Very cool mod. Found it difficult even on easy. A couple of things I'd like to mention, though undoubtedly you know about these already.

There doesn't seem to be much reason to diversify with your creature selection as tanks and turrets seem to be able the only things able to stand up to the horde.
The GUI needs a lot of work. I usually end up firing off a shot trying to get out of the tactical view.
Tactical view near useless.
The current maps are ugly as heck. It has, however, got me tempted to try and make a map myself.

Keep at it. There's a lot of cool stuff in here. Any chance of the source code being released?

Hemebond:

thanks for the comments! You are sure right that the balancing needs further optimization, but if you play the mod a bit more, you will find out, that the other fighters are important as well, as they are quicker to reach control points and thus important in the beginning to gain enough money to keep up and also later in the game to regain control points quickly.

I should try to stop the firing when exiting the gui. This is easyly done by deactivating the weapon while the gui is active.

I did not end up using the tactical view a lot, because you allies already try to do the best thing most of the time by themselves. I can sometimes beat the game in veteran mode without commanding my allies, but it might sometimes be useful to gain control points quickly - if you have the time to care about tactical (usually not). I should add th option to command your allie to attack the enemy base. Not sure if that would make the game too easy though, so I will need to test this carefully.

Yes, the maps are ugly - I am not a mapper. I hope that someone will make some nicer ones. There are some issues to keep in mind:
a) For proper AI movements, any models should be filled with world geometry as close to the model surface as possible, otherwise monsters will try to shoot through them.
b) vis_portals in func_doors blocked the AI movement towards beacons (not towards enemies though) making the AI very inefficient. Vis_portals next to door were fine though and still able to block off the hidden geometry.
c) I tried some alternative ways to spawn enemies on func_movers to avoid having them appear out of nowhere, but anything else than spawning enemies on worldspawn kept them from efficient pathfinding.
d) in the current version, the performance bottleneck is the number of certain monsters and fighters. Soldiers are the most performance hungry entities, followed by imps, which are a bit lighter. Maggots and Morgue zombies are pretty light and can be spawned in larger numbers. Keep this in mind if you edit the monster spawning probabilities.

Last but not least, there is very little SDK sourcecode related to this mod. The only SDK stuff is basically a revised version of the full guis toolkit I release a while back at doom3files.com I just added a few more commands to directly change hud.gui parameters from script and I removed the forced update for any gui changes and added a separate command to update the guis on demand. All the rest is scripted in the doom_utils.script file. I will probably release the updated full guis source if anybody is interested in it.

Cheers,

Leif

Combine this with "ground zero" and you could make a "real" Doom RTS!

If the GUI is being finicky with the player's weapon, movement, etc. feel free to shoot me a PM or email, and I'll give you any input relevent to what I understand/have already done.

Okey, here's my honest opinion.

Engine wise, the thing seems cool. It works and it's a good idea.

However, the experience itself can be quite frustrating. It's pretty hard for anyone to figure out what to do. The shopgui and the other gui (tab and t) aren't listed on the binding list, so if the user doesn't know about them in advance, it's hard to get started. Even then, they work in an odd way. It took me some time to understand that I could only build one thing at a time. I also didn't fully understand what the 'upgrade' arrows do exactly, or how they work.

I think the game *is* there, but right now it's usability hell. I think there's a lot that need to be rethink in order to make this attractive (or not frustrating) to a normal user. I'm not talking about fancy icons and graphics, but rather about paying a bit more attention to the user experience. The learning curve is not even a curve right now, it's a block, the interface is too cryptic.

Some guidance is needed in order for most of the stuff to work. This include being allowed to build several different "things" at a time, maybe by way of a queue. Several of the on-hud elements are also pretty mysterious, and remained like so even after I managed to properly win a game.

It also needs a bigger focus on either FPS or RTS. Having a mix is fine, but when you're wasting too much time fiddling with the menus, it's hard to bother about your player avatar. I think the player either needs to be immortal, or have a 'safe point' on the map where he can stay for a while and pull his strings without having someone constantly hit him and blur the menu.

I guess that after a while, after the user gets used to interface and understand everything, it's a better game. But the curve needed for that now is too steep. It's pretty frustrating to click on stuff hoping it'll do something and it does nothing, or having a bunch of different icons and text on screen without a clue on what they mean.

This version is much better than the previous one, even interface-wise. It's getting good. I just think it has a long way to go until 'new' users can pick up the game and have some fun while they learn the rules around it... because right now they'd spend too much time fighting with the interface.

Anyhow, keep it up, it's getting better each time.

Thank you very much for your helpful comments. By playing this game for a while now, I do not realize some of these aspects - but I suspected that the tech tree and tactical screen are not yet fully intuitive.

I think I could improve the interface a lot by adding mouse-over responses and more useful icons in the radar and tactical screen. That way it would be clearer which parts of the interface are interactive and their meaning would be more straightforward.

I am not sure though on some of the other aspects of gameplay. Allowing a build chain queue can lead to robotic monotonous player behavior and the small numbers of available (and performance-wise possible) units does not make it really necessary in my opinion. It also puts pressure on you to do the right thing at the right time. I personally also like it that there is no safe spot and that you have to balance the time you spend on strategy and action. I do not thank that there will be dozens of entities on screen with the doom3 engine, so I will need to get good fun gameplay from what is possible - so the strategy aspects need to be limited in some way.

I think that sometimes less is more, but I also agree with your criticism, that the interface should not be a part of the challenge - the challenge should come exclusively from the gameplay and I will try to make that as much fun as possible!