More adventures in #DoomModding today, this time we're shining some light on an old addon that has been revived, stripped down to just the parts that are needed, and brought back up with some new life via the new helper functions I've been tinkering away with over in HDCoreLib.

Given that I've mentioned this flashlight item previously (see above a few posts in this very chain) I won't belabor the refactored particle function, although what is new here is the use of a newly Planck's Law calculation for the color temperatures of the incandescent flashlight and the cool white LED flood light.

Also you may notice the physicality of the light beam itself, that's due to a Damped Spring function easing the position and direction of the light beam, which is different depending on the place that it's mounted, with your shoulders slightly lagging behind your camera without overcorrection, and the helmet being instant since it's attached to your head and thus the camera.

The flood light is still WIP, but is a decoration that can be used to light up an area in front of it, dragged around, or salvaged for its battery if it has one.

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So I spent the better half of the last week or two working on fleshing out a common base class for various melee weapons across different #HideousDestructor addons, and at least initially, I think it turned out ok! Things are quite extensive already, and hopefully will grow as more new instruments are created.

The challenge was figuring out the intention behind various disparate parts of code across each individual weapon, in order to rewire everything up to a more modular, hopefully cleaner abstraction layer. From here, though, not only should a new weapon be simpler to create and receive boilerplate feature enhancements, bugfixes, etc automatically, but also allow for more interesting mechanics going forward.

https://github.com/HDest-Community/hdest-core-lib/blob/main/zscript%2FHDCore%2Fbase%2Fweapons%2FBaseMeleeWeapon.zsc

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The other side of the UaS Laser/Light Module code that I refactored into a reusable helper function was the ability to spawn particles to look like the atmospheric haze from the beam of a flashlight.

The first thing I wanted to wire this up to was an old "DarkDoomZ Bootleg" whose developer had long since abandoned, but their additions being Hideous enough made me want to try and revive it, so I ported it over to GitHub and started working on removing the bootleg portions of the code, making it a standalone flashlight mod in the process.

What we now have is DDZ without any DDZ code left in it (hopefully), and what remains (as well as a starting point for new additions) is a much nicer piece of equipment.

As you can see by the sample screenshots, the original developer added the ability to change where the flashlight was mounted, as well as what type of beam you wanted. What I tweaked beyond that, is that going forward the beam will be intrinsic to the flashlight itself, and for handheld versions like the one in the screenshots, you can cycle between the mount points with a few key combinations. This allows for much more dynamic gameplay, plus it just feels all the more tangible when picking one up "mounts" it using the handheld position.

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One of the other refactors I worked on was hoisting a very well-made set of VFX functions that create very believable looking laser beams. If you're unaware, these are the same laser beams that Ugly as Sin uses for its LLM device, with additional parameters and checks for added flexibility/extensibility.

The first thing I wanted to try reimplementing with these new methods was my Laser Tripbombs which, like their Duke Nukem 3D counterpart, emit a laser beam that detonates upon being crossed. In Doom, rendering such a laser beam isn't exactly straightforward, however, the LLM has been doing this sort of thing already so why not make it reusable for other addons? This would also come with the benefit of having other addons that use it increase the consistency across the community content.

I can already think of a few other things that could want something like this, including the SOCOM .45 pistol from Bangers & Mash that already has an attached laser that you can toggle.

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One of the bigger implementations of these commands has been with Merchant, where you can now:

• Define custom store types, each with their own set of entries, allowing players to have full control over what stores sell what things, for how much, and how often they are sold
• Define custom merchant skins and associate them with whichever store types they want, instead of every merchant store using every skin defined.
• Store types leverage the Weighted Random Tables, so when selecting one of the stores, they can be defined with different relative weights if so desired.

There's still plenty more we'd like to implement, like being able to sell stuff back to merchants, turning the current coins/gems into things you need to sell to get actual cash for, adding more treasure/valuables, etc.

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