Xaser

Do the acid pools have the MISSILE flag set? If not, that would explain it -- `A_SpawnObject` copies over the `tracer` and `target` pointers if both spawner and spawnee are missiles, but only in that case -- it's specifically meant to support projectiles spawning sub-munitions, but the general case of having monsters do attacks without the +MISSILE flag is kinda undefined-land in general. If that's what's going on, it sounds like a good case for adding some explicit flags to control this behavior (e.g. a pair of "alwaysCopyPointers" and "neverCopyPointers" flags for A_SpawnObject ).

This is intended to already work if you're using MBF21's A_SpawnObject to spawn the sub-projectiles -- if that's not working, there's a bug in the implementation that ought to be fixed and compat-option'd for the next one.

[EDIT] I originally had a response to Clippy's post here, but it's no longer relevant -- is good, we all cool now :)

A sorta-on-topic corollary: You will see folks say things like "baaaah the regulars are so cliquey! they shut me out!!" in any community. Sometimes people indeed don't get a fair shake, because shit happens, but take things like these with a grain of salt, because a lot of times you're hearing a complaint from someone who got banned or shunned because they were being a jackass. :P -- Every well-run community will have its detractors, because there will be bans, and modern Doomworld is on the good side of the line more often than not. [This isn't @OP, I don't get the impression you're doing this here, just sometimes you'll hear such things from outside folks and it's tempting to give in to confirmation bias.]

Just to add on to Arlene and Decay's posts: your reputation isn't Bad Forever(tm) because of any of these things; simply apologize, move on, and do better, and you'll build it back up in no time. Many of us regulars started out as spammy bad posters -- if I can recover from that, so can you. ;) Another thing worth mentioning: joining an existing "in crowd" is by no means the only (or even best) way to "fit in" to a community -- plenty of community fixtures here got their start by forming their own team (with blackjack and hookers), networking with other relative newcomers and collaborating together to crank out some absolute gold (e.g. Squonker Team). Some folks just went solo, made some great content on their own, and got a "following" that way (MtPain comes to mind; Arlene got her start on YouTube before joining DW, etc). "Success" in the Doom community is kinda what you define it -- just hanging around and having fun is totally a noble goal on its own -- but nah, you don't need to "infiltrate" some upper echelon to be accepted 'round here.

I'd much rather see folks IDCLEV around a set than get stuck on a map and have a bad time with it or decide to quit playing altogether, especially for projects that have lots of different map authors. If you don't like Person A's work, maybe Person B's suits your fancy. tl;dr, you're doing it right. ;)

Check out STRAIN -- it's a great classic, with new enemies and resources galore. Still holds up today. ;) Also give REKKR a go -- also fantastic, an entirely new game in the engine, technically made in relatively-modern times but it runs in DOS so it fits the bill ;)

This is probably worth bugreporting to GZDoom -- that particular texture isn't meant to be drawn at all.

I've been playing around a bit with ripper projectiles recently, and there's a flaw with the current implementation in dsda-doom (unsure if shared with vanilla heretic, haven't checked): projectiles won't rip through freshly-killed enemy corpses until they hit their A_Fall state. This isn't always noticeable since enemy height gets reduced to 1/4 immediately on death, but if you fire a ripper at the foot of a monster as they're dying, it don't rip. :( Dunno if this is best handled with a compat option or a new flag, but either way it'd be a demo-compat-breaking change to just fix in place, so "fix it in the new standard" we go. ;)

I'm boring and voted "ambivalent" because IMO there's nothing wrong with sewers as a concept -- it's a matter of execution, like everything else -- though it's certainly valid that following the theme exactly without doing any out of the box thinking will result in a pretty boring maze, which is why there's so many bad ones out there. ;) The other thread (and this one too) have some great examples of well-executed sewer levels, but I also wanna give a shout to The Cistern from the first Tomb Raider: Interesting design, revolving around a central chamber that's tricky to navigate with the water lowered, and the obligatory water-raising puzzle isn't brain-bustingly difficult. Good stuff. That said, the map immediately following this one ("Tomb of Tihocan") continues the sewer theme but falls square in the "boring maze" category for its first half, so the game's got a duo of "good example, bad example" in a row. :P -- For Tomb Raider Anniversary they ended up cutting out the crappy part and merged the two levels into one, which was the right call for sure.

