^{I suspect i used that “title” line already but if I did it was before 2006 and who cares if I don’t?}

flopping lerd. compare to

the old version from 2003 that I only drew quickly from the front and never gave further thought to.

for as big a time destroyer as this was, i rather like some of the results, including the facing away angle (the lower right sequence here), which i almost never like. Its arms seem to diminish at the end since wide “corpses” never work very well, especially ones that spin as you move around them.
hopefully the hardest step of this deceptively difficult to draw monster is concluded with these. obviously I will still touch it up at length after separating it into separate pieces for each angle and will probably have to separate the bodies from the tails again, and an additional frame between the first and second ones may need to be created, but unless I have forgotten something, which I quite well have, this is the hardest part of the most complicated legacy monster redraw sequence concluded. I still have yet to redraw any of the “spof” monster because I never definitively concluded what it should look like rather than nemitz, but its own defeat merely involves it falling over sideways. its gruesome “explode” destruction is more complicated but i spared myself from multi-angling any monster explode or melt animations so far, so my obsessive compulsion will likely not force me to think I have to start then, if I even think that monster is necessary.
it occurred to me that dopes, meant to be the primary figures, do not have any non-melt, non-explode decimations, nor do fopes or yiths, and I do not at present think they need any. Why did I think this thing did?
also I seem not to have designated a website entry about the fope melting or apparently anything do to with fope but it does melt.

indeed

hey look lerd pain frames. it does not feel like much of an update to me but i am not the one experiencing pain from five angles forever. i might plausibly add the other three angles but for once i will see if it is necessary first. Maybe this creature HAS suffered enough. Though I will definitely have to add its gold tail bracelets at some point. Maybe it is freaking out now because its bracelets have gone missing.
no that cannot be it; after I added the bracelets the creature looks equally as distressed as before. most troubling.

now the previous animation also has bracelets! This subject likewise seems not to have noticed.
AND I accidentally deleted one of the frames and didn’t save a copy and didn’t notice until now. It also isn’t the first time I accidentally deleted a frame off of this animation but last time I had a backup. This time curiously I have to use the accidental 3 frame version from last time as a backup since mercifully I accidentally deleted a different frame this time. unfortunately I spent more time fixing other stuff that was wrong with this than drawing the bracelets so I have to do most of that again as well but I have had worse. frippit

to be used prior to or amidst the energy launching frames shown here. alas this might also require some bits to be separate objects since blatantly the sparky bits that trail off do so for more than four frames. but mercifully that isn’t a decision that is harder to implement if I wait to see how necessary it is.

also some relatively non-silly trees from a location that this monster probably is not to be found in. Although probably more because there are dopes about than because there isn’t water.

lerd again, this time to amend its aggressive motions.
oh boats; my most recent edits to angle 2 fixed some unusual erratic movements but I realized afterward that i was meant to leave those movements in place and just draw them better, to imitate the lunge of angle 3. whoopth. i may have to put them in as they are and see which looks less awkward to decide which to change to match the other. or just leave them alone since nobody who isn’t me could possibly care.
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i like blue electricity better but i do not want to use the same palette section as the tail segment, EVEN though I will probably need that split off into separate object(s) like with the move around frames. I would prefer to set all color changes on the main object (the lerd’s body) since additional objects created by it (such as its projectiles and its trail of body parts) can inherit its color swap settings, and thus i will only need to designate one color change for each base lerd type. I need at least two lerd types; one that crawls on land and one that hides underwater and jumps out like a seaworld captive to throw abuse and then promptly resubmerges. And later a third that, more like a Hexen stoker,

never leaves liquid and uses a more powerful attack that also doesn’t, since I presently don’t know a way to have a creature check what sort of floor it is on before attacking, but i CAN set a creature to not leave the floor it is on. It is probably possible to issue a floor-check command but it isn’t necessarily necessary that I know how to do that at this juncture since I don’t even have the main two that I DO know how to make implemented yet. And then like with the jumping fyip I will probably come up with a buggy half functional way of doing it, then ask for help on the zdoom forum and get an embarrassingly more efficient way that actually works explained to me by someone else, assuming north america hasn’t melted into the sea by the time I get around to that.

