"Custom Edition" (another mod!)

On this Thanksgiving day, one of the things I am grateful for is consistent support for my little project even if it takes me forever to do any updates. And people who take inspiration from it.

The weapons were one of the first things I changed in the game, because ponies can't really use zorchers. They became spells, instead (incidentally, that's why I chose Rarity as the protagonist; in my mind, I couldn't justify Twilight as needing to learn the spells and also running out of mana for them). Originally, I was going to have her use her horn as the weapon, but then realized that every time she switched weapons, her horn would rise up from the bottom of the screen and that made me laugh. So it became a spellbook (which I'm still pretty proud of thinking up, btw; though in fairness, anything would be better than the black boxes on the bottom I had before).

When you fire the simple spark or rapidfire spark in raridoom, there is a 'flash' image up at the top of the screen, something I made in GIMP forever ago, designed to look like light overspray from casting the spell. But that's it. I figured the light would be enough to sell the illusion (this is also why most changelings have that that blue glow around them for the death animations, they were 'stunned' by the spell). Also, they were hitscan weapons, and it wasn't like I could make it a spell. Besides, at that time, I was more interested in sprite replacement than anything else. So I left it at that.

Turns out it's very possible to replace every weapon with a projectile. A lighted projectile. With different colors depending on the spell. And it looks a little something like this: 

Video link if it fails to load

The grenade from the TwiBlast altfire is even in there! Even the Trixieling has the spells, which made me really happy for some reason. The flamethrower part surprised me a bit, but in hindsight, it's doing exactly what it said. Maybe a bit harsh looking at how I'm planning on ending the game; but frightfully effective. And that EFS... Well, I just had to try it out after that.

There are also some new sounds, too, and they're awesome. I can't choose a favorite. There's new magic sounds, new teleporter sounds, the melee attacks on you sound like magic sparks that actually startled me when some changeling sneaked up behind me, the Fluffy Pony cries, the big enemy cries, the poison joke, and the Twisted Princess active sound may be my favorites, though. 

Ok, I had a lot of favorites. And the lantern now does this little ring of light around you instead of raising the light level of the whole level. It's really immersive. To be honest, it's like a whole new game, put new life in my old levels. I really recommend this one. 

But as much as it pains me to say, you may have a little trouble with this one. First of all, don't even try to load this in zdoom (it has no idea what to do with the lighting stuff, and the old version that came with Open Beta 3 doesn't know some important codepointers). You'll need gzdoom 2.1 at the latest (click here to get it). Also, it wouldn't load for me at all at first (mod author recommended using zdl to make sure the mods are loaded in the right order, click here for the zdoom wiki page on that), but finally I got it to run from the command line by renaming all the files to not have spaces in the name (so Win+R, "F://raridoom/gzdoom.exe -iwad chex3.wad -file rarimusic.pk3 -file rarity.wad -file raridoomedit.zip"; raridoomedit.zip has to be the last file when doing it this way). When I tried to just run it with spaces, it wouldn't load and I got a DECORATE error that crashed gzdoom (without telling me where the error was, which was rather unhelpful). It is entirely possible that it's just my old computer, though.

And when it did load, there were some issues that probably have more to do with my kludgy replacement coding than the mod author's ability. You can pick up weapons, but you can't switch them (the numbers don't light up). It only switches automatically when I run out of mana. You don't spawn with the new simplespark, but idkfa gives it to you (so you can switch between the two, old and new, with the same book sprite). The blue fluffies spawn old school fluffy ponies when they die, and the trixielings drop old rapidfiresparks... which still give you mana for the new rapidfirespark.

But when it works, it's a ton of fun, and major props to niko for the hard work done on this. I did have a little luck when I renamed the weapons definitions in the .zip to "[weapon]2 : [weapon] replaces [weapon]" (so hoof, simplespark, spreadshot, doublespreadshot, rapidfirespark, TwiBlast, flamethrower, EpicFireballSpell) and re-adding in weapon.slotnumber X for all the weapons. There's probably an easier way to do it, but coding isn't my strongest subject.

Links are in the description of the video. Enjoy!

Either deep or sleep-deprived

I'm sure glad computers aren't sarcastic yet.
"Wow, baha, I have to resave this entire wad, recreate the whole thing and save the backup on a flash drive that's running dangerously low on space; all because you forgot an opening bracket in one monster definition. One little bracket. Nice."

Irony

One of my levels (E3M7) is entitled, "Afraid of the dark?" Like the name implies, it's a really dark level, especially in this huge maze-like section. You could barely see in front of you.

And the only lantern in the map was in a secret place I'd completely forgotten about.

Suffice it to say that I am now afraid of the dark. Especially after needing to resurrect like five times in the level because Trixielings are popping out of nowhere.

So now it's a bit brighter. You're welcome.
there's also a little more ammo because have you ever tried to punch out a Trixieling Mage [arachnotron]? Doesn't work, 0/10, do not recommend

In an alternate universe…

…I'm a decent artist.

And the cover of raridoom in that universe looks a little something like this:

IT IS ON - Rarity by hinoraito on DeviantArt

New Year's Reso- whoa, deja vu...

I just pulled up my last post entitled New Year's Resolution and, well, it seems that resolutions are made to be broken. :-/

But in my defense, I did graduate college, and I got married. I just got my hours at work increased which will do wonders for me (and certainly won't hurt my dream goal of 'get a new computer').

I was tempted to release what I had now, but where I am with the mod, I'd give away too much in spoilers and then not deliver on them. So I can't do that.

I do have more plans, though. And I did get that cut scene more or less set up. But it all. Involves. Spriting.

But really, though, I'd say I'm a couple boss fights and two levels away from being done with this game. The levels are flatter than I'd like, and the wall textures on some of the later levels are meh and boring, and I'm not sure how hard it is (and how much difficulty is due to "there's like two revenants right in my face wtf" as opposed to being good, well-designed maps), and I want to do more decoration to make it look more hive-like; but yeah. It's close.