MAP24 (The Chasm) Rework

[ApprihensivSoul]

In spirit of my other reworks of times yon past, I decided to give a whirl to this one. Most of the differences are better felt than looked at, but I have a few screenshots just in case. Mostly I fleshed out the lighting/atmosphere (though I tried to restrict myself to what was likely at the time) and fights, though I very slightly increased the width of the walkways, though in some cases possibly not enough to notice. Realistically, some people are just not going to like this level because of which level it is, which is totally fair. I definitely made every effort to not remove it's identifying nature, and made no changes to layout. But I thought I'd toss it up here just in case some people liked it enough to switch it out in their normal Doom 2 rotation. 

All in all, I really like Sandy's ideas, and wish he had more time to work on them. I hope this feels a little more like he had pulled it off.
It works fine in Nugget (my test), no idea what other ports it should work in.

 

Download link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18xbgsC5NSMv0a1jWyS5PLz7qAhqDY79u/view?usp=sharing

 

Spoiler

 

[LadyMistDragon]

 

[Bri0che]

MAP24 is OBVIOUSLY the best DOOMII map with Tricks and Traps. Sure I'll play this :)

[SleepyVelvet]

 

Already my favorite map of the year so far an I haven't even beat it yet:

FDA: noisy_MAP24.zip

[Oxyde]

What a level I must say.

 

While I don't know the original level well enough, this felt refreshing. The extra archviles here and there surely add to the mix. Here's my FDA for this;

 

One thing I will suggest though is to avoid using blocking decorations on the ceiling, especially if those are so high up that you don't see them and question why you are blocked. This happened to me a few times in this level.

Also, a lot of ghost monsters on this map! Barely made it alive!

[KevvyLava]

This is great!  Just a little too punishing for me.  I think there are too many Hell Knights and Demons.  But maybe the collective group on here is better at this than I.  Extremely well adjusted map, though, really cool stuff.

[Zesiir]

Bit of an unpopular opinion perhaps, but I like The Chasm. It's got a calm, atmospheric vibe to it and part from the tightrope-walking on those ledges it flows pretty well.

 

This felt like a nice homage to that. Good level design setpieces to make it seem a bit more logical with caverns and hellish influences. Quite hard though, with many tough encounters I wasn't expecting. Some of which were improvements. Perhaps a tad Archvile heavy for my tastes.

 

Works fine in GZDoom.

Edited February 26 by Zesiir

[ApprihensivSoul]

On 2/25/2024 at 10:06 AM, Oxyde said:

 

One thing I will suggest though is to avoid using blocking decorations on the ceiling, especially if those are so high up that you don't see them and question why you are blocked. This happened to me a few times in this level.

Also, a lot of ghost monsters on this map! Barely made it alive!

 

No lie, I genuinely didn't think of that, because I always play with blocking turned off. Where are the Ghost monsters getting created? I might have to look into that, it was certainly not intentional.

 

@Zesiir: Never enough Archviles. XD. I had to reign myself in honestly.

Edited February 26 by ApprihensivSoul

[Oxyde]

14 hours ago, ApprihensivSoul said:

 

No lie, I genuinely didn't think of that, because I always play with blocking turned off. Where are the Ghost monsters getting created? I might have to look into that, it was certainly not intentional.

 

@Zesiir: Never enough Archviles. XD. I had to reign myself in honestly.

Ghost monsters are a product of the engine and nothing you could do to prevent this from happening. In short, when an actor dies, they leave a corpse on the ground. When the corpse is crushed by any hazard (a closing door, a crushing floor/ceiling, or in the case in this map, a raising lift), it turns into a pool of blood. This changes the properties of the corpse to match those of the pool of blood, but the engine remembers it's actually a dead monster. So when the Archvile resurrects said pool of blood, the monster retains the properties of the pool of blood. The monster become intangible and can only be harmed by blast damage (rockets are the best tool to dispose of such monsters).

 

In your specific case, you could either;

- Make the floor a permanent move, resulting in the Archvile beingfreely able to move around and preventing corpses getting crushed.

- Remove the Archvile altogether, or have it teleport in the center of the room instead.