Agent_Ash

I took a break from my other projects to make a definitive HUD mod. It took a lot more effort than I'd initially expected, but it was worth it. I present to you — FlexiHUD!

Watch the trailer:

You can download the mod and read full description here: 

Here's a bunch of clips of the things recently added to Alice: Toys of Madness:

* A nice camera dip at the start of the jump

* Your falling speed is reduced when you're falling down after a jump (as opposed to just stepping over a ledge). The logic here is to make jumping feel more like third-person platforming jumps, where the initial movement tends to be fast while the falling is slow. More changes will likely happen here, like increased aircontrol and reduced friction, but this is a start.

* Double jump! Similar to the one in Madness Returns.

* And, finally, proper jumping animation is now added.

Since ZScript doesn't offer individual 3D-model bone control (at least, not yet), I cannot move the torso and the hips/legs individually, as opposed to how American McGee's Alice does it. But to make the movement a bit better, I'll now be turning the model towards its movement direction. This isn't ideal, and when you attack, the legs will stand still, unfortunately, but 

Both features are shown in this clip:

This update spent a bit too long in the oven, but it's finally out! The main focus was to improve performance. The main source of performance issues in GZDoom is a multitude of actors, such as smoke, debris, trails and flames spawned by projectils and special effects.

GZDoom has had an internal particle system for a while—that system allowed spawning particles that were very cheap on performance, but the downside is that you couldn't modify their look. They could only look like circles or squares. Well, this has changed!

Now particles can be textured with any graphic. While their animation capabilities are limited, and they can't have physics or interact with environment, this meant I could replace almost all smoke, debris and flame effects with these shiny new particles. So I did.

The performance difference varies from slight to very significant. You can find multiple examples (and more information about the update) in this video:

Lots of bug fixes, lots of improvements. A bit of new mechanics too. Now Electro will actually interact with water sectors! Inspired by Quake's Lightning Gun, except it won't straight-up kill you. If you fire it while underwater, it'll damage everything in an area, including you. If you stand on the surface and fire the lightning into the water, it'll deal damage in an area around the point of impact. Getting it to work was kinda painful, but now it works, and the area of effect is properly clipped to the water sector and doesn't leak outside. I might need to update the visuals a bit, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far.

I made a simple mod that adds customizable map markers for monsters, keys, weapons, ammo, health, powerups and other items. Optionally, markers for items dropped by monsters can also be created (but changing this option will only affect items that are dropped after the change).

Download here:https://github.com/jekyllgrim/Robust-map-markers-for-gzdoom/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

No need to unpack, just run it as you would run any mod.

The mod uses MIT license, so you can use it pretty much for anything.

Although Alice: Toys of Madness is definitely a first-person mod, I decided to add a proper 3D model for the player character from American McGee's Alice. It also will change weapons properly as the player changes them.

(Sorry it took a while to upload this here, I'm still getting used to having a Boosty blog)

I made 5 sprites for a melee for somebody, and decided to quickly throw together some code to test how well it can be animated by rotating, scaling and moving it via ZScript code. This is the result!

People seem to be enjoying the more technical GZDoom posts... So here's a GZDoom tip for weapon spriting: use layers!
My most layer-heavy weapon is probably the Rifle/Flamethrower from Painslayer: all of its main elements are separate graphics.

I move and scale them independently, and the final result looks pretty volumetric.

The pilot light is also a series of sprite layers that are independently created, scaled down and moved up. They're also dynamically offset when the player moves the camera around:

I wanted to have a HUD face in Alice: Toys of Madness. But I needed multi-frame animations for blinking, pain reaction, etc., in contrast to Doom. It's pretty difficult in UI context... So Alice's face is actually handled by an actor.
The video shows how it'd look if rendered in-world.

How it works: a monster-like actor is spawned and attached to the player (but isn't actually rendered in the world). It uses actor states to display animation sequences when the player is hurt, idle, etc. The HUD reads the actor's current sprite and draws it in the UI every frame.

The Cards weapon in Alice: Toys of Madness contains an array of 52 values (4 suits x 13 values). If the array is above 0, the next card is pulled from it; if empty, it's recreated. So, you never get duplicates until you've fired all 52 cards. The card value determines damage.  

There are 52 sprites for the cards that are drawn in separate layers by the weapon, and 52 textures for the models used by the projectiles. Thankfully, the file size is tiny 😅