Comments - Truvix

I would say that it does still count as a bug, but yeah, this sounds incredibly situational and I can't see this being a huge problem unless it's nuking peoples PCs to the point that they completely freeze, as you said. It's probably still worth looking into regardless, but really, how often are the player and a hellknight/baron going to manage to kill each other at the exact same moment anyway?

Yeah, a full release by the end of the year is probably a bit too optimistic, since, as you said, Pa1n's most likely going to be taking time off during the holidays and is probably already pushing himself to strike a balance between his personal schedule and PB's development, I was just under the impression that we should be seeing some kind of official release in the very near future due to his most recent post.

Considering that Pa1n's waiting on spritework from others until he finally drops the test release, it's still up in the air as to how long we could be waiting, since he hasn't made it clear how much still needs to be done. Spritework can take quite some time, but I can't imagine he's too far behind schedule since the original plan was to push for a full release by the end of the year.

Just out of curiosity, how exactly did you get ahold of the Doom 3 alpha voice clips that the zombies use? It's not really important, since I don't have any personal use for them, but I did a bit of poking around online and they seem pretty hard to get a hold of.

I would like to see this feature added to other enemies as well. It just seems kind of odd that only the base imp has this functionality. I know it would probably take quite a lot of work to do this for every single zombie variant (the sergeants alone would probably take quite some time), but I feel that this should at least be added to the dark imp so that the gimmick at least remains consistent.

As far as I know, the Arachnorb is currently there strictly for compatibility purposes when playing Valiant (they spawn whenever an arachnotron is killed). I don't think there has ever been any mention of the enemy becoming a part of the base mod, but now that you mention it, I think it wouldn't hurt to play around with the idea for a bit to see how it works out(it might not be the best idea since arachnotrons are already quite high on the list of annoying enemies).

You know how you can kick both Hell Knights and Barons in the balls to stun them for a few seconds? I think this feature should be added to the paladin and the other two (three, with the Bruiser Demon now joining the roster in 3.0) Baron variants. It might just seem like a little joke feature to some, but I've found that it's actually fairly useful, especially if you're trying to go in for an execution, since it means you can usually guarantee that you won't get destroyed by their incredibly strong melee attacks in the process. Also, you could probably make the argument that it would make sense for the cyber variants to be immune, but this DOES already work on the Cyber Hell Knights, so if this is the general thought process, then you should probably grant them immunity as well for the sake of consistency.

While we're on the topics of Hell Knights and Barons, I feel that if the Baron is receiving a new variant, it would probably be a good idea to give the Hell Knight a new one as well (assuming one isn't in the works already, since I don't remember hearing any mention of one at any point). I say this because I noticed that the Hell Knight and Baron variant attacks kind of mirror each other (the Cyber Knights and Barons having rocket attacks, the Paladin and Belphegor both using exploding projectiles, etc.), so for the sake of consistency, the Bruiser Demon should also have a Hell Knight variant that mirrors it somewhat. I was thinking that the Pyro Demon could be repurposed into the Cryo Demon by coloring it blue and giving it ice based attacks instead. I think this makes sense because while the Cyber Hell Knight uses a freeze ray, the Cyber Baron uses a flamethrower. Since the Bruiser is going to be fire based, I feel this would be a nice way to keep with the theme. This is probably a whole fuckton of work, but I still felt it was worth throwing the idea out there.

Also, Pyro Demon: Realm667.com

So how many new enemy variants have been confirmed to appear in 3.0? From what I know of, there's going to be new variants for the imp, revenant, and baron, and that the current plan for the flesh wizard is to scrap it in favor of a new variant. Do you have variants in mind for any other monsters, or are you just sticking to these four? I know that skymarshall has sprites for the hell elemental (a cacodemon variant) floating around, but I'm not sure if he ever sent them to you or not.

Also, if you do have any more variants planned, do you think any other variants may be scrapped?

The ability to destroy corpses was actually removed intentionally, but it's going to be officially be reinstated in 3.0

Also, the slide kick needing a running start was confirmed quite some time ago.

You know something I just thought about suddenly is, since you're planning to officially call it quits on PB after 3.0 (minus some possible hotfixes and compatibility patches), what to you plan to do afterwards? I know you mentioned that you've been busy applying for jobs, which is why news seemed to have come to a halt for awhile, but are you planning on doing any other projects to fill the time while you're waiting to hear whether you've been accepted anywhere, or do you think you're pretty much done with the modding scene for awhile?

