baja blast rd.

Night on Doom Mountain (#3) I'm noticing this map has an unusual structure to it where it feels like the main temple part on its own a traditional three-key map, but then there was an intro phase and a long second phase added to it. No complaints, but the three key temple and heresiarch boss fight feels like it would normally mark the end of a map. In the second half, this whole phase is a banger. It's not even just one setpiece -- even if the big imp and cacoswarm with accompany cyb turret and viles might be the best setpiece in the map -- but it's also the way they all play off of each other. I love how you're graciously allowed to leave before taking out everything, which lets me go and grab the BFG and come back to clean up the cyb with it. Leaving isn't free though as this time the cacos wandered into the BFG area and followed me. By triggering the post-BFG fight before dropping down, I ended up with some chokepoint clearing, but even that wasn't bad because they're all easy pickings for the ample rockets and cells we'll have at this point. This map continues to make a case for a lot of the ways setpieces can be separated from each other without using timed lowering bars. Also that cyber-vile trap at the end is mean lol. Totally forgot about that one.

Night on Doom Mountain (#2) This curved rocky stairstep fight is the hardest in the map by a good margin (assuming you're not dragging in lots of resources from elsewhere, possibly). It's to the point that it feels miscalibrated, because you can beat pretty much every other fight in the map straight-up without anything special but this one has lots of 'FDA bait' (like those perched revenants that are replaced with archviles). The key is preventing that big mob of revenants from charging up the stairs. Taking them out first won't work reliably because the cacodemons will crowd into the stairs. So you want to immediately rush up and take the 'high ground', which keeps the revenants clumped up downstairs, which ends up looking like a cheese due to how irrelevant they are for most of the fight when this is done well, but that's one of the reasons there's often little distinction between 'good strategy' and 'cheese'.

Night on Doom Mountain (#1) Finding the overview format stifling my motivation to write, so I'll talk about various parts of these wads as I'm playing them, which is how I naturally comment on wads anyway. I played NoDM last year and enjoyed it. Years go so deep now that this won't even seem like an especially 'important' release that a lot of people talk about, but specifically within the hard map niche you should not miss it. My favorite early part is your intro to the big SWTW-like black marble temple that is at the heart of the map's progression. You press the switch and are met with a setpiece encounter that introduces the 180mpv Nightwatch Cacodemon, which you can think of as a more palatable version of an afrit -- but rather than locking this encounter into a bars-lowering setup, what the map lets you do is escape directly into the fray of other small skirmishes, and this is really fun, just running around and stirring up trouble that has its benefits and its downsides. The speedrunner in me will always play along happily with 'setups' like this if you can call them that, without needing a particular reason to do so. A lot of map starts do this naturally, so you come to expect it there but no where else in a map. So another reason I like this one so much is that it comes a few minutes into the map, after a series of battles in the surrounding mountains.

