This is a forwarding of a monthly update post from the wiki which might make some of this seem kind of meta or confusing at points.
I have experienced the woes of travel in a post-2020 world, but got some stuff done nonetheless.
Slide To The Left
I accomplished a few things the last month that can be feasibly shown off. Unfortunately most of it I'd say will just need to be experienced in motion and embedding videos here tends to be a pain and it's nothing major enough to warrant a YouTube video for, so you'll just have to bare with me. I also have a slew of minor fixes and tunings to talk about as well but let's start with the major stuff.
For starters, the Ice Giant is nearly complete. He's full of sounds, his FX are pretty much complete and all pickups work, save for a couple of weapons which aren't fully implemented yet (I usually give myself items directly until I consider them pretty much done to make it easier to operate on a sort of checklist. That way no matter what I'll know that if I can't pick it up off the ground it needs more work. Saves me space in my notes). I also still need to adjust enemy ice death sequences, as the default doesn't cut it. This also does mean that the Ice Giant does have an "interesting" relationship with monsters from external packs, however the vanilla monsters across all supported IWADs and the custom monsters to AGDoom will have full ice death functionality as I intend it to work.
I've also been working on improving visual effects, as every update demands. Railgun-based weapons (primarily including the Beraltian's entire weapon cast, the Algonquin/Cicconian's Super Rocket Launcher and the Legionary's lightning gun) now have generally prettier and more interesting beams with particles that are higher resolution and have their own sort of FX. Translucency and alpha properties has been adjusted a bit on various projectiles to make them appear better, the Nova Trooper's rocket launcher (SAVAK-12) weapon has a new projectile sprite and stuff like smoke and sparks are higher resolution and look a bit better. I'm still working on adjusting particles and other visual FX to look better and work more "dynamically" but it's all ultimately minor stuff so unless you're really paying attention you may not notice all of it. Still, I consider it important to work on as I find it easy to notice when mods lack these details.
As the Fancy Monsters PK3 is being phased out in favor for an integrated enemy faction selection system with overhauled vanilla monsters, the Heretic cast of monsters are in the process of being integrated into the mod, with the main hiccup being figuring out what enemy should replace who. While the substitution isn't exactly a difficult process to figure out, it makes you consider things you hadn't before about the way this affects the difficulty of things. Ultimately I consider it more a QOL feature and I'm sure people playing through Doom maps with Hexen enemies will be relatively forgiving of the fact that maybe an Undead Warrior is going to be a bit easier to take on than the Revenant he replaces. If, however, you think it'd be a better idea to adjust the enemy health and damage values rather than trying to stay true to their original design, I'll consider the input, though adjusting said enemies would take a bit more work.
I've been overhauling melee sound effects and some other various SFX as well because I know parts of AGDoom sound a bit weak. I've actually been pulling more SFX from fighting games as they have weightier and meatier sound effects on average, which is specifically why the melee sounds are the ones getting an effective total overhaul. Oh, pickup sounds also had an overhaul as did the intermission screen (the latter of which may be removed if people end up not liking it). I've also been working on fixing up many of the weapon sprites across all characters to make them a little bit better. Again, mainly minor details of adjustment, but ones I've taken to noticing more often than not and that bother the hell out of me.
Here's a (rightfully) divisive concept. A friend of mine whose opinions vary in quality once told me I should add hitmarkers to AGDoom. I told him no. However I'd been considering it more as an option that is disabled by default but can be enabled if you want, with customizable hitmarker sounds and FX. I'm just going to ask for public input in this regard rather than make any definitive decision as hitmarkers and hitsounds have a habit of popping up in really well made and popular Doom mods.
OK, final paragraph for this section, and it will be long, but I saved the neatest for last. For a long while (since Version 2 of the mod) I've been struggling with GZDoom's evil MENUDEF lump to get the player class selection to have a Hexen-style selection screen, and until just a couple days ago the menu would essentially crunch down the class list to save menu space that didn't need to be saved on modern monitors (I dunno if you've noticed, but AGDoom is a very 1080p Doom mod because unlike sprites and text intermissions, screen resolution is almost universally not an intentional artstyle or aesthetic choice). Just recently, though, I got our more robust class selection screen working and it's quite pretty. This comes with the caveat that I also need to overhaul the graphics displayed when highlighting a class and add more details to the selected class. So now, when you have a class highlighted in the menu, it'll display some essential info for the class. Their health and armor stacks, movement speed and a general list of pros and cons to their specific playstyle. I also got the difficulty selection screen to work with a better look, and I wanted to include graphics for the selected difficulty ala Doom 2016, Halo or basically any other FPS game ever made post-Halo, but I've been having some trouble with that one so I may launch it with just a lot of empty space on the right side of the screen to give myself the ability to fuck with it in later versions. Another neat thing, though, is that the menu has animated transitions like Build engine games, which has technically been a thing since Version 2 of the mod, but because of the rescaled class and difficulty menus, they didn't keep this scripting so no menus had a transition between one another besides the "game files" option on the main menu which got added in the previous version (I believe). tl;dr - Menu looks prettier now.
