DavidN

Right, so, uh, this will go a bit quiet for a while because June is over and RAMP 2023 attracted THREE HUNDRED AND TWELVE maps from 240 authors D: With a project of this size it will take a while to go through and do final preparations, but until then, you can get an early-access snapshot version from the download page. https://ramp2023.teamouse.net/download.php I will have to work out a path to stability...

I'll help with any major problems before final release :) SNDSEQ lumps seem to have some issues that I hadn't accounted for, with different people's definitions colliding - I'll write something to track those issues down. If your monsters are being replaced then it's usually because someone has used the same DoomEd numbers that you've defined for your monsters, but like you I don't see any warnings about them. What monsters have been replaced?

I swear, how do people come in saying "this is my first ever map" and come out with something this good :) And that goes for a ton of other maps in the project as well. Looking forward to playing this one!

I just want the Doom community to know this happened.

Mentioning it like this completely reads like that’s what killed her D:

Oddly enough I was trying to work out how to do this a few years ago, for a silly Doom-based order management tool I was going to submit to a hackathon at work :) (Maybe a stuck order spawns an enemy, shooting it makes it retry or cancel) Looking at the log file was the only way I could imagine how to get data out of GZDoom as well - although as it’s open source I suppose you could just get it to do anything with some tweaks. Input was the other tricky part - I’ve seen a weird technique used where a streamer sets up their controls so that some key inputs run scripts for spawning monsters and so on, then another program is set up to listen to a stream chat and simulate those inputs so that the audience can interact with the game and make the player’s life harder :) These days you can also use ZScript to check the contents of a lump, which can be changed at runtime if GZDoom is running an extracted pk3 folder. I’m glad this caught your interest :)

The textures in your screenshot are from OTEX - this is included in RAMP 2023's resources, so you should be able to upload it without redefining them!

Yes, these should work! Take a look at your build log (the terminal icon next to your map in the list on https://ramp2023.teamouse.net/download.php once the project has been downloaded at least once since your upload) and you can see what the compiler extracted and included. Let me know if anything unexpected happens

I'm amazed at the quality (and volume!!) of people's submissions this year - you're all amazing people and there has definitely been an influx of visibly Myhouse-inspired maps :) @obake, if you have any suggestions for ratings for length and difficulty out of 5 (with 6 being possible for extreme cases), please feel free to send them to me!

Can you let me know which ones? I think 4.8.0 was the latest in 2022, and it was all tested on that.

What Meyland12 said :) Feel free to build and submit something, whether in the Discord or not!

This sounds like Mr Friendly by JP LeBreton! https://jp.itch.io/mr-friendly

These look great :)

Glad to see so many people enthusiastic already! :) RAMP only lasts a month to encourage experimentation instead of perfection - there's no expectation that maps will be big or elaborate, instead that they can just be quick projects for people who are trying something new.

Download from the RAMP 2023 Site Welcome to the third edition of RAMP, and its biggest year ever! This is a project I started in 2021 to continue the spirit of TerminusEst13's DUMP projects, encouraging people new to Doom to give mapping a try and to get their creations into a wider project. It's a compilation of maps from incoming members of the Doom community, together with some regulars who are experimenting with some new ideas. This time, your quest is to use the submitted maps to bridge your way through a strange cave system and discover the secrets behind the artefacts you'll find in there. Thank you for everyone's contributions and for helping each other out so wonderfully - we ended with a frankly ludicrous 296 maps by 228 authors. Have fun exploring the gigantic hub level and using your maps to find your way through the game. (Tested on GZDoom 4.10.0 - some startup errors/warnings are normal and shouldn't impede your progress.) See the RAMP landing page to see the previous two years' projects!

It's fantastic to see so many more people getting interested in oldstyle Doom due to this and potentially getting into making their own content :) I've always found the Doom community surprisingly welcoming for a game that was so infamously violent when it came out, perhaps due to the average age being a bit older than many other internet communities.

This is due to a special case in how Doom handles drawing skies! If two adjacent sectors with different ceiling heights both have the sky flat as a ceiling, it will fill the gap with sky instead of drawing nothing and causing a HOM. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Sky And that’s nice because gazing into the abyss of the void scares me D:

I definitely interpreted it as "it's only a walking simulator, jesus christ, why are you all so excited about this" but I'm glad that it wasn't :) What is a walking simulator - a game that focuses minimally on combat? I've seen a few in Doom before, so the concept isn't entirely new to me, but nothing I've seen before in Doom has toyed with the player this much - that's the part that I think people are most focused on, rather than just the unusually low amount of combat (until the spike near the end)

Amazing! How did I never notice that…? AND! “ANNA” in the Cancelled jumble - is that our A in S+A?!

