Alright, so after playing around with the latest version a bit, there's only a couple things I would consider changing.
1). The Imps' capacity for projectile saturation is still too high imo. The only nerf I'd suggest is bringing their fireball multishot down to 2 max - I think that would go a LONG way in making them less oppressive.
2). Overall, I like how the Cacodemons feel like a major threat and not just a flying bullet sponge.I'm also a big fan of how their dashes cancel their recoil - so there's fewer Cacodemons flying off to a different postal code. However, I think their spread shot is a bit too much. On certain maps it becomes nearly undodgeable.
If I could give a couple suggestions, maybe you could replace it with a shotgun spread of projectiles that has a vertical spread - play into how it's often hovering above you. Or maybe a projectile that increases in size with travel time - taking advantage of the fights with Cacodemons at longer ranges. Or maybe give them a railgun-type the player can narrowly dodge. That keeps them threatening at every range. I saw something like that from the Arachnotrons in Strange Aeons.
3). The current Rocket Launcher feels like it might be a little *too* good. But rather than dialing back the damage, it could be an interesting spin on the weapon to make it a bit slower between shots. Give it a reload that dials back the dps that way...
4). As good as the Chaingun feels, I think that its fire rate is too high. It often breaks encounters with how quickly you can mow down a target. It may burn ammo fast, but that's not terribly relevant if a level that gives you bullets and expects the challenge to be the time spent focusing down targets.
Aside from that, everything's flawless to me. I love this mod a *lot*.
The current version of Babel (Monsters) (20230715193925) has no safety on the function A_CacoSpread and thus potential for VM aborts. The members mid, left, and right can be null since A_SpawnProjectile will fail to spawn a projectile if there is no room. Recommend you check if these exist before setting fields on them, e.g if(mid) { if(left) { ... } if (right) { ... } }
Hi, I was wondering if you could upload or send me in some way a link or guide on how I can make that fix myself (and this archvile bug people talk about) because I'm just not confident that we will get another update anytime soon.
One possible solution below, as provided by a friend who instantly fixes the bugs when he sees them without even thinking. I've not seen the archvile bug yet, but if you can describe it or better yet provide a VM abort I can try to look into that too.
Oh my thank you so much. The VM abort hasn't happened to me but you can see it mentioned just two posts below me. There is another one three posts below.
Was just checking in and I can't believe this WAD got updated! Fuck yeah!
I remember that my only serious complaint from the previous version of Babel was that the Imps were simply too aggressive - with close to Arachnotron levels of attack saturation making corridors horrid to face. Not sure if they've been nerfed, but I'm nonetheless excited to give the latest version a go!
Hi, Babel is by far my favorite gameplay mod. Thanks for making it.
Recently I've had reoccuring crashes that seem to happen when fighting archviles. The only other mods I run with Babel are mapsets like the doomer board projects.
Here are some screenshots of the error from two different wads (DPB19 and DPB61). Hope this helps.
I'm getting repeated "address zero" crashes in the middle of fights. They seem to coincide with archviles resurrecting monsters as I'm hitting them. Example:
Games/GZDoom/doom.id.doom2.commercial/save12.zds)
MegaSphere!
Picked up an energy cell.
Picked up an energy cell pack.
Picked up an energy cell pack.
VM execution aborted: tried to read from address zero.
Called from SyncEnabledMonster.SyncFire at ProjectBabel+_20230715193925.pk3:actors/babel_monster_base.txt
Called from BabelMonster.TriggerSync at ProjectBabel+_20230715193925.pk3:actors/babel_monster_base.txt, line 549
Called from BabelBaronOfHell.StateFunction.31 at ProjectBabel+_20230715193925.pk3:actors/monsters/baron.txt, line 178
Called from BabelMonster.Tick at ProjectBabel+_20230715193925.pk3:actors/babel_monster_base.txt, line 218
Called from state BabelBaronOfHell.31 in BabelBaronOfHell
danaton, I just started preparing a New Review-Remake of your Mod and ran into some kind of bug.
Switching Projectiles Origins to Vanilla. Everything is fine with the Revenant: it shoots one missile. But the Arachnotron has not changed. I stayed with the same Triple Shots. Is this a bug?
