DMPhobos

Thank you for sharing your music, hope everything is okay, and i hope we see you soon return to Doom to share your amazing work

I do miss the atmosphere of the old doom games where it was about a lone space marine trying to survive against hell unleashed. Classic doom games did had a bit of horror in them and while today those bits might not have aged as well, they're still there (tho it also had a lot of silly stuff too :P). Doom 3 does the whole horror stuff the best, it has the same premise of the first game, but runs with it more seriously and has a terrific atmosphere. Doom 3 might have a lot of flaws in it's combat and level design, but the setting and atmosphere is the best in the series in my opinion. I think doom 2016 was fine in terms of story and atmosphere, and i guess it makes sense that after years of battling the demons the old doom guy would turn up into a legendary demon killer, but i think doom eternal is too many notches too far for me, and by that point the old horror atmosphere is completely gone. At some point you return to hell again in a later part of the game, but it has no impact at all, it's just another location for the slayer to go on. Doom eternal story goes too far imo, and the entire DLC story devolves into just pure nonsense to me. DE gameplay is incredibly fun and i still have a blast playing it from time to time, but i do miss when the doom games weren't about being a power fantasy, and a instead were pulpy action horror games.

Oh wow that's it, you got it!!. No wonder why i couldn't find anything about it since it's unrelated to anything Alien related (wonder how it got identified as such for a long time), interestingly after looking up the music, it seems there are many variants of that music ingame. Amazing, thank you for identifying the source!

No, that's not me lmao Seems i'm not the first one to get curious about that midi, that places it many years before i thought tho

I'm familiar with the music of the snes/mega drive alien games. It's not from there sadly

Not really. Doom 64 textures are very few and with little variety. They're also very small and look a bit bland to be honest, but this is because they're designed to be mirrored and to be used with the colored sector lighting to make them standout. The colored sector lights pull more weight for the look and feel of a map rather than the textures themselves.

Gonna try again... Here's this midi i once found in the mid 00's on a site where it was listed as a midi from the Alien movies (it's not), later i found it had been used on an old wad from 2002 called SlayeR.wad as the intermission music. I'm curious if anyone knows anything about this midi since i have no idea if it's based on a movie, game or if it's an original midi Alien.zip

Some dev commentary about 27 from my perspective Cronologically, this was my second contribution to eviternity 2 and it's a collaboration. The start of this collab basically sums up to Dragonfly asking if anyone was open for a collaboration to stay motivated to map during a time where not much was being worked on. Two maps were made as a result, Map22 which was a collab with Bauul, and this map. Both maps were started the same day. At the start we didn't had concrete plans on how the map would play or how progression would work. Dragonfly made the start with the fight you see on the final map to set the tone for the rest of the map, and once i picked up the map my first instinct was for reusing this area for a further fight, so in order to make the player revisit it, i added both keys on the corners of the circles (this idea ended up being unused, but it's the reason why the keys lower the way the do) which ended up helping figuring out how progression would work. From then on we both worked on the map by working on an area and then passing it on back and forth A month or so after the map started, i bailed out from the map and from everything doom related due to dealing with some hard blows in my personal life. This lasted for a few months and after some time passed i picked up the map again to try to get back into doom and mapping again, but it was a slow process and my contributions started to take longer to make. Still development was back on track, and we started to pass the map back and forth for a few more rounds, until both areas at the sides were complete and the exit was ready to be placed. I decided to do one last final arena. My first idea was to have various types of cacos emerging from the ground, but this worked poorly in dsda doom due to infinite heights, so i scaled that idea back and reworked the area into the arena you see on the final map, which involves timed waves of monsters teleporting in with some supplies available at the expense of reducing cover. Once the map was done Dragonfly did some small changes to the fight and then added a teleport to return outside of the final arena... Which was weird since there was already a way to get back outside of the arena. Instead of deleting the teleport, we decided to add one last secret fight after the final fight. A happy little accident As for the gameplay of this map, it is a more setpiece focused map. While progression is non linear, each path is very straightforward and there's less focus on exploration in terms of progression. This was not always the intention and i don't think we both realized this until both key areas were completed, but in hindsight having a map like this come after 26 which is more experimental in terms of gameplay and progression seems to be a good call since it works well in grounding the player back into a more regular type of map and also as a breather after a long experience. Don't have much comments about the midi other than it is a killer track by Jimmy, it's not a bespoken midi, but it fits the map really well and it's an amazing track overall. For a long time while testing we used to idmus to map29 music also which fitted the map visuals really well, but a few weeks after the map was complete Jimmy's midi was picked for the map. Finally about the necromenace at the end... It is a post release change (I think it was added on RC3?). I cannot say much about it since it was added by Dragonfly, but after seeing the intial reactions for how most players tackle this map it seemed to me that this map needed an extra bite at the end (specially for players who found the secret BFG or were playing continous with a perforator) and a necromenace works well there (at that stage the player has plenty of room to move around). The fight is very doable with plasma only, and we added extra supplies to take it into account, also it's UV only. I like it In the end it's a very good map, i think my contributions are a bit minor, since the more memorable areas on this map were made by dragonfly, but you can still tell i worked on some areas, most notably the end arena. I don't have much dev material to share, but just for fun here's more or less my main contributions to the map. It's not accurate, since Dragonfly added a lot of things to the areas i worked on, but guess it's fun to see

