THT

plums' example is a great case of why you should just stick to plain old DOOM linedefs and sectors: you can FORCE the player to cross a line from a specific direction, but not necessarily to pick up an object. Stabbey has really good advice too: I'm currently picking up a megawad I started 20 years ago and have no plans to use enhanced scripting; you can do quite a lot with the original DOOM/DOOM II spec. A monster teleport ambush isn't really the simplest thing in classic DOOM level editing, I'd call it intermediate because it involves several cascading actions instead of just sending a single command. To do what you're describing, you need to make the map do each of the following: 1)Monsters have heard player >> monsters are swarming around in their closet, -there's a few ways to do this, usually with "dummy sectors", but for simplicity you can just make a separate monster closet with a tiny hall linking to a room housing the player. Nothing complex, you just need a path for the sound to follow. The player should be 'forced' into firing their weapon to excite the baddies in the other room. 2)Player walks over line triggers by object >> lowers door on monster closet >> opened door allows aggro monsters to walk over second set of 'tripwires' -set the player-triggered Lines' special type to "4" (a walk-once trigger that opens a remote door) and match their Sector Tags with the sector (closed door) you plan on opening in the monster closet. Make the monster door open into a sector with a trigger line to teleport monsters that cross it. 3)Monster walks across teleport-tripwire, gets teleported near player, -for the monster teleport, you'll need a second matched pair of Sector Tags to link the monster-teleport tripwires to the sector where they'll teleport. Use line type 126 (a walk trigger that teleports monsters-only and can be activated infinite times). -finally, go in Thing mode and add a Teleport Destination to the tagged sector where monsters will spawn. This defines where specifically they'll go. Don't get the "Sector Tag" confused with the line special-type: if your "player tripwire" is Sector Tag 1, then the door you'll lower must also be a sector tagged 1. Likewise, the monster-teleport lines and their destination sector should share the same Sector Tag number. DON'T FORGET YOUR TELEPORT DESTINATION 'THING'! Hopefully this gets you on your feet!

As others have said, it spices things up. If, say I take that 80-damage rocket from 100% health, I can't reliably run past those hitscanners anymore and thus whole strategies change. It engages your decision-making and makes for a more dynamic experience. Somehow I find it almost always works that when I take a hit that feels like a glancing blow it gets a low roll but that's probably confirmation bias... Either way, Doom lacks accurate aiming--you're simply looking to hit the target with as many shots as possible--so randomized damage feels at-home here where it would be frustrating in a game where you can actually make a headshot and roll a dud.

If they'd just given her the secondary ability to rush like Lost Souls with a ton of damage she'd be a lot more interesting.

Wow it's cool to learn little bits of neo-anthropology like this. Funny how something like Doom can bridge generations like that!

It's just got a brutal opening hub with the fast pinkies and, yes, the shotgun guys. Yeah I mean consecutive run...M1 and M2 are't too bad.

Probably beating E1M3 on Nightmare...yeah that isn't that impressive but that map is when Nightmare really starts to lay into you!

You've got great modeling skills; this would definitely work as part of a massive TC that could somehow generate 3D structure from wall textures by analyzing the surroundings (i.e. placing rails by height drops into nukage, decorations by computer terminals, etc.) to generatively upscale maps.

It's hard to go back to the intermission music after you've heard it with The Demons From Adrien's Pen; SNES was my first DOOM. The viney, semi-permeable motif of the map with its varied lighting makes it hard to feel safe from any given position and I feel the music suits it better than hard rock. Wide halls combined with lots of openings and false walls means monsters up to a Baron could be anywhere and makes for a paranoid experience.

Wow I've seen a lot of threads on here over the years, but I've never seen anyone anthropomorphize the actual weapons. Can you do the whole line-up?

Those black-and-silver USB converters are the bottom-of-the-barrel...you'd think this would be "good enough" but that hasn't been my experience. I have a bigass MIDI studio with over 30 devices and an M-Audio Midisport Uno is all I use when I need to backup or otherwise connect one to a computer. Same deal (it's just a USB cable with 2 MIDI DIN plugs on the other end) but it's actual decent quality; I've used the same one for a decade and it's still going...the generic black-and-silver one I got for free with a used device has never worked. $30, not gonna break the bank either! FYI to other people looking here: any MIDI synthesizer that supports "General MIDI" ("GM") will do what the SC-55 does! Here's some module examples: Yamaha: MU-devices (MU-50/MU-500/MU-2000) Roland: JV-1080 (getting to be in-demand!), SC-whatever ("Sound Canvas" range of modules) Korg: any old Triton, the Korg workstation keyboard/module can be coaxed into GM as per this link they've kindly provided Alesis: NanoSynth. There are more, and you can get actual keyboards as well: Yamaha CS-1X, Roland Gaia are some examples, but, uhh....well... Acting as a GM sound module is kind of a sad underuse of most synths; most people won't shell out $500 for a used Roland Gaia just to make DOOM sound better (but it probably will!). Most of these GM devices fall into a class of synths known as "ROMplers": machines which use fixed sample data for tone generation instead of something more sexy and exotic like "real live" oscillators. Having an oboe sample for an oboe is good enough for most of us, but if you don't like the way the sample sounds there's little the rest of the synth's engine can do to fix that! In theory you could put a 16-part multitimbral synth or groovebox to the task (I'm looking at a giant Roland MC-909 as I type!), but these modules simplify this by using a standardized set of patches that matches the GM standard. For those of us who aren't synth nerds, probably best to stick to one of these or a software equivalent!

