How did people map in the 90s

[Lonespacemarine]

Like really, how did they ?. I was very curious about this

[129thVisplane]

i wasn't there for it, but i presume DEU was the way to go back then. just looking at it i am so glad we got doombuilder later down the line

[Chris Hansen]

This topic has been discussed before in length, so try searching for those threads.

 

But I will say this, that it was a tiresome and slow process with buggy editors on slow computers. Everything crashed all the time and you had no useful 3D preview. It required a lot of patience.

 

@Doomkid made a video where he tries to use some of the old editors. It will give you a good idea how it was for us back then.

 

 

Edited July 9, 2023 by Chris Hansen

[Kor]

I used DoomEd, starting at the end of 1995, which came on a shovelware CD (D!Zone). The version was pretty early, and it kept finding problems with my maps that I didn't know how to fix and didn't even know I was making. Then we got another shovelware CD, which came with a thick book on Doom editing (Tricks of the Doom Gurus) and it came with a later version of DoomEd. With that, I was able to make levels with out that problem showing up. Over the years, as my eiditing skills advanced, I came to see DoomEd as limited in what it could do, so I switched to DETH (Doom Editor for Total Headcases) in like 97. It was a lot more complicated, but it gave me a lot more control. But as Chris Hansen said, no editors had the 3d editing feature. Hell, the first version of DoomEd I used didn't even let you see what the textures you were selecting in the sidedef editing window looked like. You had to see what the textures looked like in another part of the program, and then remember their names.

 

Other editors were DCK (Doom Construction Kit), DEU (Doom Editing Utility) EdMap, WadEd (which I used one time), WadAuthor. Most of these editors were for DOS. WadAuthor and DoomEd were for Windows.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Kor

[joepallai]

I used WadAuthor from the 3d Alchemy book.   

[Chris Hansen]

55 minutes ago, Kor said:

Hell, the first version of DoomEd I used didn't even let you see what the textures you were selecting in the sidedef editing window looked like. You had to see what the textures looked like in another part of the program, and then remember their names.

Yeah, guesswork and imagination was a huge part of the design phase! I used DoomCAD 6.1 and you had to build structures by placing vertices and then connecting them with lines afterwards to form sectors. That meant we had to imagine and internally visualize our structures and lighting and then build them this way in 2D.

 

(screenshot of DoomCAD courtesy of Doomwiki).

 

I know it doesn't say much and in 2023 this image isn't all that cool, but building this in 1998 with DoomCAD was a chore and it took a lot of time. Especially, as we already mentioned, you'd probably have to involuntarily go through multiple iterations of a room like that because you'd probably suffer at least 5 crashes in either DoomCAD, the nodebuilder or Windows itself! :D

 

[Lonespacemarine]

 

6 hours ago, Chris Hansen said:

This topic has been discussed before in length, so try searching for those threads.

 

But I will say this, that it was a tiresome and slow process with buggy editors on slow computers. Everything crashed all the time and you had no useful 3D preview. It required a lot of patience.

 

@Doomkid made a video where he tries to use some of the old editors. It will give you a good idea how it was for us back then.

 

 

I see, I find doombuilder hard, I can't even imagine mapping back in the 90s

[Kor]

1 hour ago, Chris Hansen said:

Yeah, guesswork and imagination was a huge part of the design phase! I used DoomCAD 6.1 and you had to build structures by placing vertices and then connecting them with lines afterwards to form sectors. That meant we had to imagine and internally visualize our structures and lighting and then build them this way in 2D.

 

(screenshot of DoomCAD courtesy of Doomwiki).

 

I know it doesn't say much and in 2023 this image isn't all that cool, but building this in 1998 with DoomCAD was a chore and it took a lot of time. Especially, as we already mentioned, you'd probably have to involuntarily go through multiple iterations of a room like that because you'd probably suffer at least 5 crashes in either DoomCAD, the nodebuilder or Windows itself! :D

 

 

Yeah, that's how DETH worked. Insert the vertices, then linedefs, then a sector. I think it had a way to automatically make sectors with a certain shape, but first inserting the vertices in the shape you wanted was the primary way to do it. It was tedious at first, but I got used to it and eventually made just about all new sectors that way. The first reason I switched to it because DoomEd, even the later version, didn't like it when a level got too big and would assign an unknown texture to one of the sidedefs, thus causing Doom to crash upon loading the level. That's why most of the maps in the first Invasion are small, compared to what a lot are in Invasion 2.

