Eevee

i don't have a specific example off the top of my head, but as a genre: maps with big hard optional fights that are made significantly easier by earlier secrets which are equally hard to find. nothing is quite like discovering the hidden BFG in a map full of corpses

they're called "secret" because they're hard to find. expecting to find them all first-try — without any downtime, no less — doesn't make any sense. this feels like a combination of two factors: ① uv-max, originally a speedrun category, has become "how you play the game" to some amount of players. which is fine, except it produces backwards pressure on map authors to make maps that are approachable to uv-max. ② there are A Lot Of Maps, and a given player will only play many of those maps once, so there's also pressure to make maps that are satisfying to only play once. put these together and you get pressure on authors to create maps that are reasonable to uv-max on first attempt. but that's nonsense. the whole point of secrets is to give you something new to look for when you play through again! and to encourage you to play again at all! so my stance is the complete opposite: tag all of your secrets, even that horrible obscure one that only contains a single armor bonus or whatever. actively taunt the player and their non-vanilla hud. make maps where routing to the exit is very easy, but routing to also get every secret involves a ton of convoluted backtracking. this is a game to be played and experienced, not a series of numbered hurdles to leisurely hop over.

i stress that slade has been nigh unusable on linux for five and a half years and it broke shortly after i actually released a map for the first time so very exciting

no, i think you're right—

ah, you're right— edit: i also stumbled upon something interesting:

i think this is a map that is best experienced by letting it unfold. but i've watched several people either not realize there was more to do, or post "cool map, had to check doomwiki though" which is unfortunate since even the table of contents on that article kind of spoils everything. to that end i've written a gradually-unfolding list of tips that are hopefully enough to gently prod most players along the right path... or at least into realizing there is more path to tread.

to expand on this: i know this is pretty much all obvious to anyone who's enough of a doom nerd to be reading doomworld, but it's all struck me so hard that i just needed to write it down

technically this is a spoiler, but i think it's a very mild one. if you're wondering if you've genuinely reached the end of the map:

i think i did it. i can't tell if i did it. there could be more. there's always more. but i'm guessing the solitary secret is the true ending? honestly, one of the most impressive parts of this is dropping it with such humble trappings and just trusting that enough people will try it. i linked the thread to someone else and we were confused for like twenty minutes until discovering that they'd played the wad instead of the pk3

my condolences on the loss of your friend, m c escher i love this so much. i love it especially because 90% of it is exactly the sort of thing i would want to make, and here you've saved me so much trouble by already having done it. everything about it is impeccably clever and the way it plays with doom culture is excellent. can't wait to read all these spoiler posts, but despite getting seemingly everything, i'm still missing something...

✌️ I can only take half credit — you pointed out the manual movement :) For the curious: the Hell Warrior's shield was an invisible actor for absorbing attacks, defined over top of the rocket and spawned with A_CyberAttack. In vanilla, I believe this set off the following sequence of events: The shield is spawned via P_SpawnMissile at exactly the Hell Warrior's position, and as part of this process, is added to the blockmap. (The actual structure of the blockmap is an array of pointers to the first mobj in the cell, which functions as the head of a doubly linked list.) The last thing P_SpawnMissile does is call P_CheckMissileSpawn, which attempts to move a missile by half a tic's distance immediately. As part of this process, it directly changes the missile's position before trying to move it. (I'm guessing this is so if the missile ends up exploding, it explodes in front of its shooter, not in their center.) Normally, a mobj is only moved in one of a handful of places, and all of them remove it from the blockmap and then re-add it to keep things consistent. The movement attempt always fails, because the shield overlaps the Hell Warrior. Normally this would be fine, as projectiles don't collide with their shooters, but the shield doesn't have the MISSILE flag. Because the movement fails, P_CheckMissileSpawn destroys the shield with P_ExplodeMissile, which sets it to its death state. It doesn't have one, so it's destroyed immediately. Now for the fun part. As part of its destruction, the missile is now removed from the blockmap. However, if P_CheckMissileSpawn happened to move it across a grid line and into a different cell, this fails to work correctly, and the end result is that the list from the original cell is duplicated in the new cell. In the simple case, the only mobj in the original cell was the Hell Warrior. If it now steps into the new cell, the game attempts to add it to the list there — but it is already in that list, and the result is that it ends up pointing to itself. The next time anything attempts to move into the corrupted cell, P_BlockThingsIterator will try to iterate over the list of mobjs in it, and since there is now a loop, it will iterate forever and hard freeze the game. Boom altered the blockmap so that deleting a mobj from it still behaves correctly even if the mobj isn't in the right place, which specifically avoids this kind of problem. I was also scratching my head for a hot minute trying to figure out why this doesn't happen at least occasionally in vanilla, and the answer turned out to be very simple — every single vanilla projectile has the NOBLOCKMAP flag. None of them are ever in the blockmap in the first place.

Just played this for like four and a half hours. I like to think I know a respectable number of things about Doom mapping, so I only saw like three tricks in here that I can confidently say are impossible. Absolutely brilliant. And it seems to play better than the original!