Purple Rain (My First Map) [Vanilla Doom 2 + Dehacked]

[Arsinikk]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> DOWNLOAD WAD <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

 

"Strange toxic purple slime has seeped its way into the core of the Earth. Will you find the source of this sludge or will you find more than you bargained for?"

 

Purple Rain is a short 5-10 minute singleplayer map that has been designed to work with Dehacked Vanilla Doom. The map has been thoroughly tested to make sure that none of the Vanilla Doom errors like VPOs and Savegame Buffer occur. The intended difficulty is Ultra-Violence but all skills are implemented (not sure if Nightmare/Fast is possible).

 

This is my very first doom map (build time: 3 weeks) that employs many fake 3d Vanilla Doom effects in addition to vanilla conveyors to showcase the actions and environmental transformations that can be done in Vanilla Doom. The map consists of Plutonia-like traps and situations that can be deadly upon first playthrough. The map is made to be able to be speedrun and done pacifist. There are elements of micro-slaughter in the map.

 

This is meant to be the first map in a larger mapset.

 

 

Purple Rain will work on most any port (complevel 2) that supports voodoo dolls.

Spoiler

Compatible Source Ports:

• MS-DOS (Doomhack.exe)
• Chocolate Doom
• Crispy Doom
• Bethesda Unity Port (compat version here)
• PrBoom Plus (use software for correct radsuit colour)
• GZDoom
• ZDoom
• Eternity Engine
• Woof
• ...and more

 

 

/idgames: Download Now

 

 

IRL I'm a songwriter, so it's no surprise that I'd want to compose my own music for Purple Rain. You can listen to some of the songs composed for the project here:

 

 

When I play Doom, my soundfont of choice is 8MBGMSFX.sf2

 

 

Spoiler

 

Mapping Credits:

• MAP01: Arsinikk

 

Graphic Credits:

• Titlepic, M_Doom, Credits, font recolours by Arsinikk
• Interpic by Evilneck

                                                   

Music Credits:

• TITLE: "Amethyst Heights Theme" - Arsinikk
• MAP01: "Visceral Vices" - Arsinikk
• INTERMISSION: "Statistic Beat" - Arsinikk
• (Bonus) MAP02: "Toxic Groove (Demo)" - Arsinikk

                          

Texture credits:

• All new textures by Arsinikk
• Includes textures from id Software (Doom 1 and Plutonia)

                          

Sprite credits:

• All sprites recoloured for new palette by Arsinikk, except:
• Green (Purple with new palette) chaingunner skin by TheDarkArchon

 

 

• THEiF for both playtesting and being very supportive and awesome!
• TheNoob_Gamer, FrancisT218, GarrettChan, Vpurple Izumi, DavidN, and NinjaDelphox for playtesting and feedback!
• Danlex for letting me use his status bar from Lullaby (Thanks to Vphurple Izumi for widescreen version)
• Capellan, Sinshu, Noiser and maxmanium for helping me figure out Vanilla Doom shenanigans.
• Linguica for giving me the idea of utilizing a vanilla conveyor like this one but with my own tweaks to make it with barrels and work on the ITYTD skill and allow for 7 actions.
• Jimmy for his critiquing of my original midis

 

• The map has been tested to avoid VPOs, but using IDCLIP/NOCLIP will most definitely crash Vanilla/Chocolate Doom
• The map includes a custom palette and colormap with a custom radiation suit colour. PrBoom Plus OpenGL mode does not have the ability to render custom radiation suit colours. If you are using PrBoom Plus, I suggest using Software mode instead.
• There is a 5% chance for hell knights to get stuck in an invisible pit in the circle arena room. Further into the fight, the hell knights will pop up eventually, so UV-Max is always possible.

 

Since this is my very first map, I thought it would be interesting to detail some of the problems and issues I ran into creating the doom map (especially a doom map that is Vanilla Doom compatible and not limit-removing).

 

Keep in mind some of this information may spoil your first playthrough of the map, so I implore you to play the map first and then come back.

