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By popular request, all of my songs from Back to Saturn X episodes 1 and 2 are now finally on BandCamp! Yours for free or for any price of your choosing :)

Some minor detailing work on my first Quake level. I'm still getting used to these light settings.

The Inquisitor 3 by "Shadowman", "BigMemka", and "Guest"

Har har. I win.

I was originally going to post this in a recent thread that basically revolved around the idea that the (mapping) community is actively hostile to new ideas and new mappers, as predicated on some series of events I've not investigated in any real depth where a certain mapper's efforts were barred from a community project for essentially refusing/failing to abide by the project's ground rules. Included was a layout shot of the map itself, which some cursory investigation showed to be essentially a disjointed collection of mostly dissociated rooms and ideas slathered in a motley mix of ZDoom features--a pretty ordinary newbie map of the 'fingerpaint collage' style, in other words, something we've all seen before. As I was writing this, the thread rapidly descended into the worst sort of Internet Melodrama (which was presumably the OP's intent from the get-go), and it seemed somewhat foolish to me to dignify it with a direct response, but I still want to post it somewhere anyway, in the off chance that a new mapper might chance upon it and find a little food for thought. I've edited it to be more general in thrust, but some specific references to the original thread/OP are still there, which surely introduces some awkwardness in parsing, and my posting this here instead of there will perhaps be seen as needlessly cowardly or passive-aggressive by the reader of a certain social predisposition, but I suppose I can live with that. ********* I've been playing the game more or less actively for as long as it has existed, and I've seen many a design trope or philosophy rise and fall, and in many cases rise and fall again. I suspect I'll see some of them rise and fall a third, fourth, even a fifth time, if I keep watching for long enough. While the play/design styles between some of these forms are as different as day is from night, they've all proved to have lasting appeal for some significant subsection(s) of the community because they learned from, built upon, or honed in on something that people liked about the base game or from one of the WADs/mods that came before, while de-emphasizing or even entirely discarding other aspects of the game of less present interest to the creator. There is no rational or justifiable reason to view learning from what has come before as a necessarily toxic or self-limiting approach to creating, and the implication that the 'established' community at large really only "wants one thing" as a result of some slavish devotion to convention is, at best--and this is me being artificially civil, here--willfully ignorant at best. Lately, for instance, I've been watching one of the community's members stream (on Twitch) the creation of a painstakingly detailed, balls-hard but entirely monster-free puzzle map. This is a map that will--quite understandably!--likely appeal to only a fairly niche audience, but I can almost guarantee you most onlookers will be able to appreciate and respect the level of craft and thought involved in the creation of such a whimsical and idiosyncratic thing, even if it's not the sort of thing everyone might actually enjoy playing in their leisure time. I can also almost guarantee you the map will be remembered a few years down the road, something predicated not only on it being what it is, but also on it functioning correctly and at least reasonably intuitively for what it is, which, again, is a state of affairs largely built on drawing from established wisdom and experience (selectively interpreted, of course!). Certain extreme cases aside, most appeals or references to established practice, particularly those between fellow creators working alongside one another on this or that project, are not used as blunt instruments to stamp out creativity or new ideas, but as whetstones to hone them into the best they can be. I've seen the map screenshotted as a layout in the OP before. I've played it. I first played it in early 1995 or so, when I got my first shovelware CD. I've played it hundreds of times since then, and I'll probably play it many more times in many more iterations before I'm through. I've seen it rendered in a form that will run in the original distro version of the original executable, and I've seen it buried under a veritable mountain of advanced engine features, requiring bleeding-edge SVN builds of modern sourceports to load and launch (I hesitate to say "to function"). It's not without value or potential! I've seen it provide interesting ideas and memorable vignettes that I'm thankful I got to experience. More often than not, I've seen it take the form of a mechanically dysfunctional, effectively and occasionally quite literally unplayable mess, which in the worst cases reads like a tragedy because you can still occasionally see flashes of the cool ideas crushed under the weight of the sundry failures in mechanics and implementation and basic usability design, like a mangled hand poking out of the rubble left in the wake of some natural disaster, weakly grasping at the air. Happily, there have been occasions where I've seen it nurtured, refined, and ultimately built into something worthy of a visit by everyone, giving the cool, sometimes quirky ideas within a chance to shine and get some of the appreciation they deserve. More often than not, though, I've seen them rot on the vine, sacrificed at the altar of wounded pride. I've also seen the Grand Prophesy declared in the OP (** essentially the idea that the community is doomed by being shackled to convention, though basically phrased as "the meek shall inherit the earth and cast down the Tyrants") spoken many, many times before. Not once in over two decades has it ever been vindicated, which, if we take a little flick of Occam's razor, is likely because no one really wants it to be--newcomer or old hand alike. Something to be thankful for, yes?

I really love this community. Everyone has been so kind and welcoming since I joined last month. It makes me feel so included. Such nice people.

Some silly first map tries here(maybe it will make someone better about their skills):

Spinoff conversion idea: The earth citizens that fled from the planet in Doom 2 made a settlement in a meteorite named MTD 360 NS 2. Tens of years passed, the settlement getting bigger 3. Scientists discovered a virus that can corrupt the human mind and he tested it by injected himself with it. he injected the government officials with said virus so they too can become corrupted. 4. A foul mouth, one liner jerk teenage girl noticed the government acting weird by funding the science team a spaceship back to Earth that might still infested with demons. Decide to investigate. 5. That girl messed up, got sentenced by imprisonment. Got injected just to know that the virus not affecting her, but makes her somehow smarter and stronger. 666. Girl decides to escape and shit gets worse.

Good news: I adjusted the Heretic/Hexen font to be fixed width. Bad news: Spaces aren't.

OMG! Thank you so much @beloko I just played my Doom map on android! WOW! Holy shit! D-Touch is awesome. You rock.

How maintainers dont rejected that unofficial Plutonia sequel

Your music rocks!

halp. I have the last stage of brain cancer

Doom truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

I don't understand why they can't make up their minds...