Difficulty balance is one of things that's more of an art than a science, but I've gathered a handful of (subjective!) tips/principles/whatnot I tend to stick to. Some of these are more on the topic of "how to make a map challenging in general" rather than the OP's "how to balance across difficulty settings", but there's a good bit of overlap. Emphasis on "subjective" above -- for anything that reads like a "do" or "don't" here, there's someone who's done the polar opposite and made something amazing out of it. Perhaps that next someone is you. ;) Incoming SFALL1 of Text: It's completely reasonable to expect UV players to be familiar with the map, or be prepared to learn it. By "learn", of course, I mean "die and try again". :P A big part of the enjoyment of any map, IMO, is the challenge of discovery -- figuring out how the map works, how fights play out, finding where to go, unearthing secrets, and all those good bits. On UV, it's totally reasonable to expect players to engage with the mechanic of discovery to a higher degree than HMP and below; it's just as valid as requiring a UV player to have good knowledge of monster movement patterns, finely-tuned dodging skills, and all that other skilled-player magic. Relatedly, I typically thingplace for Ultra-Violence by "default", not 'cause I'm super-skilled (I definitely ain't), but because I already know where all the traps, secrets, and side routes are. ;) -- UV is basically the "I know what I'm doing" difficulty, HMP takes the edge off the "sneaky" evil bits, and HNTR and below are the comfy fun zone. NOTE: There are occasionally people who make the counter-claim (intentionally or not) that every map must be completable on UV blind saveless FDA or The Map is Wrong -- ignore their ass. This is a vocal minority whose existence should not influence your designs in any way. :P DOUBLE NOTE: Just to be clear, the above doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea to add deathtraps and unwinnable situations carte blanche and go "just retry or savescum!" to anyone who voices frustration. You should definitely ask yourself whether or not that instakill pit or surprise archvile mob trigger is actually fun -- BUT sometimes, amazingly, it actually is. ;) There's a fine line between trolling the player and pulling off a fantastic "gotcha!" moment, and straddling the line is an art of its own. There are entire challenge-based mapsets dedicated to the "try, fail, and try again" concept, often with hilariously unfair failure conditions, and they work. :P Ammo starvation is a legitimate tactic... ...on UV, at least. ;) Sure, some players don't care for this, but you can't please everyone and there's a very unique flavor to ammo-management-heavy combat that might complement your map well. Got a fight toward the end that's trivialized by the BFG or plasma gun? Maybe the problem isn't the monster placement, but there's too many cells in the map and players are always overstocked when they get there. Players trivializing your cramped maze bit with the SSG? Limit the number of shells the player has. And so forth. ...But don't flood easier difficulties with too much ammo. The flip-side of the above. You usually want to provide easier difficulties with more of an "ammo cushion", but don't overdo it. Although it's a bit counter-intuitive, sometimes you may want to _remove_ a few ammo pickups on lower difficulties if there's significantly less HP the player has to wade through. If you don't keep an eye out for this one, the player may end up sleepwalking through the map while holding mouse1. ;P DISCLAIMER: These two issues are often a bitch in the ass to deal with if you're targeting both pistol-start and continuous play (i.e. basically every megawad/episode ;) -- there's really no easy solution there, aside from Test Both and just do your best. :P DOUBLE DISCLAIMER: Backpacks also make this one considerably harder to deal with. There are even some folks around that explicitly recommend never giving the player a backpack ever -- "never" is a strong word, but it may be worth considering whether your map really needs that backpack; how does it play without it? Might work better. ;) RELATED NOTE: ITYTD already has double ammo, so if "survival horror ammo starvation" is an explicit Design Goal of your map, the game at least provides a built-in outlet for players who want it. It's not a catch-all, but it _is_ always there. Unless you're doing fancy GZDoom stuff and rip it out I guess. :P Don't remove the most interesting parts of a fight. e.g. if you've got a well-crafted scene where a few archviles are unleashed in a sea of fresh corpses, and it's a bit too spicy on lower difficulties, it's probably better to subtract a vile or to, or give the player more resources, than to demote the archies to revenants or somesuch, since it completely removes the entire Thing that makes the fight interesting. There are tons of different variants of this one -- it's a broad principle, but a good one to keep in mind. Invulnerability spheres are trump cards for lower difficulties. Can't figure out how to make your awesome monster mosh pit not a massive pain in the dick on ITYTD/HNTR? Try tossing in an invuln. 30 seconds of OP power fantasy is often more fun than a nerfed battle. Megaspheres work in a similar fashion -- giving players a free 4x effective-HP boost is extremely powerful. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the "Invuln on Easy, Megasphere on Medium, Medkits/Berserk on Hard" pattern; you might not even need to shuffle any monsters around if you're lucky ;) "Meat Reduction" is only as effective as your "combat arena" allows. This one takes a bit of explaining. :P There are probably better terms for these, but by "meat reduction" I mean reducing the total HP pool of a group of same-type monsters by removing a few (e.g. reducing a crowd of 8 revenants to just 2), and "combat arena" is a catch-all for any part of a map a particular fight takes place in, whether it be a literal arena or a series of rooms/hallways or a mindbending abstract fuckscape. When it comes to monster crowds, there's sometimes a "critical mass" where adding or subtracting Meat to the pool doesn't really make any difference in difficulty -- this is heavily influenced by your Arena shape. If you've got a very large circular room with some revenants in the center, it doesn't actually make a ton of difference difficulty-wise whether you've got 10 revs or 100, since in either case the fight is basically "circle strafe and don't stop moving or you Just Die". Got more of a maze-like area, though? The threat is now getting boxed into a corner, and adding more enemies absolutely increases the pressure on the player. The above examples are a bit contrived, but there are all sorts of scenarios where adjusting the monster count in an area only affects the time it takes to complete the fight, not how hard the fight actually is. If done wrong, this could lead to UV simply being a "more tedious" version of HMP, or HMP accidentally becoming "whoops it's actually still as hard as UV" if the reduced meat is still just as lethal. ;P A lot of MtPain's "monster window dressing" callouts fall into this category (i.e. a lot of time is spent cleaning up enemies on ledges which will never hit you if you're moving in a circle; the threat is the same whether there's 5 monsters or 50), and there's a phenomenon that often happens in high-monstercount maps where players lament "I've already beaten the fight but it takes 10 minutes to finish cleaning up." Less is more, sometimes literally. ;) This is another general guideline with no hard and fast rules, but you can easily fall into this trap by leaning too heavily on formulas like "3 monsters on UV, 2 on HMP, 1 on HNTR". Guidelines, not rules -- they don't always work. EXCEPTION OF SORTS: Monsters with built in "time pressure" mechanics (e.g. archviles and pain elementals) buck this trend a bit, since leaving them alone for long periods of time can have disastrous results for the player. You'll get much more mileage out of "meat-reducing" crowds of these types than others. Archviles in particular need careful consideration -- they have a very steep"meat to difficulty" (lol) curve, i.e. the difference between 0 archviles, 1 archvile, and a trio of archviles is pretty massive. Without a rocket launcher or BFG, this goes straight from "no threat" to "seek cover or take heavy damage" to "seek cover or Become Die." ;) That's all for now. I may jot down some more ramblings later, but this has been churning in my brain for long enough. So here, have a post.

