Lou Guards vs Super Medium Hulks

[Sirius]

It is quite easy to dodge. But it's not really fixable unless you convince the Rebirth and/or Retro devs to modify the value or, more plausibly, add a toggle for it. Which doesn't feel like something players will opt into.

They wouldn't have to if a per-mission setting were added to either the level format or .mn2 file, but by that point you're heading off into D2X-XL-land. I don't expect either project would agree to incorporate it.

[Xfing]

Well, if D1 boss robot AI has been brought back, then why not this?

[Sirius]

The main reason I can think of is that it makes the in-built missions significantly harder than they were designed to be by Parallax. Rebirth historically has been very reluctant to mess with existing gameplay.

Since the in-built missions didn't use the D1 bosses, that change has less impact.

[AlexanderBorisov]

The main reason I can think of is that it makes the in-built missions significantly harder than they were designed to be by Parallax. Rebirth historically has been very reluctant to mess with existing gameplay.

Since the in-built missions didn't use the D1 bosses, that change has less impact.

If done on per-mission basis I don't see how it could break anything. Yet better, if one could have a new property for homing weapons (acquisition cone) to modify, but I guess it would break backward compartibility with old version because of saves and demos format. But I think it can be compensated by other means, for example to make a homer harder to dodge you can make it faster. Has nearly the same effect. Or go AF way - "waves of Red Hulks in a single room". But to me those easier to dodge homers make the game better, not worse. Who likes to hide and corner snipe everything like a tunnel rat? Also you can consider the room geometry where you place those homing missile bots, in limited spaces even those easy homers are not easy to dodge... Fourth solution is to use Defence Robots in later levels (like in AF), which were designed by Parallax but not used in stock missions, they fire like 5 homers, are fast, and have the plasma pulse, too.

[Xfing]

That's why we could just use a toggle, like an ini file parameter or something like that.

Oh, and Lou Guards are usually placed in wide open spaces in D2, so the impact on Counterstrike itself wouldn't be quite as big (can't speak for Puuma levels yet though, haha )

I'd really like to have this option because I miss D1's lethal difficulty. In D1 if you know how to play, you'll take no damage at all - but you make a mistake, you die. In D2 you'll take damage anyway, slowly. I really miss those moments of terror from D1. Though I should probably halt my judgment until Puuma sphere, as Boarsheads tend to do just that. Looking at it that way, D2 does provide a smoother and more adjustable difficulty curve for sure. Still, a toggle wouldn't hurt for all those of us who like things Nintendo hard. I was able to beat all of D1 on Insane without dying, and even though I'm currently struggling to do the same with D2, I still think I had more fun playing D1 just for the emotions. Being forced to be wary of Super Hulks at all times certainly was part of the experience.

[Sirius]

Yeah but the question is how to do it on a per-mission basis. The most natural way would be to modify the weapon type format, but then you need to patch users' .HAM files, and that would stop other versions of D2 from loading them. So you'd need some extra files somewhere that only Rebirth understands... something like what D2X-XL did with e.g. its .lgt/.clr files.

[Xfing]

I think an ini file parameter would be the best solution, just like the old -legacyhomers parameter.

[Alter-Fox]

Could be, and it's nice to dream, but I don't think it's likely to actually happen -- at least not in time. May have to settle for the damage upgrade. And remember those trainee players probably can't even dodge D2's homers.

[Xfing]

Could be, and it's nice to dream, but I don't think it's likely to actually happen -- at least not in time. May have to settle for the damage upgrade. And remember those trainee players probably can't even dodge D2's homers.

I actually got word from kp (Zico's new handle perhaps?) that it could be implementable on a per-mission basis.

https://forum.dxx-rebirth.com/showthread.php?tid=1029

[Alter-Fox]

How soon though? Our own progress is, I think, faster than we expected.

[Xfing]

No idea. I don't think it's that essential though, it's not something that couldn't be implemented retroactively afterwards anyway

[Woolie_Wool]

I did some tests and the results confuse me, to say the least - they make no sense at all. First off, the player homing missile is just as good as it was in D1, if not better. In D1 it would take 6 homers to blow up a super hulk, in D2 it takes 5. That would suggest they've actually become stronger in the sequel, of course apart from their turn rate (that's a whole other topic, amirite).

