Night Shift - Limit removing Doom 2 map

[moonchaser26]

 Overall Information

 Night Shift is a single map (MAP01) made in GZDoom Builder in 'Doom: Doom 2 (Doom format)'. I wanted to see what can be done with just vanilla Doom 2 features. My intent was to build a map in "Tech base" style, which would maintain balance between realistic environment building (implying that people actually work/live here) and a decent amount of action. Currently, i am unable to continue to work on this map due to a bug (see at Problems).

 This map took ~5 months to build due to me being a novice map maker at a time i had started working on this map. It was a great learning experience.

 

 

 Gameplay

 If this map was a part of a multi-level .WAD, then it would be the first map of the pack. Thus, the difficulty is not high pitched.

 There are 64 monsters in total and 4 secret areas for you to discover.

 Music used: Quake II - Stealth Frag (MIDI) by Jey Reichard (silentzorah)

 

 Rules

 -No Jumping

 -No crouching

 -No freelook

 -Vanilla HUD (preferably)

 

 How to Play

 *Please note that i am generally unexperienced with 'technicalities', so i will list how i personally play-tested it*

 -Port: GZDoom

 -Compatibility: Doom (strict)

 -Sector light mode: Software

 IWAD: DOOM2.WAD

 

 Additional Screenshots

 

 

 Problems

Spoiler

 

 -There are a few unfitting textures and lighting in some areas

 -Automap function is not optimized

 -Sidedef limit is above 65534

 

 The biggest problem is a broken sector, which (i assume) was accidentally created when i was making hanging wires on the ceiling (yellow keycard area with 4 demons in the room; the door to the empty room with a closed door and a window). Since then, the playable area became "haunted"; monsters, items and even lamps would fall into the ground or float high; there would be invisible barriers, weirdly deveating floor height.

 

 If you open this map in the editor, select all vertices there are and drag them (even a slight distance is enough), then you would see this sector appear:

 

 

 Deleting this sector would also lead to unfortunate events, so that was not a solution to fix this. The only option i had was to "distract" the problematic sector by creating a mess somewhere else on the map and hoping that it would work. After many attempts, this is the only area that worked:

 

 

 Currently i am unable to modify anything on the map aside from Things because it would break the map again.  That is the reason why i can't fix the minor problems mentioned above.

 

 

NightShift.zip

Edited June 17, 2020 by moonchaser26
Misplaced screenshots. Again.

[Walter confetti]

Looks awesome! Maybe it could be better with a night sky?

Edited June 17, 2020 by Walter confetti

[moonchaser26]

Thanks! Once again, i wanted to make a map using only Doom 2 resources and features, so no custom textures, sounds, etc.

[HQDefault]

1 hour ago, moonchaser26 said:

Thanks! Once again, i wanted to make a map using only Doom 2 resources and features, so no custom textures, sounds, etc.

It's ambiguous, but Doom 2's burning city sky texture could plausibly be nighttime.

It seems like your setting could fit with the city skybox on top of that.

 

That said, I'm pretty sure you'd need a MAPINFO in order to change it from sky1 to sky2, and although that doesn't involve any custom assets, I'm not sure if that betrays your 100% vanilla rule.

[Zolgia108]

if you tell me the number of the sector i can try to help, in the meantime i ll just play and record the map :)

[moonchaser26]

Thank you for the reply. This map takes action on somewhat terraformed part of land on Mars, hence the dark brownish sky texture instead of a city one. I am aware of MAPINFO possibility, yet i find it more convenient using WhackEd 4

[moonchaser26]

15 minutes ago, Zolgia108 said:

if you tell me the number of the sector i can try to help, in the meantime i ll just play and record the map :)

 

The sector number is 7989

[Zolgia108]

i am trying to fix the problem, it's really weird, but everything you did made it worse hahahaha

 

By the way, i played the map and it was really cool, i recorded it but when i got to the yellow key room (4 pinkies) something happened with the clip and it stop recording (truly is a haunted map!) so i won't be able to show it.

But i will tell my thoughts

 

 

I think it was perfectly detailed, somewhat creepy, i liked the music (maybe a little too loud and you should, in case, lower the volume via slade). Cramped spaces and tight ammoes were on point and i couldnt kill the 4 pinkies so i had to explore all the rest of the map in search for something ( i was 1% health because of a revenant). I found it challenging, i found no secrets and no rocket launcher nor plasma gun so i wonder if that cells and rockets were for secrets or if i just couldnt find them.

 I tend to get lost in these kind of maps and i usually play with low brightess so i was freaking lost all the time, at one point i was back to the entrance and i didn0t even know how the hell did i get there hahahaha

 

Last fight was grindy but on point, i completed the map with no secrets, no ammo and no health, so that's a good thing. Sad that i had to escape from some monsters, like the cacodemons, cause i knew i couldn't afford to kill them

 

Overall i think it's a very well done map, it took a while for me to get used to the switched doors, but it's a nice touch.

 

Bottom line: I don't think i will be able to help with that sector problem but who cares, the map playsm i think, as intended, so go on with your life and make other ones:)

 

have a nice day m8

[P41R47]

16 hours ago, moonchaser26 said:

I wanted to see what can be done with just vanilla Doom 2 features.

For the look of it, i doubt this is vanilla compatible, but as you said you don't know much of the technicalities, and as an advice because the title might be missleading, this is a limit removing map with stock Doom2 assets.

And a really awesome one i might say. I love all those details.