 

Spoiler

 

Here is a fun diagram showing how the map changed over time. (note that looking at the map may spoil some of your first playthrough)

 

 

 

It's no surprise mapping for Vanilla is alot more difficult than working with limit-removing or boom projects, just because you have to deal with the quirks of the original Doom Engine. Here are some of the issues I ran into:

• Visplane Overflow - this is by far the most well-known and notorious doom engine limitation. Believe it or not, there were only two rooms in the map where I ran into issues with VPOs. VPOs are kind of confusing with the way they work since it is basically how many floors/ceilings that are in the view of the player that when they exceed 128, the game crashes. This was extremely difficult for my mapping style since I like to have the environment change around the player which requires shifting floors. What makes VPOs strange is that the Doom Engine considers floors/ceilings with the same lighting or same textures as 1 plane. Additionally, even if the player can't see a plane that is either too high or too low, the Doom Engine will still consider those planes as visible. I spent multiple days trying to get a specific environmental transformation in the circle arena to not cause a VPO.
• Spechits overflow - It was imperative for my map to be demo compatible, which meant it was important for the player to not be able to activate more than 8 triggers at once, since that could cause a spechits error which can cause demo inconsistency. What makes this error extremely hard to deal with in Vanilla Doom is that Vanilla Doom is awful with skippable linedefs. So oftentimes I'd add multiple of the same trigger so that the player couldn't accidently skip it... but add too many triggerlines and the spechits error will occur. There is a certain poison cage trap in this map that caused me much pain in this regard. Also because of my Vanilla Conveyor system, I had to be careful not to trigger too many linedefs at a time.
• Tutti-frutti effect - This is a bug that really surprised me since I tend to use GZDoom and PRBoom Plus as my daily source ports. Depending on how short a specific texture is, a tutti-fruti effect can show up. Also really surprising to me is that the original doom does not really support negative vertical texture offsets, else you'll get a Tutti-Fruti.
• Visible sprites limit - Doom has a limit of only being able to render 128 sprites in a single view. I ran into this issue in a fight, in which I ended up reducing the amount of enemies.
• Save Game Buffer - When making this map, I actually ran into this bug, where it is possible for a Doom map to have too many things that Vanilla Doom will crash when trying to load a save game. Fixed this issue by moving part of the map to another future map.
• Enemies forget the player after saving and loading the game - ran into this issue with some of my dummy monster closets.
• Slime trails - They are the bane of my existence. Nuff said
• Floor heights in the positive and negative - sometimes when moving floors around in the Doom Engine, if you want a floor in a positive height to go to a negative height, the Doom engine can get confused (especially when using instant moving sectors).
• Bad (Chocolate Doom) - This is a really stupid error message I got, which I couldn't for the life of me figure out for the longest time. Turns out Chocolate Doom will return an error message with "Bad" when trying to use widescreen titlepic/interpic.
• Barrel explosions which do no damage - since the map heavily utilises vanilla conveyors with barrels, this bug only affected me in ITYTD. I set up the barrels to only hurt the player 1% and gave the player a health bonus, and since in ITYTD damage is halved, barrels won't inflict any damage if the damage is less than 1%. The problem with this is that barrels can only push the player/voodoo doll if they damage the player at least 1%.
• Replacing Sprites/flats in Vanilla Doom - using new sprites/flats in Vanilla is actually extremely difficult compared to how source ports work today. The order of the wad is very important or the wad will not run at all in DOS:
  
  SS_START
  S_END
  SS_END
  FF_START
  F_END
  PLAYPAL/COLORMAP/DEHACKED/MAPINFO/MUSIC/TEXTURE1/ETC
  PP_START
  PP_END
  MAP01
  
  The reason why SS_START and SS_END were added was so I could use the dehacked functionality in the latest Ultimate Doom Builder.

 

 

This map utilises a vanilla conveyor system based on Linguica’s mikoportals conveyor belt, but instead of using mikoportals, it relies on the first barrel explosion blast radius to push a voodoo doll over multiple trigger lines. Below you can see the system set up in Doom Builder:

 

 

The voodoo doll can only walk over at most 7 lines to keep the map demo friendly and not go over the vanilla Spechits limit. The barrel is exploded by a crusher and the blast radius pushes the voodoo doll over the trigger lines. I have set up the system very particularly to utilise the blockmap to only damage the player 1%, and that is why you can see the health bonus behind the voodoo doll. The second barrel is only there to make it so the conveyors still work on the ITYTD difficulty. Since the ITYTD difficulty halves damage, and blast radius is ignored unless the affected target is hurt at least 1% and that is why the extra barrel is added.

 

Advantages:

• This system allows up to 7 actions to happen at once.
• There is absolutely no way for the player to skip the linedefs in the conveyor.
• Works in Vanilla Doom and any source port that supports voodoo dolls (unlike mikoportals).
• Amazing to see conveyors in Vanilla Doom.

