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Finally got to play this amazing map (yesterday, as of now), been meaning for a while after watching MtPain's review. I managed to forget absolutely all details from the video so it was a nice blind experience, I only wish I was a bit more awake for it (did a playtest of some 1 hour long sunder tribute map right before this, bad life decisions).
Really fascinated by these non-linear interconnected layouts like in this map, want to incorporate it more into my mapping and this map is a great case study for that.
During the playthrough I noticed how the map very often spirals around 'locally' by opening progression with walkover triggers organically. This works really well for the maps flow and doesn't seem, at least on the first glance very hard to replicate; of course, everybody does cool progression bits here and there occasionally but the systematic use of them here seems to do the trick. I imagine you'd draw some nice geometry in the editor and then figure out how to make these small loops everywhere.
More 'global' non-linearity of the map was also quite interesting, I noticed at least one place where monster closets were used differently depedning on which key-path you take (which seemed to lead to some bug in my playthrough, I think, a closet with cacos opened by they were facing away and blocked off by soundlines). There seemed to be a few branching points across the map and its interesting how it works together with all different parts opening up as you progress in different directions.
Very non-orthogonal geometry which still appears highly structured is also something I want to do more, most of the time I lean to one of the extremes: embrace the 64 unit grid or go full gridless free form style, and find it difficult to do something inbetween. The texture palette helps here of course with not having to worry about alignment along the skewed lines etc. I would probably opt to choose textures which are easy to work with if I attempt geometry like this.
I'm quite experienced with limited texture mapping so the fact that the map looks great while using only graytall, fireblu and doortrack doesn't surprise me as much. I usually limit myself to 5-10 textures when I start a map anyway, even if its not imposed by project rules or whatever.
Anyways, always more to learn in this craft.
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wow I never noticed you skew either to the 64 grid or gridless! I guess I could've guessed the 64 grid thing from how orthogonal some of your maps are. I think I always work in 64 or greater for initially drawing the space/form of a larger room/sector, but then I always begin to refine and adjust and shave corners, usually using 8 or smaller, I really like 8.
Didn't know about the texture limitation thing you tend to do either, it's implied in a lot of your maps but didn't know how consciously rigid you choose to make your maps in terms of texture variation. Looking forward to interconnected map layouts from you! I should try to do the same
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Found this gem on today's idgames upload
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/d-f/elysium
Description:
QuoteSpectacle map with about 2900 monsters and portraits of anime boys. Read postmortem.txt for why this is a thing.
Storytime: Yagoo's evil twin, Oogay, has been unleashed and has taken over the Tempus guild in Elysium.
He intends to convert it into the homebase for his very first group to rival Cover Corp's Holostars: Naked Inc.'s Pleistoquasars. They are also evil because I say they are.
He has also thrown a demonic kegger and the neighbors have begun to complain about the noise. More so than usual.
You are a random hobo that has been abducted off the street and tasked with dispatching the demons and stopping Oogay before his evil plan of evil evilness can come to its evil frution that is evil.
Did I mention that he's evil?The map itself turned out to be quite good, visuals and combat are very solid. Kudos to @riktoi for actually trying it out, it was was worth my time (ingame playtime was about an hour).