baja blast rd.

Man, 2015 posters didn't know what they were talking about. Not one mention of SIGIL!

map of the year just dropped

This is instructive because it's an imagined constraint. The hurt floor can be used as a sort of pressure release to avoid being cornered. (Especially the lips with the switches, but I also mean the owie floor itself too). In fact you can beat the fight by standing in fuck-it-hurts floor as much as possible while the HKs are alive, which is just for demonstration purposes don't actually do that lol. ("Needing to keep running around" is also not a constraint here.) Imagined constraints are worth being vigilant about because people usually make stuff harder on themselves by believing they exist. "I have to kill the PE/vile/chaingunners first" (target prioritization overfixation) / "I have to avoid as much damage as possible" / "I have to use my shots wisely" are common ones that get people into trouble.

<3

"Whether I agree with it or not" is by far the least interesting lens through which to engage with a review of something.

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/d-f/elysion has them

free undertitle

The only truth is that dogmatism is wrong. One example is that it might make sense that if you're working on a gameplay-centric map, you'd want to meticulously test gameplay before doing aesthetics -- but if you're good enough at designing a whole map's gameplay and having it function like you imagined in your head before you even test/play it once, that isn't necessary, and there might be reasons to work on aesthetics first instead. (And that is possible, not just a made-up example. I've done it many times, and some people are even better than me at that.) My approach is most similar to Ravendesk's. Even basic layout design can be chaotic for me, lots of unclosed sectors and shapes late into the process. I'll do stuff like place items in the map because they feel right and then figure out what they'll be used for two weeks later.

This is basically always "unnoticed user error."

To clarify what I mean by "smaller living spaces or houses that are set in a broader environment." *clears throat* - myhouse.pk3 and myhouse.wad don't count Neither would A Visit to the Creep Doctor, or most oldschool Myhouse maps. Those are all, or close enough to, singular houses that are the entire point of the map (diegetically at least, even if not in the editor). I don't want to pick on the named maps or anything -- just trying to define the bounds of the thread, and those are some recent very recognizable maps to do it with. This has been on my thread idea list for longer than those three maps have been out. - For positive examples of what does count, think structures like this group from Avactor, which often are so simple they have only one room: Or on the larger end, many of the houses of Lost Civilization, which can be complex but are usually just a small portion of the overall layout: This smaller or simpler type of house tends to have a very different purpose and aligns with a different experience than the "whole map is one house" type, and it's these that I have been thinking about lately. Out of all the levels you've played that contain them, which level is your absolute favorite at using smaller living spaces like these and why? Since this is a thread I started, all replies must be 500-word mini-essays minimum. :P (I'm kidding.)

For level design and for playing: "master the fundamentals" is a pretty useless idea for beginner- and intermediate-level improvement, because most people don't have a good sense of what the fundamentals are even if they think they might -- because these are not obvious and are often very misleading. Imagine how hopeless someone would be at ever playing difficult wads if they hold on to the idea that the fundamentals are concepts like: using the right weapon for each monster, saving ammo (lol), target prioritization, and circle-strafing. But that set probably sounds logical to many people. A level design equivalent of an unhelpful ontology of "fundamentals" would be ammo balance, weapon progression (start with SG, work up to BFG), Romero's Rules, and understanding each enemy's (singular) role -- which would probably cap people to making maps that are mediocre by their own standards. In fact knowing how to abstract knowledge into a useful set of fundamentals and do that well probably means you're an expert already, so it's circular. With level design it's even more overwhelming because every niche can have its own underlying fundamentals. Much better when possible is to emulate experts and try to remake what they have made, or design heavily in their style. Choose a broad selection of experts and you'll end up learning a lot without aping one person too much. With level design that is how some of fastest learners seem to have improved. (For playing this would be watching demos and trying to do what you see, or to beat times, or to just get reasonably decent times. Speedrunning is the easiest way to improve a lot partly because the "study->emulate" loop that happens to be great for learning is literally what speedrunning to beat times is.) This doesn't require any theoretical know-how going in, and you'll end up picking up a lot of 'tacit' lessons that are not obvious just from looking, by actually trying to do stuff.

Monster prioritization is pretty important for beginners* ;) (It's a neat heuristic but over-relying on it will hard-cap your skill level so don't take it too religiously once you move into playing the community's more challenging wads (not even really hard stuff but I mean wads like Speed of Doom).)