Another map of mine is next soon so i'll leave more dev comment about it... Map23 - Thaw whaT As i mentioned before when i joined the team i was offered the chance to pick multiple slots, the first one was for the meso episode, and the 2nd one was for the ice tech episode. Right after completing map07, i moved to work on stuff for other projects and as time went on the claim changed from a "claimed" to a "maybe claimed". Long story short, I ended up giving up this slot and it ended up being claimed by another mapper who unfortunately couldn't contribute to the project due to the approaching deadline (iirc this was during the last 6 months of development). Since the slot was free again, I asked if i could work on it again, and as a result Thaw exists. Unlike 07 there were more maps to reference for the episode. I had a start for how the beginning since 22 was already complete (24 was still far away from completion, but antares left a wip for the entrance to reference for the end of this map), once i started to draw the map i simply added more areas and expanded more rooms as i went along, focusing a bit more on the outside areas. For this map i wanted to make a more "traditional" base map with the layout twisting and turning around, but at the same time that was easy to navigate both for players and monsters, which encourages incidental combat. In order to do that, i applied one trick i do in a lot of my other maps, which is by "building areas in circles". Basically this means building areas towards one direction and along the way twisting that direction back to the start again, and then overlapping those circles with other circles outside and also building areas or mini circles inside of them. This is a great way to makes the map feel more interconnected and at some point i even had arrows drawn where i wanted the circles to lead to (you can tell that i built the map this way by looking at area where the yellow key is located, if you enter the building from any side and just move forward, you'll end up on the same area you started). The original plan was to name the map "Heat" and make it based around heating the base and melting ice to unlock progression, as i went along the way i did tried to implement the gimmick into regular progression, but i couldn't figure how to implement it in a way that wasn't obstructing the incidental combat, so it ended up being relegated to a few setpieces and at that point i realized such name wouldn't work at all, so i ended up naming it "Thaw" when the map was mostly complete. (Funny enough i've seen that the ice melting gimmick goes unnoticed a lot lol) As for gameplay, as i mentioned right from the start i built the layout around the idea of making it easy to navigate for both players and monsters, the result of this is that the gameplay for this map is based around incidental combat and players are free to approach it however they want. This also extends also to a few setpieces, the area where the "thawing" mechanics are introduced looks like a lockout fight... but it's not, you can get out if you want by pressing the switches quickly, or even cheese it by returning to the start (tho that wouldn't be fun heh), melting the ice for the blue key releases a horde of corporals, viles and flying monsters into the map, and you're free to approach it however you want. The only exception to this is the red key fight, which is based around melting the ice and revealing monsters. It can be defused easily by moving around prioritizing the nightmare demons to keep the space around. Finally the music... Usually when building the map i try to have a music track set for inspiration, but the map music was claimed by Tristan and he was busy either working on 26 or other music at the time. The stock doom 2 music for the map23 slot is this track, and while i don't dislike the track, i absolutely HATED testing the map and hearing those opening notes. It didn't took long until i had enough and i replaced the music with a silent midi and it stayed that way until the last few days of development. Tristan asked all of us for instructions and references for the music on the map slots he had claimed. The main reference i gave was "Dark Groove" from Jazz Jackrabbit 2 along with some really confusing instructions (sorry about that!). Time passed and it wasn't until the last weeks of development when Tristan showed us the track he wrote and it was a banger. I have said this multiple times, but this might be my favorite Eviternity 2 midi. During those last days of development Tristan just kept coming with banger after banger up until the final hours before release Since this map leans really hard into the incidental combat part with a lot of pressure from revs and hitscans all around to encourage players to keep moving, many people will not enjoy it, and it might wear out the patience of some players (which i've seen occur for some pople). Also this map is sandwiched between 2 really amazing maps (right between "Inclement" or "Parallel" which are both great maps and the amazing "Temeraire" which has one of the most memorable moments i've ever seen in Doom) so it is overshadowed. I'm really proud of this map tho, probably my favorite of all my contributions for Eviternity 2 Sorry for the long post, i thought i didn't had much to say about this map, but guess that wasn't the case heh