historically it has been able to launch two wimpy projectiles from its hands on that “ball” frame. It would also, and still does, throw a single larger shot when it crosses the arms. throwing magic out of your hands or mouth is not original, but from head protrusions is less common. i decided thus that i should have the twin shots launch directly from the electric appendages (using additional frames that are yet less complete than these) rather than the hands. Arms needing to cross in order to launch a blast is also unusual so I kept that. it is still dumb old doom engine which is inherently limited to stuff that has since been done in thousands of other games but i aim to do my best with the fate i have set for me. even if it kills me, though i won’t know if it has done that until probably right before it does.

also i call the hexen stalkers “stoker” after how kan naito pronounces “land stalker,” because I think dumb things are funny. and more recently after how the 1999 playstation port of final fantasy 5 supposedly refers to the wendigo monster, because this wiki proclaiming that fails to explain that stoker means stalker, not wendigo, since the later localizers opted to change the name entirely rather than correct the silly romanization of the original name that was simply a Japanification of an english word.

but admittedly it is easy, 25 years later, to look back and say OBVIOUSLY this naked blue horned steroid man with a club is too busy jumping stupidly and tickling his arms to waste time wendigoing about stoking, and I envy the optimistic ignorance of those days somewhat.

finally back to lerd,

another of the very old 2003 monsters, redrawn at ten times the size with slightly more competent animation.

marginal progress, major reminder of how stupid my life is, which I do not need, because I do not forget.

the movements of the tail appendage do not match on each angle, but they do not have to, merely not look terrible, and only the back facing one does, along with the arms, that look more like a low-impact exercise than a motion to pull the body along a floor but it looks better than the old version, to me, and inside that game the old one looked fine so I will be impressed to see how this ends up being worse.
the mid-section is a different color now but I can palette-swap it to green in-game. And I can also NOT palette swap it to green, in case you were wondering why I’d bother to discolor it at all. the colors only need to be distinct, not specific.

keeping the color zones distinct and mapped to indices on the game’s 256 color “palette” means they can be changed separately from each other, to colors which are not necessarily on the palette but for the purpose of preparing this example quickly they are.

There was never a reason for lerd having four breast orbs before, as it only had two arms. maybe it looks unique but I don’t want people to think I have a fetish for bare cartoon breasts considering how much other fetishy junk I have attached to my name in the intervening years. ALTHOUGH if, as today’s commenter suggests, having just two makes the problem worse, I can change them back or try something else entirely.

i will start the next non-snake comic strip page next. probably. you might think i have spent some of the long period since posting the most recent page figuring out what is going to appear on the next page but you ought to know me better than that!

these are for animated door objects.

the effect is decent enough that I want to stand in front of them opening them repeatedly fortunately despite them appearing on flat lines and having no depth, unlike regular doom or hexen doors that have visible moving edges.
the fourth one is relatively serious because I have a lot of vestigial level content to work with from when I had more straightforward yet still unreachable “doom mod”-type goals which I do not want to totally jettison, and it requires at least one functioning vague technical junk themed door.

for now all four close by simply playing the opening frames in reverse but I have the power to have them close differently, as might be called for with a zipper since generally those are pulled both open and closed. Though there is no hand pulling the zipper and I do NOT at present have the power to make there be one without having the existence of that hand becoming my singular focus.

