Developer's Month Log - September 2017 news

Well, hello fellow arena warriors, today i decided to start make the devlogs as a way to tell you how the mod is progressing by each month depending on the importance changes it have but hopefully at least one major thing will be announced/changed per month so.

So fellas, for this month this is the changes so far:

Player Characters:

• Next version will feature Doomslayer with his berserk ability, this is a promise i am making to myself as i have been dragging this for so long due to my demotivation to make his animations for Berserk mode, but this is progressing anyway, slowly, but progressing:

Monsters:

• Continuing the separation of shared models between monsters, Cacodemon in the next version will be using his Doom 2016 variant as well and Pain Elemental will be kept as a modified Doom 3 Cacodemon:

This dude looks happy in join the hell armies to fight us, ugh.

I'm still thinking if i should use his original sounds from Doom 2016 or find custom new ones for him as i have done to Baron of Hell since all monsters in Doom 2016 seems to growl and moan in similar ways with exception of Pinky and Lost Soul, sound clarification is important because this is a characteristic the monsters have to warn the player which one specifically is around without the player needing to check for them on sight.

• The allied Tamer of The Dark is also getting a total rework as a part of my entire redesignation of all creatures in the mod, the old model was edited so much and distorted so much that i couldn't keep it to make the desired adjustments and animations i wanted so i decided to make a new model on my own while keeping only the shape of the head from the old model, i enjoyed the rework of the model and also reworked the sword so this is brand a new creature basically, this cleaned up all the design choices i really wanted for the Tamers of The Dark, such as no-tail, no wider hip, no thin waist and skinny look, as seen in the image the new model is also bigger than the old, the proportion of the legs and feet between both is the same but the new model have a bigger body size so the inverted proportions in the lower limbs is now smaller in comparison to the body in overall, it's pretty much the same nerf done to Cyberdemon and Tyzen:

The other Tamers of The Dark will also recieve this reworks, Veridion is the next in the row to get reworked and Ranerion will follow up as well, she specially doesn't look like enough female yet, specially because the way she holds her cannon while standing still and walking pretty much hide her breasts so it is hard to notice she is female.

• Cyberdemon and Asmodeus will now have their bodies to fade out from the world after 3 seconds lying in the floor instead of 20 seconds, many people let bodies hit the floor but big bodies is not nice in regular maps since their corpses blocks the player's view alot, damaging the gameplay in terms of know where your enemies are and the projectile awareness, so this is also a change that is coming along.

Both of them will also now attempt to fire their projectiles at the player's hitbox base instead of middle, this will reduce the chances of the players make them miss their projectiles whenever they have the high ground.

Weapons:

• For the weapons, the next version will hopefully fix the issue with Dark Matter Gun instantly killing monsters with high mass such as Helltime Hunter and Veltanir.
  
  
• Plasma Gun's Ultimate is also fixed for not bouncing in liquid floors, the ball would vanish instead of bouncing on them as it should be.

Code:

• Recently GZDoom builds blocked all mods to change the native Options menu as many have been doing, this issue has been adressed in Hunter's Moon already, the next version will get rid of this problem and some options has been reorganized between the additional options from the mod.
• All scripts the mod runs while the game is executing is now changed to named scripts instead of numbered ones, the numbered ones was always meant for the maps makes use of them and in to maximize compatibility with all maps possible no matter ACS being used, this has changed as well.

For finishing this article here's a random gameplay video recorded with Version 2.9, i couldn't manage to upload it here due to duration and file's weight so here's the Youtube link:

And oh! The final note, there's a discord server for the mod now! The server has been up have few months already but i forgot to announce it in the previous post.
Discord.gg

Well that's all for this month folks, stay tuned for Version 2.9.2, it will arrive this month as celebration of Zandronum 3.0 official stable release.