Agent_Ash 

Let's see what has happened over the past months, shall we?

Alice: Toys of Madness got a Cacoward in 2024 in the gameplay mods category! That was a big and nice surprise. By the way, the latest version of the mod at the moment is 1.2.0 and it can be downloaded here. 

I've still not given up on the idea of making an Alice-themed monster pack. That said, 3D model support in ZDoom has progressed a lot, so I'd have to update some things. 

Painslayer appears to be a bit broken on the new ZDoom versions (bullet tracers appear at wrong positions, and I've heard there are issues with the Demon mode). While I'm not planning new content, I do want to fix it.

FlexiHUD 3.1.0 is still in the works. I've implemented almost all suggestions, but finishing off the little bits and finishing touches is taking a while.

And finally, the yet-unnamed Terminator mod is in the work (I'm considering "Terminator: Doomsday"), and I'm close to finishing all the weapons, but items, mechanics and balance are still to be done (not to mention menus, intro sequence and the like). This is my first work done fully with 3D models, and it's all about realizing my childhood fantasy to "play Doom as a Terminator, man!"

Don't worry, I have a video showcase too:

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: https://github.com/jekyllgrim/UniversalFlexibleHUD

Here are some features:

- FlexiHUD replaces default HUD, not the AltHud. Make sure AltHud is off. FlexiHUD doesn't differentiate between fullscreen and statusbar modes.

- Not a single graphical element — everything is done through code.

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.

The other part is that I'm now heavily utilizing GZDoom's native particle system. Particles have been around since forever, but nowadays they're not limited to being just flat-colored circles/squares; you can also apply arbitrary textures to them. Practically all smoke and projectile trails in Painslayer will now be particles.

The difference? Performance! The impact is pretty noticeable—especially on top of moving floors. Just look at this: ~60 FPS dip with 6-8ms VM time before (left) vs stable 200 FPS and 0.6ms VM time now (right):

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: