"Lost civilization" pre-release. Feedback would be nice :)

[Jaska]

I'm now releasing all of my finished maps from my Boom-compatible project for feedback.

Download link:

Updated (Hope all of the bugs fixed now):

https://files.fm/u/f3rrbyyk

 

Doom2.wad needed. Especially i'd like feedback from difficulty and gameplay. Maybe these are too easy for all you doom-veterans? Maybe puzzle-part is boring? Too long maps? Stupid monster placement? Too little monsters?

Now I have 6 maps finished. Aim is something like 20 map megawad and get all of my current ideas out off my head :)

map01: Mountain pass
Will be my best map for long time. How many routes do you find in here? I would predict many will like playing this kind of maps. If not gameplaywise but the because of the nonlinearity and natural environment.

map02: The secret city
Hope you won't get bored in this one. There is a puzzle here.

map03: Fort
Straightforward blasting.

map04: Prison
Maybe a bit harder map.

map05: Laboratory
I like this. Get your chaingun and keep the fire button pressed! Or blast everything into pieces with a rocket launcher!

map06 Downtown
An open map. Find all keys and exit. It was very difficult to get any sense gameplaywise.

map07
The largest map. Very many different paths to go. Quite difficult on UV for me at least.

Screenshots:

Map01

Here it begins!

View towards bridges

Map02

Start

Exit

Map03

Exiting the cave

View from a secret area.

Map04

Inside the prison.

Outdoor area.

Map05

Item teleporter and just a decorative suits.

Mancubi area.

Map06
Starting point.

It's child's play.

Inside a building.

Inside factory.

Map07

Outside a mansion.

Will u wake up cacodemon?

Fighting for a snack. Or a drink? Every mansion has to have a kitchen?

And a dining room.

And lots of more!

Oncoming maps:

map?? Suburb
map?? Hidden castle
map?? The pyramids
map?? Towers
map?? River valley

Some gameplay ideas and some single rooms ready also. 12 old maps. I'm thinking if any of those will be suitable in this project.

So this is Boom-compatible. I used a lot of silent teleporters to get the 3D-feeling. I'm a little proud how those work in the factory on downtown map. And that one apartment building too maybe.

I've used a lot of lightsources so gzdoom is recommended for best visuals. Some places can be quite dark otherwise. Maybe I should add sector lights also to all lamps etc. Some have now already but I got lazy.
Difficulty settings implemented: yes but only tested on UV.
Coop starts. Also more monsters on multiplayer. Not yet properly done yet.
Tested: GZDoom, Zdoom, ran through with prboom-plus-2.5.1.4

Story:
You have landed in a planet habitated by long lost human sivilization.

But what the hell is going on here? You begin a mysterious journey to solve what has happened this sivilization.

There will be hidden cities, mysterious structures, horrifying prisons but also nice looking environment.

Edited April 2, 2017 by Jaska
Link, again

[baja blast rd.]

Shots look excellent. Would recommend tidying up the title and using a cleaner hosting site, like Dropbox.

 

It doesn't run in prBoom+, by the way; I'm getting an error message of "MID_ZAP3" not found. It might be a mistake with merging the maps and your resource wad.  

 

 

[Veinen]

The file-hosting site seemed pretty legit to me, certainly much better than pretty much anything other than dropbox. I hope you didn't view it in Finnish only rdwpa since that's bound to confuse the hell out of anyone. Also got the same error message in prboom 2.5.1.3 but played the first two maps in gzdoom.

 

All I can is that hot damn that is some impressive amount of detailing! You've done an excellent job making the environments look very realistic and lifelike. Absolutely loving the adventurous feel in the first few maps and didn't mind the low difficulty one bit. So yeah, enjoying the hell out of this so far, hopefully the rest of the maps keep delivering as well.

 

Spotted some bugs in map02: sectors 120 and 2033, which are slices of sand on the river banks, are flowing downstream with the river. Missing backside textures (at least) on linedefs 7284, 7286, 7288 and 7290. Edit: those missing textures might not ok actually, I just drag&dropped the wad to gzdoom so it could be a complevel thing on my part. At least the spot looks fine in one of your screenshots.

 

Edit: Alright, I just finished the whole thing and this wad is absolutely wonderful. The attention to detail in this is ridiculous and everything is done in such an elegant manner that there's nothing that feel's too much or out of place. A great example are those two switches in map04, which upon pressing have a neat visible effect on the "screen" in front of the switches. Overall this has to be one the best interpretations of realistic level design I have ever seen in a Doom wad. Difficulty got a bit higher later on but the adventurous feel prevailed, which was a great imo.

 

The only thing I have to criticize is that did you really use the same music track for all maps?

 

That aside; amazing work. Seems like award-winning material to me although I'm not one to decide those things.

Edited March 17, 2017 by Veinen

[Jaska]

9 hours ago, rdwpa said:

Shots look excellent. Would recommend tidying up the title and using a cleaner hosting site, like Dropbox.

 

It doesn't run in prBoom+, by the way; I'm getting an error message of "MID_ZAP3" not found. It might be a mistake with merging the maps and your resource wad.  

 

 

Slade's "remove unused textures" got rid of all animated textures.. I've had tons of problems merging my resources! I'm fixing them now.

[Jaska]

Veinen

 

Thank you for feedback!

 

I changed filesharing sites language to English. I updated the filelinks also. Now I just deleted "animated" to get rid of prboom error. I'll fix it later when I figure out how. This day I won't have too much time to do it.

 

I'll ramp up the difficulty on future releases.

 

Oh the music was just copy/pasted because I test without music. I have some music options in my mind but no time now tho change that.

 

[DoomKnight1984]

Environments look nice and detailed. Will try it one of these days.

 

By the way, it's "Civilization." Sorry for the grammar-nazi tendency.

[Jaska]

57 minutes ago, DoomKnight1984 said:

Environments look nice and detailed. Will try it one of these days.

 

By the way, it's "Civilization." Sorry for the grammar-nazi tendency.

Heh, no problem. I can't undestand how I was so careless. Embarrassing start anyway, so many stupid mistakes.

[Walter confetti]

This looks awesome!

[omegamer]

An hour ago I played trough map 1-4, the little details in the map designs are very cool and creative, Go on with this!

[Officer D]

Pretty good. I had a few missing textures and found a few bugs and glitches that might need some work. Might of been because of my source port and mod setup.

 

Source Port : GZDoom 2.3pre-343-g49605bc

PWAD's :

• d4d.pk3
• dark_doom_lite.pk3
• sb_all.pk3
• DoomTerrains.wad
• contrast3.wad
• beamflashlight.pk3
• brightmapsdoom2.pk3
• hqdynlights.pk3
• fog_effects.pk3

VOD : https://www.twitch.tv/videos/129563000

 

Edit :

In-case the Twitch VOD has buffering issues, here is the YouTube version of it.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited March 19, 2017 by Officer D

[Houndoom]

Those screenshots look gorgeous.

[Rangar]

Does this have custom music?

Edited March 18, 2017 by Rangar

[NecrumWarrior]

Aw, I liked the old name. It had character. 

 

I've only played a little bit on uv.i might have to play on a lower difficulty cuz I'm struggling. It's very pretty, though! Very good job with the details. I wish I had the patience to make stuff like this. 

[doom5962]

Hi,

 

These several maps, artwork, ... wads completely amazing. Extremely highly nice maps.

 

My favorite is the level map 06.

 

Thank you

em2-city.zip

[DoomKnight1984]

Finally played until Map 06, pretty fun especially when I added LegenDoom to it.

[DAZZER]

I played through the first 2 Maps in 25 Minutes with Prboom and it was amazing ! :)

 

These Maps shows me again that island Maps work perfectly in doom ! But very hard to make I think...

Great atmosphere and textures. This City within the rock in Map 2 was awesome ! I loved the Monster and Item Placement and I cant wait to play more when i have the time :)

 

I found a bug in Map 02:

 

You can slide out of map through this gap ^^

 

 

[Suitepee]

Well since this was was bizarrely included with Doom5962's 1-map wad on their thread (I mistook this wad to be Doom5962's creation...), and seemed to be a slightly different version to boot, I will soon be playing the correct version on stream in the near future. The 4 maps that I did play through from the other version indicated a lot of good detailing, but I look forward to playing the actual version of this wad.

[Suitepee]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/130728030 = part 1 of my playthrough.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/130728649 = part 2 of my playthrough. (the first 40 minutes of this one, then I playtest other stuff)

 

Overall I was impressed with this wad. The detailing throughout was great, bar the missing textures and two awkward midtexture spots on map 2.

 

Gameplay was also good for the most part; I still feel that map 2's "reveal" of the secret city needed a more impactful fight, and I wasn't too happy with the Revenants on the cliffs in map 7, but otherwise the fights were fun.

 

To be honest I'm not sure if this needs 20 maps; it might be suited to perhaps just have 1 or 2 more maps atop the stuff already out there. But I'd happily recommend this wad to other people.

 

EDIT: And please fix the music bug that loops the same track throughout the whole wad. Musical variety is always appreciated.

Edited March 24, 2017 by Suitepee

[Dedalus 80]

Congratulations!
- VERY VERY beautiful and detailed environments and interiors. They are inspiring, memorable and have a lot of personality. Pro level stuff!
- Enjoyable gameplay
Cons:
- the maps are too big. It doesn't seems to me the doom creatures and gameplay are suitable to this kind of scenarios. Maybe this kind of levels are better managed as hexen-like hubs? You can reduce the cpu/gpu resources and give more value and more detail to the sublevels.
- the environments have a LOT of personality so they screams for custom enemies (yeah I know... it's a ton of work... virtually unachievable) and music.
So finally i think the environments should be used for a total conversion.

[Jaska]

I finally had patience to search and fix all (hopefully) of the bugs.

https://fi.files.fm/u/f3rrbyyk

 

Thanks very much for feedback and videos!

 

I added more monsters on some maps and took some ammo away. I'm also thinking if I'll change map2 someway to be more easy to find bridges switches. I have to consider other feedback as well.

[NecrumWarrior]

I decided to give this one another shot as you have updated it since I last played, and the HMP is definitely toned down a lot which I appreciate. Since you say you haven't tested difficulties beyond UV, here's a demo of the first level and part of the second. I would record more but I gotta go to work. Recorded in QZDoom with Boom (Strict) Compatibility settings.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6h3lxsjawc1wqd9/LostCiv_Necrum_1.lmp?dl=0

I did find a problem in Lost City.

I friggin love these maps, man! You are awesome! I can't wait to see the other ones you're working on and get further into the set.

[Jaska]

Thanks for the feedback and demo NecrumWarrior! Fixed the bug on map02. Not yet to the mappack. Changing other things too. Adding medkits to map02 on HMP etc. Balancing is very difficult. These maps tend to get too large too. It makes balancing even more difficult.

 

But as for map02 it is kind of hard to cut it into smaller pieces.. Maybe if I get rid of the bridge thingie and underground part...

[Jaska]

I'll thank again for the feedback but I'd like to know more what I should change. I will delete the bridge "puzzle" from map02 at least. So you'll rise the bridge when you find all keys. Not have to hunt those switches.

[Jaska]

Maybe switch to UDMF format and add NPC:s and stuff like that and make more adventure feel? Then I would be forced to add slopes and redesign everything...

[Demon of the Well]

8 hours ago, Jaska said:

Maybe switch to UDMF format and add NPC:s and stuff like that and make more adventure feel? Then I would be forced to add slopes and redesign everything...

Maybe not my place to say since I haven't really commented on this before, but I reckon if you want to make something more Strife/Hexen-esque and with lots of more advanced port features it's probably better to start over from square one with new material (or at least with maps for this project you're only in the early stages of creating) than to try to staple all of that on top of something you initially designed to be a more or less straightforward/classic Doom experience--I think you'll find that the new stuff will likely feel forced.

[Leonard]

Hello.

I'm a big fan of your maps. I have played pretty much all of them and I loved every single one of them (not just this wad).

On 29/04/2017 at 1:41 PM, Jaska said:

Maybe switch to UDMF format and add NPC:s and stuff like that and make more adventure feel? Then I would be forced to add slopes and redesign everything...

In my opinion you should definitely keep the Boom compatibility.

If you were to add new enemies, weapons, etc.. that would definitely turn me down.

I have always enjoyed the vanilla gameplay.

[everennui]

The whole slopes thing is a joke. You can use UDMF however you want. If you want slopes, fine. It's as easy as adjusting a number field. With the amount of detail and pride that you put in to your maps, I think you'd benefit from the simplicity and possibilities of UDMF, that the average player (read: not skilled UDMF mapper) is completely oblivious to. The environmental options you can include really are a cherry on top.

 

To create a switch with a lock. Boom: dummy sectors, Linedefs, tags, voodoo dolls. UDMF: choose that option from a drop down box. There are many examples where using UDMF over Boom will save you a lot of time. A 1994 map in UDMF is completely valid to me and I think people should lighten up about it.

 

That's just my two cents. 

 

I think I'll stream this set tonight on Twitch. It looks really great.

[NaturalTvventy]

This is a great set of maps. I'm up to level 4 maybe and am having a blast. Quality.

[NinjaLiquidator]

This looks like cool and high-effort stuff. Every map is different. All those custom textures, unusual themes and non-Doom shapes remind me on Eternal's maps. Which is cool, cause Eternal is not mapping anymore so we got a replacement. Will definitely play this!