Xaser

doom_complete.pk3 is the product of a little tool called WadSmoosh -- it basically merges all your Doom games into a single package, for use with GZDoom. That said, the vast majority of (if not all) wads are built to run with the regular old Doom 1 / Doom 2 data files (DOOM.WAD and DOOM2.WAD, respectively). You probably won't need WadSmoosh -- it's just a fun little bit of convenience if that's your thing.

This thread isn't for debating whether or not somebody else's mentionation is worthy or not (as long as they follow guidelines in the OP) -- please keep that sort of commentary elsewhere.

The config still says zdoom.exe: You'll need to update the configuration to point at zandronum.exe, not zdoom.exe -- you can grab that from here if you don't have it yet.

Why not? MBF21 is absolutely intended to work in GZDoom the same as other ports. If something is different or busted, it might be a bug -- it's best to to make a bug report rather than work around it.

Doom's RNG falls into the "meh, it's fine" range for me. The occasional 80-damage-tracer surprise isn't too much of a showstopper, just a funny moment that sometimes happens. I'm much more likely to die to my own rocket blast, which is 100% in my own hands. :P Heretic, though? Oh, boy. Balancing a map's ammo usage around vanilla Heretic's randomized enemy drops is basically impossible to do well -- the player often ends up with a glut of ammo, since you have to add enough to the map to make sure the player can't get stuck if their luck is bad. Either that or lean very heavily on inventory items, turning the game into Timebomb Simulator. :P Just as an experiment, when I revived Sacrilege* a couple years back, I ripped out all the randomized enemy drops completely. Since I'm touching all the maps already, I figured I could just up the ammo count in any maps that needed it, but turns out the game's balance felt way better in general, even on most unchanged vanilla maps. Weird, but convenient. Back to Doom? Never felt the need to do anything of the sort. It works. (*it's not dead, just sleeping -- I got busy :P)

Brand-new players who aren't familiar with the game aren't going to know that jumping and crouching can break levels. They're options right there in the menu; what sort of game would give you a bindable control and then expect you to not use it? On the surface, that's crazy talk. :P Technically speaking, the best solution to this whole deal would've been to make jumping and crouching features that maps would opt into (i.e. be disabled unless MAPINFO turns them on) -- but that ship sailed twenty-plus years ago. The second-best solution is what GZDoom does currently. Allow MAPINFO to switch it off, but give the user the ability to turn it on anyway if they know what they're doing or just wanna say "fuck it, let me jump dammit". All that said... this discussion has been done to death about six trillion times already. The current way of doing stuff is Fine, about the best it can be without starting to introduce breaking changes, and nobody wants that.

You'll want to run the map through zwadconv first, which converts it to Hexen format -- then you can open it in UDB, press F2, and save it to UDMF. That will preserve line specials, so you won't have to spend ages fixing up the map afterward. [It's a bit puzzling that in 2024 there isn't a one-step method for this. Searching around, the only workable good advice I've been able to find on this is the above series of steps. It works, but it's cumbersome.]

You'll only need to load the DEH file if playing vanilla or chocolate doom. For GZDoom and other ports, you just need the wad.

Forum posts are not a good fit for this sort of thing, since the content will immediately go stale unless every single person who posts here (or a very very enthusiastic moderator) keeps it up to date all the time. That's the big boon of wikis -- they're collaborative. Other folks can help keep your Doomwiki page up to date for you, and there's no rule against people updating their own pages if you want to add missing things yourself. If you don't yet have a Doomwiki page, and you've got some good* releases under your belt, make one! Or ask one of the friendly locals to lend a hand (I don't have a list of the current active wiki editors handy, but they're floating about). [*by "good" I just mean like, "some minimum quality bar", i.e. not just make a bunch of lazy/trolly stuff or whatever :P ]

For fixing the "blurriness", go to Options -> Display Options and set "Texture filter mode" to one of the "None" options (I use "None (linear mipmap)" myself; the various Nones all have different behavior on how textures on distant scenery look, just pick one that suits your eye best). For the rest of it, check that your graphics drivers out of date. That sort of glitchiness seems like something screwy with your drivers/GPU.

Heads up, threads like these ought to be posted in the Doom Editing subforum.

If you're making your own map, you can set it to Dark with the "lightmode" MAPINFO field -- see https://zdoom.org/wiki/MAPINFO_options_for_GZDoom's_GL_renderer , Dark is "lightmode = 3". This update hasn't removed or altered the mapinfo keywords at all -- maps made specifically for gzdoom can specify whichever lightmode works best for the map.

