DooM Weapon Resource Wad

While I was working in the lab, late one night, my eyes beheld an eerie sight. That's a problem of working out of the ZDoom Wiki. Occasionally you find something awesome and have to waste an otherwise productive evening playing and blogging about it. :)

The Weapon Resource Wad represents the work of many modders in the community, with a healthy dose of editorial oversight to keep them from being completely overpowered. There's some darn clever code in there. There's a pistol which has a special ammo type all it's own, to represent it's clip. When you run out, it does a reload animation, grabbing a new clip's worth of ammo from your bullet inventory. There are mines. There are grenades that allow you to charge your throw so you can choose how far you lob them. There are throw then detonate pipe bombs (from Duke Nukem). There are freeze rays (from Hexen). There are molotov cocktails. There's an icon thrower weapon that spawns friendly monsters. Oh yeah, and half these weapons have secondary fire modes. It's pretty insane.

Here's one of my personal favorites, the Necronomicon. First you summon a ghost.


Then it raises a monster which now fights for you.


The first time I used it, I had a huge pile of corpses from testing out other weapons. So what do I do? I spawn a cyberdemon and selectively respawn barons (or try to; the ghosts randomly pick a nearby corpse) and watch the fun. Of course the fact that the icon gun can spawn friendly archviles is pretty mind blowing as well.

Ordinarily, I might not sidetrack onto something like this. I like the default DooM weapons and probably wouldn't add anything else to my co-op wads. But I've been following a Penny Arcade impromptu modding team who are working on a mod for the Source engine, tentatively titled Shotgun Sunrise. It's a co-op only mod, so that got my interest immediately. The first player spawns as a survivor of some sort of zombie outbreak, weakened and with few supplies. The survivor tries to stay alive. Subsequent players spawn as better armed rescuers, trying to save the survivor and collect whatever supplies they need to keep their convoy on the road and well stocked. The idea of a co-op rescuers map was one I had many moons ago, but they've added some mechanics and twists that make it interesting again. With the examples in the weapon resource mod, I think I might be able to give them some prototypes to playtest some of their concepts with.