Old map editors

[Somniac]

(Mods please move to Editing subforum if appropriate)

 

I'm somewhat morbidly fascinated by vintage Doom editors. @Doomkid has a really interesting video of attempting to use these archaic pieces of software, which mostly didn't work. Would love to see a follow up!

 

I first had a go at mapping in the late 90s/early 2000s and never got much further than a room. I may have used DoomCAD, but I can't remember. For me as a kid, just making my own room with default textures felt like a huge deal. Obviously nowadays we're blessed with editors like Ultimate Doom Builder which make things so much more easy and intuitive once you get to grips with it. But it does make me wonder...if I had no 3D mode, auto texture alignment and everything else, how far would I really get?

 

How people made amazing maps in the old days is a bit beyond me, where DB basically gives you everything on a silver platter, and says "there you go!"...and yet many of my favourite maps would have been made on them.

 

Does anyone out there still use really ancient editors somehow? I'd like to see a community project where everyone has to make a map using an obsolete editor, within a time constraint...that is, if they can get anything to work! 

 

Is less more, or is it not enough anymore? 

[MFG38]

11 hours ago, VisionThing said:

I'd like to see a community project where everyone has to make a map using an obsolete editor

 

I love my UDB too much to even think about hosting that.

 

On a more serious note, it is interesting to think about what people had to work with back in the day. As someone who's used to doing a lot of his editing in 3D mode, the thought about having to work without that intimidates me the most. The manual texture aligning not so much - it's mostly a matter of doing some simple math. I actually downloaded a bunch of old map editors from /idgames once but never got around to trying any of them out.

[Redneckerz]

11 hours ago, VisionThing said:

(Mods please move to Editing subforum if appropriate)

 

I'm somewhat morbidly fascinated by vintage Doom editors. @Doomkid has a really interesting video of attempting to use these archaic pieces of software, which mostly didn't work. Would love to see a follow up!

 

I first had a go at mapping in the late 90s/early 2000s and never got much further than a room. I may have used DoomCAD, but I can't remember. For me as a kid, just making my own room with default textures felt like a huge deal. Obviously nowadays we're blessed with editors like Ultimate Doom Builder which make things so much more easy and intuitive once you get to grips with it. But it does make me wonder...if I had no 3D mode, auto texture alignment and everything else, how far would I really get?

 

How people made amazing maps in the old days is a bit beyond me, where DB basically gives you everything on a silver platter, and says "there you go!"...and yet many of my favourite maps would have been made on them.

 

Does anyone out there still use really ancient editors somehow? I'd like to see a community project where everyone has to make a map using an obsolete editor, within a time constraint...that is, if they can get anything to work! 

 

Is less more, or is it not enough anymore? 

Our lord and savior monkey @Gibbon did an update of DETH. So its technically not DETH.

 

Get it? Not DETH...

 

Spoiler

For more high quality jokes please subscribe to my page kthxplox

 

[hobomaster22]

I haven't touched a map since 2019 but I still use Deepsea like a crusty old doomer. This is hardly a handicap for me. I used it to make Pinnacle of Darkness released in 2015 and Pyrrhic in 2017. In the early 2000s I remember trying other editors and they felt especially crippling in comparison. Deepsea for the time was really full featured. It would auto align textures but you had to select the linedefs. There was a way to do 3D mode through Risen3D but I never felt the need to set it up. It also included built in wad editing which was great. I have the controls ingrained and the way it feels is very fluid and nice for me. I don't map enough to have an incentive to switch to something like UDB. The nice thing is it still functions on Windows 10 and since it's effectively the same since the early 2000s it doesn't have resource usage creep and only uses 4-10MB of memory. This is stupid low by today's standards, but I remember my first PC with Windows 98 with 64MB of ram. A lot of my early 2000s development was done on an upgraded machine running a Pentium 3 with 128MB of ram running Windows 2000.

 

I got really interested in Doom mapping right before Doom Builder was released. If I had started maybe one year later I likely would have ended up on Doom Builder. Interesting to think about how that may have changed my releases and style since Doom Builder has a very different feel.

[ducon]

I remember yadex (yet another doom editor for Xwindow).

I really loved it but it’s not maintained anymore, and it’s not in Debian anymore too.

[Doomlover77]

I have used DEU2, DeeP, Dck and Dmapedit for DOS from 1995-2004 to make Doom, Doom2, heretic and Hexen levels and from 2005 to the present day I switched to Doom Builder 1.64 for Windows. @Doomlover77  

[Remilia Scarlet]

13 hours ago, VisionThing said:

Does anyone out there still use really ancient editors somehow?

I started with DEU (well, "ADE", which was just DEU for Doom 2) and stuck with it until the first Doom Builder came out.  No 3D mode was definitely difficult, but not impossible.  You mostly just had to keep a few extra numbers in your head, and exercise your brain to visualize what you're doing.  Aside from a small number of maps in E3, and a very small number of fixes to get it ready for release, my megawad Kill was done mostly in a modified build of DEU (and almost entirely in DOS since I started it that long ago).

 

But these days I've gone halfway back, and I now use a slightly customized Eureka most of the time.  Eureka is based on the Yadex code, iirc, so it's actually a descendant of DEU.  But has a lot of nice touches added to it so that it feels somewhat modern.  And its 3d mode definitely helps.  So while it doesn't feel too much like DEU, it does some.  It's still a "DEU-based Editor" in my mind.

 

So..... I guess I kinda do?  I did Freaky Panties V entirely in Eureka on Linux, and it seems to have turned out OK.  In fact I've kinda come to prefer some of its tools ^_^;

[Kor]

Last old-time map editor I used was ZETH.  But in 2004, I got a new computer and running DOS editors from the command prompt became troublesome.  So I said fuck it and became slowly became accustomed to Doom Builder, which was new at the time.  Since then I have no desire to go back.  And from the video of Doomkid's it doesn't seem I'd be able to.

Edited June 13, 2022 by Kor