My first map, made sometime around 2003 i think. I literally just discovered this page here in doomworld, downloaded all of the editors i could, and after trying them out, the only map editor i could get to run was DeepSea (nearly every editor was DOS and i had no idea how to run them). I started by making simple edits on the IWAD maps and later on other people maps with deepsea. Eventually i dared to make an original map on my own based on a specific spaceship. I had no idea of what i was doing, i didn't understood the concept of sectors and lines at all, so i just used the square tool and placed a few squares in the map because i didn't knew you have to draw shapes to make sectors, and i deleted some lines when i wanted to join stuff. The end result is a map that barely works. Oh and this was made directly on doom2.wad, since i didn't knew how to make a map on a separate wad. To top things i had a few custom graphics so uhh... enjoy Few screens

Nova 3 had a long development cycle, and during that time many of those mappers did contributions to other projects or released more stuff on their own while their Nova submissions remained unreleased for a long time. For the record, when i joined and submitted my Nova 3 map, my only released map was this one (looking back seems that even that map was released after my nova 3 submission was made) and had a few contributions in progress for other community projects.

The fact that the 32 slots filled up in less than an hour kinda shows that theres quite a lot of interest :P (maybe enough to open another episode?) Anyway, im glad to see a new Nova up and running for newcomers to show up!

In hindsight, yeah, it would had done the same effect (albeit with a slight delay), but at the time when i was doing this area i was still open to reusing the astral arachnos elsewhere in the map so i didn't wanted to limit myself there so the idea was replicating the effect with a different setup to not limit astral arachnos on a single area (tho in the end i ended up only using them there). That's right, eviternity 2 map07 was a dead simple clone all along!

This is because you're using software render, which unfortunately doesn't work well with the fog effects of some maps, You need to switch to hardware render on GZD, or if you're still keen on still using software render, you can use DSDA Doom instead, which is the port we recomend for software render (tho you can also use other ports like woof that also support evi 2)