My actual favorite 'no reason to do this' two-shot. :P

I don't have a single approach -- it shifts with the wad and my mood. Here are some things that I try to do sometimes (not all at once): - Do unnecessary things just because they are fun. Not just little mini-challenges like two-shotting these awkwardly placed cybers for no particular reason, but one example is that I replayed Scythe X map06 recently and decided the two central cacodemons were pets and I would protect them from chaingunner crossfire and keep them alive. - Replay hard encounters after my first success at them so that I feel confident I understand them, rather than just desperately moving on the first victory because I got it. Have found this to be a good mental game level-up because it preempts that feeling of just wanting a too-hard map to be over with. You don't feel scared of any encounter. - Avoid what I feel are pointless types of ammo conversation. (I ~never run out of ammo anyway. This is because playing evasively rather than 'see monster, shoot it' is 10x better at saving ammo than painstakingly swapping between weapons to save every shell or bullet.) - Play experimentally and try to ask and answer questions about what it's possible to do in a setup/map. Recently I played Fallen Leaves map04's final fight two different ways because I was curious about how they played. I have a lot of curiosity about how maps work as gameplay systems and find that fun to dig into. - Seek beauty in pragmatism and discovery. The above Fallen Leaves fight is a good example. If you completely ignore the pain elementals and fact that half the arena is damaging floor, that fight is pretty easy, but the very first time I played it I thought this encounter was hard because I naturally respected those constraints too much. (This is why I end up butting heads with 'ammo conversation for its own sake' and the way people talk about target prioritization sometimes -- because it's shackling to supposed ideas of 'clean play' that commonly just make things harder, but not in ways I think of as sexy like getting to pull-off a cool cyb two-shot. :P) - Treat maps as one big space instead of clearing out the 'first area', then clearing out the 'second area'. - Seek fun. I think of playing as a cooperative interaction between player and map, where my goal is to enjoy myself. That is not always possible but it means I care more about "Is it possible for me to enjoy this?" than "If I don't even try to enjoy myself and put zero effort into try to have fun, does this play badly?" or "If I try to shoehorn this one particular playstyle (like cautious survival maximization) in a wad that doesn't support it (because it's loose and easy), does it suck?" This is why I don't really have one playstyle. I adjust to whatever I feel I need to do to enjoy the wad more. - Don't go out of my way to max maps, track down all the straggler kills or every last secret. Leaving a little bit of mystery left over usually strengthens my experience.

It had to be done in the interest of competition, because otherwise the record tables would be dominated by one runner.

bye

In the future, try this thread. It's designed more for one-off questions where the asker isn't necessarily looking for a big effort commitment (or calling for that from others), which is more of the "spitballing ideas" approach you are talking about. If you start a lot of threads (currently 6 out of the 25 on the first page) and don't use the responses in all of them, threads might not be the right medium for what you're looking for.

Extended club by half a month because some other wads dropped and I feel compelled to play those too. :P You can stick to whatever you were planning to do if you want, though.

Fwiw I don't want to dogpile but I can't help but point out that this is made-up -- when it comes to what speedrunners focus on, and even how the program works. (DSDA-Doom has long had an in-game reset feature, which makes load times next to 0 amortized.) There are other fictitious ideas about speedrunners, but that one seemed to capture the way people are making stuff up the best. It's impossible to have a productive discussion when one "side's" perspective is based on misconceptions and imaginings. That puts the burden on the other side to not only argue, but to educate the other from the ground up. There's also this invention of a unified "speedrunner group" that apparently cares about one thing, when speedrunners can differ pretty wildly. Even the idea of sides is a pretty big misconception here. Speedrunners are pretty often dedicated casual players too. Even the most active casual players sometimes -- Vile probably streams more wads in half a year than most people play in several. This whole discussion has a ring of "not even wrong" to it. It's feeling intractable because a lot of the points being made and argued (by the side that has grievances against "speedrunners") don't have any correspondence in the real world. There's probably a way to have a productive conversation about this but the odds of that are greatly lowered when people start attaching complaints about communication and decision-making to these fictitious ideas about what speedrunners want.

Was a pleasant last few pages to not read lol. Anyway, I was super excited about What Lies Beneath map01 and map04 (some of my favorite maps this year) so even though I don't normally make a big deal about agreement, I smiled when the praise was mirrored. Muumi and DFF are a couple of the best, most inspiring mappers.

Some mapsets have used hitscanning spiders. Purely in gameplay terms, they don't feel especially remarkable as enemies (Rowdy Rudy 2's tiny spider mastermind is hilarious though). In real maps, they tend to be less dangerous than chaingunners because they eat up a lot of space, are worse at sneaking up on you, aren't that mobile, get hung up on infighting (which is a lot more relevant than with the usual fragile hitscanners), etc. One chaingunning spider would be more dangerous than one chaingunner, but the relevant comparison is more a few to several chaingunners to one chaingun spider, since the chaingunners are more fragile and can be used more frequently. There are even many situations where a single chaingunner might amount to more danger than a chaingun spider, like if you have a chaingunner roaming around that catches you by surprise. thiccyosh described them as 'clunky chaingunners' which feels right. Their clunkiness makes it harder for them to be 'obnoxiously' dangerous unless an area has literally no cover or hiding. You can design dangerous setups around them, but that takes more effort so unlike with chaingunners they are less often accidentally overbearing.

