zokum

Auto run can be done by setting the joystick button to run to 31 or so. It's a hack, but it works. A better pistol would mean you wouldn't want new weapons as badly, but since you still would want them, there wouldn't be much of a change I think. I have never felt that the range mattered, but your mileage may vary. I agree with there not being any enemies in the range between demon and revenant. Above that there is a nice spread of health. A monster with 200 hp would have been a nice addition. Revenants are nice at 300, but their attacks are fairly brutal compared to some of the sturdier monsters. Sandy being given slots is not a problem. The problem was a too tight deadline and him being the only one stepping up to get the job done. A lot of Sandy's maps are rush jobs / Tom Hall maps, he has said so himself. The work load was much better balanced in Quake and it shows as the quality difference is more or less gone. Sandy was the guy filling in the blanks, making sure the projects got finished. The problem is poor project management, not poor mapping skills / too many slots etc.

It should also be noted that when they started mapping, they most likely only had Doom 1 resources. Aligning for a 64 wide texture and then retexturing the map with a wider texture could easily throw off the current alignments. If you move things around, you would have to realign textures. Aligning by hand is the last step you would do in a map if you expect changes anyway. I suppose one could look at the amount of linedefs and the amount of offsets that are different from what auto-aligning would do and get some sort of metric on how much alignment work there was to do, and how much of it was 'bad'. Given that Sandy made so many maps, he might actually have aligned more textures than Romero did, but it was spread out over so many maps that percentage-wise he had less aligned maps. I doubt this is the case, but it would probably paint a better picture in SP's favor.

Petersen was responsible for 20 maps in Doom while Romero did 7. With the tools back then and the time constraints, expecting the same level of polish would be unrealistic. Sandy was the designer for 17 Doom 2 maps. He made more maps than all the others combined. Mcgee made 8, Romero 6 and Shawn Green 1. Given how time-consuming it was to align in DoomEd, it just wasn't realistic to do a better job.

Texture alignment was a lot of work to do in DoomED. You can't compare judge it with today's toolstack. Back then you had to manually enter in two numbers, firstcol and firstrow in order to align. What they could/should have done was add a -devparm parameter to align textures in-game and save the changes to a file. That way they could have visually fixed it and loaded it into the editor. Doomed didn't use wad files directly, it worked on text files. It wouldn't have been too hard to have a senior designer make the map and a junior designer to go through and improve texture alignments.

Support for more players in Doom 2, ala Hexen. Player 5 could be blue. The others could be another color range (dark grey?) or green, red and 'indigo' but with recolored boots. With different colored boots you could probably scale it up to more than 8 players. On a modern 100mbit switched network (back then), the ineffecient protocol in use should still work 'ok'. They could also write a slightly better protocol with a server player and the rest as client players.

She could have had a teleport attack. Worked well in other id engine games and makes sense lore wise. If she teleports around, her slow walking speed wouldn't matter. The map would have to be built around the ability and she would be a formidable opponent. Teleport to the farthest away from you that is in LOS or if not, to the closest location. As long as she starts firing quickly, she would be formidable. She would keep her distance whenever possible and hunt you down quite efficiently.

A lack of prey/herbivores make sense in a hell-army. You want your 'soldiers' to be hungry carnivores. Prey most likely exist either as other worlds to invade or something conjured or grown out of a bog or a vat. If you look at most human armies over the centuries, you would assume we're only one gender and that most die very young (pre 30), since all of the soldiers are fairly young. An army in no way represents the eneral population. The episode 3 places we visit are most likely bastions of fighters, not 'farms'. Given that lost souls are conjured endless lessly, food might be as well. There's certainly enough corpses, beating hearts and other edible things to indicate meat is readily available.

What you mention is indeed a variation on the theme. A somewhat narrow playing style. Maps that cater for different ways to play it do not get much cred for that. That is one of the things AV did well. It was designed with all 3 skill levels in mind AND coop. I remember there being a fair bit of discussions about this. When we played Doom, we tended to either play coop or dm, and not swap much between them. So if we did play coop, we'd play a lot of coop. It's something we talked about and for many of us in that area, the coop/dm/LAN play was a very important part of the game.

