What are the little tips and editors that people used back in 1994-2000?

[ALPINED]

I know they used wintex but what else? Also what are the tips for 90's style mapping?

 

Thanks for answering if you did,

[Silhouette 03]

For your first question, you'd have to talk to an archivist, or consult the Doom wiki. To answer your second question, mappers in the 90's used a lot of minimalist detailing and focused rather on gameplay rather than creating detailed environments. I wasn't in the mapping scene in the 90's, but I've played a lot of 90's megawads, so this is more a personal observation than anything else. To understand how 90's mapping, I'd recommend playing through some 90's wads, and see how mappers structure their maps.

[Kappes Buur]

Towards the end of 1995 I found a book by Joe Pantuso DOOM Game Editor which include a CD with the editor RGDOOMED. While that editor was not that awful I tried several others, DCK, DOOMCAD, etc, but eventually settled on DETH as it progressed as an editor also for HERETIC and HEXEN. Well, what could you do with all of them, not that much. One was restricted to the features of the original games. Lay down sectors, interconnect them in one way or another, maybe vary the brightness of them and that was that.

 

There were other editors, like Wadauthor and Deepsea (a map editor and lump editor in one). I still use Deepsea from time to time. But they were not that popular because they were not freeware at the time.

 

I am sure that I am leaving out quite a few editing tools, either they are no longer relevant, they do not work in a modern OS or I can no longer remember them.

 

However, once ZDoom was a thing, I quickly changed to ZETH, which was essentially DETH 4.24 but streamlined for ZDoom. ZDoom has always been an open-ended editor sourceport. Things progressed over the years through mappers' requests to add more and more features until it finally was transformed into GZDoom.

 

The whole editing for DOOM scene was shaken up by the introduction of Doombuilder and it's 3D preview. DB underwent several iterations until todays Ultimate Doom Builder (UDB).

 

If you want to map for GZDoom, then the only tip you need is to use UDB and let your imagination run wild.

 

Edited May 9, 2021 by Kappes Buur
oops

[P41R47]

2 hours ago, ALPINED said:

Also what are the tips for 90's style mapping?

thats depend on what you aim.

In fact, if you know the rules, you cand bend them all you can without breaking them

The most serious vanilla friendly mapsets, like Alien Vendetta, Kama Sutra, Back To Saturn X serie, TNT: Revilution and Three's A Crowd both handled the visplane limit in different ways.

Take a look at URE2020, it has tons of details map per map, and it is still vanilla compatible.

 

Using an old editor could help to challenge your cretivity, but if you don't know the basics of map making, it will only hinder your progress, and probably frustrate you to getting into this.
Aside from that, the new Doombuilders are exactly like the old editors, except they have a 3D edit mode.

But i know authors that don't use it at all and still make great maps.

Edited May 7, 2021 by P41R47

[boris]

1 hour ago, P41R47 said:

Aside from that, the new Doombuilders are exactly like the old editors, except they have a 3D edit mode.

That's like saying that Word is exactly like notepad.exe, except for some more buttons.

[P41R47]

30 minutes ago, boris said:

That's like saying that Word is exactly like notepad.exe, except for some more buttons.

work and function was what i meaning, sorry for my inaccuracy and missleading statement.

Yes it has a lot more features, but for starting to map, one of the features that help a lot the players are the shortcuts for making doors, and the 3D mode that let people view what they are drawing and not just imagine it. Once they know how to use the stair builder to not make stairs, it becomes far easier.

[joepallai]

The biggest tip I learn back in the 90's was save often.

 

 

[SilverMiner]

2 minutes ago, joepallai said:

The biggest tip I learn back in the 90's was save often.

Save, and then load: all the enemies forget about the player lol

[VanaheimRanger]

1 hour ago, P41R47 said:

work and function was what i meaning, sorry for my inaccuracy and missleading statement.

Yes it has a lot more features, but for starting to map, one of the features that help a lot the players are the shortcuts for making doors, and the 3D mode that let people view what they are drawing and not just imagine it. Once they know how to use the stair builder to not make stairs, it becomes far easier.

I'm not gonna lie, I hate when I am playing a map and I need to figure something out in it by using the editor, only to find none of the doors have tags because the author used the "make door" feature.  It makes it harder for me to find my way through complex maps, personally.  I still make all doors the old fashioned way.

 

EDIT: Also, on point in the thread, I used an editor called WADEd back in the 90s...it wasn't great, lol.

Edited May 7, 2021 by VanaheimRanger

[Mr.Rocket]

To OP, I used WinTex as you mentioned but that was only to add stuff after making a map, WinTex was, for me, mostly adding music or some small graphic details like textures.

Aside from that, DCK and Wad Author was the primary map editor in a PC environment.

DCK was a bit buggy and DOS based, and I made a few maps with it. Later, I could run Wad Author in Windows, which was a plus. ~ I think WA was DOS based also but never used it if it was..