As I mentioned, unlike regular up-rising doom doors, these do not, cannot have depth within the game geometry, so the effect here can break down if the moving elements are too block like. Also unlike normal doom doors, since these aren’t part of the original game programming, they have no means of checking for if objects might obstruct them from closing, so they simply close regardless of circumstances, and so I need to make the door-close script ALSO force objects away from them, which includes the player, so it is not POSSIBLE to stand close to one and analyze how flat it looks unless you are specifically setting out to do that, and I would not aim to deprive you of your right to do that, but casually you will not be forced to notice. i CAN have the invisible force-emitting object cause damage or have those who are shoved out of the way damage each other but I choose not to at this time. They PROBABLY deserve it but I won’t assume that they always will.
On that note, the game rise of the triad has a more developed type of animated door which will shred dead bodies which happen to collapse partway between them. But for every neat feature rise of the triad has there are three practical features that it lacks so I am not concerned about that.

i have a list of traits that mark something as “a doom mod” and not a separate production which uses the doom engine.
*doors that open by rising upward
*firearms
*monsters that stand in place and throw single fireballs
*low numbers of animation frames

of course blocky architecture, vertical doors, dumb monsters that take a lot of damage but are easy to outmaneuver and fun stuff to blast them with are qualities that I LIKE and find comforting about doom, so I remain at odds with myself about how much I want to avoid. Even the low animation frames I have found are fun to repurpose for different actions via decades on manipulation, like having the baronknights “laugh” by rapidly cycling between their pain frame and fourth walk frame after throwing off complex strings of fireballs

It looks incredibly stupid. It makes ME laugh that they laugh at me so stupidly.
as can be observed in pof.wad that I put together at some points to use with other people’s levels. Mostly for 1994 era levels from old shovelware CDs that I never finished but thought I might because I like the unrestrained, reality-disconnected attitudes people sometimes made levels with back then.

like what the heck is this? (93talio.wad by Tom Talionis) This is awful. I love it. But the limited bestiary/behaviors can become monotonous. Maybe if I just reveled in that aspect of the game and moved on with my life otherwise I would be further along in it.

but golly beets the exit is RIGHT there! There can’t be much further to go.

here is an annoying hanging imp
it drops down and hits

this pig so it turns and stops yelling “herrow” at and pushing back the player, since unlike this video from February that area actually has other constructions in it now that prevent the pig from merely being ignored.

the imp is summoned by this problematic lever.
if the lever is used enough times the imp will get yelled at by the pig and then appear again beside the lever to hit that instead, which then afterward renders itself unusable.
the lever is behind the hammock imp,

who must be attacked with a strawberry.

the strawberry comes out of a vending machine which for the time being can be directly activated by the player. It only has one frame but I use internal manipulation to make it jump up slightly when attacked and then shake after landing since for now i am not forcing my self to animate it. I didn’t even finish drawing it, really; the large strawberry on the upper right is pasted over directly from the hand animation above it here.
But still that is five separate animated objects all for this single dumb little task. The lever at least can be reused to activate other situations and the pigs can decorations elsewhere, but I really do not manage time well. There may be more evidence of that fact in the immediate digital vicinity.

the hammock imp can officially be offended by a strawberry in real time. implementing this as usual took more effort than it should have, but also as usual it involved doing something for the first time that I expect will be easier on subsequent uses of the same technique, which as usual probably will not be.

the gif version has a shadow. the one in the screenshot doesn’t because I only just added it and it still looks awkward. But it looks worse without one. Wolfenstein 3d (and blake stone) sprites had shadows drawn on the ground but conventional doom engine never did, since they can leave the ground and in the 1993 code there was no way for an object to check if it was on the ground. And also perhaps the only way to ensure the shadow was never lighter than the ground was to have it always be full black, which looks cartoony. Never mind the bright red blood or weird saturated blues in the palette. But cartoony works for what I am doing, at least to a degree.

there is a way to automatically generate duke-nukem 3d style shadows behind objects but that looks bad with anything meant to appear attached to the ceiling or that might possibly appear near an edge, as the shadow will always display in full even if it runs out of level ground

the snapping motion is for if the player attempts to attack it with something other than a strawberry, which for the moment flings the player backward into the air (surreptitiously using four wah blasts fired at once) without inflicting damage. HOWEVER, this view change makes clear that despite the shadow issue the object still isn’t REALLY attached to the ceiling! If I make the ceiling lower, the top of the sprite gets visually cut off from the ground view which prevents you from seeing the creature escape through the ceiling when it does and also that I applied a minor palette conversion to make sure the trap door is the same color as the ceiling!