MtPain27 has overall good reviews. He has a bit low knowledge about vanilla limits and techniques. Treating vis plane blockers as pointless annoying obstacles / bad design. It is harder to make something look good yet stay within vanilla limits. I feel this is a bit under-communicated at times. He also views it strictly from a single player view. Some maps have quite well implemented coop play and features, and that is a factor he doesn't mention much. Many maps break catastrophically in coop. You have to discard some designs when mapping with coop in mind. Adding stuff like respawn teleporters in the start, avoiding long runs to pick up weapons when respawning etc are all important for coop enjoyment. Keyed doors that close can be a major pain in coop when someone dies. Some mappers are notorious in creating situations where if you die in a specific area, you cannot complete the map when respawning. Typically areas you go into, a door closes behind you and you have to find a switch to get out. A good coop map will add a teleport or use a drop to let players enter multiple times. You also need to take into account that in coop, players can do two actions at the same time at wildly different locations. This can easily break features like "find 4 switches that raise a floor 24 units each". If two click at the same time, it will break. Care must be taken to avoid creating such scenarios.

I think it's a mix. Some are regular creatures that breed, some are conjured. Some are augmented by stolen/observed human technology. Revenants and Lost Souls are reanimated magically, and revenants are then modified. Most of the demons seems to mirror humans/humanoids. They most likely had some sort of information about earth/humanity before the invasion. It is unlike that the Spider Mastermind was 'built' after the invasion had started. To be honest, it all just doesn't make that much sense and the cyclical idea from Doom Eternal is a reasonably good explanation as to why it is like it is. Bases on Phobos and Deimos do not make sense either. Especially with the size/gravity/climate depictioned. The muscles on a demon do not make sense, so it is most likely magical in nature. From a lore point it is interesting how the new demons in Hell on Earth are tougher and many of them are cybernetic. Going from only bosses being augmented, we now got revenants, arachnotrons, mancubi that are all augmented. Already in the original, we saw multiple cyberdemons. A clear hint that these entities are not unique.

The steps do not need to have the same height as the starting sector. The four raising stairs switches on Doom 2 map 21 is a good example of how this can be done.

E4m3-ing the map? The first time I finished it I had like 3% secrets.

When it comes to dithering, I was thinking of low-res modes. You often come close to a wall, and having dithering could improve the look. Moving in closer would reveal more image data from the original 256 color version. A shaded wall like the shawn/silver textures could look more shaded.

It makes sense to me to make them small. There are already a lot of full-size maps. Dying unexpectedly due to an unknown end boss and having to redo a large map would be frustrating. If e1m8 was tagged on at the end of e1m7, would it be a better map? With all "full-sized" maps they could simply lower the map count by one. We'd have e1m1 to e1m7 as progression maps and e1m8 as a secret map. Doom is a better game due to the different map sizes/formats. One opening level, 6 full length maps with some progression, a secret map and a boss map per episode. Doom 2 suffers from an endless amount of maps without much content progression or break of monotony. You can take any map after map 10 or so and swap around and you wouldn't really notice it. The only ones that are well placed is map15, in the middle, for the secret exit and the sheer size of it, and map29 as a very good build-up to the somewhat lackluster map30. Doom episodes had a clear theme and a sense of buildup and progression. The boss maps are part of that. Short boss maps aren't any more lazier than not having 15 maps per episode in Doom and 9 episodes. Map making takes time (money), which is a finite resource when developing a game. There are also memory constraints. A big map30, with so many different monsters, wouldn't run on a 4 meg machine, which was the target hardware.

The GUS memory problem is only an issue if you have music turned on. If I could drop music and gain some fps, I'd do that over a lot of the graphical tweaks. You could also run with the 256kb or 512kb instrument set and use the leftover for sounds on 1 meg cards. The Gravis Ultrasound pnp supports up to 8 megabyte with 2x32pin simms. With pigus clones becoming a cheap reality, having access to 'GUS' is starting to be a very viable retro pc setup.