Xaser

For community projects like these, it's generally best to not reserve specific map slots (aside from special places like 01, 30, the secret exits, maybe 07), or at least reserve the right to reorder the maps before release to fit, otherwise the difficulty curve is going to fly all over the place. The theme itself doesn't require an exact ordering, since mappers are free to combine whichever two maps they wish. Relatedly, you're probably best off not targeting exactly 32 maps, unless you're willing to open up more "slots" and then take the best-of-32 at the end of it. Inevitably, many people that claim a slot will end up dropping it for some reason, and even with the 3-week expiration, you'll inevitably wind up in a situation where there are less than 32 finished submissions at the end of it. In cases like that, it's best to release what you've got rather than overextend the project to try and hit exactly-32 -- lots of projects "bleed out" in this phase. Plus, if you're using UMAPINFO, you can tie off the set in a nice bow at the end of it (for ports that support it) regardless of length. I may be choir-preaching, just seen plenty of projects fall into these pitfalls, so I gotta give my usual cautionary spiel about it. :P

You're going to need to produce a finished sprite (or something close to it) to really gather any attention for this sort of project. It's all about the execution, and folks are going to be naturally skeptical since the vast majority of past attempts at this kind of thing have all fallen short.

OK, but counterpoint: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/g-i/impencse

Maybe the mystery at this point is the fact that it hasn't been done well, since the game's been around for a long while and it's not like we have any shortage of great artists around these parts. But those folks are always busy cranking out awesome new stuff -- e.g. I know Cage would be able to pull off an HD Doom set but he's putting those skills to good use on Supplice instead. :P There's one shining beacon of an exception: Cheello's voxel models -- those are fucking great, and nail the style exactly. But even then, those are at the OG resolution, so you couldn't really use 'em as a base for something like this. But you'd be looking at something in the vein of that level of complexity, at a minimum, and that was a Big Ass Project(tm).

True, the neural upscale is definitely the best result, but IMO a lot of the textures ended up looking like oil paintings. The sprites did fare much better though, which is a rarity -- somewhere in there, there's a hypothetical "perfect" HD sprite project if someone is brave enough to the time to go through and pixel-edit everything. Neural upscaling in general is a bit sketchy in hindsight, what with all the modern AI image generation shenanigans going on, but I dunno offhand how many of those troubles the old models from 2018 are subject to. I don't know the tech well enough to make a judgment call on that one, just mentioning it in advance before someone else does. :P

"HD Sprites" is one of those cursed project concepts that never, ever seems to work. The amount of time and effort it takes to replace Doom's entire sprite set, including every monster in the game, is absolutely herculean. Many people have tried (often having no idea how big the project is), and every attempt* has fallen well short of the goal in some way or another. That said, the sketches you're showing look less to me like an "HD Sprites" project and more like a "Stylized sprites" project -- which is actually a way more interesting concept. If you can produce sprites in the same style you're showing off in your sketches there, and just roll with that (rather than try and match the look of the originals "but HD" or whatever), you might just make something cool here. It's still a fuck-ton of work though. [*I'm talking Doom here -- other communities have managed to pull this off, e.g. Marathon, so it's certainly not impossible in theory. In practice, though, we're 30 years strong and still waiting. :P ]

GZDoom doesn't have a ton of fancy music-related features, but it does have a SetMusic ACS function that's pretty straightforward to use. If all you're wanting to do is change the music when you cross a line, toss it in a script and throw ACS_Execute on the line, and you'll be good to go. If you need to do something more complex than that, it's still a good starting point at least.

There are plenty of games that deserve a shout-out, but the one that comes to the top of my head at the moment is Dead Space. It's a rare case where the ideal way to play the game is to turn the music off and let the audio design do all the heavy lifting. Shit's great, yo.

What's with this response? The OP is relatively new to the community, and this is a fairly normal question to ask. I don't know what "memes" you're referring to here.

This sort of thing is pretty much expected when you're playing at low-resolutions -- it's part of The Look(tm). Even BTSX does this at parts. ;P

I still feel like this is a great case for GZDoom's auto-compatiblity stuff -- If a wad explicitly documents which lightmode to use, but doesn't set it in MAPINFO, add a hash for the map to gzdoom.pk3 to auto-set it. Then those of us goofballs who know how to make a GZDoom PR can patch 'em when we find 'em.

A side thought here: if the reasoning behind removing the save-on-exit behavior was to reset the option back to default for everyone, that could also be achieved by changing the name of the cvar to something new, so any previous configs just ignore the old value. If that gets done, and the new name gets saved to the config, that would only require folks to set it from the console once before it "sticks". Since MAPINFO takes precedence anyway, that won't trip up any GZ projects that need something explicit, and folks setting the cvar are consenting to modifying the base game at that point.

