Beautiful Doom

Beautiful Doom is a mod for Doom-based WADs created by Jekyll Grim Payne that provides new graphics and animations for all monsters and objects, while affecting gameplay as little as possible. It is designed to work with WADs and other mods that provide their own custom content. It is designed for the GZDoom source port.

Development
The first version of the mod was released some time in 2008 and is one of the oldest total enhancement mods for ZDoom. The concept of the mod was to take every single object (weapon, monster or decoration) in Doom and make them look better in some way. Among other things, it focused a lot on gore, introducing a basic particle-based gore system where enemies that could be gibbed would spawn limbs and heads with graphics matching the original enemy sprite. They were also shootable (which notably caused issues for users with the default autoaim settings). While lacking polish, it garnered some attention from the community.

Over the course of its developments and multiple updates, the vision of the mod changed several times. Certain objects changed their style, features came and went. Despite the goal to keep the vanilla gameplay unchanged, Beautiful Doom, in fact, featured a number of deviations, especially in earlier versions. For example, the Super Shotgun and the Chaingun] featued alternative attacks, and the [[Plasma Rifle used non-vanilla sprites for a while.

The mod eventually switched to having two weapon sets ("Vanilla" and "Enhanced"), and later three (with "Modern" being added circa 2019). The author took some breaks in the development. The mod resurfaced in 2015 with a 6.x generation of updates, featuring better gore sprites and various other improvements.

After another hiatus circa 2017, the mod resurfaced again in 2019, this time in the process of being heavily converted to ZScript. Jekyll Grim Payne used this opportunity to learn ZScript better, and, after a stream of dev releases, on May 18, 2012 Beautiful Doom 7.0.0 was released, featuring 3 weapon sets, once again updated graphics, improved gore physics, texture materials, improved muzzle flashes, optimized performance and other changes.

The 7.x.x generation kept receiving updates into 2021, mostly focused on increasing compatibility with other mods, which became one of Beautiful Doom's primary features.

Weapons
Beautiful Doom features 3 weapon sets — "Vanilla", "Enhanced" and "Modern" — that the players can change at any moment in the game using Beautiful Doom Settings menu.

Vanilla Weapons
The Vanilla set features weapons that behave identical to Doom weapons, except featuring smoother animations, various extra effects (muzzle smoke, bullet casings, bullet tracers) and higher-quality sounds.

Enhanced Weapons
The Enhanced set features the same weapons but with different sounds and alternate attack modes:
 * Fist: features a kick as a secondary attack
 * Chainsaw: no secondary attack, but the primary attack doesn't attack the player to monsters, allowing them to move more freely
 * Pistol: if a second one is picked up, the alternative attack is firing both pistols for increased firerate but reduced accuracy
 * Shotgun: the alternative attack is a melee strike which can be quickly cancelled into a shot afterwars
 * Super Shotgun: the alternative attack is a single-barrel shot, after which the weapon can be reloaded
 * Chaingun: the barrels can be spinned with the alt fire button, while the primary button can be pressed to start firing. The maximum firing speed is significantly increased in this mode, but the weapon can overheat.
 * Rocket Launcher: the secondary attack fires homing rockets with reduced fire rate
 * Plasma Rifle: the secondary attack fires a non-piercing long-range railgun
 * BFG9000: the secondary attack fires a wide, short-range piercing beam that deals a lot of damage but needs some time to wind up. It consumes cells quickly, and, if fired for too long, needs time to cool down.

Modern Weapons
The Modern set features significantly rebalanced weapons, sometimes with different graphics, tweaked damage, accuracy and other values. They're generally more realistic than the vanilla weapons, but still aim to fulfill the same gameplay roles. Their general features are:


 * Bullet-based weapons and the rocket launcher have magazines and need to be reloaded. By default they will reload in background if deselected long enough (this can be disabled).
 * Energy weapons feature overheat mechanics.
 * Bullets are not hitscans but rather projectiles that feature travel time and distance-based damage drop-off.
 * The base damage is fixed, only affected by the damage drop-off (for bullets).
 * Quick Kick is accessible at all times with a dedicated key, as long as the currently selected weapon isn't firing.

The weapons:


