About Brutal Doom

Problems with Brutal Doom is multifaceted one:
	Code side:
	It uses the worst way to achieve one of its main goals - hitboxes. Instead of using a script that checks for shots height/offset compared to enemy position to determine where the hit landed, it spawns additional Hitbox actors several times a second. For every enemy on the map. This is ridiculously resource intensive since you are basically spawning double the ammount of monsters of the map, remove them, then spawn them again several times a second. This is the main part that contributes to BD having 1/4 of the framerate of the unmodified game. The difference between regular 800+fps and 200 fps may not be all that noticable on original maps, but loading any decently sized modern map with greater monster count than a few hundred can result in massive slowdowns on machines that otherwise should have no trouble running any other Doom mod.
	Furthermore, instead of running his global scripts as all regular people do, Mark attached some of said scripts to the player actor. This is a silly thing to do and no sane coder would do that since it's just begging to break. And it does. Just not on the vanilla maps. Any Boom-format map (i.e. 95% of all maps released since early 2000s) uses additional player actors (aka Voodoo-dolls) for some scripting and sequence purposes that are otherwise impossible in doom. Bigger maps have more of said voodoo-dolls, and each of them runs same scripts that originally intended to be run only once, which leads to all sorts of trouble with the mod itself, as well as disrupts the work of the voodoo-doll based sequencing tricks that breaks a lot of maps using them. Things that's supposed to happen, won't happen, switches might or might not work, or may work at the start of the leel instead of when you press them, etc. Example: some of Scythe 2 maps autofinish in 20-30 seconds after start because of altered voodoo-dolls.
	Nobody knows how, but BD somehow breaks part of the sound propagation, and makes certain sounds ignore reject table. What it means is some monsters become alerted and active way before they should. This leads to all sorts of stuff breaking on the level, random infights occurng before player even enters the area, enemies leaving their areas and entering another etc. Not much of a problem on small vanilla map with not a lot going on in terms of scripts and triggers. Big problem on large and script/trigger-wise complex maps.
	A bug that went unfixed for at least 3 years as of now: some stuff that should not be tangible (gibs and special effects) suddenly becomes tangible under certain conditions which leads to it blocking paths and sometimes making the level incompletable without cheats when they block out a crucial part of a level. Blowing up a chaingunner with rocket/grenade in a tight corridor with low ceiling has a good chance of triggering that. Also fire splashes and gibs for some reason.
	Overall, BD's code is a horrid tangled mess of code snippets from crapton of different sources. It's all weilded together with sudden jumps, gotos, references to objects defined in different files etc. which makes it incredibly difficult to read. Several people attempted to fix the aforementioned problems, and all concluded that it would be easier and faster to rewrite the mod from scratch than to wade through the code and find what exactly goes wrong. Mark takes money for his mod from his patreon, and even he can't fix his own shit, so nobody is willing to try and do that for free.

	Gameplay side:
	Weapons in Doom have their own niche (except for pistol). BD makes every gun a do-it-all cookie-cutter. Hitscan emeies that should be weak are suddenly made dangerous glass cannons, and enemies that shold be tough obstacles are made frail due to large hitboxes for critical damage hits you may incur without even trying. A good example of how this can be detrimental is a classic "chaingunner path" trope of the early 2000's maps that takes its origin from Plutonia wad - numerous chaingunners/shotgunners are placed in inaccessible spots along the path that lay down constant pressure on the player (without doing all that much damage) and a breadcrump-trail of health pickups  forces player to quickly move in a certain direction which results in a suspensful "pursuit" sequence coupled with a simple resource management puzzle. With BD it falls apart as player just dies to chaingunner fire. That is the simplest example, there are many more. Quite a few mappers are pretty meticulous in their encounter balance, and all that work that is basically 80% of the wads appeal is immediately thrown out of the window.
	And when this thing is praised as "the only true way to play doom", which basically invalidates a decade-worth of mapping efforts, mappers and coders that worked on Doom content for a long time are being told that all this time they were doing it worng by people who know next to nothing about intricacies of the original Doom. That definitely one of the most prominent reasons of animosity towards BD from the modders and mappers. Because instead of crafting a unique experience with tools that are well known to them, they are being pressured by BD fans into making content with none of the complexity or charm. Good example: all the tricks in Alien Vendetta - the beautiful experience just does not work in BD for gameplay reasons.
	Add to that that instead of polishing and fixing things he had released, Mark instead bloats his mod with more bells and whistels nobody asked for, breaking more and more things in the process.