Hope you can work and made more maps, pal!

Thisis amazing!

[Egg Boy]

Hrm, I tried playing this map in Crispy Doom and Pr-Boom+ (both of which support limit removing features) and its completely broken in both and it likely has to do with that broken sector. So limit-removing isn't quite accurate because it won't run in Crispy. I would have loved to play it in either of those because I prefer how they play, but I had to settle for GZDoom, and here's my thoughts:

 

What this map really has going for it is atmosphere. The whole time the map felt like it was building to something that never really came. Its very nicely detailed, and features a ton of Doom-cuteisms like interactive water machines and openable bathroom stalls. There's a sense of realism throughout, which can be detrimental to the gameplay. A great example of this is the terminals to open doors, which is neat at first, but gets tiring the further in you get, especially when some doors do not adhere to this rule, and some doors that have these switches don't open. Everything inside the complex is so cramped (I'd assume to resemble a realistic structure) which can really damper the variety of monster encounters, which the map is extremely thin on to begin with. I don't want to downplay the visuals, because they are really great, especially so because they stick to vanilla resources, but the fact remains that I found any time not spent admiring the detailing rather dull.

 

Anyhow, I hope I didn't come off as excessively negative, since there's a lot of cool details in the map, and its very clear you worked hard on it. It'd be a shame to discourage someone as clearly talented as you, but I think you should try to match the quality of the gameplay with the quality of the visuals. Keep mapping, I'll be on the lookout for later works for sure.

[P41R47]

12 hours ago, Egg Boy said:

Hrm, I tried playing this map in Crispy Doom and Pr-Boom+ (both of which support limit removing features) and its completely broken in both and it likely has to do with that broken sector. So limit-removing isn't quite accurate because it won't run in Crispy. I would have loved to play it in either of those because I prefer how they play, but I had to settle for GZDoom, and here's my thoughts:

Yeah, i just quickly tried it on GZDoom and the builder, and seeing no custom line i went with the limit removing answer.

But i just tried it on DoomRetro and it is totally broken, i thinkt that something happened to the node builder because i experience a all ghost mode and the following:

I never seen a sector broke things this bad :S

[HQDefault]

So I decided to play this while waiting for a game to install with the NeoCore mod. I didn't use jump or crouch, but I did use freelook because frankly having it disabled feels really unnatural to me.

 

Okay, so to start off with the good: Dude, you've really got the hang of detailing within Doom's limitations. There's some really creative sector furniture and I felt like I should be taking notes on some of the crazy ideas you came up with. The whole base feels very elaborate and gives a believable feel that is rarely achieved in the Doom engine.

 

Sadly, I really had trouble figuring out your level's layout and visual language. I don't necessarily mind the doors that are opened by the adjacent consoles, as they are pretty quickly tutorialized, and you remain consistent with their appearance. My issue is that it's not very readable when a door requires a key. It's a lot clearer to have the entire border of the door be lined with a color than just a few pixels on a computer.

Furthermore, I honestly couldn't find the red keycard. Around the 30 minute mark I just gave up. This level does the thing that really bothers me in maze-like maps where I'm looking for the area I missed, I find the door I hadn't opened yet, I go inside, and there's nothing useful in there. It's just a dead end. It's an important rule to make it so unnecessary side areas are obviously less important than the critical path. When every door looks of equal importance, I can't discern which is the exit and which is a broom closet.

I bring up that I was using NeoCore because it's possible that you were using some level scripting that broke when I loaded it with the mod. If you can think of anything that would do that, let me know.

 

Ultimately, I think my verdict is that you're really good at detailing and have a lot of patience for intricate level design, but I think you need to add just a bit more visual clarity as to what's important. (There were also 2 switches I flipped somewhere that I still have absolutely no fucking idea what they did)

 

Opinions aside, I think you did some really neat work here. I'm interested to see what you do in the future. I hope this feedback was helpful.

Edited June 24, 2020 by HQDefault

[Cacolemon]

Great map! With only 64 monsters this is obviously very different to most maps out there, considering the huge size of it.

In total I spent 2:13h (+x because of occasional savegame reloads) on this map. I didn't get overly frustrated, only a little, because I couldn't memorize the whole map, so I spent a lot of time just running around, trying to find certain areas. What gave me the most trouble was finding all the secrets. The one with the rocket launcher was the only one I found rather quick.

Ammo is pretty tight. I had to ignore the Hellknights and the Baron for a while until I found more rockets and shells. And I punched out a couple of Pinkies/Spectres and Imps. But if you find and pickup all the ammo the map gives you, you will be able to kill 'em all eventually. I finished the map with 139 bullets, 23 shells, 3 rockets and 80 cells left, so.... And I didn't even use the plasmagun because everyone was already dead when I found it...lol

One thing I noticed is that I could open the yellow door only once, so everytime I wanted to go back, I had to make a huge detour. Don't know if intentional or bug (played it with GZDoom 4.4.0).

 

I'd REALLY love to play another map like this!

[Dr_Cosmobyte]

Sorry for necrobumping, but i really thought this had something to do with a gameplay mod i made, also called Nightshift.

 

I can't download it yet, my pc is on repair, but i am also posting here to register my interest and, who knows, maybe even draw inspiration.

 

I have a thread for my mod here on Doomworld, but the main link is outdated, so here is the Zdoom thread with the most recent version.

 

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=68043

 

I hope you enjoy it, and i wish you success on your modding. ;)

Edited July 10, 2020 by GAA1992