It's nice to know that I'm not the only one that has noticed the weird issue with the turret's health. I haven't been able to pinpoint it myself either, it just seems to happen rarely when they're placed down. It's probably still worth looking into considering that the glitch that allows turrets to be picked up after being destroyed is going to be fixed.

I second this. Backpacks are few and far between in many wads. I understand that upgrades are supposed to be somewhat rare to balance out how powerful they are, but they really do need some kind of boost so that there's actually a somewhat plausible chance of obtaining all of them during a playthrough. Considering that there's going to be three (four? not sure if AnKeburu's Mancubus Cannon upgrade has been finished and made official yet) new upgrades, there's no way in hell (hah, jokes) you're going to find all seven (eight?) upgrades with the way the upgrade system is currently set up.

I'm honestly not sure that disabling mob infighting is really a wise idea anyway, given that there are some maps intend for you to rely on getting the mobs to attack each other, so it should go without saying that disabling mob infighting would make these maps extremely difficult (and maybe borderline impossible if the mapset being played abuses traps that use high mob counts).

I think the easiest example of this would be Tricks and Traps in the vanilla game. There's one part of the map that contains a Cyberdemon and a bunch of Barons, and you're intended to let the Cyberdemon open fire on the Barons and clean up whatever mess is left by using the invincibility orb. Trying to kill that many barons and a cyberdemon by yourself is a terrible idea, especially given that the Cyberdemon has an insta-kill stomp in PB, so you're screwed if you don't dispose of it in time. This is just one example, there are probably some other examples that work on a smaller scale, but I feel that my point still stands.

This became a bit of a ramble, but it's something I feel is worth rambling about since, as stated, it's actually serves a pretty big role on some occasions.

Allow me to be the first to say that I'm glad to hear that you're still active and that some progress has still been made despite the fact that you've been quite busy personally. It's also nice to hear that you also plan to wrap up the update relatively soon, but I feel that I can safely speak on behalf many people who frequent here that it's just nice to finally hear something official after the length of your hiatus.

That being said, I am quite curious as to what new features you currently have planned. There are some features that I can see being backported from the new Doom that would integrate quite nicely with classic Doom, but there are also a fair few others that I personally can't imagine to really be possible to implement in a way that really makes a decent amount of sense. I guess only time will tell exactly what actually makes the cut.

I'm sure that everyone who frequents the Brutal Doom addons section know of this already, but for those that really only check back occasionally in the hopes of news on 2.1, I feel I should point out that Daarkon (the developer of Project Brutality Mutators) has decided to pick up the pieces of what Pa1n left us in terms of 2.1 spoilers and is currently working on the following:

New sprites for the HMG and Freezer Rifle
Pulse Rifle upgrade for M1 Plasma Rifle
Desert Eagle/ Hand Cannon upgrade for Revolver/ Dual Revolvers
and the Quad-barrel Shotgun

I have no clue if he has plans to do a full unofficial 2.1 release (There's been no word of the new monster variants or adding some of the smaller changes like Merser's helmet intro animation), but I feel that this is still worth putting out there since there are probably many like myself who have lost any sort of optimism they once had about the future of any more official PB releases. If your hoping to get to play around with some of the new toys that Pa1n had planned for the future in some form, I'd suggest getting your news from here until Pa1n finally decides to make an official statement about the mod's future(and also check out the other great work he's done if you haven't already):
Moddb.com

I'll admit that it's not really a necessity as much as it is more of a personal convenience, but I wouldn't say it's a complete waste of time, as I personally find that cells are absurdly rare and really pretty much never end up using anything other than the BFG and Black hole Generator since I don't want to be caught in a bad enough situation where I wish I hadn't toyed around with the Freezer Rifle earlier. I know that cell weaponry is meant to be kind of situational and only used when you're in a bit of a bind, but seriously. Not having to waste health is also quite nice, since picking up a health pack when you really only need 10 health can come back to bite you sometimes.

Also, I find it kind of odd that you decided to glance over a lot of the stuff I talked about and decided to talk about solely about smart scavenger, seeing as how I only mentioned it very briefly. You seem unusually passionate when it comes to ammo balance.

A quite lengthy question/suggestion dump

1.has it been decided what the secondary fire is going to be for the Pulse Cannon? I know that there were a few ideas that were being thrown around, but that there was also some concern about these making the weapon too OP. If it hasn't been decided, I vote for it to either repel enemies or to behave like the Doom 4/2016 stun upgrade for the plasma rifle (I've seen this done in the Doom4Doom mod, so I know this is doable). I feel the stun effect would be the better choice, as it could open up some good opportunities to use berserk on tougher enemies in the late game (seriously, have fun trying to execute anything stronger than a pinky without getting ripped in half or having your skull crushed).