 * Fist: The primary attack allows to raise the combo counter with quick left punches, while the secondary performs different finishing moves (a right punch, a heavy punch, or an uppercut). The Quick Kick can be implemented into the combo as a secondary finisher. The longer a combo is, the higher is the chance that it'll put the enemy into their Pain state, so with some skill this can be used effectively even against strong enemies.
 * Chainsaw: Requires to be started, after which can deal a lot more damage than the vanilla Chainsaw. However, it needs to be cleaned by revving and spurting the blood out with the secondary attack, otherwise it can jam. A jammed chainsaw needs to be restarted.
 * Pistol: Semi-automatic with high fire rate (it can fire almost as fast as the player can press fire).
 * Shotgun: Features a higher base damage and fire rate than the vanilla Shotgun.
 * Super Shotgun: Portrayed as a one-handed sawn-off, features single-barrel and double-barrel blasts. This is the only bullet weapon that can actually pierce weapons, with the chance of piercing based on the monster's health (so it can easily pierce multiple weak enemies but only a couple strong ones). Much higher base damage than the vanilla Super Shotgun but harder and slower to use.
 * Assault Rifle: A replacement for the Chaingun, since the author couldn't find a satisfying way to design a minigun that would feel somewhat realistic while also featuring the sniping capabilities of the vanilla chaingun. It's a pretty standard "workhorse" weapon, with an ADS mode as a secondary attack. In ADS switches to a 3-round burst and gains improved spread.
 * Rocket Launcher: The rockets are significantly faster than vanilla. Features grenades as a secondary mode. 8-round drum magazine.
 * Plasma Rifle: Somewhat lower fire rate than the vanilla weapon, but with increased projectile speed. The secondary attack pushes steam out, performing a quick cool down; if not used, the gun is forced to cool down at some point, which takes more time.
 * BFG-9000: Holding the primary fire button allows to charge the weapon, spending between 10 to 80 cells on the shot. The attack itself produces a large energy orb that tracks enemies around itself with visible beams; those enemies receive damage once the orb collides with something and explodes; the orb also deals impact explosion damage. In short, in contrast to the original BFG 9000 that damages enemies within the player's field of view, this one damages enemies within the orb's FOV. In order to prevent the players from firing the orb into the distance to easily kill remote enemies, the orb actually slows down after flying some distance. The amount of cells spent on the attack determines:
 * the orb's visual size,
 * initial speed,
 * the number of targets it can track,
 * the maximum distance towards the targets it can track,
 * the impact and explosion damage.

While using Modern Guns, some of the monster behavior changes. Zombiemen, Shotgun Guys and Chaingun Guys can all fire multiple bullets per shot, and also need to reload (during reloading they will try to flee before starting to fire again). Their bullets also gain travel speed and damage drop off (the latter also applies to Spider Mastermind).

Other features
The mod aims to improve on all aspects of the game, so the following features can be found:


 * Smooth monster animations (provided by Gifty, the author of Smooth Doom)
 * Multiple new death animations for the monsters (including burning and smoking/blackened effects for being killd by fire and plasma attacks)
 * A custom gibbing system where monsters produce multiple unique parts (such as recognizable heads and limbs, a Cacodemon's eye, etc.). The gibs are coded to impact performance as little as possible, while still bouncing and interacting with the geometry of the map.
 * Monster projectiles feature extra effects, such as smoke, particles and improved animations. Their visuals can be changed in the options as well.
 * Flies will appear over monster corpses after a while.
 * Animated blood particles and pools with scripts that prevent the pools from hanging over ledges and being properly angled on slopes.
 * Decorations (such as floating skulls, torches, lamps) feature various enhanced effects, such as lens flares, smoother fire animations, etc. Some decorations react to being shot by explosive projectiles (e.g. lamps can be broken).
 * Gore decorations (such as impaled victims or hanging bodies) feature fully customized hand-painted sprites by Jekyll Grim Payne. Wall textures with gore are updated accordingly.
 * Locked doors play different sounds based on the key type they use (card or skull).

Configurable features
Beautiful Doom features multiple options the players can change:


 * Weapons: can be disabled fully, or can be switched between 3 possible sets.
 * Monster, item or decoration replacements can be enabled or disabled fully (requires starting a map anew to take effect).
 * Gloves color: can be switched between black and classic brown.
 * Muzzle flashes: can be switched between smoother, yellow flashes and more clasic-looking red ones.
 * Projectiles tyle: can be switched between 3 styles: no replacement (vanilla projectiles), classic (similar to vanilla but with improved animations/colors) and enhanced (updated sprites and extra visual effects).
 * The various special effects, such as smoke, debris, bullet casings, smoke, etc. can be toggled, and their maximum amounts can be adjusted to help with performance.

Mod Compatibility
Beautiful Doom is built to be as compatible as possible with custom maps and other mods thanks to the following features:


 * Weapons, monsters, items and decorations featured in the mod can be disabled, allowing for compatibility with other weapon mods, monster packs, etc.
 * Thanks to the use of ZScript, the mod prevents the player from getting wrong weapons if a cheat is used or an ACS script gives the player a weapon directly (i.e. they can't receive vanilla Doom weapons if Beautiful Weapons are enabled, and vice versa).
 * Thanks to more ZScript code by 3saster the mod will also be compatible with older maps that use DEHACKED patches or direct graphics replacements. For instance, it will not override enemies if played with a custom map that features its own custom enemies defined in DEHACKED, or simply an enemy or an object with replaced sprites. (Can be seen in Eviternity, for example, where the Cyber Baron and the Green Chaingun Guy will remain intact when played with the mod).