E3M8 from a pistol start was an interesting challenge back in the day for folks who hadn't built up any skill at playing FPS games (i.e. everyone, 'cause they were so novel). You've got to manage limited resources, use infighting, and move around the central pillar as cover (which is tricky when you haven't mastered the art of moving around in first person). That said, the key phrase there is "from a pistol start". Neither of Doom's big boss monster maps (E2M8 and E3M8) have aged well, but at least the cyber is much more difficult for a brand-new player to just end the fight immediately with the BFG. That's a skill that takes practice -- not so much with the spidey, where you can drunkenly stumble forward with the trigger held down and come out victorious every time. :P

This thread seems displaced out of time -- 2023 was one of the best years ever in terms of wads, with one of the biggest releases of all time (myhouse) drawing in a massive amount of attention. Far more people have been gaining interest lately than losing it, seems like.

I don't understand the reasoning for excluding several of the suggestions here (aliens tc, satchap, etc.) -- its fine to put disclaimers next to em (e.g. "this wad is pretty old" or "this one is mega-hard"), so people know what they're getting into, but they absolutely fall under the "horror-ish" umbrella. Let folks pick their own favorites rather than pre-emptively DQ something notable. Sorta related: it may also be worth separating wads into "action oriented" and "survival horror ish" categories, just to manage expectations a bit. That's somewhat biased I guess since one of dead.air's quirks is that it's a fast paced actionfest with a horror aesthetic, which occasionally throws folks off if they're only interested in the spooks. A bunch of the other mentions are in the same category too.

A forum thread isn't a good solution, unfortunately. People who see the thread may post their own art, but there's no guarantee they'll keep it up to date, and there's no way to edit other folks' posts to keep it up to date either (unless you're a moderator :P ) -- There needs to be a way to curate sprites made by other people (e.g. go through this thread and sort and tag things), else the concept is DOA. There's also no tagging and limited searching -- once page 2 gets hit, it's not really much better for end users (people searching for sprites to use) than trying to poke through this thread, unfortunately. I'm not sure offhand what websites or off the shelf solutions there are for this, but the concept is sound enough to maybe start poking some folks who have web dev skills and get something made.

Realm667 hosts "complete" monsters and weapons, with code, rather than sprites or spritesheets. A similar concept but just for the resources (no code) would definitely be a better fit for archiving stuff posted in this thread, if some enterprising soul is interested in doing a thing for that.

TNT hate is not a new phenomenon by any means -- folks have been mixed about it for as long as I've been in the community (read: about 3 metric forevers). If anything, nowadays you'll see a lot more supporters of maps that used to be universally panned (e.g. Habitat, Metal, the O'Brien maps). It's pretty dang cool that so many folks are able and willing to pick out the good parts (and often craft cool new maps using said ideas) rather than just say "lol it sux" and move on.

Not directly, unfortunately -- modifying the actual weapon slots or the starting arsenal was a bit too tall of an order at the time. Maybe for future things, but no guarantees. :P Still though, the concept totally works even without modifying the arsenal, 'cause the pistol is... well, the pistol. :P

I do tend to keep a lot of backups scattered about, 'cause yeah, you never know when that old scrap will prove useful for a future project. I guess my thoughts are more like: if you're posting about a wad in here, it's probably because you'd be interested in playing it. If the author is still floating about, then letting them know there's still interest in it is the best thing you can do to help it see the light of day.

I'm part of the "always give a weapon at the start" crowd, but one minor under-appreciated thing about starting with the pistol (as opposed to beginning with the shotgun straight away) is that I can make that first weapon pickup a chaingun or a rocket launcher instead. ;) Maybe the ideal starting loadout would've been nothing but the fist. A la carte, all the way.

It's honestly very weird seeing a WIP map of mine listed in this thread (this is at least twice now) -- this thread is supposed to be for posting things that are lost to time, and I'm very much still an active member of the community. If you're interested in someone's WIP, its better to reach out directly, that way they know someone's looking forward to it. I do still have this map, there's a fancy mini-project I'm spinning it into, but it's been very low priority lately.

Targeting MUS will, by definition, compromise the compositions. Those sorts of limitations need to be codified before the project starts, not afterward. I do still have a WIP track, but I'm going to be incredibly busy over the next couple of months. Unsure I'll be able to attempt anything until late May.

Somewhere between "quite" and "hella", I'd wager.

There are a bunch of music lumps sandwiched between MAP02 and ENDMAP (there can't be any additional lumps between these two aside from stuff that the level editor creates for you) -- move them below ENDMAP and the editor will recognize the map again.