To wrap this entire thing up in a neat bow, I'll say this: Assuming nothing goes terribly wrong like the Donnie Darko plane crashing into my house, I'd give it about a month and some change for this update to come out.
Musings of a Quake Deathmatcher
I've been playing a decent bit of QC:DE lately which is, as always, a really good mod and provided some partial inspiration for AGDoom (GMOTA did more but hey Chuck Schuldiner liked Jazz so we're allowed to be influenced by multiples). Specifically playing with some friends in deathmatch. To my amazement something that went under my radar was Q-Zandronum, a fork of the sourceport Zandronum which is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned as a project, which is a tragedy because that means we are all playthings of Graf Zahl now. Indeed, AGDoom doesn't even try to work on Zandronum anymore simply because it lacks some (in my opinion) flags and functions that are essential for the mod to work. Which is, honestly, a shame, because Zandronum's fixation on multiplayer and GZDoom's lack of fixation makes the Doom community feel that much smaller outside of Doomworld, which is still not the same as actually playing Doom with people.
Doom had multiplayer and its style of multiplayer is, in my opinion, an important element of the experience and design that is worth maintaining more than a lot of the other stuff GZDoom tends to focus on which feels very arbitrary at times; Such as forced menu rescaling for a sourceport that is very much not a vanilla style experience, or texture filtering that makes the game look like dogshit. Have I told you that you should go into your GZDoom settings right now and make sure Texture Filter mode is set to none, Disable Menu Clean Scaling is off and Enhanced Night Vision Mode is off, all settings enabled by default? Whatever, I can't get further into this rant I'm pushing my luck already.
Point being, playing through Q-Zandronum has been a lot of fun and, while it still has a long way to go, I really hope that it gives way to a technologically advanced multiplayer-focused sourceport of Doom, and should it be able to adopt some of GZDoom's essential functions, flags and other enhancements that Zandronum is still missing, I would absolutely begin to focus AGDoom on being developed in Q-Zandro over GZDoom. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. If this is the first time you're hearing about Q-Zandronum, I'd highly recommend you go check it out. It's some impressive as hell stuff and I hope the best for its development going forward.
You're Wormfood, Dude
About a couple weeks ago I came down with something that seriously debilitated me for a few days. I'm talking, rolling around on the couch for days on end in a fugue state bad. Maybe not literally but, it sucked. I hate being sick, especially since I usually don't get sick in the first place. I don't know if it was COVID, and I don't think so but at this point I basically won't know. However, my mom got COVID just recently and I've been taking care of her lately and I hope it's not gonna get to me because it would suck to be better from a bad sickness for a few days only to immediately get sick again. So wish me luck I guess.
Oh and my car's broken down too. FUCK, am I right? In light of some of these difficulties I've been considering opening a Patreon which is something I've been very hesitant to do because I just kinda feel weird taking people's money for working on a Doom mod. But I'm also quite broke at this point with little ability to get things working out so I may not have too much of a choice. I also may begin to pursue freelance writing as well, anything I can do to be able to make money off of things I already enjoy doing would be great, even though I originally intended to just get a job somewhere and work on passion projects occasionally. I guess I'm at a crossroads in life where the movie protagonist would risk it all and follow his dreams and get the girl, but I also know this is the real world so it's not that simple either. Maybe if I keep ignoring my problems they'll go away! Who knows.
Sorry for how ranty this month's update may have been. Between sickness and financial difficulties I haven't been especially cheerful. The song for this month is gonna seem kinda weird based on its thumbnail but I assure you it's a pretty good song in my opinion (I say this because I hate anime and base all of my initial judgements of something on that hatred like any reasonable person would).
This has been Dewm. See you starside. Song for the month.