>Switching Projectiles Origins to Vanilla. Everything is fine with the Revenant: it shoots one missile.
Technically it shoots two missiles in exactly the same spot, it's a bit weird. This setting is purely for debugging and making compatibility work on maps that absolutely need the projectiles to appear at the original origin. In... 99.9% of scenarios, you should leave it off. The height check that makes the revenant fire the missiles from a bit lower if they would end up inside a ceiling works well enough.
>But the Arachnotron has not changed. I stayed with the same Triple Shots. Is this a bug?
No, it's the same as the revenant. Normally in the mod it fires from 18, 6, which is to say 18 units off the ground and 6 offset to the right. With the setting enabled, it fires from 32, 0 like it would in vanilla no matter what. Pic related, some code from the arachnotron.
This setting is only relevant where the difference between the "new" firing origin and the vanilla one would cause unintentional hits that wouldn't be possible in a map otherwise. For example, the logic for the arachnotron tries to see if shooting from 18, 6 will hit, and if it doesn't, it checks if 32, 0 will hit. If 32, 0 will hit but 18, 6 won't, it adjusts the offset to 32, 0 so it doesn't miss a shot that it would have landed in vanilla. However, the downside to this logic is that if a shot from 18, 6 will hit, but a shot from 32, 0 won't hit, you will get hit by a shot that might not have hit in vanilla.
After extensive testing I find that this usually makes zero difference except in cases where revenants can fire over a chest-high wall that they normally shouldn't. For maps with very tight balance, the setting exists to aid players in avoiding an unintentional difficulty spike from the result of a mostly cosmetic change.
I was checking out "Babel" on "SCYTHE 2" to test the New BFG Feature, and I found something. BFG reacts only to Normal Monsters, but not to Custom Ones.Is your Mod sharpened only for WAD's with a "Vanilla" Bestiary?
And I was also trying to understand the work of a Loaded BFG Shot. Honestly... And why is it needed at all? Somehow, it was played normally without him.
I'm more concerned about her enemy tracking behavior. I had moments during the passage when there were Cacodemons and Cyberdemons around. I aim at the Cyberdemon, and the Big Ball flies away at the Cacodemon. Or at the End of E4 "Ultimate Doom In Name Only" BFG could not fix the target in any way to kill Spider Masterminds!Does it depend on the close distance to the enemy?
>BFG reacts only to Normal Monsters, but not to Custom Ones.
Ah, you're right. It's a bit of an oversight now that I think of it. Technically, anything with custom monsters kind of needs a compatibility patch. I can probably make a Scythe 2 patch that will work, give me a little bit and I'll see what I can do.
The reason for this issue is because the BFG scans for "BabelMonster", not just "Actor" with monster tags, in order to speed up calculation and improve performance a bit, while also avoiding issues like accidentally hitting shootable actors.
>I had moments during the passage when there were Cacodemons and Cyberdemons around. I aim at the Cyberdemon, and the Big Ball flies away at the Cacodemon. Or at the End of E4 "Ultimate Doom In Name Only" BFG could not fix the target in any way to kill Spider Masterminds!Does it depend on the close distance to the enemy?
Yes, to some extent. It tries to weight their health and distance to avoid the reverse situation where you would end up shooting some big target a mile away but not the thing in front of you. I don't remember having these issues when I did those maps, but I'll go through them again, maybe something strange is going on with the new aim logic. As of right now, in order to fire, you need to be able to "see" a monster (According to GZDoom) and also fire a straight ray from your player's center to the monster's center (the general firing line) before the target is valid. There's a bit of strange logic on that second one to get around being able to shoot through other monsters, so it's possible something weird happened there.
Anyhow, gimme a few hours and I'll test all this out.
Okay so I did the first one first, which was checking E4M9 on UDINO and, assuming you're talking about the two masterminds in the lava that shoot up at you near the entrance after you return, I could shoot them just fine with the BFG. See very poorly compressed video here https://files.catbox.moe/k46pvn.webm :^)
I also noticed a detail of the thing about trying to shoot the cyberdemon and hitting the caco, technically you should have hit both due to the way the gun works. If those two were the only things onscreen and only one was hit, somehow the BFG must have not seen a valid line to shoot the cyberdemon. I'd be very curious to know exactly where that happened, because I tried to find situations that could break the raycast aim check but it seemed very solid. If it turns out it's malfunctioning, I'll remove it right away until I can fix it.
