esselfortium

Sometimes it's better to not post.

A few things that come to mind: SpaceDM9 was originally planned to have significantly more than three maps, and a hub map where you could pick levels. There was going to be a gothic map (which used a bunch of textures that later appeared in BTSX E2), a blue-and-white Greek island map, a forest map, and more. It was very ambitious. A few years prior to that, SpaceDM5 was at one point slated to have a "submarines" gimmick map that would use ACS tricks and camera textures to simulate the sound and visuals of a team-based submarine battle. Most of the actual details of exactly how it was going to play never really materialized. Back around 2008, KDiKDiZD was originally slated to include ambient sounds and bullet casings, but when I revisited the project in 2020 and redid its dehacked patch from the ground up in DEH9000, I decided that my vanilla implementations of both those features were far too obviously janky to be worth keeping instead of using that precious dehacked-patch real estate for things that would actually be cool instead of awkward and half-functional. In 2020 I also very nearly got rid of the camtextures, because my original implementation of them was way too obviously a hack (and was also arguably too low-resolution to be useful), but then the half-circle projection approach came to mind, vaguely inspired by the weird projected computer displays in the movie Brazil, and everything fell into place from that. In BTSX, I heavily revised the layouts of some of my own maps before releasing them (or in the case of Navigating Flood Regions, I also did it a second time after release). Prior to E1's first public release, I'll Replace You With Machines and Navigating Flood Regions both underwent significant reworking in the form of "delete roughly 2/3rds of the map and start over", because their original layouts consisted of a lot of aimless corridor spaghetti that I struggled to do anything interesting with. In the case of Machines, skillsaw had been kind enough to finish up its original version into a playable form for me, and his comments about the thingplacing decisions he made for it were a big part of what finally convinced me to just scrap a lot of it. (Though I felt a bit bad about doing so right after getting his help with it, though some of his contributions are still there in the final.) Machines was actually the first BTSX map ever started, initially as a texture test map (the outdoor gazebo-in-lava scene was the first structure built for it), and due to my careless development it ended up being one of the last ones finished for E1. A handful of 2010-vintage screenshots from an early version of I'll Replace You With Machines, featuring some crusty ancient versions of some E1 textures:

Not in vanilla. You can make them walk away from the player, by giving them a negative speed and then swapping the names of all their sprite lumps to invert the angles (so the backward-facing sprites are now forward-facing, etc), but that also isn't exactly random. Depending on what you're trying to do, though, it might be close enough.

I think it was OpenGL + ZDoom, since the GL renderer was its original selling point over ZDoom.

Contrary to some other advice here: Don't start with WHackEd. The graphical interface might seem like a more welcoming choice, but it becomes significantly more awkward and difficult to work with as soon as what you're doing reaches even a moderate level of complexity.

Okay, I'm curious now. Which custom maps from 1994 would you say are better looking and flowing than the average Doom 2 level? I was also playing custom maps in the mid-90s and from what I recall it seemed incredibly rare for anything to even approach the quality of the official maps, even a few years later. Also, Doom 2 doesn't play the same as Doom 1. Nearly every monster in Doom 1 is an imp: regular imp, taller imp with more health, imp with splash damage, flying imp, etc. Doom 2 allows for vastly more complex and varied encounter design by introducing monsters that require different strategies and demand different types of time/spatial awareness from the player. The possible combinations of all those behaviors have helped make Doom 2 such an effective canvas for so many different schools of mapping to develop from over the past 30 years.

Nope. And it still doesn't!

It was posted because people were not letting the mystery be a mystery, and were invading the author's privacy by treating their actual life as part of an ARG. It's not "gatekeeping" to forward a message from the author kindly asking people to stop.

These look great!

What more is there to say?

It was pretty limited, though there were lots of small-scale shareware and freeware games. I spent a lot of time with the Mac Wolf3D and Doom communities that existed at the time, with things like Batman Doom and Laz Rojas's work.

UDMF doesn't have a designated blockmap lump, I believe. It's either combined in with ZNODES or skipped over entirely. What are you looking to do with the blockmap?

Amazing, congrats on the release!

Saw this on the upload for "Frantic" and I love when people proudly announce they don't actually seek out any new music.

This thread got me to listen to the opening track from St Anger for the first time and while I kinda laughed at the snare tone I was more stunned by the way they sidechained it to the kick so it just cuts out very abruptly in a bunch of places. I had to double check that I was hearing an official upload on Youtube and not some fan mix. Also the lyrics and songwriting are hilariously terrible. FRAN TICK TICK TICK TOCK KEEP ON SEARRCHINNNN. Sorry Grungo, this is just embarrassing.