Skulltag

Skulltag is a source port by Brad "Carnevil" Carney, based on ZDoom with network code derived from Quake 2. Its gameplay has been described essentially as a hybrid of Quake 3: Arena and Doom.

Multiplayer game modes
Influenced by Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, Skulltag's multiplayer mode includes game modes including Deathmatch, Cooperative, Invasion, Terminator and Last Man Standing. There are also several Teamplay modes, such as Capture the Flag, One Flag Capture the Flag, Team Deathmatch, Team Last Man Standing, and so on. In addition, a game can be played in Instagib or Buckshot mode.

In the nameship game mode, Skulltag, players capture the enemy's "skull" and take it to a skull pillar where they get points, similar to Capture the Flag. Before 0.97b, the player did not need both skulls to score; afterwards, the enemy player's skull needed to be in their home base before a player could score at a skull pillar.

Bots
Redone in version 0.97c, Skulltag includes deathmatch bot players that can be used in online servers or offline skirmishes. They do not perform well in game modes other than deathmatch and its variants, however. They are unable to attack monsters or to grab tokens like the skull or flag. Bots have personalities and chat phrases based on their status (winning, hurt, killed, and so forth). And some of the bots names are based off of greek gods, such as the bot Orion, and off of well-known modders around the entire Doom community, and reference's to the game's developers or otherwise.

Features

 * Supports all ZDoom features (deep water, skyboxes, transparent walls, etc.).
 * Client/server multiplayer architecture.
 * Customizable, dynamic bots.
 * Support for loading DeHackEd patches directly.
 * Extra weapons, items, and monsters.
 * Medals to award achievements during multiplayer mode.
 * New multiplayer modes, including Capture the Flag, Last Man Standing, One flag CTF, Skulltag, Team Deathmatch, Terminator and Instagib.
 * DECORATE support for custom monsters (and weapons, as of 0.97b).
 * Support for Heretic, HeXen and Strife (with some bugs, which should disappear in the upcoming 0.97d).

New weapons

 * Minigun: Even faster than the chaingun, but has a cooldown pause when the trigger is released, and no first-shot accuracy.
 * Grenade launcher: Fires bouncy, explosive grenades that not only damage enemies on explosion but on impact as well.
 * Railgun: Fires hitscan slugs that can pierce multiple enemies.
 * BFG 10000: Unleashes rapid-fire, hitscan bolts with splash damage which can affect a large area. Has to charge up before firing, however. Takes the appearance of the Bio-Force Gun from the Doom movie since 0.97b.

The full set of Doom weapons are also available. All weapons may be placed in maps, summoned via the console, or given to players at the start of a Last Man Standing round. The weapons bunk with their respective Doom equivalents (i.e. the Railgun is in the same slot as the Plasma gun, and the Grenade Launcher is with the Rocket launcher). As a side note, this also shows that those weapons share the same form of ammunition used by their counterparts.

Spheres
All Spheres will only be available for a limited amount of time for the carrier.


 * Turbosphere
 * Speeds up any player that picks it up. During the time the sphere is active, the player leaves behind after images in a similar manner to Hexen's Boots of Speed.


 * Time freeze sphere
 * Freezes everything in the map but the player who picked it up and his/her allies for a short period of time. This means everything: projectile weapons remain frozen in midair, for instance. Time unfreezes jerkily at first. The effect is easily mistaken for connection problems by the uninitiated.


 * Invisibility sphere
 * Makes the player translucent to the point where they are almost impossible to see, essentially being an enhanced version of the partial invisibility power-up. The sprites for the sphere come from the Doom pre-release beta, which essentially is the sprites for the partial invisibility sphere with the reds and blues swapped over.


 * Doomsphere
 * Multiplies the damage done by the player who picked it up by four for the spheres duration, similar to the quad damage powerup in the Quake series. While active, the player turns red as an indicator to others as well as having a saturated red screen.


 * Guardsphere
 * Reduces the damage done to the player by 75%. While active, the player turns green as an indicator to others as well as having a saturated green screen.


 * Random powerup
 * Rotates through the following: Invulnerability; Soulsphere; Megasphere; Turbosphere; Invisibility; Doomsphere; Guardsphere; Partial Invisibility; Time Freeze.


 * Terminator sphere
 * Only appears in the Terminator game type (but can be summoned during any other game mode with cheats enabled), where the sphere is central to the modes gameplay. When a player picks the sphere up, they are given full health and armor, similar to the Megasphere, as well as a permenant Doomsphere effect that doesn't affect the players vision. The Terminator sphere appears above the player that possesses it, making it visible to other players. When the player holding the sphere is killed, the sphere is dropped, allowing other players to pick it up.

Runes
The effect of a rune remains as long as the player is holding it. Players lose runes on death.


 * Strength rune
 * doubles the damage of the bearer's attacks


 * Rage rune
 * doubles the bearer's rate of fire.


 * Drain rune
 * each successful attack by the bearer heals the bearer with an amount equal to half of the damage inflicted.


 * Spread rune
 * Causes the player's weapons to fire in three separate directions


 * Resistance rune
 * Halves the damage done to the bearer, by monsters or by other players.


 * Regeneration rune
 * "Regenerates" 5% of the bearer's health every second.


 * Prosperity rune
 * Lets the bearer pick up all health items to max health at 200%.


 * Reflection rune
 * Makes half the damage done to the bearer hurt the opponent who inflicted it.


 * High jump rune
 * Makes the bearer jump much higher. Good for shortcuts.


 * Haste rune
 * Makes the bearer run faster.

New monsters
Aside from weapons, new monsters are available. They can be placed in any kind of Skulltag map, or summoned. They do not appear in any maps included in Skulltag (because it does not include new single player maps), but many PWADs use them.


 * Blood Demon — a twice as tough version of the demon. Dark red.
 * Dark Imp — a twice as tough imp with a faster fireball. Black with blue/purple fireballs.
 * Super Shotgun Guy — A zombie that wields the super shotgun. This is the only monster with original sprites (the rest of the opponents are merely recolors of the enemy sprites from the game).
 * Cacolantern — an orange Cacodemon, twice as tough as the original and with a faster fireball.
 * Abaddon — a three times as tough and faster black cacodemon that fires a volley of two fast, powerful fireballs.
 * Hectebus — a twice as powerful mancubus with a near-continuous five-way spread attack. Black with green fireballs.
 * Belphegor — A variant of the Hell Knight and Baron of Hell, three times the health of a Hell Knight and twice the fire rate. Red and black.

Controversy of 0.97b
On December 22 of 2006, Carnevil released Skulltag 0.97b. It was a very hyped up version of Skulltag due to the number of game modes, monsters, weapons, and maps that were included as well as the OpenGL binaries. However, it became a nightmare for the developers to realize how bugged Skulltag was at the time - crashes and glitches were frequent. Because of this in addition to a few other reasons and the stress these things caused on him, Carnevil departed from Skulltag on January 13, 2007.

Soon after this, Torr Samaho stepped in as a new coder. He joined the development team in February 2007. Rivecoder was also working on the Skulltag source code secretly and was later announced to the public on March 16, 2007. Carnevil eventually came back and started programming Skulltag again in July 2007. Currently the three coders are working on improving Skulltag together. In the current internal beta for 97D, support for Heretic, Hexen and Strife has greatly improved; Skulltag can now be run on Linux and FreeBSD (even with the OpenGL renderer from GZDoom), and Skulltag is catching up fast on DECORATE compatibility with the latest ZDoom revisions.