Felt like playing a reality mapset since I haven't done that in a while. Hundreds and Thousands map01 "Morsel" Good aesthetics here, a familiar meso + highlight color combination that feels like a 2016-era Ribbiks B-side (compliment). This sort of hubspoke layout with areas branching out of a central point is old hat but saturating that inner chamber in darkness does so well to give the pattern a fresh coat of paint. The circular blue laser ring over the mancubus is also a simple effect that adds a lot of spice. So this is a gentle intro to reality maps. Since all it takes is one hit for you to die, this has the curious effect of making zombiemen a genuinely frightening enemy, not because it's likely for you to get killed but because it's so possible, which in turn has you respecting cover on the other side of them, leaving you more vulnerable to the projectiles enemies on the other side. This map also showcases one unique role of melee enemies in reality-style maps, which is that since avoiding danger becomes so much more crucial to do well, even slight interference or attention-splitting in the form of ordinarily harmless pinkies becomes more dangerous than usual. You can't really ignore a single monster in these. Also wow that mastermind has a lot of marine kills. Were they all just charging it without using cover? Silly marines. Speaking of comedy, I love this god mode version of the player face. A short/easy enough map even with 1 health to do a fast-paced demo so I'll do that, but probably not for others.

Garden of Plagues by Sneezy McGlassFace This is cool. The background MIDI and the everpresent green slime and feeling of being in the dour bowels of some ruins do contribute a lot to an oppressive atmosphere. One of the map's strongest qualities in this respect is the feeling of 'tiered-ness' to the way the various areas are oriented relative to one another. In the knotted pretzel-like layout, with the way one slime chamber pours into another the map kinda feels like this endless procession of descents to the bottom of something, and like it can keep going. Screenshots naturally undersell the map's appeal then. Action is rooted in modern 'tactical setpiece slaughter', but it does have a certain looseness to it that might be appealing if you don't want that type of gameplay to feel overly choreographed. Sneezy is more than willing to use more extensive, complex spaces that make it basically impossible for fights to feel too scripted, with chaotic enemy placement rather than more cleanly delineated armies of species. Save one traditional rev hallway, the larger fights feel more like they're dumping in clumps of fun enemies for the weapon you have -- and at that, they do a good job of being made of satisfying-feeling compositions. There's even a sense of looseness to the nonlinearity. I once ended up taking the route to the rev hallway fight without the rocket launcher, which... yeah, reload save. There's a lot of vicious little tiny fights too, going up a lift and fighting three revenants in a tight box, or having to deal with viles in areas with unstable, precarious cover, which is the sort of one-vile fight I often like -- you have to figure out where in the room to hide rather than using the obvious pillar. These little battles suit the emptier, quiet spaces well, imbue them with a much greater sense of danger. You can definitely see the Mucus Flow inspiration in the resource cache rooms, a few reviving turrets, the tech-hallway stretch, and the slime, but the inspiration overall is light outside of some more apparent notes. Much of the map is dominated by green slime, but there are also two other liquids -- brown slime and hurt floor blood. And it's neat how these have different personality types where they are introduced. Green is sort of the status quo. A shift to brown later on indicates sheer treachery, and then blood is home to the action climax of the map. Getting an idea from that, which is using different liquid types during different moods of the map, like water might be healing/safety, green slime (I don't feel right calling it 'nukage' in maps like this) might be sparse, resource-starved combat, black slime might be puzzly exploration and mystery, lava might be guns-blazing action. Or whatever. Matching theme to gameplay style is one of those big ideas I find interesting.

