How there were wads in the 90s

[Doomlover77]

@Dusty_Rhodes  I’ll upload them this evening. There are some wads where I was playing around with the editor to see what I can do with it. 

[Dusty_Rhodes]

1 hour ago, Doomlover77 said:

@Dusty_Rhodes  I’ll upload them this evening. There are some wads where I was playing around with the editor to see what I can do with it. 

Well be sure to tag me when you do. Maybe you could put out a new mapset based off the old levels. Like the 1994 Tune Up Project.

[Doomlover77]

@Dusty_Rhodes  in April 2002 I did do a compilation of my works called Paulcoll & Tcollect which I’ll upload as well. @Doomlover77  

Edited February 11, 2022 by Doomlover77

[Doomlover77]

@Dusty_Rhodes  As promised earlier Here’s my old files. 
DOOM2LVL.ZIP - Doom2 wads from 1997-8. 

DOOMLVLS.ZIP - Doom wads from 1997-8. 
HERELVLS.ZIP - Heretic wads from 1997-8. 
HEXNWADS.ZIP - Hexen wads from 1998. 
HEXLVLS2.ZIP - More Hexen wads from 1998. These are some heretic levels converted to Hexen. 
paulcoll.zip - 32 level compilation of my works from 1997-2002. 
TCOLLECT.ZIP - another mini compilation of my works from 2002. Twenty years ago!! Can you believe it ?

hope you enjoy playing these as much as I have making them. @Doomlover77

[Dusty_Rhodes]

6 minutes ago, Doomlover77 said:

@Dusty_Rhodes  As promised earlier Here’s my old files. 
DOOM2LVL.ZIP - Doom2 wads from 1997-8. 

DOOMLVLS.ZIP - Doom wads from 1997-8. 
HERELVLS.ZIP - Heretic wads from 1997-8. 
HEXNWADS.ZIP - Hexen wads from 1998. 
HEXLVLS2.ZIP - More Hexen wads from 1998. These are some heretic levels converted to Hexen. 
paulcoll.zip - 32 level compilation of my works from 1997-2002. 
TCOLLECT.ZIP - another mini compilation of my works from 2002. Twenty years ago!! Can you believe it ?

hope you enjoy playing these as much as I have making them. @Doomlover77

Thank you! When I get home I'll gladly play them. Have you considered uploading them to the idgames archive? 

[Doomlover77]

@Dusty_Rhodes Please let me know what you think of each of the wads. 
I’ve not considered uploading them to idgames as I *don’t* think they are good enough as most of them are experimental wads. @Doomlover77  

Edited February 11, 2022 by Doomlover77

[thestarrover]

44 minutes ago, Doomlover77 said:

@Dusty_Rhodes  As promised earlier Here’s my old files. 
DOOM2LVL.ZIP - Doom2 wads from 1997-8. 

DOOMLVLS.ZIP - Doom wads from 1997-8. 
HERELVLS.ZIP - Heretic wads from 1997-8. 
HEXNWADS.ZIP - Hexen wads from 1998. 
HEXLVLS2.ZIP - More Hexen wads from 1998. These are some heretic levels converted to Hexen. 
paulcoll.zip - 32 level compilation of my works from 1997-2002. 
TCOLLECT.ZIP - another mini compilation of my works from 2002. Twenty years ago!! Can you believe it ?

hope you enjoy playing these as much as I have making them. @Doomlover77

Congratulations and thank you for the wads! I can't wait to play them! :)

Edited February 11, 2022 by thestarrover

[Doomlover77]

@thestarrover  please let me know what you think of each of the wads I’ve uploaded. @Doomlover77  

[Maes]

It's interesting how no Doom editor before Doom Builder got that mythical "3D Preview" mode really going, or at least well-implemented enough to really make a difference and save you from the chore of having to visually verify texture alignment etc. in-game. It was a feature that was forever teased in DEU's (never released) successor, DEU 2 since 1994 at least, but AFAIK never really made it into any editor before Doom Builder, at least not in an equally usable form.

