Rework Spicy Air
This has been up in the air for months now, but I couldn't figure out a half-decent implementation. I still haven't, not entirely at least, but I do have something that might just work.
All of the previous ideas I went through had serious flaws and did not make the mod any more interesting than it is right now.
- Anything involving enemies, like presence, density, etc.: this doesn't work by design in this game. By the time you kill everything and fix the air, there's nothing left to explore or take your mask off for.
- Environmental events a la DS: originally I was planning on making spicy air an event. Again, flawed by design because events are usually not meant to last too long, unlike the entire design of the mask. Also having mancubraps meant no other events could occur. Gay.
- Shrooms. I was sitting in a chair watching my grandma's flower garden a couple of months back when I was struck by the idea to implement spores, if only to get away from the idea that cow farts were damaging the megawad's ozone layer. The reason why this one wouldn't work is because making the mushrooms a physical thing was too much of a crapshoot with how Doom geometry is. We already had that problem with contracts. Can't rely on "certain" sectors (e.g. green nukage) because there's no guarantee a mapset would even use them, and that's not getting into details like texture packs.
- Daynight cycle. Following the release of that mod, anons came up with the idea of basing things off of the current time of day. Unfortunately, it'd create a hard dependency with that mod. I don't know how to feel about it.
Ok so what's the solution? The solution is all of the above. Sort of. Not entirely. The current glaring problem with spicy air is how binary it is. Either you have the mask on or you don't. Lame. Spores is a good way to break that up by having waves of varying intensity to catch the player by surprise. Another is to get rid of the mask air mechanic. Air pockets? Come the fuck on. No more of that. Masks have infinite air, but degradation is still a thing. Below a given percentage, spores begin to go through. Their effect won't be some lame "take X damage every Y seconds which btw you can completely fucking neutralize with a stimpack in your buttcheeks." Rather, the effect would be heavy debilitation that on its own wouldn't kill you, but it'd certainly make you susceptible to death. Because masks are a speshul item and cost lots of money, levels would spawn up to 3 filter purification stations, like the health/armor stations in Half-Life, plastered on random walls. Unlike contracts, finding those is completely optional and not critical to your survival, so shitty doom geometry moment spawns are far less of a problem here.
Don't worry, it will totally work this time.
I might get additional ideas later on. We'll see. Nothing posted here is final, obviously.