	Developer side:
	After getting a lot of attention from the same people that give CoD, AssCreed and other annual shit high scores, and all the ego-stroking from the underage fans, Marks ego got blown out of proportion. This resulted in him thinking he's above the rules layed down for everyone, and resulted in him being a dick and antagonising most hubs of the community he visited.
	He began dismissing the valid criticism like the things I discribed above on the grounds of "your'e just jealous of my success", openly antagonising people and stealing their content. For example when confronted about not giving proper credits for the sprites he used, he inserted the credits, where he listed all the edited stuff as made by himself (there were several pages of stuff, all labelled as "Made by SgtMarkIV"). When being told that gluing together pieces of several different sprites (aslo known as "frankenspriting", which is a common thing in Doom modding) does not make him a rightful author and that he should credit he original authors of the sprites he used, he threw a fit and engaged in a flamewar that lasted dozens of pages and his temporary ban from several forums. Later he apologised and snuck proper credits into the game in place nobody would ever look for them (while putting his own name upfront). This lead to another flamewar etc. He was getting temporary bans regularily for flaming, breaking the forum rules etc. After another drama he managed to spread across several sites people decided that they had enough and got him permabanned. I think the only Doom community left where he is NOT banned as of now is Doomworld, and IDK what atrocity against humanity you have to perform to get banned there.
	He's still a major dick, which is evident from the latest fit he threw at ProjectBrutality Discord - that lead to PB beta builds becoming unavailable to public.
	He continues to take money for working on a single mod, while still having bits and pieces of code and art that are not his, and that were provided by artists to the community with explicit note to not be monetised. This fact grants him extra animosty from artists that provide assets to the community. Just to note that While Mark slowly plows away at a single mod for a decent payment for more than 6 years, several other modders like Terminus and Pillowblaster had made 3 or more feature-complete mods with completely custom graphics and new features while also contributing to numerous other projects.

	Fanbase side:
	Imagine an MLP-faggotry at its worst, with newcomers attempting to spread their newly acquired cancer to completely unwilling and uninterested people. Now add in same new-fans demanding from artists to draw their crappy fetishes and throwing fits when they are not catered to. This is essentially what happens in Doom community every once in a while after major BD releases. The wave of newcomers try to spread the word of "new amazing BD" as if nobody has ever heard of it, outright demand BD-compatibility from authors of other mods (in 99% cases is completely impossible since diffeent mods cant modify same actor - only the last modification of the actor counts, and BD modifies everything in one way or the other), throw fits at every opportunity, brigade down on anything negative said about BD,  and overal being toxic to everyone around them. All this ever does is multiply resentment towards Mark and his infamous mod.














V2

Code-wise:
The main feature - locational damage and enemy reactions are done not with a clever and efficient script (that exists, but requires knowledge of math to use), but with constant spamming of several extra hitbox actors 10-15 times per second, for every monster on the map. This tanks FPS down by the factor of 7, more on larger maps. On some maps with 1000+ monsters that work just fine without the mod with 100+ fps, it can make the game degrade to single digit FPS.
Such inelegant brute-forcing approach is prevalent throughout the whole mod, and is the reason for many other issues.

Nobody knows exactly how, but BD somehow breaks part of the sound propagation code, and makes certain sounds ignore reject table. What it means is some monsters become alerted and active way before they should. This leads to all sorts of stuff breaking on the level, random infights occurng before player even enters the area, enemies leaving their areas and entering another etc. Not much of a problem on small vanilla map with not a lot going on in terms of scripts and triggers. Big problem on large and script/trigger-wise complex maps. Even bigger problem on maps where monsters have opportunity to open doors that shouldve been locked.

Some scripts that shouldve been made global, are instead attached to player pawn, which then gets inherited by voodoo doll that gets used in all sorts of Boom-compatible shenanigans. Gives any map that uses voodoo-doll scripts (which are 90% of the large maps) a chance to break in unfun ways, like switch puzzles not working, scripts not activating in the right order and so on. For example on several Scythe 2 maps there is a ~5% chance that a map will autofinish itself in 30 seconds because voodoodoll collided with a trigger linedef while in undefined state and triggered level exit sequence.