 

I heard that WadAuthor or DoomCAD had a sort of static/wireframe 3D preview, but it would have seem trivial to implement at least a static fully textured 3D preview (no navigation) in any editor, even without knowing exactly how the Doom rendering engine worked. And yet, for Doom this functionality only really was there "for the masses" well after the game's prime.

Edited February 14, 2022 by Maes

[CBM]

On 2/9/2022 at 5:04 PM, Fobos said:

How doom wads are made in the 90s doom builder did not exist so what were they made with

Well we had a HORRIBLE map editor than ran in MS-DOS known as EDMAP

 

I can't recall any tools similar to SLADE and dehacked stuff was made with an old dodgy DOS EXE editor called something along the lines of dehacked and it modified the doom exe file directly

 

most of my 90s levels used startan textures, I remastered them once I returned to mapping and found the gem called doom builder

 

pre-historic EDMAP:

Edited February 14, 2022 by CBM

[ChopBlock223]

Hearing the stories of veteran oldschool mappers, it always painted a picture of clunky and awkward tools I probably couldn't tolerate.

tl;dr follows

Spoiler

 

I'm 29, and I first played Doom at like, 7, but I first started making Doom maps around the mid-2000s (it was before the Obama administration, so 2006 or 2007 maybe), and I started out with Doom Builder, a program which I felt was remarkably intuitive from the get go. I didn't get everything right away, in fact there were loads of things I was completely ignorant about, but much of it could be ignored because I was mapping for Skulltag, so I could plain put a wall texture on the floor because I felt like it. I didn't know (or care) about what a flat was and how it differed from a texture, because for the given format it didn't matter.

Completely trash maps, I largely used Doom Builder as a notepad to doodle in, so I focused a lot on trying to make maps look cool, and nothing else, I played with God Mode and had no idea about the theory of gameplay, as long as it looked pretty, that meant it was good. Obviously.

I did eventually make some stuff which actually looked pretty nice, once I learned I didn't need to stick to the 32x32 blockiness, as I took strong inspiration, and textures, from Deus Vult II, Epic 2, and Crucified Dreams. Except for monster placement, exploration, and resources, that all boiled down to "Let's put X here because that would be cool!"

 

I had lofty ambitions of everyone lining up to praise me because my maps were so good, LMAO. Then I lost untold hours of work to XWE being a fucking piece of shit, and that just deflated my drive.

I would learn to play Doom without cheats, and that obviously made it much more fun, but I didn't give mapping another glance for a very long time, instead dabbling with gameplay modding (which wasn't that excellent either, lol).

However, I would eventually catch something called Evolution Of The Wad, and it was REALLY interesting to me, it felt like I learned an incredible amount about the game from the analysis those guys did, and I would watch each episode religiously.

 

I didn't get back into mapping right then and there, but I felt that when I got the opportunity to be part of a mapping project in 2020, I knew enough that I jumped right in with confidence!

I fucked up, a lot, committing numerous errors, largely ZDoomisms, and got a lot of shit for it, the criticism was harsh, and at the moment it hurt and deflated my undeserved ego at how pretty my maps looked, but the criticism was incredibly fair, and most importantly very valuable.

I managed to kinda salvage the shit I did wrong, enough that it was workable, and I did following maps better for the project. I learned a lot of what to do and not to do.

 

I feel like I have a good understanding of how to actually map for Doom today, and like I can make a map which doesn't suck.

 

 

Quote

For me, XWE finally dethroned WinTex in terms of usability in 2005/6, though it was way buggier... in 2016 or so, after 10 years (and several file corruptions), I finally had to admit XWE was a great UI but with too many bugs to keep using, realistically. Luckily for me Slade’s UI isn’t vastly different from XWE and it’s far more stable to boot, so that’s what I’ve been using since.

 

God, how did you keep using XWE that long? I switched over to Slade3 when it came on my radar, it's not perfect, in fact there's lots of stupid little inexplicable things it does, but it doesn't just randomly corrupt your files like XWE liked to do if you sneezed too loudly or hurt its feelings.

[Kor]

55 minutes ago, ChopBlock223 said:

Hearing the stories of veteran oldschool mappers, it always painted a picture of clunky and awkward tools I probably couldn't tolerate. 