And yet, player homers (as wielded by the super hulk) do 43 damage to the player in D1, and 30 in D2 - even though in the latter their power rating in the data is 40. There must be some damage scaling algorithm at play in D2, because even on Insane, player homers when used by robots only do 4 more damage on direct impact, and have a projectile speed of 90, as opposed to the variable speed of the robot homer, capping off at 80 on Insane (it's 60 on all other difficulty levels).

I have no idea why a missile with the listed power of 40, only does 30 damage to the player. Might be a bug from the nightly versions of D2x-Rebirth, so testing under a stable version might be required, but this gave me a whole new idea:

Maybe we should give the player homer to the Lou Guard instead - it's only marginally more damaging and marginally harder to dodge on Insane than the default robot variety. Of course that would make the robot a bit tricky on Trainee etc, since player weapon values generally don't change throughout the difficulties - but then again the robot so dopey even on Insane that the player is usually able to pick it off before it even gets to fire once, so Trainee players will also probably be fine.

And then, we'd fine-tune the robot homing missile instead, bringing it to values identical to D1 on Insane, and then give it to the red hulk. That way we'd accomplish basically the same thing while sacrificing very little. Either that or we find out why the heck player homers do much less damage than they're stated to do.

EDIT: Just tested this - when fired by the player at a wall point blank, the homers do the same amount of damage in both D1 and D2 - around 31-32 points. That's more than getting hit by a player homer from a robot! There must be some mistake in the code, seriously. I'll test it on a DOSBox installation and see.

Aaaaand nothing changes. Even on a vanilla installation the homers do 30 damage to the player, while they clearly should do more.

I would quite strongly urge against adding player weapons to robots that don't have them! As a Rookie player, one of my top priorities when designing my custom HAM was giving robots that used player weapons their own variants that scaled based on difficulty to balance out lower difficulty levels. Personally, if you must do something to Lou Guards, I suggest giving them robot smart missiles--it complements their color scheme and it gives them a role distinct from the red hulk.

[Xfing]

I'd never do that though, seeing as how everything except bosses is supposed to be vanilla, so the only changes I'm making are such that things work more like in D1.

[Sum0Beatz]

The mechs in descent 1 were way better than the mechs in descent 2 imo, I hope descent 1.5 brings back the dangers of super hulks

[Xfing]

The mechs in descent 1 were way better than the mechs in descent 2 imo, I hope descent 1.5 brings back the dangers of super hulks

D1 and D2 bots will be used about equally, so you should be quite happy I think. Also I'm hoping to sneak in an overrepresentation of C1 Drillers, but we'll see how it turns out.

Thinking only in categories of functionality could make some levels wind up having an overrepresentation of robots from one game, but thankfully there are some significant functional overlaps between robots from these two games, so we can easily slant them towards a roughly equal representation. There are Vertigo robots to consider too of course, but those introduced new functionality for the most part, so they can be used according to it. Sadly it doesn't seem like Vertigo bots can be put in matcens, which is a bit of a shame.

[Sirius]

Hmm. Remind me to investigate that... unless someone has already proven D2 won't support that, it seems possible that DLE just doesn't expose the feature. Reactor strength was already an example of such a feature...

[AlexanderBorisov]

Vertigo robots cannot be placed in matcens? Strange, Lost Levels had a lot of Sniper NG and SPIKE matcens, even MAX...

[Alter-Fox]

Lost levels snuck them in in a different way so that the expansion wouldn't be required to play it, and so it could switch their weapons... but at the cost of several D1 and D2 robots not being able to appear in the mission; and messing up the textures on some of the standard robots that were used.
It's not a tradeoff D1.5 is able to make and still keep to its vision.

[Xfing]

Sirius may be right though, DLE may just not show this as a feature. I remember back in the day you couldn't even choose the D1 reactor, even though it's been in the files all along.

That doesn't change the fact that Vertigo itself never featured its new robots in matcens, probably due to the fact that they came from another data file altogether. I really wonder whether it's possible to make this work without any sacrifices.

[Alter-Fox]

I'm also not sure whether any of them use AI that's different from the standard bots.
Particularly whether Smelter II's uncanny ability to bounce its shots into you is something on the normal accuracy slider or something new.

I definitely remember them being easier in Lost Levels than they were in Vertigo proper.

[AlexanderBorisov]

For example sniper ng's in Lost Levels weren't set to snipe mode from the moment they appeared (level 9) so could seem easier but later they were... But I don't think those Smelter 2 were different in LL, in both cases they seem to always hit you with those bouncing shots, but I don't believe it is intentional.