Overall, BD's code is a horrid tangled mess of snippets from a lot of different sources. It's all weilded together with sudden jumps, gotos, references to objects defined in different files etc. which makes it incredibly difficult to read. Several people attempted to fix the aforementioned problems, and all concluded that it would be easier and faster to rewrite the mod from scratch than to wade through the code and find what exactly goes wrong. Mark takes money for his mod from his patreon, and even he can't fix his own shit, so nobody is willing to try and do that for free, especially when they can go do their own things instead.


Gameplay-wise:
Weapons in Doom have their own niche (except for pistol). BD makes every gun a do-it-all cookie-cutter. Hitscan emeies that should be weak are suddenly made dangerous glass cannons, and enemies that shold be tough obstacles are made frail due to large hitboxes for critical damage hits you may incur without even trying. Cyberdemmon example is egregious, as one can reliably defeat him with several SSG blasts due to his enormous headshot hitbox.
This wreaks havoc on the balance side of things, and some mappers are pretty meticulous about the balance (that gets thrown out of the window here). BD can make such maps either completely unwinnable, or piss easy depending on the initial monster composition.

Radius of some monsters are altered for no good reason, which causes issues. Most notably Barons/Knights and cyberdemons are now prone to get teleported out of bounds (happened on numerous occasions)l or get out of tight-fitted closets. One good example on one of the Plutonia 2 maps two Cybies spawn on top of their enclosures and initiate the fight immediately as player enters the area, instead of ambushing the player when he picks up the key, diffusing entire encounter, and allowing te player to safely dispose of them before he triggers enemy waves that should've served as meatshields.

Cyberdemon steps now cause damage not only to the player but to monsters too, which makes them flinch and bump into each other and instigate infighting. This may cause fights to defuse themselves beforehand and make player arrive at a barren battlefield with few straggler survivors instead of a climatic showdown.

And after all that there's people that claim BD to be the "one true way to play Doom", which is simply bogus.

"Mark being Mark"-wise
:
    After getting a lot of attention from the same people that give CoD, AssCreed and other annual shit high scores, and all the ego-stroking from the underage fans, Marks ego got blown out of proportion. This resulted in him thinking he's above the rules layed down for everyone, and resulted in him being a dick and antagonising most hubs of the community he visited.

  He began dismissing the valid criticism like the things I discribed above on the grounds of "your'e just jealous of my success", openly antagonising people and stealing their content. For example when confronted about not giving proper credits for the sprites he used, he inserted the credits, where he listed all the edited stuff as made by himself (there were several pages of stuff, all labelled as "Made by SgtMarkIV"). When being told that gluing together pieces of several different sprites (aslo known as "frankenspriting", which is a common thing in Doom modding) does not make him a rightful author and that he should credit he original authors of the sprites he used, he threw a fit and engaged in a flamewar that lasted dozens of pages and his temporary ban from several forums. Later he apologised and snuck proper credits into the game in place nobody would ever look for them (while putting his own name upfront). This lead to another flamewar etc. He was getting temporary bans regularily for flaming, breaking the forum rules etc. After another drama he managed to spread across several sites people decided that they had enough and got him permabanned. I think the only Doom community left where he is NOT banned as of now is Doomworld, and IDK what atrocity against humanity you have to perform to get banned there.

And after all that the credits in the latest BD lists people that explicitly forbid him from using their stuff as "contributors" which implies that they explicitly provided their stuff for him to use (which they obviously did not).

  He's still a major dick, which is evident from the fit he threw at ProjectBrutality Discord - that lead to PB beta builds becoming unavailable to public.

  He continues to take money for working on a single mod, while still having bits and pieces of code and art that are not his, and that were provided by artists to the community with explicit note to not be monetised. This fact grants him extra animosty from artists that provide assets to the community. Just to note that While Mark slowly plows away at a single mod for a decent payment for more than 8 years, several other modders like Terminus and Pillowblaster had made 3 or more feature-complete mods with completely custom graphics and new features while also contributing to numerous other projects.


    Fanbase-wise:
    Imagine an MLP-faggotry at its worst, with newcomers attempting to spread their newly acquired cancer to completely unwilling and uninterested people. Now add in same new-fans demanding from artists to draw their crappy fetishes and throwing fits when they are not catered to. This is essentially what happened in Doom community after major BD releases. The wave of newcomers tried to spread the word of "new amazing BD" as if nobody has ever heard of it, outright demand BD-compatibility from authors of other mods (in 99% cases is completely impossible due to how Doom mods work), throw fits at every opportunity, brigade down on anything negative said about BD,  and overal being toxic to everyone around them. All this ever does is multiply resentment towards Mark and his infamous mod.