 

Disadvantages:

• It takes an amount of time to trigger the actions waiting for the barrel to be crushed.
• Each conveyor can only trigger the actions once, unlike boom conveyors.
• This system requires for the player to get hurt at least 1% and grab a health bonus, leading to random health bonuses being given to the player throughout the level.

 

Weighing both the advantages and disadvantages of this vanilla conveyor system, I have found that it allows for more dynamic vanilla doom levels, and I think it would be interesting to build a mapset based on the system.

 

 

Personally, I actually really like the Bethesda Unity port for vanilla wads (at least now that they fixed the music and lack of a 16:9 option).

 

So it may be interesting to explain why there is an exclusive version of Purple Rain for the Unity port. To keep it short, the Unity port just does some stuff differently that make the original wad, since it was made for Vanilla, either not work correctly or even crash the Unity Port.

 

Unity Dehacked

The Unity port now supports dehacked… kind of. It supports a majority of vanilla dehacked except for the following Misc section:

If you have any of those values in your Dehacked, the Unity port will actually not respond and crash.

 

Unity and Custom Sprites

Sorta related to Dehacked, in order to get Purple Rain to work in Vanilla, I had to replace the names of all the sprites. For example for the zombieman:
 

POSS = POS2

 

This is because Vanilla Doom does not like directly replacing the original sprites unless you replace EVERY sprite in Doom.
I bring this up because the Bethesda Unity port completely ignores this part of the dehacked and you can only replace sprites with their original names.

 

Unity and Widescreen Status Bar

While it’s really great that the Unity port supports widescreen assets like the TITLEPIC and INTERPIC, it’s implementation of the STBAR lump is different from how all other source ports deal with it:

 

As you can see with the graphic above, the Unity port offsets is set to the beginning of the STBAR graphic, while all other source ports use the offset of where the original STBAR started as the draw point.

 

Unity really doesn't like Nazis

I ran into a really strange visual bug when killing multiple Nazi things (changed through Dehacked) with a fancy teleporting corpse trick. Only happens in the Unity Port:

 

I encourage anyone to steam/record their own playthroughs of the map.

 

In fact, if you plan to stream it on Twitch, if you give me a heads up, I’ll gladly join your stream in the chat, or if you’d like I have no problem joining on a Discord call!

 

Here’s some playthroughs of the map (including my own developer commentary):

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 24 by Arsinikk
Added /idgames link

[Noiser]

I remember seeing this before, can't wait to try it out. Congrats on the release!

[TheNoob_Gamer]

I had a go of this (earlier build) a while back - can affirm that this is a very fun map to play!

Bit curious about the presence of an Unity version, though. Any noteworthy changes there?

[Blip]

Pretty awesome map, the traps and fights are pretty mean on a blind run and the secrets are well hidden, I like it. The hell knight fight could have a couple more cacos to create pressure but it isn't a big deal honestly, it's just fine as is.

 

Can't wait to see more maps from you, this is very good, especially for a 1st map.

 

Here's my uv max demo and recording of this map:

 

prplrain01m420.zip

 

 

ps: The 4:20 time was non intentional btw, but lets just say it was :)

Edited November 15, 2021 by Blip

[Arsinikk]

1 hour ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

I had a go of this (earlier build) a while back - can affirm that this is a very fun map to play!

Bit curious about the presence of an Unity version, though. Any noteworthy changes there?

I have actually added a section to the post under The Mapping Process header talking specifically about the Bethesda Port... because the Bethesda Port is weird...

 

There are no actual changes to the actual MAP01 itself. It is mostly changes to the Dehacked and Sprites.

 

First of all, The Bethesda Port supports Dehacked... Kind of. If you use any of the values in the Misc section of Dehacked, the port will crash.

 

Secondly, to get this wad to work correctly in Vanilla Doom, I had to rename all the sprites (example: POSS = POS2), because Vanilla Doom doesn't like when you replace sprites unless all of them are replaced. So the only way to use the custom palleted sprites in the Bethesda Port is to use the actually name of the sprites (POSS).