Map07 is next, so i guess i can leave some dev comentary about my involvement in evi 2 team and the map itself (sorry for the long post!) I got involved in Eviternity 2 somewhere around late 2021, and at that time most of the other members in the team were members that had already participated on Eviternity 1 before. When i joined i was given the option to pick any number of slots for any episode (all of them were mostly empty and unclaimed), 2 themes in particular caught my eye, desert/mesoamerican and ice techbase, so i ended up picking up a slot for both episodes. Obviously i'm a huge fan of mesoamerican themed maps, and i had the chance to work with this theme on elementalism (E1). For that one i tried to use real life influences while building the map, but for Evi2, instead of referencing real life locations i was more interested in adapting the meso theme with the abstract style of a doom map. At the time there were really few maps completed, Map01 was completed but most of the maps after were not even started (all the progress for map26 was only a few areas of the starting area, and i think there wasn't a single map for the ice tech episode yet). For the mesoamerican episode however, Map09 was already complete, so it became the map i was influenced the most in terms of gameplay and style (even if it doesn't show). After a few months after joining, i started this map in early 2022. At the time the otex meso textures only had the white stone textures with a few of those having a few gold accents. As with my Elementalism map, i wanted to use bright colors to accent the structures, so my first idea was to use red and green and contrast them, but after experimenting a bit it was clear that the green textures weren't working as i had hoped (i wanted to have really bright greens, which weren't available to use) Also, while the red marbled otex textures looked super neat, i wanted to use red colors directly on the meso textures. I was allowed to make a few texture edits, so i ended up making a few red variants of the otex 2 meso textures (which at the time were meant to be placeholders to be replaced, but ended up being on the final map heh), after experimenting with more with colors, i added a few blue accents which worked really well with the red buildings. As for the music, initially there was no claim on the map slot, but after having a more substancial part of the map complete, out of nowhere Dragonfly ended up completing a midi for this map which was really helpful in developing the style for this map. From then on the theme and atmosphere for this map was mostly set... My intention for this map was for it to be exploration focused. Obviously the map is linear in terms of progression but the start of the map is completely open and the player is free to explore around the city and figure the correct route (which i understand might not be everyone's cup of tea). Both keys required to open the exit have a combat setpiece which contrasts with the exploration part of the map. The first fight involves cacos, archviles and annihilators, and the second one is a forced combat setpiece involving imps pressuring the player in a pit, and astral arachnotrons shooting down at the player, forcing them to move around to avoid the incoming fire. The setup of this fight involves monsters blocking vodoo dolls to force the players to kill all the arachnos in order to progress, but i ended up overcomplicating it a lot, which ended up causing it to not work on some versions of gzdoom and softlock the map. That dumb initial implementation ended up caused a lot of headaches and had to be fixed post release There's a really big difference between the first version of the map and the one on the final release. On the first version after picking the yellow skull, instead of the arena fight of the final release, a bunch of mancubi would teleport along with some cacos, and then on you could proceed to the exit building, which had a completely different fight... This last fight involved fighting 2 cyberdemons while taking pressure from archviles at the center while cover dissapeared, and well... it was quite bullshit to be honest!, in hindsight i don't know why i ended up submitting the map with such a huge difficulty spike, but after asking for feedback for the first draft, Dragonfly ended up recording an FDA, and suprisingly he finished that fight on the first try, which kinda made me think for a while that "that fight isn't so bad!". Some time later, Ukiro was playing thru the completed maps and he was the first one who brought up how unfun and bullshit that fight was, so i made a note to rework it or remove it at a later time. In the end i just removed that last fight and instead reworked the center area to have a different setup, the space around the yellow key area was spacious enough to allow for a fun fight, so i reworked the area to change the geometry after picking the key, and do a final ambush which looks more intimidating that it actually is, since it can be easily defused by circling around the area while using plasma and rockets. I think it's a fun fight, and i'm glad that the first draft ending was discarded since it had no business in such an early map slot heh One last piece of trivia for this map, is that the original name for the map was Tlatoani, which is the name for the aztec rulers. I chose the name since it sounded perfect to me for a map where you find up this ancient city that was once ruled by ancient aztec kings, and also because Map09 had used Quetzalcoatl (The feathered snake aztec god) so i thought would be appropiate to pick a Nahuatl name to keep with the theme. For a while most of the E2 maps used nahuatl and aztec god names which i thought it was cool, but those names are not easy to pronounce so most of them got renamed, including this one. I couldn't figure out a way to translate the name while keeping the spirit of it, until an_mutt suggested using "Sovereign" which was the perfect name.