I have no idea what an immersive sim is but I fucking love them and want more

Define Immersive Sims Without Including Ubisoft Games Challenge (Impossible)

@kasdeya does Voices of the Void count?

Personally I consider Hideous Destructor to lean quite heavily into ImmSim territory, especially with certain addons included

@Undead_Zeratul I would definitely count Voices of the Void! and also thank you for reminding me of that game. when I played it a few years ago it was in too much of a rough state but I really want to give it another try because IMO it had so much potential

@Undead_Zeratul also, which HDest addons are you thinking of? they sound interesting

@kasdeya I only just picked it up this past October for Spooky Games Month, and I honestly already want to jump back in after the 0.9 update drops.

@kasdeya

Ugly as Sin adds some nice scavenger style mechanics like scarce spawns, looting off corpses, etc.

Spicy Air makes it so that things can be flagged to emit or consume toxicity in the air around them, and being in that space causes you to breathe in and increase toxicity in yourself, dealing various types of damage to you over time. You can find gas masks and whatnot too which help.

Merchants can break the vibe/aesthetic a bit, but if configured well enough, they can provide a nice bit of benefit for finding secrets.

Personally, I run with quite a lot of addons myself, but I'm also refining and tweaking my entire setup to just be more of a slow-paced, spooky survival feel rather than a fast-paced tactical shooter.

It's taken me the last few years of curation and now the last year or two of helping maintain/upgrade these community addons, but I'm finally starting to make meaningful progress.

@Undead_Zeratul woahh thank you for the modlist! that is actually amazing to have. I’ve already really enjoyed Ugly as Sin’s survival mechanics (especially the food. I find it so grounding to make an area safe then take some time to eat and drink) but Spicy Air sounds amazing too

I’m currently using an older version of HDest with an older set of addons so I’m missing a lot of whatever has been added lately (I’m too lazy to update lol) but if/when I do update I am definitely checking this modlist out - thank you!

@kasdeya

Of course! That's honestly why I made the modlist, I get a lot of people asking what I run with whenever I stream or post videos/clips.

I run with the bleeding edge, mainly due to the fact that I also maintain a good portion of those same addons. Having said that, I do disable/tailor nearly everything I include. While it looks like I would run into issues with consistency, the fact that I reduce my ammo pool to the vanilla rounds, .45 ACP, .50 OMG, and the various 12ga shell types, already limits what weapons are even useful, but even beyond that I prevent the rest that are simple variants (missing scopes, sawn-offs, etc) or are dropped from the additional mobs from spawning naturally.

What I do keep in, I also give back via Merchants or the Field Assembly Kit which allows me to convert some weapons into others, like the aforementioned sawn-off slayer or silenced pistol.

The plan is to build some LiTDoom-style loadouts, rework spawn tables, etc. to allow for a more progressive, slow-burn style of play.

@Undead_Zeratul oohh that sounds so good. I love shooters with a slow burn, survival-oriented gameplay loop. it sounds like your addons would be perfect for me

also I had no idea you made HDest addons too! which of the ones in the google doc are yours?

@kasdeya mine specifically? Currently I have a Reskin and a weapon pack in the works, but I also have a HUD mod that lets you configure your HUD to a ridiculous degree if you're willing to fiddle with menus for a bit.

My GitHub Profile has all of my repos, although most of them are forks of their proper repos.

@kasdeya

Having said that, I've contributed quite a bit towards The HDest Community Organization repos, so while I don't want to take credit from those original authors, I have still helped maintain and contribute towards plenty besides my own works.

@Undead_Zeratul woahh you’ve done so much! and your HUD mod looks incredible too. I can’t believe how many different appearances it can have - let alone all of the other options

to be honest the most I’ve done in terms of HDest modding is manually changing the bible verses that appear when you get a helmet pickup lol. and that really just consisted of editing a text file

@kasdeya aww thank you! It helps that I program professionally, but I've also spent a lot of time consistently over the last year or two modding more than playing.

Funny you mention changing the text, that's basically how I got started; my reskin was the first thing I ever made, starting with simply changing the color of the revolver from teal to purple, before slowly adding more purple recolors and even completely new sprites.

I forget what mod was the first one that had me think "I could tweak this to get it working", I wanna say I found some that were outdated and not being maintained, figured I could troubleshoot the errors they were throwing to learn how things worked, and it's been snowballing since then.

Hell, I just figured out I can pass functions into other functions earlier this evening. This way I can tweak what logic is run in a much more modular/generic way without having to redefine things unnecessarily.

Personally I miss some of the nicer bits of syntax I'm used to, such as optional chaining, nullish coalesceling, or lambda functions; not to mention I'd love to have better IDE support or some way to debug things, but I'm amazed with what I can do with what we have already.