2. Have you considered merging any more addons with the main mod? It was confirmed that Merser's imp was going to be used as a new variant to fill the void between the normal and dark imps, but there are some great weapon addons by TheBarge that have been floating around for awhile that I feel would make excellent additions to the existing PB arsenal (primarily the Lightning Gun, the Alpha Unmaker, the Under Barrel Grenade Launcher upgrade, and the BFG2704, though I have to be honest and say that I feel the current sprite doesn't really look all that great).

The next worthy mention is Daarkon's mutators. I know this has already been referenced a few times before (primarily his brightmaps), but there are a lot of great expansions here that I feel would be great additions to the PB. I think the two things I would love to see integrated the most are the smart scavenger and additional powerups mutators (going back to the unmaker, the artifact scavenger hunt is a fun and interesting implementation) , as well as some of the improvements/edits made to some of the weapon sprites included in the overhaul core (the fact that the reload sprites on the M2 plasma rifle haven't been properly edited really irks me quite a bit). It would also be nice to see some the cosmetic changes be toggle options as well (the rotating armor, keys, and floatbobbing powerups are some really nice eye candy), but I wouldn't be too bothered if these remained separate.

Also, very minor thing, but the jawbones addon from the UAC survival pack becoming an official part of the mod would be some great amusement. The jawbones really aren't all that useful, but it's a stupid little fun bit that addons to the ridiculousness of the mod.

I can get behind this idea. Chucking objects at the enemy is always a good bit of fun, so I wouldn't mind seeing the ability to toss watchers. Also, we need to see proper gibs for watchers. It always kind of bothered me how they just fall to the ground without suffering any sort of mutilation. I was thinking they should explode into chunks of meat like normal cacos do sometimes when shot with the minigun.

I really like the look of the new sprites for the lost soul and the phantasm (the Forgotten One sprite works really nicely as a lost soul replacement) but the only thing that bothers me is that when you grab them out of the air, they still use the base sprites: Imgur.com

Do you think you'll be able to fix this in a future update? It's a very minor issue, and I don't really use the ability that often, but inconsistencies are something that irk me a fair bit.

I feel like the new Pain Elemental could do with some slight adjusting (using the same orange color as the normal pain elemental doesn't make it feel very ghostly imo), but I really like the new look of the spectre.

Also, thinking about it, can you gib these enemies? Ripping chunks of meat out of something that's supposed to be ethereal seems a bit odd, but I guess it wouldn't be the most absurd thing you could do in PB (considering you probably couldn't harm them in the first place by this logic).

I feel that there should probably be some easier way to obtain ammo for the Revenant Launcher in the future. Obtaining fuel for the Flame Cannon is quite easy since you get 50 fuel from each ammo pickup. Removing the arms from the Mancubus and Daedabus is fairly simple since you can just spam quick melee until the arm falls off, but the only reliable ways to remove the Revenant's launchers are through using explosives or blasting it point-blank with the SSG. Both of these can cause massive headaches because using explosives at close range is obviously a terrible idea, but using the SSG means you have to spend some time baiting them around corners if you don't want to eat rocket spam. The other problem here is that getting in melee range of anything stronger than a pinky is usually a bad idea because melee in general is just really powerful, but you can at least stun Hell Knights and Barons with a crotch kick (It still baffles me why this was removed from base BD, this is incredibly useful for something that's supposed to be a small joke).

The other problem here is enemy variants. Both the Mancubus and the Daedabus both give fuel, and while the Volcabus can't have their unmaker cannons removed, this is kind of circumvented by the appearance of Pyro Troopers spawning in the same stage of Dynamic Progression. The Beam Revenant does not drop the laucher, and now that we're getting a third variant in the newest update, obtaining ammo will probably be nearly impossible in the late game.

This is a bit of a lengthy read, but I felt it should be put out there. The Revenant Launcher is kind of fun and is actually fairly useful, but I never find myself using it because obtaining more ammo is such a pain in the *** and this has caused me to be very stingy with it.

That's some great work you've done there. I saw that sprite set floating around and thought it looked fantastic, so I'm glad to see someone else liked it enough to give it the brutal treatment.

