DRL > Requests For Features

DeHackEd

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Titt:
Remember DeHackEd, the program used to edit DOOM2.EXE, when even making a full IWAD wasn't enough? It let you change a lot of Doom's basic behavior; it was very easy, and quickly got boring, to give the Super Shotgun the same rate of fire as the Chaingun, and other overpowered things like that. Much more fun was making rockets have "partial invisibility" (like Specters) and have zero speed, so they acted as mines. I remember making a DeHackEd patch and a WAD once which were intended to be used together so you could play "BFG tennis" in Deathmatch--with the EXE patch, the BFG ball moved very slowly, and was "solid" and could be hit by weapons fire, which would push it around; the idea was that each player would get a BFG and a shotgun, and each would fire their BFG shot, and you would try to use your shotgun to get your BFG ball to hit a wall so you could use the weird area effect mechanics to kill the other player, while at the same time keeping the other guy's BFG ball from hitting anything and exploding. It wasn't actually very fun.

Anyway, DeHackEd was a pretty well-known part of playing Doom in those days (the mid-1990s), and it might be fun to see it show up somehow in DoomRL--maybe some vaults could contain an item called a "Computer Terminal" or something like this, which could act much like a lever (immovable, can be destroyed by explosions) but on using it you would have a few options--get a Computer Map for the level, or getting to take your choice of any the usual effects of a lever, etc.; but for players fitting the right requirements (a level of Whizkid? having found and kept an artifact "Disk of DeHackEd"?) you might get to choose to "Run DeHackEd" and edit some of the parameters of the game while you are IN the game. Obviously you shouldn't be able to give your Double Shotgun a firing time of 0.1 second, but it would be fun to be able to tweak other game parameters in a less abusive way:

[*]making all bullet weapons do an extra +1 damage--both your pistols and chainguns, and also those of the former humans and former captains (or similar for all shotguns or all plasma guns);
[*]making everything unable to fly--so cacodemons, lost souls, and pain elementals will be affected by acid and lava;
[*]tweaking the rates of appearance of the various monsters, like a less powerful version of Nethack's Scroll of Genocide--you can't make Archviles disappear from the game, but you can make them appear less often;
[*]tweaking some AI parameters, so some monsters are more likely to run from you, for instance;
[*]making a certain kind of monster never leave a corpse, so it can't be resurrected by Archviles;
[*]making a certain kind of monster drop a different kind of ammo when it dies--having Mancubuses drop plasma cells instead of rockets, for instance;
[*]dropping the armor level by 1 on all monsters of a certain kind that have at least 1 level of armor by default--Revenants, or Mancubuses, or Archviles, etc.;
[*]giving yourself a 10% (or whatever percent) boost to the experience gained from each kill;
[*]changing the "natural" weapons of certain enemies, like downgrading Barons of Hell to have shotguns instead of their fireball attacks;
[*]making yourself "big enough" to use the artifact weapons that the game says you are unable to use;
[*]there are probably a lot of other possibilities.[/list]

Some of these things would be pretty good in an Ao100 game, where (for instance) a couple tweaks to make Archviles less of a threat would really improve your long-term chance of surviving.

Malek Deneith:
Sort of "ingame cheat" it looks like to me... Hell no I say! Hell no!
* Malek Deneith sends JC after Titt

Conker:
Assuming that such a terminal would be rare, and possibly have a chance of failure, and the stats wouldn't be affected too much (+1 bullet damage is fine, +10 is not. Same for -5% chance of Archvile generation versus -50%), this sounds like a great idea. It should offer a random selection of all the possible effects (like, ten out of the hundred possible ones), but it should word them in an ambiguous way. Similar to D&D players having to word 'wishes' from a genie very very carefully...

Titt:

--- Quote from: Conker on May 06, 2008, 04:52 ---Assuming that such a terminal would be rare, and possibly have a chance of failure, and the stats wouldn't be affected too much (+1 bullet damage is fine, +10 is not. Same for -5% chance of Archvile generation versus -50%), this sounds like a great idea. It should offer a random selection of all the possible effects (like, ten out of the hundred possible ones), but it should word them in an ambiguous way. Similar to D&D players having to word 'wishes' from a genie very very carefully...

--- End quote ---


This sounds right.


If there are "computer terminals" in the game and DeHackEd had to be "run" by finding it on a disk and using the disk at a computer terminal, another disk to put in the game would be one of the old WAD editors that was really successful, probably DCK, although I think today DoomBuilder is more popular; anyway, good options on running a WAD editor in-game would be to let you destroy all walls in the level, to remove a certain portion of the enemies in the level (say, 50% of the enemies in that level?), remove all the archviles in the level, scatter some ammo throughout the level, etc. Obviously the player should only be able to choose one of these options for each time they use the computer terminal, and the terminal could be set up to function like a lever, where it only works 1-3 times.

Titt:

--- Quote from: Malek Deneith on May 06, 2008, 04:29 ---Sort of "ingame cheat" it looks like to me... Hell no I say! Hell no!
* Malek Deneith sends JC after Titt
--- End quote ---


Nah, what I'm thinking of wouldn't affect the balance of the game very much--it should be something that is only possible to make work in a small proportion of games, say, games where you find both a rare object, the disk, and a rare lever, the computer terminal, and you use them together; and even then you only get a certain number of uses before the computer terminal shuts down, like any other lever. It's an "ingame cheat" in flavor, because DeHackEd was used to change the basic mechanics of Doom; but what I'm suggesting wouldn't change the way DoomRL plays in a very important way.


Other good disks the player could find: "a disk containing Doom," and "a disk containing DoomRL." I have no idea what should happen if the player runs these disks at a computer terminal, though.

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