Map Design and Automap Color

[A Nobody]

Hey. So Doom 2's maps were sweet, my all-time favorite being The Chasm. Downtown being my other favorite map. Although, there are people that say the maps in Doom 2 barely look like anything from Earth, and I can see why. Chasm's perfect though in my opinion. The secrets don't even seem like secrets, like one of the maps having a switch in front of a door at an area that opens when activated and leads to...a secret. A Light Amplification Visor in a map that barely has dark rooms. You get the Combat Shotgun a bit too early in Map 02 of Doom 2. FreeDoom won't have the same errors, right?

 

The automap for FreeDoom could have different colors, maybe the opposite of Doom's color palette. For example, the walls on the map could be blue, orange, or purple. Background color could be white. What do you think?

[Xindage]

unfortunately the automap colors is based via the engine running freedoom so there's not much we can do about it.
about the mapping things you say i cant agree or disagree the mapping in freedoom is "generic"

[Catoptromancy]

A related issue: the automap does need work. It is a very tricky to do make a clean automap. Lines or sectors are drawn depending on how they are tagged or labelled in the editor. The map can look very messy if the wrong line types are chosen. There are likely suitable lines that do not interfere with how the map plays, but how the map is seen. Maps can even point out or hint at very hidden secrets, with hidden lines not viewable from the main screen. 

 

Here is a screenshot, some lines are yellow, some are not. I am extremely rusty on editing, but tidying up lines seems possible.

[Death Egg]

Very easy to fix those up with GZDoomBuilder-Bugfix; there's a feature that's made specifically to be able to modify the automap like this.

[Xindage]

yellow lines means that the ceiling height is diferent to one of it's adjancent sectors, brown mean the floor height diference, it was aways like it even on original doom 1 and 2, also i use to make the automap lie to player about secret places not showing as diferent line color on automap, this screenshot has actually two examples on the southeast.
On the west of screenshot you can see a brown line in there alone but on real that is not the end of the automap actually, after tiggering the planned play route there is going to be a switch in there and the automap is going to close on red lines, it's not a secret.

[Death Egg]

Yeah, there's a lot of untapped potential to play around with the automap. I remember being impressed with Grove because the automap looked completely different from the level itself, instead resembling a real map with general locations rather than just the level geometry.

[Xindage]

have you ever tried looking the automap of my freedm dev map32? ;)

take a look heh.