Bastion of Chaos
Some of you have heard of my standalone map released last year called Bastion of Chaos and while this is a classic Doom 2 map the plan was always for it to go through a ... metamorphosis. A proof of concept for the style of map that will make up the majority of Age of Hell.
My how big you've grown
All stock monsters, items and decorations have been replaced with Age of Hell assets
And the whole thing has been fully tested as a complete map for Age of Hell
Including some brand new enemies with unique attack mechanics
This will be used as an internal test map and leaked to a few lucky individuals to showcase. Unfortunately the wider public will have to wait till episode 3 is released to play it.
The Lord of the Manor
It turns out that the Bastion wasn't just manned by some garrison. True power lies at its heart. A power you must face if you are to push further into Hell's corrupt heart ... a power that rages.
Still a few things to refine but this is a good representation of what you can expect from the boss encounters in Age of Hell (Warning: spoilers)
General progress
And then this year has been mostly about working on episode 1 maps tweaking areas and implementing gameplay. Slow but steady progress to actually get maps finished has been the name of the game. I'll do an updated more focused on this (and work by the guest mappers) in the near future but here's a few shots of recent stuff
A1M2: The Foreboding Impasse
A1M5: The Godless Gate
And that's it for now. Next update will hopefully cover some more guest mapper work and a showcase of the lovely new pickup sprites done by TypicalSF. In the background we are still working on the demo map and first official trailer which should be out soon.
... A new age is coming
Ok Moddb is a pile of garbage. It somehow deleted the 2 comments that were here regarding performance so I will post the response here. Apologies to the people whose comments were deleted, I have no idea what happened
"Bastion of Chaos (the original vanilla version) will be the benchmark for Age of Hell performance wise. If you can run that then Age of Hell will be fine for you. There will also be new menu options that will help people optimise performance to their preferences. AoH will ship with minimum and recommended specs along with an optimisation guide as well"
Will do! I generally do not have a problem running Doom WADs, but I had to give up on Ar Luminae because it brought GZDoom to a crawl. Hopefully, it will not be an issue with Bastion of Chaos.
Bastion is pretty chonky but Ar Luminae is definitely more taxing. If there is enough demand for it I will seriously consider doing a "low spec" version for Age of Hell like I did for Bastion. If you find the full edition too taxing then this might be more for you. Can be found on the DW thread
Doomworld.com
Cool! Out of curiosity, will Age of Hell levels contain as many monsters per map than Bastion of Chaos?
Some of them yes but there will be variety to encounter design and level length to keep things interesting. Slaughter fights will feature heavily but Bastion's count of 4k+ will be at the upper limit. For instance The Foreboding Impasse (A1M2) is shaping up around the 600-800 mark at the moment.
Not a big fan of getting stuck in a closed area surrounded by enemies (especially Revenants), so I am struggling with Bastion of Chaos. Anyway, I had to stop using darkdoomz, as turning on the flashlight brought the game to a crawl.
Yeah it's not mod friendly. Although I have run through the whole thing with Supercharge which was a blast. Note that while UV is similar to late Sunder maps in difficulty, difficulty settings are heavily implemented and well tested. Most people play on HNTR
I would not say it is not mod-friendly so much as darkdoomz is not well optimised.
Man, this is going to be such a beautiful mod. I am looking forward to this. I've been watching you stream your map making and everything.