 

Well, my feeling is that it was all that I knew, so I didn't think too much about how awkward it was.  Of course, now that I have one editor (GZDoom Builder) that handles all my mapping needs, I'd hate to go back to DoomEd, DETH and WadAuthor.  Especially DoomEd.  Damn thing's node builder couldn't handle a map that was more than 2000 linedefs (or maybe it was sidedefs??).  That's why I switched to DETH, it allowed me to do huge levels and I had more control over things.

Edited February 15, 2022 by Kor

[Doomkid]

On 2/10/2022 at 8:25 PM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Just in case your sarcasm detector isn't working today, these people are all joking with you. There weren't any WADS in the 90's. The internet wasn't even invented until 2000. There was no place to share custom maps so people didn't bother figuring out a way to create them. Whenever you come across a map that says it was released before 2000, that's just the author role-playing. Some people just like to imagine what maps would have looked like back then. In reality, only the people who made DOOM had the technology available to create maps. Sorry all these people are having a joke at your expense.

It's been days but this post just made me laugh for the 3rd time, so I officially have to say so!

 

1 hour ago, ChopBlock223 said:

Hearing the stories of veteran oldschool mappers, it always painted a picture of clunky and awkward tools I probably couldn't tolerate.

[...]

I feel like I have a good understanding of how to actually map for Doom today, and like I can make a map which doesn't suck.

[...]

God, how did you keep using XWE that long? I switched over to Slade3 when it came on my radar, it's not perfect, in fact there's lots of stupid little inexplicable things it does, but it doesn't just randomly corrupt your files like XWE liked to do if you sneezed too loudly or hurt its feelings.

Lmao, that's a damn good question. A lot of people continued to prefer WinTex even after XWE came on the scene, and I can't blame them.

 

Over the years of trial and error, I learned exactly what does and does not crash XWE. In the years since it fell off my radar I've naturally forgotten all of that (or rather, would have to use the editor again to remember them and just.. no way).

 

Once I really realized that Slade could do 99.999% of what XWE could do, but also had some other cool features on top, the switch was obvious - but when I first halfheartedly tried an early version of Slade a few years earlier, the fact that images didn't auto-convert when exported and imported turned me off. When I returned years later I realized that I was just a dumbass and that the option to convert lumps before and after import/export was there all along, it just used PNG rather than BMP which doesn't matter at all, really.

[RetroAkaMe]

On 2/9/2022 at 5:04 PM, Fobos said:

How doom wads are made in the 90s doom builder did not exist so what were they made with

There was wad author a bit in the 2000's iirc, and in the 90's, you had DEU. Those are some popular ones.

[Gibbon]

On 2/9/2022 at 5:04 PM, Fobos said:

How doom wads are made in the 90s doom builder did not exist so what were they made with

And you think people in the 90's were cavemen? :P

 

DEU mostly.  Doom Builder is very new, before that was tools like WadAuthor, DeePSea etc...

Edited February 15, 2022 by Gibbon

[ChopBlock223]

19 hours ago, Gibbon said:

And you think people in the 90's were cavemen? :P

Me writing Decorate code in Slade is more or less like I'm banging two rocks together and hoping it works, then when it doesn't, me yelling at the rocks and banging them together harder.

[Gibbon]

3 minutes ago, ChopBlock223 said:

Me writing Decorate code in Slade is more or less like I'm banging two rocks together and hoping it works, then when it doesn't, me yelling at the rocks and banging them together harder.

You're already too much of a pro

[Doomlover77]

@thestarrover  I’ve found some more of my old wads which I’ve made in 2003. They’ve been compressed into one file as below :- 
 

VariousWads.rar

 

Notes !

Test_260503.wad is a Heretic wad. 
Mylevel_190703 is a Hexen wad. 
P_isle00 is a Final Doom Plutonia wad

T_isle00 is a Final Doom TNT wad m31. 