Wad Author was a sector based mapping for the most part, you'd make your map out of individual sectors. unlike most common editors. ~ if I remember right it also had an automatic door/sector type. it's been awhile, at least 20 years.

A lot of authors used Deepsea, and or Wad Author, I never called myself an extremists; I'm more of a recluse.. But there was a lot of heavy hitters back then..

It took me awhile to move from WA to Doom Builder, but I'm glad I finally made the move back then. ;)

It might be nice to take a stroll and see what I was working with in Wad Author back then and make something, but likely wouldn't be a wise choice considering. Back then though, you had to know what would cause an editor crash.

 

These days I use DB and of course moved on to DB2.. GZDB DBX, or whatever.. UDB is the editor of choice now and it is understood.

Basically you have the option of making something totally vanilla Doom OR anything.. you could reconstruct HL2 stuff if wanted to. 

So there's definitely some options.. I still use XwE in place as WinTex for some things, slapping some textures in etc..

It seems that a lot of authors like to use Slade, however.. 

 

Either way, Wad Author and WinTex is your best bet if you're trying to stay old school..

Otherwise you'll need something to test it, original Doom IN DOS or Chocolate Doom Render Limits, if you decide to use a modern map editor instead.. ;)

 

 

Edited May 8, 2021 by Mr.Rocket

[Doom_Dude]

I used DoomCad and a copy of The Doom Hackers Guide back in 99.  As soon as CodeImp released Doom Builder I was on it faster than a monkey on the last banana. I was gonna fire up DoomCad a few years ago but it doesn't work with the 64bit version of Win10. Oh well, I don't really miss placing vertices before drawing sectors. That's kinda too retro. haha.

 

Keep it small and keep it simple. Practice is the only way to get good at anything.

[Mr.Rocket]

/me gives @Doom_Dude a lil knuckle fist bump..

Edited May 8, 2021 by Mr.Rocket

[Chris Hansen]

It was a tedious and slow proces. I used DoomCAD 6.1 on Windows 95 to begin with. My first experience with Doom was in DOS running from Windows 3.11, if I remember correctly. Anyway, in order to build a level I had to:

1. Place a lot of vertices and connect them. That bugged out sometimes and crashed the program.
2. Edit the sectors height, choose textures and flats and set ligthing. All a guessing game as there were no 3D preview. Sometimes DoomCAD bugged and crashed. Progress lost.
3. Manually calculate x and y offsets  using math to align the textures! Yikes. Program might crash losing an hours work on 2 sectors. Sigh.
4. Then I had to start a DOS command prompt and build the map's nodes using BSP. For bigger maps it could take several minutes.
5. Load the newly built map in the game. Could take minutes.
6. Ooops. Forgot a player start! Back to DoomCAD.

If I wanted to edit something like the sky texture then I used a DOS program called NWT. It was actually pretty cool. Later I tried XWE which was better and today I use SLADE. And Ultimate Doom Builder of course. It doesn't crash.

[Kor]

I used DoomEd, which despite it's kind of weird interface, made mapmaking easy.  But it was limited.  If I made a level too big, it would put a serious bug in the level (serious in those days, anyway).  It would assign a random line the texture of "@," or something.  So the level would no longer run in Doom.  So I switched to DETH.  It was a cumbersome editor (first insert your vertices, then select the vertices in a certain order and insert lines, then select lines and insert a sector), but it gave me so much more control over the editing process, and it made texture aligning much easier (just select a bunch of lines in the right order, hit the command and boom, aligned textures), and it allowed me to make gigantic levels without getting weird on me.

 

To put WADs together I used WinTex.  But it, too, was limited.  If you added too many textures, it had a bug that would cut other textures out.  So I switched to Patcher.   You defined your resources with text in a file, and then ran the file through Patcher.  Patcher would build a wad from that.  Kind of sucked because you couldn't see the textures as you were making them, but it was better than losing textures.

 

If you want to make 90s-looking maps, my tips would be:

 

Don't worry too much about detailing.  I tend to make my levels today with a fair amount of detail, but in the 90s, with only the original Doom/2 engines to work with, you had to be careful how much detail you put into a map (I think we all know of Doom's visplane overflow limit).  Even when limit-removing source ports emerged, you still had to be careful because of the limits of what your computer could handle.  I remember running Paul Schmitz' Artifact levels (for Boom) and how choppy they were at some points.  And I remember complaining to him about it  :).  

 

Don't do Slaughterfest.  Neither the original Doom engine nor 90s computers could handle thousands of enemies.  I'm not saying don't make your levels a challenge, but if you want to emulate 90s wads, don't overload them with enemies.

 

Check out 90s wads and see what people did back then.  Some examples would be Momento Mori 1 and 2, Requiem, Icarus: Alien Vanguard, GothicDM.