It did not. In 2017 the forum software was upgraded and Linguica added the likes system for posts that functions pretty much what we have now. There were some minor display differences, but there were no dislikes. What it also initially had was a "helpful and unhelpful" system specifically for reviews, but he removed that because people upset at lilith.pk3 were brigading it.

A couple 10x10 clips I had. Here's a comfortable strategy for this area in map05. When enemies are all back-facing, I like looking for approaches that begin by waking one enemy up and making it infight with something else. Also reality-ing this part of map09. (I wasn't planning on it but just went with it.) This is not easy to do because it requires controlling movement speed finely on that very bumpy floor, but it shows that 'moving at some speed between walk and a sprint' is a very important skill because it's not really possible especially in the first half without doing that.

You're playing an Italo Doom difficulty slaughtermap and then the action suddenly stops and there's an imp with a dialog box that asks you "What's the capital of Bahrain?" and there's a 20-second timer. Naturally you answer "Manama" on the spot, being a geography buff, but there's a coding error and the imp replies "Sorry the answer is manama." Luckily this doesn't seem to kill you. And then the action starts up again and you die because you were thinking about capitals.

Yeah I would love to notice one day that this thread got 3-4 pages of responses to one video and then find out that 90% of that is not related to "controversy" in any way, but I doubt that can happen...

Great post. For extra context, one of the reasons this one is so popular among fans of hard wads is the fact that, mechanically, it is exactly like a cyberdemon in every way but the HP (and that even includes its big size). So it taps into the very richly developed skillset of fighting cyberdemons -- only it also opens up using the cyb in quick skirmishes, battling it in not-overlong fights with weak weapons, using hordes of them without the player needing the BFG, etc. And that's why this enemy is used way more often than a cybruiser in those wads, even if a "1000 HP cybruiser" seems to make more sense on paper.

map03: Las Vías del Tren Aside from introducing the sand flat, this map is pretty boring-looking, which is less about color and more about all the low-ceilinged rectangles the layout is made of -- it's obviously a South American McGee map, so that is the point. The competent texturing can't really make that interesting, and it's not so much the orthogonality as it is the combo of that and the simple architecture. Staging of encounters -- how fights are introduced, how they look -- is technically a part of aesthetic craft and that's basically the main thing going on here. The fights look absurd, which is quite an achievement for there only being 112 enemies counting lost souls (which I am in this map at least because that's the coolest reveal). A lot off that is their audacity, the way they are revealed in seemingly overwhelming numbers, and the deliberate recurrence of the "row of enemies lowering" trap motif that 01 and 02 also did a bit. The layout is small enough for 112 enemies to feel like a lot. map04: El Foco Alfonzo sometimes pulls out this architectural style that really does it for me, characterized by off-kilter, skewed-looking angles, my favorite of his being the Quake-like mini-city in Mayhem 2016 map02, which coincidentally turns out to involve Tarnsman. Under the hood, El Foco is a pretty laidback take on that style, where a few areas are skewed from what the orthogonal base shapes would be rather than a more thoroughly off-grid feeling where there's non-orthogonal constructs attached in wild ways to other non-orthogonal constructs. But even that is enough to give the aesthetic a distinct character, which is evident right from the opening view. Rather than being just for show, the shaping ties into the vibe of the map, which combines with the D2ISO aesthetic to pretty convincingly depict a rundown, ramshackle abandoned city mostly through shape alone. (It's not entirely shape -- some of the architecture seems messy, and there's also that beaten-up variant of the STUCCO texture as this opening theme cluster has been using.) I love the tacky hotel-looking wood and railings here. I'm a fan of how the RL secret isn't just for the RL but it's your exclusive way of getting to the highest plane of the map, and also establishes that the map has that extra higher plane. Good secrets often don't just provide you material benefit but help strengthen or add extra complexity to the theme in some way. Also noting the use of the chandelier prop because I basically never find uses for it. Definitely fits the shitty motel chic of this map.