 

However some of these are experimental wads. 
Enjoy ! @Doomlover77  

[pcorf]

On 2/14/2022 at 9:14 PM, CBM said:

Well we had a HORRIBLE map editor than ran in MS-DOS known as EDMAP

 

I can't recall any tools similar to SLADE and dehacked stuff was made with an old dodgy DOS EXE editor called something along the lines of dehacked and it modified the doom exe file directly

 

most of my 90s levels used startan textures, I remastered them once I returned to mapping and found the gem called doom builder

 

pre-historic EDMAP:

 

I also used Edmap a bit, esp v 1.31, came with idbsp I recall. But my main map editors were Doomcad 5.1 and later Doomcad 6.1 when I used Windows 95/98 on the old Intel 200MMX desktop PC which I owned from 1997-2003 and it never missed a beat. For the nodesbuilder I used bsp as the internal node builder was rubbish and caused crashes. The transition to Doom Builder in 2003 was seamless and it was like a vastly improved version of Doomcad in many ways (for example INSERT to add things, draw sectors but you did not have to draw linedefs from vertex to vertex).

[Doomlover77]

Is there any way I can convert Doom2 levels to Hexen as Conv2hex and her2hex won’t run under Windows 7 ? Can it be done in Doom Builder if I load in a Doom2 wad and save it as a Hexen wad ?

[Doomkid]

3 hours ago, Doomlover77 said:

Is there any way I can convert Doom2 levels to Hexen as Conv2hex and her2hex won’t run under Windows 7 ? Can it be done in Doom Builder if I load in a Doom2 wad and save it as a Hexen wad ?

Based on the short filenames, I assume those are DOS programs? If so you should be able to run em in DosBox and get on with the conversion! If they’re 16 bit Win programs, you might need a virtual machine which is more of a PITA..

[Koko Ricky]

I remember using DEEP in the late 90s and getting nowhere with it. There just wasn't a lot of online documentation on mapping back then, and DEEP could only provide a clunky, textureless 3D preview. I gave up pretty quickly as it was just too daunting trying to make anything. Doom Builder and its forks are incredibly intuitive. 

Edited February 28, 2022 by Koko Ricky

[cybdmn]

On 2/10/2022 at 11:29 PM, Doomkid said:

Liar! It was Al Gore.

 

Never ever would Tipper Gore allow Al to invent the internet, which was obviously was invented to spread porn. No way!

[Apprentice]

On 2/9/2022 at 5:04 PM, Fobos said:

How doom wads are made in the 90s doom builder did not exist so what were they made with

DEU and especially the 5.21 GCC version. It still is my preferred editor although I'm using DETH and ZETH, anything just to have that old DEU look and feel. I still have it in my fingers, even after two decades . . .

[Nikku4211]

On 2/14/2022 at 4:35 AM, Maes said:

It's interesting how no Doom editor before Doom Builder got that mythical "3D Preview" mode really going, or at least well-implemented enough to really make a difference and save you from the chore of having to visually verify texture alignment etc. in-game. It was a feature that was forever teased in DEU's (never released) successor, DEU 2 since 1994 at least, but AFAIK never really made it into any editor before Doom Builder, at least not in an equally usable form.

 

What's wrong with DeePsea's R3DEdit?

 

Other than the fact that the DeePsea editor itself was shareware with linedef and sidedef limits for so long.

[Murdoch]

On 2/25/2022 at 9:30 AM, Doomlover77 said:

Is there any way I can convert Doom2 levels to Hexen as Conv2hex and her2hex won’t run under Windows 7 ? Can it be done in Doom Builder if I load in a Doom2 wad and save it as a Hexen wad ?

 

It really is not that simple. Doom 2 and Hexen textures are completely different and have different names. Additionally, while there may be some common ground between some of sector and linedef effects (I have never edited Hexen maps so can't say) there will also be a lot that's not the same. So things as simple as an elevator or switch may simply not work.

[Redneckerz]

9 hours ago, Nikku4211 said:

 

What's wrong with DeePsea's R3DEdit?

DeeP.

Spoiler

The user.

 

[Frost-Core]

They used a tool called allyourbasearebelongtousv1s.exe the s is for shareware, here is the syntax :

> allyourbasearebelongtousv1s.exe -makemeepicandcoolwad -dontcorruptdoomelseiwillkillyou -date beforesourcecodereleasepleasedontsueme

[Doomlover77]

Does anyone know where I can get a doom2 to heretic / Hexen converter for windows if one exists ? Thank you. @Doomlover77