Data Center [First-time wad]

[Darox]

Someone spilled coffee all over the servers, and you're needed to provide some 12-gauge 'tech support'.

 

datacenter.zip

datacenterV2.zip

This is a short vanilla map for doom2, tested with prboom+ -complevel 2 and chocolate doom.

Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

I recently got back into playing doom and started playing community wads. I decided to try making my own maps, so here is my first wad. It's basically a short collection of things I wanted to try out and stuff I learned while mapping, wrapped in a techbase. Doing difficulty settings with other people in mind was tricky but I tried to go for a decent ammo balance with generous health to allow fast and loose play on UV, with HMP/HNTR being more generous overall. The midi is Sturms theme from Advance Wars because you can only listen to Running from Evil so many times.

 

Comments/Criticisms/Demos all greatly appreciated!

Edited June 24, 2018 by Darox
Updated map

[Memfis]

I really liked the design: colorful and with many neat little touches like door lights signalizing "closed/open". The gameplay felt a little easy as I actually had to carefully navigate around medikits sometimes (for example the one near the blue key is right in the center of a small room and so it's hard to avoid when you don't need it). I think transformations in the red key area were my favorite part, especially the final stairbuilding scene looked so cool. Here is a demo:

drx-datacenter_mem_FDA.zip

[Pegleg]

3 hours ago, Darox said:

Someone spilled coffee all over the servers, and you're needed to provide some 12-gauge 'tech support'.

 

datacenter.zip

This is a short vanilla* map for doom2, tested with prboom+ -complevel 2. ^{(*Unfortunately the final room causes HoM effects in chocolate doom, so it's not properly vanilla compatible.}

 

 

I recently got back into playing doom and started playing community wads. I decided to try making my own maps, so here is my first wad. It's basically a short collection of things I wanted to try out and stuff I learned while mapping, wrapped in a techbase. Doing difficulty settings with other people in mind was tricky but I tried to go for a decent ammo balance with generous health to allow fast and loose play on UV, with HMP/HNTR being more generous overall. The midi is Sturms theme from Advance Wars because you can only listen to Running from Evil so many times.

 

Comments/Criticisms/Demos all greatly appreciated!

Assuming that you're not just missing textures (I don't think that's your issue), since you're getting HOM in the final room, but Chocolate Doom isn't crashing, it's likely you're experiencing drawseg overflow. In that event, you have two options:

1. You can just say that your level is "limit-removing" and call it a day.
2. You can get a copy of Visplane Explorer or Chocorenderlimits and try to figure out what is causing you to exceed the 256 drawseg limit and fix it.

I haven't had a chance to play the level, but from the screenshots, it looks like a reasonable effort. The textures all seem to aligned and there's some nice detailing and lighting differences. There's a mish-mash of textures, but they seem to be somewhat separated from each other, so it doesn't look odd.

 

One more thing--I liked the look of the fixture holding the plasma gun.

 

Edited June 19, 2018 by Pegleg
Plasma gun note

[mun]

anfda4u (Sorta, I loaded the wad first to see if I typed it correctly, but I only saw the beginning.): data.zip

 

Played in Chocolate Doom 3.0.0. This was a blast. The visuals of this level are akin to those good 90s techbases, with neat little touches. It's easy, but very enjoyable and keeps you excited. Good for a short playthrough.

That plasma placement is an awesome idea by the way.

[bonnie]

i loved it friend!!! vvv good

here's a 10 minute uv-max demo for your troubles: bonCorrectPortFDA.zip

the uv-max was really like 8:51 i believe but i died early on and decided to just keep goin

 

overall pretty amazing. cool, fluent progression, fairly fun rooms and fights (although the ending room was a little janky), and very nice visuals. i thought that one room where it's a maze and it goes down and flattens out but then turns into a staircase leading to a different door was frickin incredible

 

my only nitpicks (since i have no genuine complaints):

Spoiler

• pretty jarring having the revenant/cells room after the plasma rifle have all those impassible lines
• supplies overlapping each other in the final fight room in one of the pinky chambers
• very very strange doors at the end there. they're barely indented and are pretty misleading.
  • maybe allow players to access the other sides of the doors from the exit room or something? or make it obvious that they're not meant to be entered

 

final verdict: thank you kanye, very cool!
 

edit: i wanted to mention that i did actually think there was too much ammo but i forgot because i liked it too much

Edited June 20, 2018 by bonnie

[HAK3180]

Terrific start at mapping here. I hope to see more from you.

[Darox]

I'm glad the stairs were well received, the original conception of this wad was "the self-building stairs are neat, let's make a cool staircase room".