Anyhow, time to see if I can make a Scythe 2 patch now.
It worked hard on E4M8 at the moment with Spider Masterminds (Right along the way). It seems like they were right in my sights, but something prevents the BFG from firing. Perhaps it's not even your fault, but the creators of "UDINO" (There may still be bugs).
And what about the Cacodemons and Cyberdemons was on "E3M7: Limbo" at the very end of the Map with a bunch of Pinky, Barons, Cacodemons and Cyberdemons (Yes, this is crazy! I know!). Although, if we take into account the mess going on there, it is not surprising that the BFG Balls can fly the wrong way. There were, of course, such cases somewhere else on other Levels, but I will not name them, since I did not remember.
Okay, I'll investigate those a bit more tomorrow to see if I can figure out what was going on. Specifically I'm worried about the unshootable stuff more than the target selection for now. The selection algorithm isn't perfect, but having a slightly illogical target selection in a mess of demons is a lot less bad than not being able to shoot them at all :^)
Ideally, I'll figure out something for both issues. Maybe I can add some weighting for aim offset as well, so it preferentially shoots things near the center of the screen.
So there was indeed a bug in the BFG aiming that you could see on that map, basically the raycast was shooting too low due to me failing to factor in the target actor height when doing a LineTrace. Anyhow, I've fixed it on my end, mostly. There is a sweet spot where you can accidentally shoot a wall if you're at the right incline/decline so I'm going to try to resolve that before releasing a hotfix. I'll also see about the FOV-offset target prioritization thing, but if that needs a lot of tweaking I'll patch this first then work on it since this is a more pressing issue.
Well, the patch didn't take as long as I thought. When loading scythe 2, load Babel, then Scythe 2, then the "Babel Compatibility Patch - Scythe 2.pk3" you can find in the "Babel Addons and Patches.zip" download and you should have Afrits and Evil marines that can be shot with the BFG9000.
The Afrit still fires baseline Revenant shots (because I'm not sure of the balance with the new ones) but otherwise they should also use the new projectiles and have particles and such. Evil marine doesn't have extra gore on XDeath but that's mainly because I'm not sure how to do it in a non-messy way in Decorate right now. Might change it later.
Wow! I read the latest changes and they are really global! I will definitely test the innovations.
About killing Bosses by a Horde of Imps, I noticed during the game "Ultimate Doom In Name Only". Although I noticed it even better at E3M1, when a bunch of Cacodemons filled up the Cyberdemon with their Balls.
I think I will test the Patch when I play the Fourth Episode.
When I first played Babel, I thought it was pretty difficult. I played the latest version, now it has become much more pleasant to play. Therefore, I briefly posted my opinion (First on the Old one, and below in the comments I wrote changes to the Latest version).
However, I noticed that when I completely clear the Maps, it is not possible to complete them 100%. It seems that either this is connected with the Resurrection of Monsters by Archvile, or with their Summoning by him. The maxisum increases, but the empty remainder remains.
Huh, I'll have to fix that issue with the archvile. Thanks for reporting it, I somehow totally missed it. I've got a few other minor bugs reported as well so I might do an update soon.
Also, though I don't speak/read Russian, I'll go through that post with a translator later. Hopefully it doesn't mangle it too badly :^)
EDIT: Just found and fixed the bug, it's the spawner flames. If you don't want to wait a little while for a bugfix release, just add "-CountKill;" (without the quotes) underneath +THRUACTORS; inside the Spawner class in ProjectBabel+\actors\monsters\archvile.txt. Can't believe I managed to overlook that, good find on your part.
Honestly, I'm glad you answered! I've been playing with it a lot lately and I have a suspicion that I need to do a separate Review of your Mod. Like a remake.