 

I don't recall having a lot of problems with editors crashing, though on a couple of occasions my wad file would get completely screwed up and I"d lose a ton of work. One time a wad file containing six or seven maps got corrupted by DoomEd, and I lost months of work. After that I learned the importance of making each wad file have only one map, and then combine them into a new wad file when finished. I also did a Heretic level once that got screwed up and I couldn't even open it in an editor anymore.

 

And building nodes on a map. I remember how long that could take if the level was big. Now Doombuilder does it in like a second.

 

These kids today, they don't know how easy they have it. :D

Edited July 9, 2023 by Kor

[Use]

Very slowly. Times sure have changed! :P

[Jayextee]

The version of WadEd I used in the '90s (barely, it was about 1999 when I got started) didn't crash at all, if I only ever saved in THINGS mode and checked for weird 0-length lines and duplicate vertices on right-angle corners and, etc, etc

Gonna echo the sentiments about a lack of 3D preview, which made things much more difficult than you'd expect -- a lot of my early maps were ridiculously-cramped affairs due to not being able to adequately imagine the scale of any given area; compounded even more by WadEd's 'thing' sprites not showing their ingame size at all.

 

Basically, from my limited (but I'd argue, not insubstantial) experience with it; '90s mapping was largely shooting in the dark, or excessive (but time-consuming, given the nodebuilding times on old computers) testing to ensure that every last little sector was made perfectly.

 

And yet we did it, out of love.

[xdude_gamer]

A lot of people seemed to have used DEU, DETH, and WadEd. A few used WadAuthor, though usually a DOS-based editor was the way to go for a considerable part of the 1990s, iirc. Which makes it all the more surprising as to how we got such good looking WADs as GothicDM, Memento Mori, 99 Ways to Die, etc.

[Herr Dethnout]

It was a slow, painful and tedious process.

 

I tried to use old dos editors through a Linux distro with Dosbox (DEU ad DETH), and man I wasn't able to do a single line... A FUCKIN LINE!!!!

 

Later after installing Win 3.1 in Dosbox, tried using Wadautor, and was a lot easier, but you can't draw sectors, it has a selection of pre-made shape sectors, and you edit it to get the shape that you want.

 

In fact, on my first map I used Wadauthor initially before switching to Doom Builder 2 (were I was more confortable).

 

But all of this give me a lot of respect to 90's mappers. Even if his work wasn't good, I know that at least a not small amount of effort and time was put on it.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Herr Dethnout

[Amiga Angel]

I used edmap in dos and it was horrific to put it mildly... what a nightmare

[Captain Ventris]

I remember messing around in the free trial of DeepSea when I was young and messing around with Chex Quest!

[FecalMystAche]

It’s funny how most modern Doom editors have 3D view but back in the 90s it was BUILD that had that and in my opinion it was far easier to map for Duke 3D than for Doom at the time. Now the BUILD editor such as Mapster32 is mostly the same as it was in the 90s which turns a lot of people off but it was familiar enough for me to get back into it. Doombuilder and its forks, as well as some of the other more modern editors have made a big difference in designing Doom maps for sure, even if it took me learning a new utility that was a lot different from DEU vs the natural progression I had with BUILD to Mapster32.

Edited July 9, 2023 by FecalMystAche

[Lonespacemarine]

Damn

[Firedust]

they had to break into the pentagon to run their doom editor with non-potato performance

 

due to the small window they had before getting detected and potentially facing jailtime, the gameplay and visuals were far from top notch

[ginc]

I used DEU in 94 and 95, mainly because booting into Windows 3.1 took a while and using a DOS-based editor let you test changes to your maps much more quickly.

 

There's a reason most maps from that era were simple: you needed to test your maps often because there was no 3d visualization (and non-standard texture alignments were a bit of trial and error if you didn't have a lot of mapping experience), and running the BSP compiler took a while on 486 computers.

 

I would imagine that Windows 95 was probably a game-changer for Doom editing (and having computers with more than 4MB of RAM), but I had stopped playing Doom by that point.

Edited July 9, 2023 by ginc