Simplifying Scythe 2 so that it runs in true vanilla (and doing it at least minimally artfully) would take even an experienced author hundreds of hours. Beyond the simplest maps, which could be just edited, the amount of required effort would be a lot like making a map from scratch that is identical to the Scythe 2 map but visually simpler. You'd also be testing each individual map diligently to make sure they all individually work in vanilla, rather than just getting to play it. All for something you can't share. A proper understanding of what's involved brings up concepts like testing for visiplane overflows and Shadowporting, but those seem overcomplicated for this thread. I guess the point people are trying to get across is that would be at "making your own megawad" level of involvedness and probably take you months rather than "press some buttons and get the finished result within the day and play it" level of involvedness. You almost certainly just want to run Scythe 2 in a port that is "vanilla-like" but has expanded limits.

Another small tip: don't get too fixated on the RL not doing splash damage. Many mastermind maps are boss maps where you don't need all your rockets for much else. And if that's the case the rocket launcher becomes the third best real weapon against the mastermind behind BFG and PR, because you can pump rockets from long-range at a very big target (and even without splash, it still does more damage than the SSG in Doom 2). As a bonus, here's a cheese by hanging back out of hitscan range (2048 units) entirely while the mastermind still sees you and shoots, which keeps it in place.

A demo doesn't need to have a file. It can be a video. These are also clearly speedruns so it fits the definition even stronger. That said this thread is extremely odd and doesn't fit anywhere imo, but that's more for quality reasons (why 9 posts in 1-2 hours?). So it can stay here where it is easier to ignore instead of accounting for all of the "Other Demos & Discussion" activity and making people mute that sub. Andromeda's advice seems good for improvement.

Only commenting on aesthetic craft because I don't like doing broad overviews. Not planning on finishing because busy. map01: Entrada Opening map that seems to be reveling in how many brown textures it can use, including many that clash a lot with each other, like the new bricks and woodtex and mansion panel asset alongside Doom 2 staples like (a slightly modded) BROWN1 and STUCCO1. Kind of gives the vibe of a map that was half-retextured in a hurry, which is funny. Near the exit there are some tan bricks that don't appear anywhere else in the map, kinda driving home that cheeky "brown texture assbundance" pattern. (edit: I really wrote "assbundance" there, not some strained pun, maybe some weird muscle memory, but Leaving It In.) It is still a pretty map owing to Tarnsman's architecture (albeit quite restrained here) and the lovely contrast of brown and deep blue water/torches, and coherent motifs like that chestnut of 'vertical support beams everywhere'. Tarns is also fond of directional lighting that emanates from a natural light source and D2ISO owing to vanilla limits doesn't really indulge in that a ton compared to e.g. TPH but there's still some here, ironically in the one butt-ugly area. The sky is cool, and the opening area's metal floor is sort of the same color as the sky, which not sure if that does anything special for the look but I like the way that looks... map02: Salas De Debajo A lot more sedate texturing here as most of the assets are stock Doom 2 rather than drawing so heavily from the Spain or Brazil (NEIS 2) suites. That hyperactivity is replaced by more hyperactive lighting instead, a lot of blinking and glowing effects, which come along with some extra lighting contrast in the form of the dark "rooms below." Compared to map01 the architecture is more loose with its shaping, and therefore instead of the vertical support pillars being at natural points of emphasis like doors or evenly spaced out sides, they tend more to wrap around at the more improvised transitions from one material to another and are even more often used the main material of a stretch of wall. Having this look coherent is not exactly very easy but the map manages to do that. At this point of the set very little is an architectural highlight (that changes later though), but I like this curving hallway. Janky skyhack. It's funny because both of these maps have been well crafted but there's been overt "lol bad design" Left In too.

I know my Megawad Club vote this month

1) shoot spider with pistol to aggro it on you specifically 2) get it to hit fodder 3) read a book or something

Competing over a mapslot is pretty much unheard of in projects and for good reason*. Imagine you're making a map and then someone else comes in and takes a combo and you know they make better, more fun maps than you, and you're guaranteed not to outdo them. Pretty demotivating, and rather than some survival of the fittest encouraging people to make better maps, you're probably way more likely to get people hedging their bets and not trying as hard in case they face unwinnable competition. Also, the competition could get very wonky. Say one specific weapon pairing gets two of the best submissions the project gets. You're going to have to turn one away. Or one weapon pairing is unpopular and only gets one submission and it's mid and you had to "reject" many better maps in the other submissions. So not only is there competition but people have no control of outcomes even if they do their best. Another thing is it's an incredibly important guideline that you don't want to slip into a big post where possible participants can miss it. (Imo it's actually more significant than the core project gimmick. :P) *