Edward covered the else if part, but I wanted to point out that this is a faulty description of what the code is doing, which is another part of why you were confused. Trying to preserve your phrasing order, it's more like: - The door will attempt to open if (the variable is) equal to 1, then will be set equal to 2. - The door will attempt to close if equal to 2, then will be set equal to 1 The code invokes functions Door_open() and Door_close() that try to open or close the door. Those functions don't guarantee that the doors will be opened or closed. They can still fail, which will happen for example if the door is still moving when one is invoked. Additionally, there's no "once open equals to 2" or "once closed equal to 1" going on; the blocks will set the variables as you've written regardless of whether the doors actually open or close properly; there's no logical need in place for the door to open/close in order for the variable to be changed. That's why it's possible in the original code to (for example) fail to close the door but still end up with the variable set to 1. An important idea is that computers are very literal and don't innately grasp your human intent. You have to be really pedantic because even slight discrepancies between what you mean and what the code is truly doing can lead to bugs or you not understanding how something is working. And layering misunderstanding on top of a bug can be a nasty combination because now you're hopeless to debug it except by chance until you correct the misunderstanding.

Yeah, note the comment about multiposting. Besides the unnecessarily long string of posts, you don't have to announce something like "i made another gif of a really old health bonus sprite from 0.5" before sharing it in a separate post; just wait and post that + sprite together. And please pick an avatar that doesn't have abrasively flashing lights.

It's unusual to whine about that not answering a question you didn't even ask at first. That part should be covered in an ACS tutorial you have referred to before.

This will answer that for you: https://zdoom.org/wiki/A_quick_beginner's_guide_to_ACS#Conditional_execution_.28if_.2F_else.29

Surprise, I felt like playing some wads. This runs from now until 12/31. If you join in, play these in basically any order you feel like it. There's no 'one map a day' rule; there's 33 maps though so you can do that. Garden of Plagues by Sneezy McGlassFace One Mucus-Flow inspired Boom map. Sigma by Didy One adventure-centered Boom map. Night on Doom Mountain by Cannonball One long, difficult Boom map. The Settlements by dashlet Three Boom maps that explore surreal environments. Glaive 3 by EANB Ten short, action-focused limit-removing maps. Fucking Hostile Psychoholic Slosh by Peter Schiecke Six fucking hostile psychocolic slosh vanilla maps. Jaded by lunchlunch Three challenging MBF21 maps (one long map and two short bookending maps). Gravity by Eternal Two scenic maps for strong limit-removing ports. Hundreds and Thousands by finnks13 Six short Boom reality maps (take any damage, you die). And finally... Bonus by unknown ??? Revealed at a later date Bonus by unknown ??? Revealed at a later date Thank you to the lovely person who gave me suggestions for some of these. They insisted that I pick one of my maps so one of them will be a later bonus. Both bonuses will be short ones.