[Sirius]

OK, on further investigation this is from D2 and not DLE. Matcens' robot lists are encoded in the RDL/RL2 format using a 64-bit bitmask; if a bit is enabled, the corresponding robot type will be produced by the matcen. That's a one-to-one mapping, though, and there happen to be 66 robot types in base D2 (Alien 2 Boss and Mini Reactor are also excluded from the list for this reason). All the Vertigo types are above the range that the matcen format has space for.

So yeah unfortunately this is unfixable.

[LightWolf]

I do recall fiddlers in matcens in... VL14?

[Krom]

OK, on further investigation this is from D2 and not DLE. Matcens' robot lists are encoded in the RDL/RL2 format using a 64-bit bitmask; if a bit is enabled, the corresponding robot type will be produced by the matcen. That's a one-to-one mapping, though, and there happen to be 66 robot types in base D2 (Alien 2 Boss and Mini Reactor are also excluded from the list for this reason). All the Vertigo types are above the range that the matcen format has space for.

So yeah unfortunately this is unfixable.

I was pondering why they made it a bitmask instead of just throwing in an option of a unsigned 8 bit interger referencing a robot ID type, but I'm guessing the reason is because the single bitmask can enable the matcen to spawn more than one type of robot where an ID would be limited to just one type unless they coded the whole thing into a array variable.

[Sirius]

Yeah, it's designed to allow multiple types. Descent levels often make use of that, although they seldom use anywhere near the number of slots allowed, so e.g. a series of eight 8-bit IDs (where FF is "empty") would use the same amount of space, probably have enough slots for all the levels in the original game, and allow more flexibility for adding robots (255 entries instead of 64) that might have been useful for Vertigo.
Of course, the most flexible system would probably be a dynamic-sized array, though that would of course make the matcen list more complicated to traverse. It probably wouldn't cause any actual gameplay problems to do that, though, so arguably that's what Parallax should have done. But we all make mistakes.

[Alter-Fox]

Back to the homing missile problem for a sec -- I remembered hearing something about modding robot weapons in vertigo missions. I don't know how it works and I think Luke was the only one to ever do it but it is a possibility if we want more than one sort of homer.

[Xfing]

You can't cross-assign weapons from the HAM to robots in the V-HAM and vice versa, I'm afraid. I think we'll make do with just one after all.

[Alter-Fox]

Unless we used the V-Ham to switch the models for Red Hulk and MAX...

[LightWolf]

Or take the complicated version of the Lost Levels way out... (replace select robots that aren't used in the level, but not outright mission-wide)

[Xfing]

That would require a V-Ham for every level, which for one I'm not sure how to make, for two - it would drastically inflate the size of the mission and for three - we're still using d2x.HAM (and it's necessary). Also I'm not sure how v-hams work, i think you can have only one in a HOG archive, named the same as the HOG itself.

[LightWolf]

LL just used HXMs...
The only tricky part is individually replacing robots as a Parallax bot is unlikely to be eliminated completely leaving a selection to choose from not large enough for every Vertigo robot.

[Alter-Fox]

It would make the mission completely incompatible with DosBox if you were to do it that way. IIRC the original game didn't unload custom bot data after finishing a level, even though both sourceports have patched that for convenience.

[Xfing]

I would like it to be playable on DOSBox, sure, but some stuff will definitely require Rebirth (the newest one, even), such as the restored rotating robot model functionality for the briefings. They will be written so that they don't cause a crash using older versions or vanilla, but it'll be required for the full experience. Also, some cube-intensive levels do slow teh game down for me, particularly the Cauldron - and no CPU emulation settings were able to fix it for me. Maybe if I upgrate to an i7 it'll be better ,but I don't think everyone has an i7 (or should require one to play freaking Descent, lol)

I prefer vanilla for the pixellated, oldschool atmosphere, the explosion sprites (no idea why Zico chose to go with his new idea for the explosions), and probably slightly different AI - some robots take to roaming much sooner in vanilla, for example (or so I think). Otherwise Rebirth is the way to go here, buggy as its current versions may be.

[Sirius]

Descent is single-threaded so you might be able to get similar results just overclocking an i5. High-end chips mostly add more cores lately...

[Krom]

For single threaded games, the presence of hyperthreading on the i7 may actually make some games slower than they would be on a non-HT i5 (assuming identical clock speeds, the i7s are usually clocked slightly faster too).

[Xfing]

Well I have an i3-6800 at the moment, I was hoping to upgrade for the best possible processor my motherboard can take, which would probably be one from the equivalent i7 line.