(WIP) MMDoom: Might & Magic monster replacer for ZDoom

[Mercs]

Greetings and salutations,

I'd like to present the ZDoom mod I am working on, replacing monsters on any Doom/Heretic/Hexen map with Might & Magic 6,7,8 ones. The goal of the mod is to complement 3rd party RPG/fantasy mods, adding immersive features like faction-based infighting and elemental resistances. Main feature of the mod is being able to pick one of three factions you want to fight against, either in menu, or randomly every time the map loads, complementing the wide choice of player classes already present in gameplay mods.

Here is a chart showing every monster in the mod:



Dark Faction is an alliance of Deyja, Eofol and Nighon as seen during Restoration of Erathia. Order Faction consists of knights of Erathia, elves of Avlee and wizards of Bracada. Finally, Chaos Faction is barbarians, pirates and outcasts hailing from Krewlod, Regna and Tatalia. Colors of squares mean individual towns in HoMM3 (including Conflux) and element colors mean Physical, Poison, Electric, Ice and Fire respectively.

I believe the sprites in Might & Magic VI-VIII games are of insane quality, and they seem to go incredibly well with what ZDoom engine is today, making this mod an eye candy by ZDoom standards. And you can further modify your experience using a plethora of UI mods, graphical options in ZDoom engine itself (postprocessing, etc) and sophisticated modern map packs squeezing every last drop of performance out of it.

The mod itself is not available now, it's too rough, not all of the sprites are even imported yet, projectiles need work, compatibility needs work, monster behavior needs A LOT of work. But I expect I'll be able to jury-rig it together in a few months time and release a full-feature playable version that I'd be able to polish further.

Here are some early gameplay videos captured on LostCivilization WAD with two very different gameplay mods: Walpurgis (brutal fantasy mod that is all about cool powers and weapon feel) and Wrath of Cronos (the mod about progression, builds, RPG systems).



And the latest (sorry about the length) video has Bloom on, making light sources and projectiles look oh-so-pretty:

[Abigail II]

Incredible mod, grew up with HoMM + MM and so happy their beautiful sprites can be kept alive in ZDoom!

I know it is still a WIP, but is it possible I can make a patch for the monsters to work with https://www.moddb.com/mods/shadowcaster ... or-heretic ?

I think it would be a great combination, as that mod already has a roster of fantasy creatures from other games.

Thanks, keep it up!

[Mercs]

I do not mind, after release. Finished with last monster sprites and their basic decorate last week, currently doing design tables to make sure I get it somewhat balanced and varied, give monster different projectiles and etc.

Hopefully, won't have to wait too long, but it became evident to me elemental system I introduced doesn't really work well unless player get enough feedback, so extra time may be required for me to understand how DamNums mod works and introduce it's modified version into my mod... Version of DamNums that is in WoC will have to be disabled in menu, it doesn't work anyway, somehow coded in a way it takes the size of sprites before scales are applied to them, and sprites in MM are several times bigger than in Doom, so all numbers spawn very high up in the air lol, or even out of bounds.

That said, I did the whole elemental system via inheritance, and I see there is a lot of inheritance going in that mod as is, so, if you just add new monsters into randomspawners in that mod, you'll end up with a situation where only MM monsters react differently to elements, while all DND/etc monsters are all considered "Neutral" element unless you manually copy contents of each "element" actor into each DND/etc monster you want in that randomizer mod. It's just a long list of DamageFactor lines, nothing fancy. And it will still work even if you don't bother with elements at all.

I haven't really though about supporting other monster mods tbh, only about supporting gameplay ones like WoC. That said, I recently got some cool advice on how to do elemental system via zscript instead, it will remove inheritance and will allow you to add elements to monsters in that mod with less effort. But I will only bother with redoing it after release, maybe. Don't see much reason to tbh.