Alfwin

Been listening to a lot of The Warning lately; just some solid, high-quality rock music!

My first (successfully-recorded) DOOM video in a little while, and omg what a WAD to start with! I'm only two maps in so far and I already love it!

A couple of reasons. Firstly, it harms the balance of levels that weren't designed to account for it (most notably, it trivializes the Icon of Sin boss fight). Second, the graphics weren't designed for it and look weird when viewed from non-perpendicular angles. And finally, DOOM has, imo, a near-perfect level of complexity in its core gameplay loop. An extra axis of view to account for isn't all that complex, but its addition nudges DOOM ever so slightly outside of that "Goldilocks zone".

To quote Red of OverlySarcasticProductions: "I am an instrument through which the universe can care about itself".

Very fun little map! I tried to record footage of my playthrough, but OBS screwed up and didn't actually capture any video. Whoops. The start was pretty hard; I died a couple times before I figured out the path to just sprint through everything to SSG, letting the baddies fight it out behind me. And the Archie corridor was a bit of a grind, since the Barons kept standing in front of the Archie and I couldn't get a clear shot at him! On the whole, though, it was a fun time. Nice visuals, too - simple, gloomy, and with that classic DOOM II charm! (also I just gotta say, you just might have the best user title I've seen here on Doomworld and I fully admit that it's a significant part of the reason I picked this map to play)

There are so many great video game composers! The ones that are foremost in my mind are: Glenn Stafford Matt Ulemen Mark Morgan Lena Raine Eric Heberling And whoever did the soundtrack for The Elder Scrolls: Battlespire. They weren't credited, but it's some of my favorite spooky ambient video game music! Oh, and of course, Mick Gordon, Bobby Prince, and Andrew Hulshult all go without saying!

Back in 2016, I'd been playing a lot of The Elder Scrolls I: Arena, and I found its graphical style incredibly charming. I looked around for games that used similar rendering techniques, and so forth. I saw that, of such games, DOOM was by far the most popular, and that I could get it on Steam for less than the price of a cup of coffee. So, I gave it a try -- and instantly fell in love. I was (and, frankly, still am) amazed that a game from 1994 could feel so smooth and finely-tuned. And imagine my delight when I learnt that a brand-new sequel was just a few months away!

My "nickname" here on Doomworld (and most of the internet) is literally just my actual name. But, one of the perks of being transgender is I get to pick my own irl name, so it does have an actual backstory. It's a modernized form of the Anglo-Saxon name Ælfwine, which means "elf-friend". I chose an old Anglo-Saxon name because I'm a linguistics nerd who loves archaic Germanic languages in particular. "Elf" because I'm also a fantasy nerd, and "friend" because I always try to be as amicable as I can. Plus, I just liked the sound of it.

It was a few weeks ago that I saw it (I don't watch many movies), but the last movie I watched was Modern Times. It was my first time seeing a Charlie Chaplain film, and I absolutely loved it! I don't usually go for slapstick humor, but Chaplain's physical performance is so precise and masterful, I couldn't help but be thoroughly entertained (plus, it never felt mean-spirited, which is a big part of what turns me off to a lot of other slapstick comedies). On top of that, the story's themes/message felt strikingly relevant, even after almost a century.

Hah, good guess! She is, indeed, a female Breton with the default head! She's not a mage, though; she's actually a knight. (shameless self-promotion:) I'm doing a Let's Play series with her over on YouTube. It's definitely not as OP as a spellcaster class, but so far I'm having a lot of fun.

Oh, nice! Arena's super underrated. Sure, it's nowhere near the scope of the later Elder Scrolls games, but it's a fun little dungeon crawler. In fact, my profile pic is actually supposed to be my current Arena character! I've been hopping around a few different games lately, but the one I've been putting the most time into recently is Diablo 2.

A village in hell. The demons have gotta live somewhere, right? I've been working on this one for a while, off and on. The plan is for it to be an open-ended, exploration-heavy map where the player has to scavenge for resources to battle pursuing Cyberdemons, and it's turning out to be one of the biggest level I've ever made. So far, I've only made about half of the playable space, let alone detailing and populating with monsters, but I'm happy with how it's coming along. Biggest difficulty at the moment is deciding what music track to use; I'm torn between Waltz of the Demons and Nobody Told Me About id. Or maybe The Demons From Adrian's Pen; something with that feeling of adventure and forward motion.

GZDoom for limit-removing WADs, but for playing the IWADs or anything that doesn't use limit-removing, I prefer not to use a source port at all.

Looking at that, there are two main things I'd suggest: First, add some vertices to the outer walls of the rooms and move them around a bit, just to make the rooms seem less boxy/rectangular. Even if the overall layout is the same, having a bit of variation in the shape of the walls can make the map look a lot more interesting. If the room is using natural rock/cave textures, you can just make the walls irregular zig-zags (key word: irregular). For man-made structures, consider things like support columns that stick out slightly from the wall, alcoves or shelves set into the wall, or even just have a few walls at angles other than 90 degrees. The other thing is: you should probably delete a lot of those vertices along the edges of the blood pools. There are a lot of lines there where the angle between them is almost perfectly straight. Anywhere there isn't a significant angle between the lines, just reduce it to fewer, longer lines. With such shallow curves, you'll lose practically no apparent visual detail, but you'll significantly reduce the risk of crashes when running in Vanilla or non-limit-removing ports. (Of course, that's not a concern if you're specifically designing your map to require limit-removing ports, but even then, a lot of those vertices are just bloating your map without actually adding anything). Also, as you continue mapping, don't forget to play around with lighting variation! Even a simple, rectangular room can be made significantly more interesting if you change its bright, even lighting for a shaft of light shining from an open doorway into a dimly-lit room, or the like. Keep in mind that the human eye is naturally drawn to contrast, and to things it can see clearly, so a bright light in a dark room can also be a good way to catch the player's attention and subtly steer them in the direction you want them to go.

I've installed Ultimate Doom Builder on my new Linux (Pop!_OS) machine following the instructions on this page. Mostly, it works, save for two problems. The main issue is that, on entering 3D Visual Mode, Ultimate Doom Builder's controls become unresponsive. Moving the mouse still pivots the camera, but none of the keyboard commands do anything. I can't move; I can't auto-align textures, I can't even exit out of 3D mode. Sometimes, but not always, I am able to click on a wall and bring up the Linedef edit dialog, but the keyboard remains unresponsive and the mouse cursor is locked in place, snapping back to the center of the screen every time I try to move it. If I alt-tab out, the cursor remains similarly locked; the only thing I can do to escape is kill Ultimate Doom Builder from the terminal. Does anyone know what could be causing this, and how to fix it? The second, significantly less troublesome issue, is that the built-in nodebuilder doesn't work. No matter what settings I use for it, it "fails to build the expected data structures". But this isn't a huge problem, since using an external nodebuilder (specifically, BSP) works just fine. A fix for the UDB nodebuilder would be nice, but far from essential.