Because I'm kind of ashamed of what I wrote earlier in that post. Then I played the earliest version and it was too difficult for me during the passage of "DBP №12: Into The Storm". Now several WADs have passed, it has become much more pleasant and fun to play with him.
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hey dev, is it possible to have the pistol, smg and psmg at the same time ? because it would be very helpfull, each one have a use
Alright, so after playing around with the latest version a bit, there's only a couple things I would consider changing.
1). The Imps' capacity for projectile saturation is still too high imo. The only nerf I'd suggest is bringing their fireball multishot down to 2 max - I think that would go a LONG way in making them less oppressive.
2). Overall, I like how the Cacodemons feel like a major threat and not just a flying bullet sponge.I'm also a big fan of how their dashes cancel their recoil - so there's fewer Cacodemons flying off to a different postal code. However, I think their spread shot is a bit too much. On certain maps it becomes nearly undodgeable.
If I could give a couple suggestions, maybe you could replace it with a shotgun spread of projectiles that has a vertical spread - play into how it's often hovering above you. Or maybe a projectile that increases in size with travel time - taking advantage of the fights with Cacodemons at longer ranges. Or maybe give them a railgun-type the player can narrowly dodge. That keeps them threatening at every range. I saw something like that from the Arachnotrons in Strange Aeons.
3). The current Rocket Launcher feels like it might be a little *too* good. But rather than dialing back the damage, it could be an interesting spin on the weapon to make it a bit slower between shots. Give it a reload that dials back the dps that way...
4). As good as the Chaingun feels, I think that its fire rate is too high. It often breaks encounters with how quickly you can mow down a target. It may burn ammo fast, but that's not terribly relevant if a level that gives you bullets and expects the challenge to be the time spent focusing down targets.
Aside from that, everything's flawless to me. I love this mod a *lot*.
The current version of Babel (Monsters) (20230715193925) has no safety on the function A_CacoSpread and thus potential for VM aborts. The members mid, left, and right can be null since A_SpawnProjectile will fail to spawn a projectile if there is no room. Recommend you check if these exist before setting fields on them, e.g if(mid) { if(left) { ... } if (right) { ... } }
Hi, I was wondering if you could upload or send me in some way a link or guide on how I can make that fix myself (and this archvile bug people talk about) because I'm just not confident that we will get another update anytime soon.
One possible solution below, as provided by a friend who instantly fixes the bugs when he sees them without even thinking. I've not seen the archvile bug yet, but if you can describe it or better yet provide a VM abort I can try to look into that too.
Oh my thank you so much. The VM abort hasn't happened to me but you can see it mentioned just two posts below me. There is another one three posts below.
Was just checking in and I can't believe this WAD got updated! Fuck yeah!
I remember that my only serious complaint from the previous version of Babel was that the Imps were simply too aggressive - with close to Arachnotron levels of attack saturation making corridors horrid to face. Not sure if they've been nerfed, but I'm nonetheless excited to give the latest version a go!
Hi, Babel is by far my favorite gameplay mod. Thanks for making it.
Recently I've had reoccuring crashes that seem to happen when fighting archviles. The only other mods I run with Babel are mapsets like the doomer board projects.
Here are some screenshots of the error from two different wads (DPB19 and DPB61). Hope this helps.
I'm getting repeated "address zero" crashes in the middle of fights. They seem to coincide with archviles resurrecting monsters as I'm hitting them. Example:
danaton, I just started preparing a New Review-Remake of your Mod and ran into some kind of bug.
Switching Projectiles Origins to Vanilla. Everything is fine with the Revenant: it shoots one missile. But the Arachnotron has not changed. I stayed with the same Triple Shots. Is this a bug?
>Switching Projectiles Origins to Vanilla. Everything is fine with the Revenant: it shoots one missile.
Technically it shoots two missiles in exactly the same spot, it's a bit weird. This setting is purely for debugging and making compatibility work on maps that absolutely need the projectiles to appear at the original origin. In... 99.9% of scenarios, you should leave it off. The height check that makes the revenant fire the missiles from a bit lower if they would end up inside a ceiling works well enough.
>But the Arachnotron has not changed. I stayed with the same Triple Shots. Is this a bug?