@Undead_Zeratul omg huh! so even you don’t know everything about ZScript and ZDoom modding? one of the things that stopped me from pursuing it was that I felt overwhelmed by (what seemed to me like) certain gaps in the ZDoom documentation and I wasn’t sure how to start messing with modding given that that’s the case. my usual approach is to read the docs until I know just enough to make a little “hello world” program and keep reading the docs until I can do more, and gradually build up my understanding that way. but I felt like I couldn’t do that with ZDoom (or, to be honest, modding in general)

although it sounds like what you did is just start tinkering with other people’s mods and trial-and-error a bit until you learned the rules? which sounds like an interesting approach to be honest, and a smart one too. it’s probably great for quickly building an intuition of what can and can’t be done

but yeah it absolutely amazes me what ZDoom can do, even looking at it from the outside. it completely blew my mind seeing that HDest has terrain destruction and the ability for bullets to go through map geometry (I wouldn’t be surprised if this even had dynamic penetration based on the texture of the geometry too). honestly even just the ability to mantle over geometry blew my mind lol. that still doesn’t feel like something that ZDoom would be able to do

@kasdeya

ah, yeah their documentation is all over the place. My ability to pick up the language was moreso helped by the fact that I can already program in a few different languages (mainly Typescript nowadays but I'm also proficient in Java, with knowledge on C/C++) so picking up ZScript wasn't too much of a stretch. The biggest esotericisms that ZScript employs is play/ui/data scoping which can be a bit of a headache, the default block, and the states block. I avoided messing with actors/weapons/items at first purely because of the states block and how the engine handles these Finite State Machine definitions.

From there it's just been a matter of understanding things from a game engine perspective, being single threaded, etc that are the biggest breaks from my normal as a primarily web app developer. Designing systems and remember mechanics are hard for me to make manifest at times, especially with the reworks I've been doing for Spicy Air. I've learned a lot about the engine and its quirks and limitations over this grand experiment, that's for sure.

HDest's overhaul of the game's systems is what drew me in. Discovering that the stuff it does is even possible in the engine is crazy, and I've been trying to mimic that as I work on existing addons, as well as trying to design my own.

@kasdeya

https://ocw.social/@Undead_Zeratul/114345443322112886

https://ocw.social/@Undead_Zeratul/114838123321293659

https://ocw.social/@Undead_Zeratul/113841418935277796

Here's some video samples of the various stuff I've made in my weapon pack. The BHG spawns an all-consuming singularity that deletes everything within its Schwartzchild radius, based on the relative mass between each thing being attracted.

I made the pipe bombs because I wanted a remote detonated grenade, figured the DN3D pipe bombs were a good fit. I made them hideous by requiring a detonator item that you find separately in order to actually detonate them, otherwise you'll have to shoot them.

The claymores/mines I added as more explosive toys with different proximity mechanics to them. They both work as you'd expect them to, with clay.ores detonating in front of them when something moves within its range. The landmine waits until you step into it before it becomes primed, and from there you have to crouch down and use it to deactivate it. If you step off of it or use/kick it it'll detonate.

The Laser Tripbombs are the most recent addition, they work just like the DN3D ones and blow up if you walk in front of it. I'd love to add the UaS laser to them, bonus points if I can get them to show up in IR only.

I still have plans to add a single Devastator that burst fires 20mm grenades, and I'd like to figure out how to HDest-ify the Demontech Rifle from Complex Doom; focusing on the gas vents makes me think it should shoot balefire and heat up, needing to be vented. Just can't figure out how to balance it, considering it'll have its own ammo type.

@Undead_Zeratul I’m ngl setting grenade tripwires is one of my favorite HDest mechanics. it can lead to so many cool emergent situations - plus I just like feeling clever when anticipating an ambush and setting an ambush of my own. so I feel like your mines, claymores, and pipe bombs are incredible additions too. can they spawn in armed, like how HERPs can spawn? also I love the laser particle effects for the claymores, and how they can be dragged around (I don’t think dragging them would even occur to me as an option? but that could lead to all kinds of cool emergent situations too)

did you make all of this pixel art yourself? and where’d you get the sounds?

oh and what’s the Demontech Rifle? I’ve actually never heard of Complex Doom

overall these look like amazing additions to HDest that would each add a lot on their own

@kasdeya

"Can they spawn armed?"
Technically yes, I just haven't made any random spawners for them yet, but I'd love to!

"I don’t think dragging them would even occur to me as an option? but that could lead to all kinds of cool emergent situations too"
Me neither! It's just how the fists work when you hold fire mode down, they let you drag anything, although if I can I'd like to see if I can have these check against being dragged...

"did you make all of this pixel art yourself?"
Oh gosh, no; they're from Realm667 for the claymores/mines, although everything's sources are listed in the pack's readme. I can't draw worth shit, especially not at the level of the amazing talent out there, I tend to get inspired by spritesheets others have made and try to build something around that.

"where’d you get the sounds?"
Same as with the sprites

"what’s the Demontech Rifle? I’ve actually never heard of Complex Doom"
Oh! It's part of a series of weapons that mod added that fire their own energy cells, and generally hit harder? The spritesheet was made by Mike12 and is just this fantastic looking black and red skull, and it has these vents on the side that emit a gaseous plume when you remove the mag. Complex Doom recolored the red bits to green and flipped the sprite around. My take on it is planning on keeping the green recolor, as well as modularize the sprites a bit to make use of the complex states you can track with HDest weaponry.

https://youtu.be/BgJTVyFYjec here's a quick rundown of some of Complex Doom's weapons (at least in the base game, there's addons there too that literally make it into a Clusterfuck)

https://youtu.be/cfDow0_3jm0 for what it's worth, I do have an old VOD playing through Clusterfuck a bit, if that interests you, at least it'd give you an idea of what the gameplay loop is like. There's a more modern version out now called God Complex that has been ported to GZDoom rather than Zandronum, which is nice, plus it rebalances a bunch of content and adds a bit of a progression system to it all.

"overall these look like amazing additions to HDest that would each add a lot on their own"
Well thank you! I've been trying to build stuff that doesn't just exist as a "it's like this other gun but fires a different round type" sort of design. On top of that I like to make things mechanically intriguing/unique rather than simple or easy to use.