 

Next, The Bethesda Port has the widescreen assets built into the wad, since The Bethesda Port doesn't allow for multiple WADs to be loaded at once. And while this is a small change, there is a major difference with how The Bethesda Port and all other source ports deal with the widescreen status bar:

 

Lastly, there is really weird thing with The Bethesda Port that I ran into... It really doesn't like when you kill multiple Nazi enemies at once (even when they are replaced with different enemies in Dehacked). Open spoiler if you've played the map:

Spoiler

Originally I had the teleported corpses be Nazis, but it caused a weird visual bug in the Unity port:

 

Edited November 15, 2021 by Arsinikk

[Arsinikk]

33 minutes ago, Blip said:

Pretty awesome map, the traps and fights are pretty mean on a blind run and the secrets are well hidden, I like it. The hell knight fight could have a couple more cacos to create pressure but it isn't a big deal honestly, it's just fine as is.

 

Can't wait to see more maps from you, this is very good, especially for a 1st map.

 

Here's my uv max demo and recording of this map:

 

prplrain01m420.zip

 

 

ps: The 4:20 time was non intentional btw, but lets just say it was :)

Thanks for the kind words.

 

Funny thing is that originally I did have more Cacos during that fight... and ended up removing even more then there are in the final release, but later I thought there wasn't enough pressure on the player, so I added some back.

 

I guess I felt I wanted to be a little nicer on the player and make the next fight the hard one.

Thanks for playing my map!

[DarkIceCyclone]

time for me to walk a hall of shame.... You've really set a new high bar for first map.

[P41R47]

I come here, twice already, with this face expecting Purple Rain,

...and there is no purple rain, so my eyes start raining...

...but then i found one hell of a great vanilla map...
So i go to download it with this face...


Now i need to finish my Prince tribute map.

On the map, great work, @Arsinikk.
I played it blind an i had a blast for sure.

I love all the kinda scripting on vanilla you made for this one.
I highly enjoyed it.
:)

Edited November 15, 2021 by P41R47

[GarrettChan]

congrats on the release.

[Moustachio]

I agree with the others here, this is a very promising first map! The purple theme is really cool, don't mind seeing it used every now and again to add some flavor to a wad. Another thing I don't mind seeing every now and again is a map author who composes their own map midis. I personally love the midis here, they're energetic! And I'm a sucker for wads with bespoke soundtracks.

 

After UV Maxing this map, I gotta say I really like it. It's got a lot of character the way the voodoo doll scripting is used, and seeing them used in a vanilla compatible wad is a neat novelty that doesn't get used enough. Another thing that stuck out to me was the way secrets are hidden. The switches are embedded deeply into environmental details, which encourages you to pay extra attention to every detail. Reminds me of Grove, but I had a much easier time UV Maxing this map. Great job for a first map!

 

My stats for my first run:

Kills: 131/131

Items: 119/119

Secrets: 8/8

 

Time: 18:43

Edited November 15, 2021 by Moustachio

[ScrappyMcDoogerton]

This map is real good. I like it. You should remove the rad suits from UV Difficulty. They make the damaging floors irrelevant and UV players are used to dealing with damaging floors so it shouldn't increase the difficulty too much.

[Arsinikk]

5 minutes ago, ScrappyMcDoogerton said:

This map is real good. I like it. You should remove the rad suits from UV Difficulty. They make the damaging floors irrelevant and UV players are used to dealing with damaging floors so it shouldn't increase the difficulty too much.

I respect your opinion on the rad suit in UV, although it was a deliberate choice on my part to utilise rad suits on this map. This map is a map01 out of a possible future mapset, so it is not supposed to be super difficult. Personally I tend to dislike damaging floors when they conflict with combat, and with these fights in particular, I did not design them to utilise damaging floors.

 

On the other note, the rad suit has been renamed to "Purple Raincoat", so this map was always meant to include rad suits.

 

I have some future maps in the works that will take in account damaging floors into their fights, but this map is not one of those.

I thank you for your input though.

[Arsinikk]

1 hour ago, Moustachio said:

I agree with the others here, this is a very promising first map! The purple theme is really cool, don't mind seeing it used every now and again to add some flavor to a wad. Another thing I don't mind seeing every now and again is a map author who composes their own map midis. I personally love the midis here, they're energetic! And I'm a sucker for wads with bespoke soundtracks.

  

After UV Maxing this map, I gotta say I really like it. It's got a lot of character the way the voodoo doll scripting is used, and seeing them used in a vanilla compatible wad is a neat novelty that doesn't get used enough. Another thing that stuck out to me was the way secrets are hidden. The switches are embedded deeply into environmental details, which encourages you to pay extra attention to every detail. Reminds me of Grove, but I had a much easier time UV Maxing this map. Great job for a first map! 