No, it's the same as the revenant. Normally in the mod it fires from 18, 6, which is to say 18 units off the ground and 6 offset to the right. With the setting enabled, it fires from 32, 0 like it would in vanilla no matter what. Pic related, some code from the arachnotron.
This setting is only relevant where the difference between the "new" firing origin and the vanilla one would cause unintentional hits that wouldn't be possible in a map otherwise. For example, the logic for the arachnotron tries to see if shooting from 18, 6 will hit, and if it doesn't, it checks if 32, 0 will hit. If 32, 0 will hit but 18, 6 won't, it adjusts the offset to 32, 0 so it doesn't miss a shot that it would have landed in vanilla. However, the downside to this logic is that if a shot from 18, 6 will hit, but a shot from 32, 0 won't hit, you will get hit by a shot that might not have hit in vanilla.
After extensive testing I find that this usually makes zero difference except in cases where revenants can fire over a chest-high wall that they normally shouldn't. For maps with very tight balance, the setting exists to aid players in avoiding an unintentional difficulty spike from the result of a mostly cosmetic change.
I see. I saw the code myself, so I just decided to clarify.
Oh, yes, the Review-Remake I've finished the remake! So I hope I was able to attract more Players to your Project!
Review in Russian
I was checking out "Babel" on "SCYTHE 2" to test the New BFG Feature, and I found something. BFG reacts only to Normal Monsters, but not to Custom Ones. Is your Mod sharpened only for WAD's with a "Vanilla" Bestiary?
And I was also trying to understand the work of a Loaded BFG Shot. Honestly... And why is it needed at all? Somehow, it was played normally without him.
I'm more concerned about her enemy tracking behavior. I had moments during the passage when there were Cacodemons and Cyberdemons around. I aim at the Cyberdemon, and the Big Ball flies away at the Cacodemon. Or at the End of E4 "Ultimate Doom In Name Only" BFG could not fix the target in any way to kill Spider Masterminds! Does it depend on the close distance to the enemy?
>BFG reacts only to Normal Monsters, but not to Custom Ones.
Ah, you're right. It's a bit of an oversight now that I think of it. Technically, anything with custom monsters kind of needs a compatibility patch. I can probably make a Scythe 2 patch that will work, give me a little bit and I'll see what I can do.
The reason for this issue is because the BFG scans for "BabelMonster", not just "Actor" with monster tags, in order to speed up calculation and improve performance a bit, while also avoiding issues like accidentally hitting shootable actors.
>I had moments during the passage when there were Cacodemons and Cyberdemons around. I aim at the Cyberdemon, and the Big Ball flies away at the Cacodemon. Or at the End of E4 "Ultimate Doom In Name Only" BFG could not fix the target in any way to kill Spider Masterminds! Does it depend on the close distance to the enemy?
Yes, to some extent. It tries to weight their health and distance to avoid the reverse situation where you would end up shooting some big target a mile away but not the thing in front of you. I don't remember having these issues when I did those maps, but I'll go through them again, maybe something strange is going on with the new aim logic. As of right now, in order to fire, you need to be able to "see" a monster (According to GZDoom) and also fire a straight ray from your player's center to the monster's center (the general firing line) before the target is valid. There's a bit of strange logic on that second one to get around being able to shoot through other monsters, so it's possible something weird happened there.
Anyhow, gimme a few hours and I'll test all this out.
Okay so I did the first one first, which was checking E4M9 on UDINO and, assuming you're talking about the two masterminds in the lava that shoot up at you near the entrance after you return, I could shoot them just fine with the BFG. See very poorly compressed video here https://files.catbox.moe/k46pvn.webm :^)
I also noticed a detail of the thing about trying to shoot the cyberdemon and hitting the caco, technically you should have hit both due to the way the gun works. If those two were the only things onscreen and only one was hit, somehow the BFG must have not seen a valid line to shoot the cyberdemon. I'd be very curious to know exactly where that happened, because I tried to find situations that could break the raycast aim check but it seemed very solid. If it turns out it's malfunctioning, I'll remove it right away until I can fix it.
Anyhow, time to see if I can make a Scythe 2 patch now.
No, the BFG worked fine on E4M9.
