, better lighting. maybe use some proper dm maps as inspiration like "axeme bondo" or "bondowalk"
Stuff i'm working on presently:
i've got a load of soundtrack files from doom, duke nukem and quake. some will work nicely in darkplaces if i convert them to ogg format. I'm working on a patch that will include some of these remixes that are available on the net and the quake soundtrack that everyone should have. also the maps need to be recompiled to make use of darkplaces ogg-playing feature. so this patch will be large. UPDATE: it makes more sense to just link to a soundtrack website: Sc55.duke4.net Some people may not even use Darkplaces (including me). I will include a lot of updated maps in the next update but not the soundtrack files. You will need to place these in your sound\cdtracks folder and rename the files to track01, track02, etc. Darkplaces uses ogg files.
freedom bombs now bounce
if a monster is affected by gas it will sometimes spawn gibs that spread more gas, like a plague. there is also a plague double double shotgun
the fists and vortaxe weapon have been moved to a powerup, and the vortaxe damage has been increased.
do we really need the cyberdemon? i mean he's a doom monster, but i dont have any of the other doom monsters, except the arachnotron. but he's awesome. do we want doom monsters? maybe instead of wolfenstein monsters.
Stuff I looked into before but couldn't get to work
Spawning monsters from other monsters. I can do this with the arachnotron. he can launch a missile and spawn spiders near the player, but they originate from the missile. what i tried to do once is have monsters teleport, but they would teleport to outside the map, so i scrapped that. i think i have a way to fix this...Another thing that would use this is monsters that would raise other dead monsters into a zombie or somesuch. that would actually be easier than spawning monsters out of thin air, because i have an origin to start from.
Random weapon code. I don't have any idea why this wouldn't work. a player spawns into a map, but his default weapons are fixed, and there are no other types of weapons on the map. there were weapon switch problems, weapon spawning problems and none of it was indicated in the code. *shrug
Good luck bondo!