Trying to work with Enemy Within + Weapons Mod + New Music..

[RetroChallengeGamer]

My next Descent Let's Play series isn't going to be Descent 2 Limited Arsenal like I had planned. It's actually going to be a custom mission, a rather popular one at that it seems: The Enemy Within. However, to spruce up the gameplay and make it more challenging on myself, I'm going to be using Darkflamewolf's custom weapons mod. What better way to screw myself over than to play with weapons I have no idea their usage and/or properties? Furthermore I found that this level set has a custom set of OGG music made by one Alter-Fox. Where can I find these? And how do I specifically implement them? I'm using D2X-XL just for grins and I'm not sure how to make both the custom weapons mod or custom music soundtrack work. Any help would be appreciated.

[karx11erx]

Hi,

please see the D2X-XL installation instructions on how to use custom music with D2X-XL (see the menu at the left side of the home page). To enable the custom weapons, just check "Allow Custom Weapons" in the new mission menu.

Please register on the D2X-XL forum and ask future D2X-XL related questions there.

[Alter-Fox]

The version of The Enemy Within hosted on descent2.de includes the soundtrack (unless it's been changed, it was a pretty big download). Also sorry those songs were never mastered -- you may want to put the music volume a little higher than usual. Or not.
The level 16 and level 26 songs were by Pumo, so don't credit me for all of them.

I'll be watching, so make it good. XD

[RetroChallengeGamer]

I think I got everything worked out so far. The only issue now seems to be a bug with the descent2.ham with the custom weapons mod and d2x-xl. I posted a bug tracking ticket and it seems to be tracked now. No idea when it'll be fixed, but when it is, that's when I'll start recording. So far, I got hi-res textures, that custom soundtrack, most settings set to max and Enemy Within.
My challenge?
- Blind run (except most of level 1 where I was doing d2x-xl testing)
- No secrets (unless required to complete a level, for whatever reason)
- Custom weapons to which I'll be going in blind as to their function and utility
- Hotshot difficulty

[RetroChallengeGamer]

Looks like everything is fixed and set! I'll be recording soon! I don't know when I'll get around to uploading anything, but it will be someone later this summer/year!

[Sirius]

Do you usually run live or record and post on YouTube? (or possibly both)
Send a reminder when you're starting, I'll watch

[RetroChallengeGamer]

I usually record and post later on Youtube. I've only 'just' started getting onto the Twitch streaming scene. But right now its more catered towards my Oblivion streaming. I don't think I'll be live streaming this series. So expect a post-record upload on Youtube later this year.

[RetroChallengeGamer]

The music ended up being pretty soft for levels 1-4 sadly. Levels 5 and beyond should be more prominent on the music volume. I'm not going back to redo levels 1-4, they are pretty good as is, sans louder music volume. Hope that doesn't detract Alter-Fox.

[Alter-Fox]

Yeah that's because the songs weren't ever properly mastered on the public release.
I have some versions of these songs that I did master some years later, they never got uploaded publicly because the combined file size is absolutely massive and would have taken hours and hours and I didn't have hours and hours.

If there is a way I could get them to you, though...

[RetroChallengeGamer]

The songs already work well enough as they are. So I don't believe I need updates yet. Right now in level 10 where I'm getting hammered by whatever boss is in the outer ring. If I so much as get within his line of view, I'm dead for some reason.

[Alter-Fox]

Cuz he has player mercs and they're brutal...

[Xfing]

TEW is brutal overall, especially the Golems and the Kalkis...

[Alter-Fox]

Shh, don't scare him off. He hasn't even got there yet.

[RetroChallengeGamer]

And I may not even be able to. I've been running through level 10 about 10+ times now and I keep getting crashes in D2X-XL and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. I'd hate to continue the series in Rebirth or plain old Descent since the transition would be jarring. I also don't want to start off either with Rebirth or plain Descent since I don't want to lose progress. (I've wasted enough time trying to record one dang video for about a week now and I've neglected my other series as a result) So if this doesn't get resolved soon, I just might post pone this project until a later time. Be it several months from now or years from now. I just don't have much time to spare on it anymore since I have many other (non-buggy/crashy) projects lined up anyway.

[Lothar]

When you say it'd be too jarring, do you mean that the graphical transition from XL with extra graphic effects to Rebirth/Retro would be too great for you or your viewers? Or is there some other difference between XL and the other source ports that is relevant?

You could always post a disclaimer at the start of video #10 along the lines of "I switched from a graphically-enhanced version of Descent to a more stable version because I kept crashing"...

[Alter-Fox]

I'm surprised it's crashing honestly. I haven't had a stability problem in D2X-XL for years.
I did have a different sort of problem recently but that turned out to be a hardware problem and I found a fix for it.

[DarkFlameWolf]

My guess is because nobody really tested my Lost Levels weapons mod/pack with XL thoroughly and we are just now seeing XL flip out in crashing bugs as a result of lack of testing.