It worked hard on E4M8 at the moment with Spider Masterminds (Right along the way). It seems like they were right in my sights, but something prevents the BFG from firing. Perhaps it's not even your fault, but the creators of "UDINO" (There may still be bugs).
And what about the Cacodemons and Cyberdemons was on "E3M7: Limbo" at the very end of the Map with a bunch of Pinky, Barons, Cacodemons and Cyberdemons (Yes, this is crazy! I know!). Although, if we take into account the mess going on there, it is not surprising that the BFG Balls can fly the wrong way. There were, of course, such cases somewhere else on other Levels, but I will not name them, since I did not remember.
Okay, I'll investigate those a bit more tomorrow to see if I can figure out what was going on. Specifically I'm worried about the unshootable stuff more than the target selection for now. The selection algorithm isn't perfect, but having a slightly illogical target selection in a mess of demons is a lot less bad than not being able to shoot them at all :^)
Ideally, I'll figure out something for both issues. Maybe I can add some weighting for aim offset as well, so it preferentially shoots things near the center of the screen.
So there was indeed a bug in the BFG aiming that you could see on that map, basically the raycast was shooting too low due to me failing to factor in the target actor height when doing a LineTrace. Anyhow, I've fixed it on my end, mostly. There is a sweet spot where you can accidentally shoot a wall if you're at the right incline/decline so I'm going to try to resolve that before releasing a hotfix. I'll also see about the FOV-offset target prioritization thing, but if that needs a lot of tweaking I'll patch this first then work on it since this is a more pressing issue.
Very good bug catch, thanks.
Well, the patch didn't take as long as I thought. When loading scythe 2, load Babel, then Scythe 2, then the "Babel Compatibility Patch - Scythe 2.pk3" you can find in the "Babel Addons and Patches.zip" download and you should have Afrits and Evil marines that can be shot with the BFG9000.
The Afrit still fires baseline Revenant shots (because I'm not sure of the balance with the new ones) but otherwise they should also use the new projectiles and have particles and such. Evil marine doesn't have extra gore on XDeath but that's mainly because I'm not sure how to do it in a non-messy way in Decorate right now. Might change it later.
Wow! I read the latest changes and they are really global! I will definitely test the innovations.
About killing Bosses by a Horde of Imps, I noticed during the game "Ultimate Doom In Name Only". Although I noticed it even better at E3M1, when a bunch of Cacodemons filled up the Cyberdemon with their Balls.
I think I will test the Patch when I play the Fourth Episode.
When I first played Babel, I thought it was pretty difficult. I played the latest version, now it has become much more pleasant to play. Therefore, I briefly posted my opinion (First on the Old one, and below in the comments I wrote changes to the Latest version).
In Russian: https://doomguy.ru/community/topic/sovremennyj-vanilnyj-doom-novyj-vzglyad-na-kl...
However, I noticed that when I completely clear the Maps, it is not possible to complete them 100%. It seems that either this is connected with the Resurrection of Monsters by Archvile, or with their Summoning by him. The maxisum increases, but the empty remainder remains.
Huh, I'll have to fix that issue with the archvile. Thanks for reporting it, I somehow totally missed it. I've got a few other minor bugs reported as well so I might do an update soon.
Also, though I don't speak/read Russian, I'll go through that post with a translator later. Hopefully it doesn't mangle it too badly :^)
EDIT: Just found and fixed the bug, it's the spawner flames. If you don't want to wait a little while for a bugfix release, just add "-CountKill;" (without the quotes) underneath +THRUACTORS; inside the Spawner class in ProjectBabel+\actors\monsters\archvile.txt. Can't believe I managed to overlook that, good find on your part.
Honestly, I'm glad you answered! I've been playing with it a lot lately and I have a suspicion that I need to do a separate Review of your Mod. Like a remake.
Because I'm kind of ashamed of what I wrote earlier in that post. Then I played the earliest version and it was too difficult for me during the passage of "DBP №12: Into The Storm". Now several WADs have passed, it has become much more pleasant and fun to play with him.
This is my favourite mod.
Thank you for your work datanon!
Loving it! Nice work.
Thanks