So this thread is talking about something more like structural intent (I don't know how to name that, but we're referring to broad strokes decisions like whether you stay in a lock-in fight or try to escape it) rather than 'strategic intent' (for example, the exact strategy you use to tackle a lock-in fight provided you're committed to staying in it). Strategic intent is borderline not a thing at all. Sometimes people think it exists, but there are several strategies for beating Sunlust map29's YK archvile fight and that fight is as rigid as it gets. As a mapper, structural intent mostly comes down to how fun the setup is. If escaping from a fight leaves a tiresome chokepoint, I might try to avoid that being possible. Or I might just decide that the tiresome cleanup is more hassle than engaging the setup straight-up, so I'll take that as an opportunity to not enforce the lock-in. But if you drop from one fight right into another fight and have enemies from the first fight apply extra pressure or even fly into that second setup, then that was probably accounted for in the design. I usually test my maps with a variety of itineraries. I've noticed that it can circle around to the point that sometimes players try to respect perceived structural intent so much that they miss when a map is allowing you to play it more freely. Like, if a map start has no barriers that prevent you from simply leaving, you're probably not "intended" to hang around in the general vicinity of the spawn spot and clear out every enemy you see before moving onward. I've run into people doing that and claiming to "run out of ammo" when you can just explore a bit further beyond the literal spawn and there's a cache of ammo right there. Also sometimes maps do not have very clear cut "structural intent" at all. In my map Deep Space Thruster, I ended up playing the map like this: All of that is allowed. It's not "speedrun tactics." That is what the map is designed to support! There's only three lock-ins in the whole map (and two are brief barrier that lower back down seconds later) and good luck trying to establish how the map was "meant" to be played. I wouldn't expect anyone to play that freely without foreknowledge, but if you're trying to clear out every area bit by bit that's going to be obviously harder than just using the freedom you're given and way more unnatural-looking. When it comes down to it, as a player, I approach it like, "I'm going to maximize how much fun I have." I also think there are lots of situations where it's impossible to really know "intent" and where it doesn't really work to think in those terms.

BTSX is a fantastic mapset for someone who cares about little nuances of craft. Just in this one scene that I randomly opened up, there's this cool-looking tower that is taller than its surroundings (back view is on right). Big fan of these little light insets and the way the brick facade tapers off to that black metal inset below it (left). And the blue light insets in the middle of this texture. The way you see this distant building you get to later in the back of this scene. (Also neat little light inset, the way it looks like it's 'part' of the brown bar at the bottom and rising up into the beige bars.) This whole asymmetrical opening and the way it's framed by the rectangular metal chunks that border the longer bars to either side of it. And this is just a mundane scene in the context of BTSX, not one of its standouts. This is not really 'detailed'-ness of course, this is mostly just skilled texturing and architecture. I find a lot of individualism in the different maps here because at this level of granularity it is far from 'samey' and there's plenty to pick apart. And yet it does still feel like you're in a cohesive world, so you get the best of both worlds. But take these from map11. That feels like Ed Cripps and I would not expect any other map around these to look similar. Stylistically, map08 and map12 are way different. I've noticed that some people don't pay attention to this; they play a map like D2ISO map01 and all they have to say about the aesthetics is "brown lol." But I've found it a wad where it's enjoyable to savor those craft nuances, and if you do that, the maps can feel pretty different. So, yeah, I don't really agree with the common sameyness criticism, and only notice it if I decide to shut out a bunch of what I notice.

Compliment fishing

My tip when you find something overly complicated or difficult is to try to do smaller pieces of it on their own. If replacing a cybruiser with a baron all at once is too complicated, try maybe replacing one frame of the baron with a cybruiser frame and then try it in-game to confirm that you've done that (yes that'll look weird on its own but you're not done). I'm assuming you're planning on using a rocket attack, so try giving the baron a rocket attack without any other behavior changes (again, yes that'll look weird on its own but you're not done). Keep learning little subskills like that until they all feel easy and you'll be able to soon do the whole thing, and not just for this monster but for other replacements too. Anything that is complicated is made of simple building blocks, so how it often works is you spend more time than expected learning very basic skills, even to the point where it feels like you're not making much progress -- but then you get the hang of it and the rest of it takes way less time than expected.

Gonna be boring and go with the obvious with pain elementals and revenants and archviles... Even more types of enemies like them.

Riffing off of this, an extra conditional sounds like a lot less effort than the extra mental work of making sure it doesn't clash with anything else elsewhere or have unintended consequences. Like, it's easy to say now that tags 666/667 wouldn't be used elsewhere, but verifying that or instituting a house rule to enforce it sounds like a lot more mental/organizational overhead. Keens would be known at the time to be a map32 exclusive, which might have precluded the level check safeguard entering thoughts. Because of that, the implementations feel conceptually similar if anything; you're still "making sure this only happens on that level," just there's a different way of doing it.