slugger

All Doom engines will accept textureless walls. There are even some maps in the original game with missing textures, but they tend to be in areas that are impractical to see. If you look at them, in general, the engine will fill their space with "hall of mirrors", a visual smearing distortion, akin to drawing on a framebuffer without clearing it first. There are also cases where looking at a textureless wall will not show any apparent discontinuity. For instance, if you have a hole in a floor or ceiling, and the untextured sides of the hole are visible, instead of HOM, the surrounding flat will bleed over it and seem to cover up the hole.

I don't know about the skill floor - maybe it's actually gone down -- but the "skill stairs" are certainly better. Someone can climb up off the floor and approach the ceiling thousands of times faster. When I was a kid I didn't have a clue how to do shit in Doom and nobody was sharing info in any obvious way that I could find. (There were chatrooms and forums but I didn't know where they were.) Nowadays, you want to improve at Doom, hell, there are dozens and dozens of great players making videos all the time and chatting about what they're thinking while playing, they record and collect their funny failures so you know that even the ultimate players are still human, you can google "how get good Doom 2" and get pointed to threads here organizing WADs by difficulty, there's a wiki where every single subtlety known to players is documented and explained.

Preview of my upcoming vanilla megawad, Hard Nut to Crack

In the first post of this thread baja blast rd. talks about an encounter where, counter to the orthodox Doom strategy, the best thing to do is to just sit in place and let stuff fill up the room. Otherwise your precious meat shields walk off behind the thing you want them to infight with. There's a thread I can't find now where someone was talking about a combat encounter with cyberdemons, pinkies, and a huge custom enemy that shoots fireballs. They were saying something similar, like the fight is much easier if you stop attacking and let the most obvious targets fan out. One of the reasons I love Doom and it still feels so fresh is because the enemies have such an expressive, wide variety of applications. In modern games I rarely think "what a useful enemy"; they have no function beyond executing their animations and shooting at you, or they were placed to be exploited in a prefabricated way. In Doom the dynamic demons can change at the drop of a hat into friends and even rivals. Any of them, any time, like you're herding a bunch of angry pigs, playing them off against one another. And it works so well, from an aesthetic/narrative standpoint, because they're demons who are violent above all else, so it's sensible and satisfying that they'll turn on their "allies" almost as easily as turning on you, while forgetting just as quickly as they're enraged. In other games people would ask "why are these braindead soldiers firing on their own guys for five minutes just because they're annoyed at one instance of accidental friendly fire?" and it would make the enemies seem pathetic and uncoordinated; in Doom that pathetic, dog-eat-dog nature just emphasizes the evil and insanity of the Hell setting.

There's not much love for the 30-second or 5-minute doors, because they tend to create unmarked unwinnable situations. People forget those tags exist, so it's even less likely for them to figure out what happened. But if you warn people, it spoils the surprise! I imagine someone will eventually figure out how to walk the line and make a wad themed around using those doors inventively, so players are AWARE it will happen but aren't quite sure how. You could create some unique but fair challenges.

I'll never beat the iwads in one sitting. I think I've beaten most of the levels individually, but not all of them, especially not the late game ones. Like I don't think I've ever gotten past the first couple rooms of Spirit World. I'm really awful at remembering where doors are, what switches open what, etc. I like it this way -- I like some classics to be too big for me to approach. If I were good enough at Doom to casually beat it, it would feel less imposing and mysterious. I am a little jealous of the people who can pick up a map and immediately find their way through and remember where everything is, though.

DoomRL

- TEKWALL2 is boss for all kinds of little columns and details - ZZFACE1-9 is a goldmine, the red tubes go well with blood textures - Long stretches of SP_ROCK look repetitive. To prevent this, you can split them up and drag the offsets around. It's such a chaotic texture that it can match up several ways without glaring seams - If you're cheeky you can sneak the Wolfenstein wood in with the regular wood

The "everything else" section of Doomworld? What did you expect?

I'm new to recording demos. Is there a way to restart the recording without exiting the program?

Great screenshots!

They're called strings. Here's the list. https://zdoom.org/wiki/Strings Asking for a technical name can be quicker than deducing the name on your own.

tl;dr: Put in marked and unmarked secrets. Best of both worlds. Decino has a few videos where he runs around after everything's dead, grumbling and failing to find the tucked away secret. That's not your problem. It's the video producer's job to make their video entertaining. My secrets percentage is usually 0%. I like it that way. It's fun knowing there's more to explore. Here's my concern about going all-unmarked. If we disable the counter, it doesn't make getting 0% more fun; it just makes it inconvenient to see my own progress. I'll go looking for one secret; I won't bother looking for an unknown number of unmarked secrets. Hiding how many secrets you have left will discourage exploration and/or drive explorers insane. Dropping tag 9 makes your progression more ambiguous -- if you find a strange secluded door that skips you past a big part of the level, is that a secret, or just the main path presented in a confusing way? -- and flattens the variety and richness of the secrets themselves. If you get 3/3 marked secrets and 10 years later you find an unmarked secret, it's mind blowing. If you have 3 unmarked secrets and you find a 4th, it's just like, "okay how many more are there". Regular Doom has two grades of secret, one common, one rare and precious. All-unmarked maps have one grade of secret. That's a step down no matter how you slice it. To compromise between making a good map and a good video, give each map 1 well-telegraphed marked secret and an indeterminate number of subtle secrets unmarked and bereft of major items. Then youtubers can say they got their 100% without stumbling around tapping on every nook and cranny, and there's still enough unpredictability to surprise and delight. Plus the youtubers could get an extra video for each map where they show you the REAL secrets!

0-255. Those light goggles are looking pretty good now, aren't they?

I would just tell people I build tiny furniture for dollhouses. It's not really a lie.