a video of pictures I made last year set to some suspicious music.
I hope you hate pine cones, since three or four of these pictures don’t have one.

It took a ridiculous amount of time to make this considering that it is 95% comprised of stuff I had already made. My trashter plan to display gzdoom-engine material from within the gzdoom engine rather than as gifs of the source material did not help like I thought it would. I opposed gifs since while I design the graphics grouped, I have to separate them to put them into the game, and I refine them after separation, so I didn’t want the less-refined versions. and some pieces, like the launched yeep parts mentioned (but not yet drawn and so not shown) previously, were separate to begin with. howEVER, since I draw the stuff at ten times the 1993 game’s resolution, and my computer is less than top-of-the line, those graphics need to be reloaded each time the game is started, and then I am having it load extra graphics and generate extra objects on top of that, IN ADDITION to me running video capture software, which means loading all that tomfoolery in an extra window while simultaneously saving a copy of it all, the game can’t help but choke up for a few moments when stuff is exploding. and SO I spent an extra day, two days? trying to reduce that, just a few seconds of the dumb video. And I already spent an extra day drawing all those dumb letters and setting up the circumstances under which they appear and explode. originally they were to use the same explosion frames as the launched yeep globs, hence my using the same colors, but those explosions looked too uniform, unless those were themselves launching more globs, but more globs meant more lag. and SO i drew EXTRA explosions for the letters I and O that would prevent them from needing to launch globs.

but that still means loading extra graphics so it doesn’t reduce THAT much lag. I also had the letters L and F turn into I and G into O as they explode, and that still wasn’t enough! For the yeep section near the end, I had all the pertinent graphics pre-load before I started recording, but that wasn’t an option with the letters because they FALL FROM THE CEILING as soon as the level starts. I COULD have preloaded all the graphics if I had thought to suspend the letters on disappearing floors or had them teleport into the room, but I was too busy to be thinking! I also forgot to set the level to change the colors to something other than orange, so that the aftermush looks less like a nickelodeon logo family reunion but if I had, I would probably still today be trying to optimize or fix it in some way and I am glad to not be doing that.

I can’t even show this picture without needing to explain it. the level editor shows a 2003 dope rather than a 2018 dope because it assumes the player character uses PLAY-named sprites, but the newer dopes have DOPE-named sprites, and I simply never took out the old sprites. the weird background is irrelevant; it is the first graphic in the definition file, since for some arcane reason that graphic shows up invisible in the game, but not in the editor. I needed it invisible so that the background shows through it. there are other hacky ways to make the ground and walls invisible but everything I do is already hacky so I preferred something that worked consistently.
these are off-center relative to the player character’s viewpoint because they seemed to my own viewpoint to be showing up offcenter when I placed them IN the center. However by the time I made the video that seemed to no longer be the case but I was too tired from the endless re-records hoping for less lag and more interesting random splat locations, then inserting that into the video, cropping out the wrong takes, then moving it to the front, then dumping it all that since I wanted to go back and change something else in the setup and then need to re-record again, that I left the positions alone.

“AASCREBO” will go to the top of most lists. It is not necessary for the list to be alphabetical, but I was trying to amuse myself. Regular Doom2 calls it

which I dislike seeing in the list, and regular regular Doom calls it

which I hate even more, and not just because the base-2 display system means you aren’t actually ALLOWED to make 24-length wall textures! Even if that worked it wouldn’t work! screbo is stupid garbage that nemitz says, and I had already changed the poison logo to feature nemitz, so it fits. I placed it over the pile of skulls that is shown by default after coloring them purple. I don’t want any of the base game’s graphics in this, even edited ones, and nemitz endorsements of rubbish are anachronistic within this project’s complex chronology of being set before nemitz, but as noted previously these don’t actually show up! but even THESE are a problem since floor graphics are backwards on the ceiling. If I want to control invisible objects that it is possible to move beneath, I risk seeing not only a backwards S but a backwards nemitz inside the level editor’s 3d view mode. What could be worse than that? I probably won’t find out until I try to make next year’s video.

and after all that, I today realized: the ORDER of the primary content is terrible. It starts on a snake comic strip that nobody cared about and then ends on generic wall textures that nobody SHOULD care about. I should have started and ended on stuff with meaning. I too more concerned with irrelevant nonsense to consider the marginally more relevant nonsense. There is probably an important life lesson there but I am too concerned with complaining to process it right now.