[karx11erx]

I am trying my best to resolve your crashes (which I cannot reproduce for the heck of it using your original player files and trying to crash D2X-XL on vastly different machines using TEW with the Lost Level's weapon mod, playing level 10 over and over, firing those homing frag missiles and homing fusion shots left and right at bots and walls and everything to provoke that crash).

Just now, a new D2X-XL version with vastly improved call tracking is being uploaded to the download servers. That feature should allow me to locate the exact program function that caused a program crash (see the update on D2X-XL's FB wall).

I have to say that I find it pretty unfair that you rant about D2X-XL here instead of giving some feedback on my forum first and hearing what I might have to say (I have been directed to this thread by another D2X-XL user, or I would have never seen it). I have been working my proverbial ass off to make your project run, where you are doing all kinds of non-standard things, like using a weapon mod from another mission.

Well, there's nothing so hard as man's ingratitude, as the saying goes.

I hope you will give D2X-XL another shot, because I would really love to find out where it crashes for you and fix that bug for good.

[RetroChallengeGamer]

whoa, whoa, whoa! Don't think I'm not grateful! I've praised your program already in my videos. I'm just frustrated that I've spent a lot of time creating 1-2 videos despite all these crashes when I could be working on other projects for my backlog (which is dwindling! lol). Its not you specifically since I know you are doing your best to kill these bugs. Just disheartening when you have an honest bug, no idea what caused it and the creator can't reproduce it either. Gives me little hope I'll complete the series if you can't find and reproduce it and I still activate it consistently. Just frustrated is all. Beyond that, the program runs beautifully and is gorgeous to look at, which is one of the main reasons why I chose to utilize XL for this series.
As for explaining myself on the weapons mod, a lot of people have most likely filmed this mission, quite possibly cold started every level too. So I thought to myself: what would make this play series far more interesting and different than any other out there on Youtube? Well, combining a cold start w/ no secrets (or goodies contained within) w/ blind run (since it'd be my first time playing the set), w/ custom weapons where I have to figure out how they work and how best to employ them in brand new situations I've never been in. I checked out the updated 'MP balanced weapons mod' that Drakona and Lothar released and it was too similar to the main set of weapons to be unique enough. The one from Plutonium Outbreak 2 was way too outlandish and the weapons too...random and hard to use to be useful for this set. The only other one I heard about was Darkflamewolf's from her Lost Levels set. After briefly viewing a video on her channel detailing the weapons, I felt this might be the one that'd provide the most entertaining while still being balanced enough to not be cheap. But that's just an assumption, I'm slowly working through the weapons as I get them in this series. Make more sense why I'm doing this?

[karx11erx]

I understand your frustration, but we could have talked about it in the D2X-XL forum.

Forget the weapon mod, that's not what causes the bug. It may reveal it, but the bug is there anyway (if it's a bug). I just wanted you to understand that you are probably stretching D2X-XL further than most other players do.

Btw, it would look better with image and render quality max'd out (render options) and soft particle and sprite edges enabled (effect options).

The function call tracker I have built into the program should lead me on the right track. However, after trying to make D2X-XL crash for me with your player profile, and playing for over half an hour w/o any problems, I have found a few flaws in the call tracker, and I am just preparing another program version (1.18.28). As soon as you get me a log file with a call stack trace, I will be able to tell more.

[Lothar]

I checked out the updated 'MP balanced weapons mod' that Drakona and Lothar released and it was too similar to the main set of weapons

The only "mod" we've released is the original set of weapons. It's not really a mod (that's simply what we named it when it was a small patch on top of another version, but it's now its own version); it's meant to be the most faithful version of Descent, specifically for people who are playing at a high level (competitive 1v1, speedrunners, etc.) where the little things matter most.

"Not crashing" is definitely one of the little things that matters.

[karx11erx]

Well, as I said: I don't think that it's the weapon mod per se that causes D2X-XL to crash (for Retrochallengegamer, not for me).

[DarkFlameWolf]

Stretching? If putting the weapons mod in another SP mission is stretching XL, then I'd wager to say having the weapons mod in Lost Levels (with which is was prepackaged) is stretching it as well. Simply playing Lost Levels should have stretched the engine far sooner than what RCG is doing. The new descent2.ham file only altered weapons, both their properties and models and left all robot models and behaviors untouched. This way it could be freely ported to just about any mission seamlessly.

[karx11erx]

It "only" changed their properties. Yeah, what you know about the Descent and particularly D2X-XL's code. Your ridiculously OP weapon mod does stretch certain parts of the engine. Descent uses fix point arithmetic with very limited precision. The faster something moves, the more likely it will break some physics code due to the loss of numerical precision. I did change some of that by using floating point instead, but not everywhere. This is even worse in the original engine, and I found a lot of ways to break that one over the years, ways I have tried to fix in D2X-XL.

Now your frag missiles for example are extremely fast and split in several equally fast (or even faster?) sub missiles.