@Moustachio , I'm glad you like the map. A few of the playtesters asked me why I decided to go with Vanilla Doom, instead of Boom or even Limit-Removing. My response would be that while Boom has amazing features, I find it more fascinating to push the original Doom Engine to its limit. In fact, the shutter room and the circle arena are each around 1-2 planes from VPOing, and so alot of testing was required on my part to make sure there was no way for Vanilla Doom to crash.

 

While voodoo dolls have been used to great effect, I haven't really found many wads that really dabble with environmental transformations. And after playing wads like Doom Zero and Going Down, having the environment change around the player, I think can really create interesting and memorable encounters.

 

I'm a sucker for secrets. In fact, for this map in particular, around half of the map is entirely optional. I despise bad and/or broken secrets, since I love secret hunting. I didn't want to make the secrets too hidden, but also not too easy to find. And I didn't want to rely on any doom secret cliches either.

 

Regarding the music, I'm very much a fan of the original doom 1994 soundtrack and I wanted to make midis that gave the same feeling as those tracks. I'm not sure if I've completely succeeded, but I'm sure that the midis do have their unique sound.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

This map really messes with your head in a brilliant and fantastic way! Heck, some of the features used here I've rarely seen in other doom maps. This is AMAZING! :D

[P41R47]

3 hours ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

This map really messes with your head in a brilliant and fantastic way! Heck, some of the features used here I've rarely seen in other doom maps. This is AMAZING! :D

It uses the latest ''features''.
Linguortals and Mikoportals.

To create mind bending map tricks and interesting soft scripting.

Its a great example of a good map made with all what the vanilla engine can offer.

[Arsinikk]

2 hours ago, P41R47 said:

It uses the latest ''features''.
Linguortals and Mikoportals.

To create mind bending map tricks and interesting soft scripting.

Its a great example of a good map made with all what the vanilla engine can offer.

I would just like to clarify that this map does not use Linguortals nor Mikoportals.

 

Mikoportals are not supported in ZDoom/GZDoom, and I wanted my map to be able to be played in as many source ports as possible.

 

While the starting part using a barrel's blast radius to push a voodoo doll is the same as a mikoportal, my conveyors (which are honestly not really conveyors) are just a voodoo doll crossing 7 action linedefs at once.

[P41R47]

7 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

I would just like to clarify that this map does not use Linguortals nor Mikoportals.

 

Mikoportals are not supported in ZDoom/GZDoom, and I wanted my map to be able to be played in as many source ports as possible.

 

While the starting part using a barrel's blast radius to push a voodoo doll is the same as a mikoportal, my conveyors (which are honestly not really conveyors) are just a voodoo doll crossing 7 action linedefs at once.

well, i didn't notice the health drop on the damage to the voodoo dolls, so i thought you found another way to implement the mikoportals.
And the backpack illusion totally looks like a linguortal, how you achieved that effect?
I mean the one that can be seen through a hole.

In other words.
This is just achieved by the known engine features and not the recent discoveries.
That makes it far better than i thought.
:D

Edited November 16, 2021 by P41R47

[Arsinikk]

13 minutes ago, P41R47 said:

well, i didn't notice the health drop on the damage to the voodoo dolls, so i thought you found another way to implement the mikoportals.
And the backpack illusion totally looks like a linguortal, how you achieved that effect?
I mean the one that can be seen through a hole.

In other words.
This is just achieved by the known engine features and not the recent discoveries.
That makes it far better than i thought.
:D

 

@P41R47 About the backpack window... it literally is just a window to the backpack:

Spoiler

 

 

This is how the view looks like further in from the window:

 

 

 

When the player enters the section, a sector in front of the backpack window view instantly raises:

Spoiler

 

Another thing to note is that the wall that you see through is transparent on the side of the window view, and an opaque midtexture in the actual backpack room (with the addition of being impassable):

 

[OpenRift]

Honestly, I had a BLAST playing this. For your first map, you absolutely knocked it out of the park. I'll be watching your career with great interest ;)

[P41R47]

12 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

detailed explanation

clever, my good man!
As i didn't heard the floor raising, thought it was another kind of trick.
So yeah, you triked me ;)

[azerty]

I will play this one when I have the time.