Also, I see an ethereal soul in the second picture (which also is a fairly nice sprite set). Are these summoned by Hell Elemental? I ask because, assuming this is intended as a cacodemon variant (five pain elemental variants seems a bit excessive), this could be a huge pain in the later stages of Dynamic Progression, seeing as how Cacos come in much higher numbers than Pain Elementals. If not, I think that'll make the ethereal soul the only lost soul variant without a summoning enemy, which would be a bit odd.

Do you think we'll get to see sprites for the new upgrades any time soon? I've seen shots of the Quad Shotgun floating around both here and on the ZDoom forums, but I don't think we've seen official pictures of the sprites for the Pulse Cannon or the Desert Eagle, so I would really like to get a glimpse of what to expect.

Also, something else that suddenly came to mind is the chainsaw special. When we collect the Quad upgrade, will the chainsaw special do a Quad Shotgun blast? I'd assume this to be the case, but I just wanted to get this confirmed.

From my personal experience, dual wielding does tend to come in handy sometimes in later stages of dynamic progression against the higher tier meat shields (paladins, cyberbarons, and volcabi, etc.), but in the early stages of the game and when fighting grunt mobs, yeah, it's really not that useful. Also, dual wielding can absolutely chew through ammo, so you damn well better make your shots count.

The autoshotgun also suffers from the problem of having the slowest reload of any weapon in the game (and maybe the slowest reload I've ever seen), so needless to say if you're caught reloading dual autoshotguns without the upgrade, it's going to be painful.

So it was confirmed a long while back that the evil marines are going to either be rebalanced or possibly even removed, but you know what else I think could really do with the same treatment? The zombie flyers. From my personal experience, these things are an absolute nightmare to deal with.

The main problem I have with them is that avoiding them tends to be absurdly hard, since they have such a high movement and fire speed. Flyers can keep pace with the player quite easily and seem to have pretty much no delay before they start firing upon catching up. Also, taking cover hasn't helped much either, since they just seem to hover above where you're hiding and annihilate you with their absurd fire rate the second you pop your head out.

Another issue (that I'm not sure how you can really do much about) is that the rifle commandos will sometimes pretty much instantly resort to a beacon, which can cause massive headaches because the flyers can be a major distraction that don't give you enough time to pick off grounded enemies, which results in getting peppered with projectiles from practically every angle.

This ended up turning into a bit of a ramble, but I still feel that my points still stand. I love the concept of the flyers, but goddamn do these things put infernal cacos and arfits to shame.

I've been messing around with the mutators for a bit and want to say that these are really nice additions to base PB, but there are a few minor issues that I've noticed that I feel I should bring up. These aren't anything game breaking and are basically just nitpicking, but I feel are still worth mentioning regardless.

1. When using the "now that's what I call midi" music pack, the message that normally appears at the beginning of each map tell you what song is playing doesn't appear when using the UDV edit found in this mod. I have no idea why this is, since its worked with every other HUD I've tried.

2. The ammo counter doesn't list how much fuel is left for the Flame Cannon for some reason.

3. The gloves on the unmaker are the old brown gloves instead of the black fingerless ones. This is probably an issue that would be better taken up with TheBarge since he made the weapon, but it just bothers me because I've seen the unmaker in 3 or 4 different mods now, and there isn't a proper edit yet.

So exactly how many of the weapons are receiving updated sprites? I know that the HMG and Freezer Rifle are both receiving some (very much needed)retouching, but the rest of the sprite work seems very solid, so I'm not sure what could really be done to improve them.

Also, not to be pushy, but has any more progress on that new HMG? The new centerpiece looks nice, but I would love to get a glimpse of what the final version of the weapon will look like.

I know that it's been said that there is only going to be weapon upgrades and no new weapons in 2.1, but weren't there originally plans to add the unmaker? I'm asking because I swear that I remember pa1n himself saying that he was going to do this somewhere on another mod/addon page somewhere, but I could just be completely off base.

That makes sense. The idea sounds amusing, but it didn't really sound like something that would really make sense for the mod. Dual wielding quad barrels is more in line with mods like Russian Overkill. The 2-shot alt. fire should still be useful for dealing with pinkies and cacodemons, since they're not durable enough to waste four shells on.

This may be a bit of a stupid question, but I'm curious about something with the new quad-barrel upgrade that's coming in the next update. When the upgrade is obtained, will we still be able to dual wield? I'm just asking because the idea of blasting mobs with 8 barrels at once seems like it could be absurdly amusing and incredibly deadly.