see?! you almost can’t! see it! which means it might as well not be there at all! aye yike so much to do

also this is my first time running the game since upgrading my RAM from 16 to 32 gigglebytes back in may. Now the game only slows down approximately exactly as much as before

I decided that early in the dope “game,” in order to progress it would be necessary to annoy this thing, whatever it is, by throwing, probably, a strawberry at it, after it asks you to bring it some blueberries.
I have yet to draw in the orange ribbon-things. yet I made a retaliatory gesture for if the player tries to attack it with something other than a strawberry, even though i could have just have the thing “WAH” at and force backward the player since, as evidenced by the linked sequence, it does have that “power.” But I also like the idea of it remaining calm UNTIL the strawberry.

AND all this will probably only be seen once!

I like in hexen how some “switches” are activated with situationally relevant items rather than just pressing the activate button in front of them, but I dislike the heretic/hexen inventory system, as it uses buttons I do not normally press, and they can be used regardless of what the hands are doing and can be used rapidly and stupidly in the heat of combat, provided you have remapped the buttons to something more practical. I want to try out the idea of using items the same way as weapons. it is tricky because generally only buttons 0 through 9 can be used for selecting those, but since the player is controlling a dope i probably wouldn’t give it too many items at once, and i would remove weaker versions of weapons that get replaced so the same number could be used to select them. like chaingun takes over the pistol slot, that sort of thing.
OF COURSE i have seen modifications where the pistol still has value since it is more precise, or like in dark forces where the chaingun-like gun uses more bullets than the regular gun. right but a lot of this is still speculative. Yes even after 6ish years of development, after more years of more passive development before that, I still do not know precisely what I am trying to do.
nuke dukem 3d has the equipped weapon go away and a hand show up and use keycards, when necessary, without needing to designate a keycard as a weapon, but I don’t know how to do that in the doom engine or if there even is a way without another pile of code I don’t understand and I hate asking for that.
my idea might still be annoying, unless the solutions are fairly intuitive, especially with thrown items that would need to be picked up again or replaced. this one isn’t intuitive, but since, at the moment, the strawberry is the first item you can get and there are only two points of interest that you might think to throw it at i IMAGINE it is functional, which is an improvement upon imagining that I might think of things to try later.

But I also need to make more comic pages. It is funny to have a project where even less takes longer to happen than in that.

I never finished playing lagoon either. I much prefer the present tasks I am never finishing.

a creature previously identified as zipe or eemp that i want to be able to jump, like the fyip now can, but also jump kick despite those requiring different animations because i am never efficient where it counts.

i like the idea of fyips flopping over if they try and jump down from too high a point. obviously i haven’t made any frames for that yet! but zipes being glop-formed (similar to dopes) simply splotch on the ground slightly. i have not planned nearly well enough to have their glop characteristics matter more deeply than that.
also now seeing these against this dark background I realize how inconsistently colored they are, a likely consequence of the regular jump frames being totally new while the kicking frames I initially drew in 2019 before I introduced shadow colors and simply altered this week. Of course the jump pose uses a walk frame as a base, BUT both the walk and kick attack were based on 2003/4 era sprites, with the kicking motion made after I amended the game palette to have two extra dark browns, which I guess carried over into the remade sprites to some degree even though those were all made with the same number of browns available, so in fact they didn’t match before either, but it wasn’t as glaring as this since the shadows weren’t colored then. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t. I will need to see which looks less out of place once I implement the new set of motions. The creature being colored isn’t nearly as tough as it thinks it is whatever the case.

today is this website’s twenty first or twenty second anniversary. I do not talk about my birth-day but i mention its. However I named myself “bimshwel” after it and retroactively renamed it to just be this/the/that website so I owe it at least this courtesy. It will continue to be malnourished on update quality.