That's exactly what I'm saying said in the post you're quoting. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, unless we're in agreement on this. :P

Ashes is a GZDoom project -- if it's designed to work with a particular lightmode, it should specify it in its MAPINFO. If the author does explicitly support multiple lightmodes or their stance on the topic is "yeah use whatever, they all look fine", then sure, it can be left out -- but far more often than not, mappers aren't using it because they don't realize it exists.

Random suggestion of the moment: none of the MAPINFOs currently specify a lightmode -- it'd be good to set that, so everything looks correct out of the box for folks who are using an existing GZDoom install instead of the standalone release.

Just a PSA for folks: if the author of your favorite GZDoom map(set) hasn't specified a lightmode in their MAPINFO, that's a very good thing to report to the author. Many people simply don't know that the option exists, or why it's important.

Just a heads-up, you should only be using DECORATE if you're building something for Zandronum -- for GZDoom mods, use ZScript. It is not more complex than DECORATE, at a core level (this is a misconception that keeps floating around).

Could keep it simple-ish and go with "Pyrodemon." Fits the naming scheme and describes exactly what it be do.

Just an FYI for folks who post in these types of threads, you can't just go "this thread is about hating stuff so you aren't allowed to call me out on anything I say". If you post something that's way out of line or not grounded in reality, someone's going to protest. That's just how it works.

A zdoom-structured pk3 would work great for the truecolor versions, yup. It'd be a ready-to-use resource for GZDoom, just like the .wad version is ready to use for other ports. That'd also work great for crediting, btw -- you can use subfolders in pk3s for textures, e.g. put all of plums' textures in "textures/plums/FOOBAR.png". Since y'all already have a head start on this on Google Drive, you may even be able to use the same structure as the Drive folder, with maybe just a small bit of shuffling about.

The volume of replies here unfortunately isn't large enough for the stackoverflow/quora/etc. "best answers rise to the top" model to work*. It's dangerous to leave a non-confident "maybe-answer" here, because you're then relying on someone else swooping in and correcting any mistakes (which doesn't always happen), and relying on the OP (who is often brand-new to Doom modding) to discern which of the two answers is correct, because neither post is likely to have any significant number of upvotes (if any). A bad answer is worse than no answer. I've noticed this particularly with GZDoom questions -- this forum does not have a large number of GZDoom experts, especially when it comes to non-mapping topics (gameplay modding, ZScript, actor stuff in general). At this point it's frankly more prudent to point people at the ZDoom forums and have them ask their question there instead. The forums are less active in general, but a quick perusal of the Scripting subforum shows a much lower ratio of nonsense/wrong answers. :P [*This particular subforum attempts to use this model, but it doesn't work at all in practice. Posts get maybe 1 or 2 upvotes, on rare occasions, and all that does is screw up the order of the posts unless someone goes out of their way to click the "Sort by Date" button up top :P ] re: KDIKDIZD, it uses Doom2 so the super shotgun works, and it needed to move its starting map to MAP13 so the secret exit in "E1M3" (MAP15) works in vanilla. There are a few hardcoded map-slot-related things in vanilla/limit-removing (boss death actions, secret exits, MAP30 monster telefrags, and a handful of others), but "map size" is not one of them. Finally, the point from the OP about targeting limit-removing is relevant in the sense that the answer must be limited to what oldschool DEHACKED can do (i.e. no MBF21 or GZDoom features, no MusicChangers, etc), but the map size discussion doesn't have anything at all to do with the OP's actual question about making a "music sound" thing.

"Doom music" to me will always be Jimmy, stewboy, Klem, and company, and their output encompasses way to many genres to try and even list. With apologies to the heaps of skilled community musicians I haven't mentioned; if I tried to list 'em all, I'd be here all day. :P There's such a wide gulf between the new and old games, musically (even without factoring in mods) that I dunno if it makes sense to try and lump them together at all. That said, my answer is still "Other" even if I consider the new games only, 'cause Mick's 2016/Eternal soundtracks sound like nothing else that came before it.

What version of GZDoom are you running? This is a very recent feature addition; you'll need at least version 4.12.0 for it to work, which just got officially released this April.

Is there an index somewhere of which people made which textures? Or is that the thing you and Gappy are working on ATM? I normally use packs like this by plucking out the textures I want rather than using it as a whole, and I'd like to know who to credit for what. It also looks like all the textures in the wad have been converted to the Doom palette, but there are surely a few here and there that were originally posted as truecolor (which would be useful for GZDoom, other games like Heretic, etc). Are these being collected as well?

Yeah, and you're making it worse. Your definition for limit-removing is completely wrong -- check the wiki -- the limits in question are things like visplanes, segs, blockmap (which is related to overall map size but in a weird complicated way). The entire concept of "MAP01's map limits are different than MAP02's, etc." you're claiming has no bearing in reality whatsoever. You need to take a break from commenting on the Doom Editing subforums until you get some more experience under your belt. You've been leaving a lot of vague, misleading, off-topic, or flat-out wrong answers lately, and you're leading new users astray. Hell, even this entire "limit-removing" tangent has nothing to do at all with the OP's question. Why are we talking about this here?