If your design is such that the player has to backtrack, a fun thing to do is make more and more of the map open up with closets off of the main corridors triggered far away. Think about whether or not the baddies are going to be aggro: If they're deaf or otherwise not alerted, they'll behave like a classic monster closet ambush and the surprise is in the unexpected opening. If they start alerted, they'll try to head for your general direction and your map should funnel them accordingly to force an unpredictable confrontation. Best advice I can think of: try to learn what mapping/gameplay attributes each monster has and use them appropriately. Pinkies, being wide and melee, are like linebackers or a pack of wolves and work best in tight areas and in groups to choke your movement. Hell Nobles will slowly and methodically stalk you like Jason Voorhees and hit hard, but being slow and slim means you can juke past or snipe them more easily. Hitscanners are great for starting in-fights and are quite effective in open spaces despite their low health, and also grant the player ammo. Archviles are always an immediate threat, circulate around a level quickly, and resurrect corpses. A revenant just out of reach that can see you from an open distance is great "background pressure" for when the player is otherwise engaged. Etc. Etc.

I'm surprised to see so much hate for E3M1. I always thought it was iconic: you're not in some twisted space base anymore, but literally have to rise out of the hellscape and scramble for your life. I'm obsessed with "monster flow" when it comes to level design, and this one gives you an interesting choice: do you run past the Cacos and try for the shotgun, knowing that you'll probably have to face them in a narrow corridor, or do you opt to plink them with the pistol rounds in the open field? Either is pretty desperate, and if you choose to rush past them you still have to worry about them following you through the entire map. There's that bigish room after the caco hall that sort of messes this up as monsters can get stuck here, but overall I always liked the look and feel of this map as an intro to Hell itself. E2M3 is another one people seem to hate because it has the interlude theme, but on SNES it uses E2M2's music and that REALLY suits it! Starting off in a weird room full of vines with the opening notes of "The Demons from Adrian's Pen" really sets this one off much, much more nicely than the intermission theme. I love the use of windows and corridors here, especially the nukage slatted hall and the creepy flashing hall through the Blue door. Being able to see the exit right there is also pretty cool. The whole thing gives you plenty of ways to approach it, whether you want to speedrun the main corridors, clear sections sequentially, or snipe enemies through long corridors and windows. People seem to have come to their senses and generally recognized E2M2 as one of the best despite the hate it seems to have gotten historically. The layout doesn't require you to methodically go through the warehouse and kill everything, but you want to! This was a "new, shiny" level for me when I finally got PC Doom after my start on SNES and I always loved it. For real shyte though? E4M1 is so badly designed it kills my desire to play that bastard Episode 4 at all. What the fuck could they have possibly been thinking making this one? It just feels like zero playtesting outside of the author themselves took place; "okay it's finally hard enough for ME" is why we get playtesters, because authors get up their own ass after playing it with tweaks hundreds of times! That and, like Sigil, it all just feels too small and cramped IMO. No fucking health = un-fucking playable. Never even tried beating this one with cheats! Doom2 kinda sucks as far as most of its maps are concerned. Nothing about this game feels like a cohesive geographical journey so much as a trial of gimmicks, especially later on. Earth looks like Hell, and not in the way they intended! I'm gonna pick on Map02 because the genre-inappropriate elevator music (love the "Taco Bell music" mention upthread!) and it's as shit-dull-looking as anything else in this game. Honestly there are worse, but like a lot of Doom2 maps, it features these miserable little vertical gaps you're supposed to clear before entering, I guess, which is a poor match to Doom Engine's auto-aim and lack of mouselook. You're shooting semi-blindly hoping that auto-aim kicks in and you actually hit something. I think this is a big part of why I don't even bother with the Doom2 campaign: on top of everything else it's painfully vertical, did you ever notice that? I struggle to think of any instances in Doom1 where you need to shoot down into deep crevasses or up on tall pillars, whereas Doom2 has you shooting at all kinds of vertical stuff that barely shows on your screen. I'd rather play Limbo 10 times than plink stuff I can't see while my ass is totally exposed in the nukage-room in "The Tenements" at all.

It's a blue surface with fire licking across it.

Maybe a stupid question, but are you looking for chunks of your ghoul or more general chunks?