The news just gets worse. The highest court in the country is taking bribes from a collector of Hitler Memorabilia, the threat of war with china and russia or possibly ourselves rises again, despite unprecedented climate disasters still nobody with power cares about stopping them. And direst of all?

dopes with glasses! That’s it, life has no meaning. We can never recover from this. I might as well

dopes with glasses and hats!
Truly awful. I can tell these things “think” they are scholars among dopes, and they are probably the dumbest dopes of all time! Not like me. I do useful things with MY life.

for the first time in united states of america history a president, former or otherwise, has been criminally indicted. but I want to talk about something more important.

not the most imaginative vegetation but the movement makes a difference compared to the old versions.

I also tried to make their scales relative to each other more consistent, but I did not succeed! These are full size and the gifs are between 20% and 25% of full size.
I should see about adding stripes to something since the spots may get tiresome. I have the power to make the spots glow in darkness by making an overlay for each frame with only brightness values, which I already did for the eyes on one of the imps, though I am wary of doing too much of that after all the slowdown I have already had from sprite over-laying.
the colors seem at first a tad flat relative to the old versions that I made with whatever colors I felt like, but the solution to that is more directly within my grasp without additional images needing to be loaded than brightness is.

I still CAN use whatever colors I want, but I desire to keep animated objects within the 256 color game palette so that the file sizes would be lower than true color images, since these are quite larger than before, over 1000×1000 pixels per frame, on average, and there are quite a number of frames! But I am able to alter how the palette is accessed. The game itself runs in true color mode; the palette is a vestige of the regular 1993 doom engine that gzdoom (what I am using) is built upon, but can still have graphics mapped to it, which allows them to be REMAPPED to colors which are NOT in the palette. Ha ha! I have probably mentioned this before but suspect that I explained it poorlier than this.

Unfortunately this program, called Slade, has a strange malfunction in its palette recoloring manager –apart from its frustratingly small window sections that ordinarily can’t be resized and the few that can will rapidly revert to their default size– that will copy the first gradient color on to the second one if a graphic that the palette change is applied to already exists within a set of definitions that I view within this editor. And it may not be apparent here but I have swapped seven sets of colors so far, two gradients for every set of 16 colors, because a single gradient across that many looks worse than the regular palette. And so I must immediately remove the data for that palette change from the file and put it into a different one that will never be opened in this editor ever again. and if I didn’t get the colors correct –which I can’t really be sure of until I see it within the game– I have to manually text-edit the color numbers to tweak them. HOWEVER up until maybe two weeks ago I also created them by text-entering the numbers so this tedious inconvenience is still an improvement. Even with the bug it lets me establish which palette indexes are being replaced rather fast.

so I only need to figure out HALF of this!

these things can now jump in places where normal monsters would stop and turn around. once in a while they even get somewhere.

for whatever reason in the south-west-facing angle I had the left arm lower, but every other angle had it up, but it was west and north-west that looked out of place, so I “corrected” them to match southwest even though that one is wrong. the jump looks too ostentatious with the arm in the air. it looked like the creature should be making that pihGAA grunt that Kyle Katarn in Dark Forces does when he jumps. It was making me laugh.
but maybe that is good and i should switch them back.

they also have marginally improved pain frames, since part of alleviating the repeatedly cited “lag” associated with this creature is exporting its sprites as single pieces rather than layered fragments that can be reused for different versions of itself (but that ultimately create a load problem since the game struggles more with volume than mass, essentially), so rather than have them wiggle around independently I have no choice but to animate them properly. however their “death” frames and all frames for the shorter pointy-noised “fyop” are still layered like before so those are not in here, though they tried to be. And then I spent too much of yesterday trying to make a better looking test area to show the sprites in, and I ended up filling it with so much useless doohickery that the video capture still gave me problems. Also the test area is still ugly.
in any event now I can do more important things

or I can start redrawing and adding needless animation to old pieces of scenery that nobody will notice because they hang from ceilings and aren’t interactive or important. ah, a life well-spent.