BeyondCompare 4 time again! Thanks @Klear for providing the original upload - this compares that version to the one that was uploaded in later March. Map definition changes: - A default map definition was added to MAPINFO in the late March version, forcing compat_useblocking to false (this is the GZDoom default, meaning that lines with actions will not block the use of lines with actions behind them - in Doom, the first line with a special in the player's range will absorb the player's Use action) - Also set lightmode 3 (Dark) on the default map Map changes: - Many, many things have been set to appear on skill 5 (Nightmare) in the late March version that were toggled off in the original upload. - The berserk pack on the shelf in the daycare has been moved so that it isn't slightly inside the wall. (It has also had its ambush flag set for some reason) - Actor Enters Sector at the bottom of the bathtub now runs script 83 (a new script Music Liminal Bathtub that changes the music to RUNNIN3 and removes the Actor Enters Sector object) instead of 64 (Music Liminal), and script 64 no longer removes the Actor Enters Sector object tagged 369. This fixes a bug where going into the Brutalist house via the Twilight Zone portal in the furnace room would also delete the bathtub Actor Enters Sector object, but I'm not certain it was possible for the player to encounter the bug anyway - An new Actor Enters Sector object at the bottom of the daycare chute will also run script 64 (just changing the music to RUNNIN3) - Script 70, executed when the mirror is uncovered, now moves the glass tumbler from the sink to the shelf in the mirrored portal bathroom! The effect was absent before. - Lines/vertices/sectors/tags for the tumbler have been added - The mysterious phone at the Shell station! In the earliest version this was a usable linedef that used lock 10. Oddly, lock 10 does not use the Quarter but instead the BlueSkull. The action is 67, Floor Raise Instantly By Value * 8, but the sector and value to raise by are both 0 so the phone does nothing. - In the earliest version, three lines behind each other on the sink in the kitchen of the flooded house have actions that alter the water level of the kitchen/bath in the altered house and lower the barrier next to the bathtub. The actions have been removed in the March update. I think this might have been an earlier attempt to script the water levels that got copied over to the flooded house when the flooded house was made, then the author later realized it was easier to do this action with a script but accidentally left the old version in the flooded house until deleting it in the late March version. If this isn't someone who was starting to learn ACS scripting after being used to doing more Boom-ish scripting then they are planting red herrings on a level truly never seen before in the history of civilization.

Part three! The warning in the readme came true - it’s taken over my entire life for the last three weeks.

https://plush.city/@DavidXNewton/110273789495475472 Even as I continue to try untangling the bare mechanics of this wad, I can’t hope to solve the mysteries of what it means - the interpretations by everyone above are all incredible, and with the pills and the bathroom signs, I definitely think that there are some gender identity issues going on here! The theme of bathrooms being oppressive or dangerous places goes throughout the wad, and that could be where a trans person feels most vulnerable. I like the theory of the house being representative of all the different “what if” scenarios, as well. There’s an odd thing I’m working on just now - for no reason that I can gather, the lines the player crosses when they leave the hospital bed will create soulspheres in the first house’s garden, the same as picking up the yellow key does! I think there might therefore be a way to actually reach them by dying outside the house so that you don’t walk over the lines in the doorways that destroy them, but I haven’t worked it out yet… or decided if this means anything at all.

I've been examining more things :) Part 2 of the analysis of Myhouse, taking us up to jumping out of a plane!

Answering a concern further up the topic, nobody here is going to demand the author reveal themselves or anything - it’s just fun to speculate, theorize and try to work out the mystery in front of us (although when the answer to a mystery is a person, yes, it’s important that people know where the lines are and they don’t track down where Alfonzo lives and start raking around in his bins for evidence, etc) There are some great suggestions and rationales above - I want to stick my opinion in again and say that the way the map is built points more towards the creator being familiar with Boom “scripting” style (or maybe just an older style of UDMF?) rather than being a UDMF/ZScript wizard, but that they were capable of learning bits of UDMF and ZScript when needed - there’s sometimes a lot of gadgetry involving lock definitions and teleports and sector-affecting Things where a script could do the job much more straightforwardly. But then, creating the impression of being a Boom mapper coming back and learning more could equally be exactly what the author was setting out to do :) Whatever their level of GZDoom experience, being able to plan consistency through such a tangled web of routes is truly amazing. The sink in the petrol station even makes sure to stay synchronized with the north bathroom, even though there’s no way for the player to see it when it’s empty!

Spectacular :) Well done Not Jabba and ShallowB, that's definitely it - a note from Steven thanking the musicians. And Jimmy gave the topic a nudge at the very start when it was looking slow, to hint there was something else there!