Link works now -- though looking at it, it's a map, and maps go in the WAD Releases & Development subforum. [I've asked a mod to move it, so no need to worry about it this time, just a note for future things.]

The file hasn't been made public in Google Drive -- we don't have permission to download it. For screenshots, try Imgur -- nowadays you'll need to make an account (I think?) but the upload limits are basically nonexistent. For now, I guess. :P

Little-known fact: "moo" is actually short for "moose".

If there's something broken in GZDoom, it's best to leave a bug report so it gets fixed.

These sprites are far too low-contrast to make anything out -- it just looks like an abstract black polygon. Unless you're going for a highly-stylized "silhouette" look for the thing you're working on (i.e. all map geometry is in very bright colors, and weapons & enemies are very dark black), it's unlikely that this will work unless the shading is touched up a bunch.

Remastering/improving stock content is also something that takes a good amount of skill to do well (source: I've been there :P ). There's nothing wrong with a new mapper using this sort of project as a way to practice mapping, especially if it's something they're interested in -- I've always found that the best way to motivate myself to learn something new is to have a concrete goal (i.e. a thing I want to make) in mind. But I wouldn't start with the assumption that doing this sort of thing is any easier than making something from scratch. To pull it off well, you've got to consider whether the additions you're making fit stylistically, or don't impede on the gameplay too much (or, better, use the new stuff as an opportunity to improve the gameplay). And so forth. tl;dr: Don't do it because it's "easier", do it because it's what you wanna do. :P

What's broken, exactly? GZDoom has a ton of compatibility options that can be switched on in MAPINFO and a ton of ways to fix up other things that work differently (e.g. shoot triggers, funky rendering hax, etc). Whatever it is, it's probably fixable.

Posting here so future-folks don't forget: walkover triggers don't work with UMAPINFO's "bossaction" field -- the safest way of fixing this would be to add a new comp_ option and default it to fixed in some future MBF24/25/etc.

Something that struck me when seeing the screenshot in the OP: E3M1 might not be the strongest map, but damn does the opening room do a good job at putting the sky texture front and center. "You're in HELL now, motherfucker!"

Plutonia's entry/exit teleporters are a great bit of consistency, but I gotta give a shoutout to the OG: EXITDOOR. As soon as you see that texture, you know exactly what's up. Also props to DOOR3 for playing the "unopenable scenery-only door" role, though that rule tends to be broken as often as it's followed. Nice idea, at least.

This sort of thing is very obnoxious -- you're best off not doing it. Myhouse didn't do anything of the sort, either -- you can lock yourself out of certain areas and endings depending on your choices in the map, but it didn't softlock you or kill you for doing so. Heck, you can technically always restart the map without even going to the menu, since the exit loops back on itself (or underhalls/sllahrednu ;).

Doom-style shooters (a.k.a. "boomer shooters") are very very different than other types of shooters, and there was a period of 15-ish years (2003 to 2018) where virtually none were ever released. Someone who plays Doom for the first time without played seen any of its kin are indeed going to find it fresh. Gonna link the usual Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom article, since it's dead-on in its summary of what makes the game unique from so-called "modern shooters" (i.e. Call of Duty and the like). The distinction may not be quite as obvious to newer gamers since we do have quite a few examples of the genre now, including the new Dooms (which are kinda half-boomershooter-half-not). The line has blurred, but that's a good thing since that means we're no longer in a drought. :P

Chainfunner.