The clouds are on heroin now. It certainly explains all the erratic and extreme weather. lately. I am surprised I haven’t heard anybody talking about this.

what i HAVE observed people talking about (or one person quote-tweeting a quote-tweet about):

I see why the Central Intelligence Agency cancelled this: “listen kids you THINK bin Laden is a bold patriot leading the fight for justice from his cave, but he’s actually on the front lines flying across the desert, controlling matter with his mind and fighting off multiple white infidels at once with a double laser sword”

Although the text in the apparent source, this 2014 article, indicates the toys were meant to be part of good will packages. Based on the minimal context year-old twitter post I thought the figures would have been given out separate from anything else, in order to make their intent less clear. It does not to me seem sensible for US allies, cronies or conscripts to be appearing sympathetic to bin Laden up front because that potentially undermines their message; the toy might never actually be played with or it could be lost or the larger package it was contained within could be stolen before it reveals its true nature, quite apart from if the MEANING of the transformation comes across in the intended fashion. Just giving out the toys at all risks sending the message: Osama bin-Laden is a well meaning merry fellow! Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. Don’t believe what we told you about him up to this point!

And then assuming the toy does go to a child who does witness the paint fall off, that kid then needs to deduce “OH i get it now, the people who gave us this DON’T actually like Osama bin-Laden. Well consider me convinced! I don’t like him either now. I will be sure to pass this along when a local warlord kidnaps my mother and tapes a bomb to my father’s chest.”
I suppose this story is funnier the less context you have.

I also saw another old twittor post last week that explained how to view articles on sites like washington post’s without creating an account, which would actually be practical information to have and I didn’t bother to take note of where that was nor of the specific instructions. Listen I can’t keep up with everything. I need to focus on what’s important like one year old posts on a broken social media platform about nine year old news stories about twenty-year old weird stuff that the CIA ultimately decided against doing.

and also teaching vaguely dog-rodent people how to jump

one of these is from 2004, the other is from a bit more recently. The usual story applies to it: I expected a certain difficulty level and it became exaggerated beyond what I could handle, foremost on the least important sections. the front view (1), the most important and most likely to be seen view, was easy. side-front (8, gets mirrored to be angle 2) was a bit harder, then side (7 (no not THAT side 7 (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is)))was horrible, and side-back (6) was a disaster. in part because I kept trying to match it to 7, even though 7 was horrible. i ought to have drawn over angle 8, but i didn’t because i was using the OLD old old 2004 version as a base, even though the old version’s angles matched even worse. i was even conscious of how poorly they matched at the time. although looking at that again did at last convince me to add stripes. Thankfully stripes have not been a disaster yet, though i have not tried to draw them on the copious amount of earlier redrawn sprites of this… thing. My best decision over the 2004 version is blocking the back muscles with that pathetic half-cape. I didn’t know how to draw back muscles then, and I STILL don’t. This new edition of the monster is old enough that I no longer recall if that was why I added a cape, but there do not appear to be other conceivable justifications.
angle 8 actually doesn’t have the far hand out far enough; trying to match angle 6 to it also held me up somewhat. Since it doesn’t look BAD on angle 8 like it does on 6 i don’t NEED to change it.

no I sure don’t.

please do not make me change it, me.

the fool (that I drew, not me) yet has no proper pain frames; in the past this motion was used both for a close-up attack and a non-violent reaction to experiencing violence. For the moment that shall continue as I am rather worn out from the length of time necessary to draw it. Going forward, assuming I am not cursed by a being beyond my comprehension to remake my own old unreleased material for the remainder of my lifespan, I want to include more expressive characters, but that will require fewer moving parts. even minimally detailed ones like this become a problem when there are so many pieces. If this gets any more frames I hope they will have the courtesy to be non-rotatable!

although mercifully and surprisingly these are still in stock so perhaps I should order one. Gosh I’ll SAVE so much MONEY!