 

Looks like I did overdo it for the final room. I thought dumping everything on the player at once might be too cruel, but letting you pick the waves apart one by one makes the two side waves pretty uninteresting. Those demos were really informative to see how people tackle the map.

 

5 hours ago, bonnie said:

my only nitpicks (since i have no genuine complaints):

  Hide contents

• pretty jarring having the revenant/cells room after the plasma rifle have all those impassible lines
• supplies overlapping each other in the final fight room in one of the pinky chambers
• very very strange doors at the end there. they're barely indented and are pretty misleading.
  • maybe allow players to access the other sides of the doors from the exit room or something? or make it obvious that they're not meant to be entered

 

Without those impassable lines you either bounce all over the platforms or get caught in the corner gaps, I wanted to let players have smooth movement around the edges of the room without getting caught. I'll keep it in mind though. The doors are a miss though, I should stick to only using decorative doors that are permanently open.

 

 

8 hours ago, Pegleg said:

Assuming that you're not just missing textures (I don't think that's your issue), since you're getting HOM in the final room, but Chocolate Doom isn't crashing, it's likely you're experiencing drawseg overflow. In that event, you have two options:

1. You can just say that your level is "limit-removing" and call it a day.
2. You can get a copy of Visplane Explorer or Chocorenderlimits and try to figure out what is causing you to exceed the 256 drawseg limit and fix it.

I haven't had a chance to play the level, but from the screenshots, it looks like a reasonable effort. The textures all seem to aligned and there's some nice detailing and lighting differences. There's a mish-mash of textures, but they seem to be somewhat separated from each other, so it doesn't look odd.

 

One more thing--I liked the look of the fixture holding the plasma gun.

 

 

Unfortunately I can't really block lines of sight in the room without spoiling the flow of the fight, so it'd probably have to involve ripping out verts to make everything more square and flat.

[Pegleg]

2 hours ago, Darox said:

I'm glad the stairs were well received, the original conception of this wad was "the self-building stairs are neat, let's make a cool staircase room".

 

Unfortunately I can't really block lines of sight in the room without spoiling the flow of the fight, so it'd probably have to involve ripping out verts to make everything more square and flat.

Congratulations on getting self-building stairs to work on your first try. You'd be amazed how easy it is to mess up that feature and how many people avoid it rather than risk that happening.

 

Then just call the map "limit-removing" (Romero did it with Tech Gone Bad) and you don't have to sacrifice any part of the final room or the final fight and you won't have to worry about the HOM in that room being a distraction.

[Aquila Chrysaetos]

5 minutes ago, Pegleg said:

Congratulations on getting self-building stairs to work on your first try. You'd be amazed how easy it is to mess up that feature and how many people avoid it rather than risk that happening.

I was one of those. Of all Doom's functions, including the ones ZDoom added, that simple function was one I never figured out. Even now I avoid it and use ACS to do it if I need to.

So, yeah, kudos for getting that to work, and I saw HAK's playthrough of your map and it was really well done for a first map. Keep it up.

[Darox]

I definitely had some hiccups with the stairs at first, especially with how they fold in on themselves. GZDoom was generous enough to not cause problems but when I first tried the level in Chocolate it got wonky. I found out that linedef numbers are a big deal and that GZDoombuilder reassigns those numbers when you delete old lines, so I had to rebuild it carefully.

[mgr_inz_rafal]

Here's the video of me playing through the level. I enjoyed it quite a lot, especially the battle on the big stairs.

 

 

BTW: The map is indeed hot visplane-wise:

 

[Garbage]

Great map! I really enjoyed the small details like the button you have to shoot at the entrance , and the big details like the stair battle.

[Pegleg]

2 hours ago, mgr_inz_rafal said:

BTW: The map is indeed hot visplane-wise:

 

@Darox

Based on the HOM issue in the final room and the potential visplane issue that mgr_inz_rafal highlighted, if it were me, I would just designate this map as limit-removing and not try to sacrifice the detail. I think the details are one of the best parts of the level. I'm actually surprised you didn't have any issues with visplanes in the self-building stair room.

 

So, if it were me, I'd add "limit-removing" somewhere in the thread's title (to let everyone know the level of compatibility), and continue on.

[Darox]

S-bends are fantastic.

 

Made a new revision of the map with some layout alterations and managed to limit the number of potential visplanes in the lobby area as well as squashing the HOM effect in the final room. The roof details were the biggest casualty, but I managed to get it under without getting too square. With this revision it is now properly vanilla.

 

The fights in the red key and exit areas got significantly ramped up, as well as shifting around ammo/health. The final area in particular is a lot more hectic. I also threw in one of the demos I used to recheck the par time if anyone likes that sort of thing.

 

datacenterV2.zip

dcuvpar.zip