Perfect Accuracy Fist Fucking

Perfect Accuracy

Since my last post on the topic of Borderlands 2 modding, I did manage to finish up and release the weapons accuracy mod I was talking about. I was able to get through a whole playthrough as Maya without encountering any massive game-breaking issues, so I figured that was a good start for a beta release. The fact that the mod makes the game so much more enjoyable to play really helped me keep up the momentum with testing and making tweaks as well.

Since then, I’ve also been releasing a bunch of other, smaller mods, some using the Python SDK, some using batch text commands. You can find them all on the Borderlands 2 Mods Page. There’s really only a few more mods I’m wanting to make for the game.

One mod I’ve been investigating since the beginning is changing the vehicle controls from mouse turning to keyboard turning. It’s always baffled me why nobody else made a fuss about the mouse vehicle turning in this game (and the predecessor). I feel like on PC this was the first popular game to do this and yet everyone was just like “okay”, even though it’s obviously inferior and stupid to have both vehicle turning and vehicle weapon aiming on the mouse. Meanwhile, the keyboard left and right movement keys are just there being unused like “am I a joke to you?”. I assume it’s just a melange of console control bullshit seeping over, noobie kids that don’t know better, and non-technical PC gamers just accepting things for what they are. But I won’t stand for it! Even if I’ve been playing this way for years, it still feels wrong! I think the change is probably possible, although it will almost certainly take the Python SDK to do so. I’ve already scoured the configs and data files looking for ways to reassign the turning axis but came up fairly empty-handed. Luckily, I think I’m comfortable enough with the SDK at this point that I’ll be able to figure it out if it’s at all possible.

I’m also still tweaking the Perfect Accuracy mod, though, of course. One change I made initially with the mod was to remove the dumbass insane recoil from the first few shots of Hyperion weapons. It made the Hyperion SMGs essentially unusable as you’d waste the first fourth of a mag just hitting fuck-all. But I kept the relatively good recoil that Hyperion weapons had overall. I didn’t realize at the time, but the Hyperion SMGs and pistols also had really low hip-fire spread for some reason (the Hyperion stats are kind of a confusing mess because of this weird initial recoil they do), and this made them basically hip-fire laser-beams with lower recoil and inaccuracy. I’m toying around currently with ways to correct this, but I’m probably going to go with something where the Hyperion weapons have best-in-class recoil but worst-in-class hip-fire spread. This kind of fits with the original flavor of the Hyperion weapons anyways, without being too annoying. It just means the player will need to judge when to ADS or hip-fire differently compared to other manufacturers’ weapons.  But trust me, if it doesn’t feel good to me, it won’t go in the mod. I don’t know how something like that got into the game in the first place—maybe for a gag? Sure, for a gag, put the effect on a legendary weapon, not an entire manufacturer’s unique feature.

I also did pick up a bunch of the DLC for the game on a recent Steam sale, so it’s quite likely that I will add support for their weapons in the Perfect Accuracy mod eventually.

I guess I should also mention this demonstration video I did for the Perfect Accuracy mod. I spent a while on it and it ended up being quite long—most certainly too long if we’re being honest. I just wanted to be thorough because I have a feeling a lot of people just won’t “get it” otherwise, they’ll just be blissfully ignorant of the situation and totally accept it as is. (Am I just too much of a nit-picky perfectionist or are there a lot of people these days that just accept whatever is told to them because of hype, charisma, reputation, whatever misplaced trust? Nobody challenges anything anymore.) But at over thirty minutes long, I should really find a way to distill the video down into a more succinct package that still gets the message across. Something to think about for a final release perhaps. Anyways, here’s the video in case you like watching changes instead of just reading about them.

Fist Fuck

Several years back I toyed around with Doom map making after another enjoyable full playthrough of both the original 90s games. Besides an interesting but never-finished beach-landing map and a bizarre bastardization of the noteworthy Marines map (my favorite feature of which was the zombie sergeant death sound being changed to a recording of Butthead saying “did I just score?” 😄), both that I did when I was a teen, I never made a proper Doom map. I have good ideas for maps generally, but the constant creative minutia gets to be too tedious for me after a while.

But the thing is, I did actually finish one small map and then forgot to publish it because I was anticipating finishing another much larger map just after. The smaller map in question is called Fist Fuck. It’s an apt name given that the only weapon at your disposal (practically-speaking) is your fist with the berzerk powerup. It was born from my curiosity about how useful berserk could actually be. In the base game, it’s never really clear how powerful or lasting the berzerk powerup is (it’s quite powerful and lasts the rest of the level btw), so I basically wanted to create a level to explore the possibilities of berserk.

Obviously, the range limitation of berzerk means that pitting the player against enemies with ranged attacks at range would be quite difficult. So, I mainly stuck to hoards of weaker and melee-only enemies and lots of tight corridors. Besides, one-shotting lines of weak enemies into red mist is as satisfying as gobbling the white dots in Pac-Man, arguably even moreso in fact.

Now there are many different versions of the Doom engine to target ever since the source code was released. But to give myself a challenge, I thought I’d try to make the level support the original Doom2 engine so that it could work on any of the ports (theoretically), even the original DOS one. And sometimes I think the Doom mappers go too far these days; sure, you can modify the Doom engine to add whatever features and remove whatever limits you want, but why not just use a modern engine at that rate? To be fair, the multitude of Doom engine limitations are quite cumbersome. But still, completing the challenge and saying your map can run on any version and port of Doom(2) feels the utmost fulfilling. Here’s some screenshots of Fist Fuck running on DOSBox for what it’s worth.

You can find more information, a video, screenshots, and the download for Fist Fuck on the newly-created Doom Levels Page. As I said before, I wanted to have more than just one map before I made a page specifically for Doom maps. But who knows when I’ll feel up to finishing the other map, perhaps after another complete playthrough of Doom and Doom2. 😛 I don’t know. I think the amount of pain I’m in on the regular is just too much to support such creative ventures anymore unfortunately. But I want to end with a few screenshots anyways, so we can see “and all that could have been”. They’re a mix of Chocolate Doom and ZDoom as the resolution of Choco is just too low to convey much in a mere screenshot most of the time.