Matt Eldrydge

I've been looking forward to this mod since seeing some sprites on the sprite-sharing thread, can't wait to play it!

More updates to my RAMP 2024 map. Not sure what I'll call it yet, but the second half of it is about halfway done.

Made more good progress wit my map, though at this rate I'm not sure I'll actually meet the deadline unless I focus entirely on it. I've already cut down some ideas I had, so it's boiled down to 2 big fights with some padding between, then a final fight. More screenies:

Interesting thread here. I must say I'm quite fond of making liminal spaces in Doom but I'm not quite sure if I like them being bright. I guess this is more because I do a lot of shading and lighting on my maps. I find it interesting that what gets a lot of attention tends to be open areas instead of enclosed spaces, but yeah, I do agree Entryway's complete lack of even a door behind you unlike Hangar gives the map an odd vibe. Would be cool to make a community project around the idea for sure.

I am a Matt and this is a fun map. Quite spicy on UV, but still a fun plasma-only challenge map!

Made some pretty substantial progress with my map. I wanna say it's around 40% done? It's gonna be easier to finish now that I settled on a vibe and palette, though. Screenshots in spoiler to save some space:

Working on my RAMP 2024 map. Decent progress so far, with the main challenge coming from making my map in the 10x10 style, evoking Sunder's scale and using more light wherever possible. Only two fights are done at the moment, kinda shooting for a fun, slaughterlite kinda thing. Also challenged myself to use a midi by Ribbiks, since that felt really hard for me to justify - but I think I'm capable of living up to the choice.

Sonik's stuff gets around, just like Doomnukem, Amuscaria and the like. If something looks real good, you can expect everyone will use it - fortunately for Sonik, his stuff is amazing. :P If it helps, Sgt. Shivers has some other takes on Doom Eternal's weapons over here.

I just like playing Doom, doesn't matter if it's modded or not. Try playing vanilla every once in a while though, it's easier to appreciate the work that goes into maps that way. Usually I play a few maps at a time, depends entirely on the WAD and map length. No way in hell will I try tackling more than one Sunder map a day.

@Average Hey, no worries! It's just how life goes sometimes, haha. Took the liberty of recording a video with Phobos AEternum's current release since I didn't see anyone talking about it on the 'tube!

Since I've been mapping for a while, I took up the challenge of making a map in the 10x10 stye: 10 textures, 10 flats - not counting some essential textures like doors and switches, as well the odd midtexture here and there. Sky's placeholder until I get one that fits the vibe of the map. I've been making this in the Boom format, so I imagine I'd have to make it UDMF in order to submit? I'm not too sure if I saw anything regarding complevels (or formats, for that matter) anywhere.

Surprised at how much changes with some greenery. Bonus footage showing the rain in action.

Some attempts at trying to evoke Sunder on a smaller scale. Still got over 15k sidedefs to go through but I think this is shaping up nicely.

Last year I wasn't really sure of my mapping abilities, so I didn't apply but I'll take a shot at it this year. :)

@Average Hey, here's a zip with the WAD itself as well as its sprite sheet should you need it for whatever reason. Hope it serves you well. :)

Eraser's final update draws near. After nearly having a heart attack when I found out UDB's standard nodebuilder couldn't handle the sheer amount of segs in the map, my mood to keep mapping tonight certainly soured - but you can keep this! This part is very WIP but it should hopefully help illustrate the scale I'm going for.

Tiberium Soul passed away last night. I doubt a lot of people in Doomworld know about it, but Sonik seemed kinda broken up about it so I felt like stepping in.

Please stop asking people to just make stuff for you for free like that when they're grieving. It's not a good look.

Played a couple of vanilla maps with this and it's pretty great! Works exactly as advertised and turns the usual Doom mood into something that's brushing shoulders with Doom 64 and Doom 3 while also being fairly close to Eternal Doom and Strain in a pretty interesting way. Definitely gonna be playing something with this loaded. :) On another note: I made a little WAD that swaps the pistol's sprites out for something chonkier and turns it into a mini-chaingun of sorts, the Doom 3 machine gun sound kinda made me want to use that instead. Could definitely share it with you, maybe as part of the optional add-on that makes the punch a bit more useful?

@Treehouseminis Hey, thanks for dropping by! Your advice has certainly helped to point me in a direction, I won't go too much into detail because it's kinda late and my brain is all fizzled out but for the pistol thing: I just find it kinda fun to have it be a mini chaingun. Is it useful? Not particularly, but I just kinda like it. I've played enough slaughter-adjacent WADs to know weapons 5-7 are the ones you'll use the most with the super shotgun being used to polish off the odd monster you don't want to use more important ammo on, but I also want to experiment with that a little. Maybe the chaingun will be withheld early on, maybe for a low-impact introductory fight. It's not that relevant but sometimes it has its uses. Will definitely look into ways of incorporating it anyway, it's part of the arsenal after all. @Ravendesk Many thanks for all the suggestions! I'll definitely take a look at the wads you mentioned, I do know Sunder is quite old by now but man, something about its visuals just has me hooked. I know there are prettier maps out there, but between the maps' names, their texture coordination, their sheer brutality - it just clicks with me and makes me wish I get better to one day experience them myself. If I had to really nail down what I'm looking to make, I guess it'd be somewhere between Sunder's sheer presence and size with Valiant/Overboard slaughterlite (I think that's the term) style gameplay. Gotta study up to make the best map I can, after all!

@quakis Thanks for playing! I just finished reading the review and I'm not really sure how to put my gratitude into words, but still, thank you for writing it - I enjoyed reading it while coincidentally working on Eraser's next update. :) As for the issue, I've tested that particular section of the map at least 20 times and I'm yet to run into that. Still, I'll look into it just to make sure. I'll look into /idgames soon, though I'd like to reserve the occasion for when version 3 finally does materialize. I've kept mostly quiet about it but you can find the odd screenshot in the what you are working on thread, though by now even those are rather outdated. You can think of V3 as a new game + mode or what Eraser was meant to be if I had more time before V1. It has a tiny amount of implied lore, substantial changes to the map (mostly with new areas) and a few new faces to meet. Lest I forget, the weapons have been given a pretty good facelift, a few powerups make their appearance and you play as someone other than Doomguy! :D I'm maybe 60% done with Version 3 and the feedback I've had so far leads me to believe this will be even better. I do admit some of the mystery will be lost in this next update, but trust me when I say I'm working to make sure you're left with more questions than answers...and it's not like I can hide all the secrets from people, so updating the map is one way to keep the map interesting. Some screenshots below, since the thread has been bumped. ;) Hopefully the map will be finally done and perfected before October, I love working on it but knowing I've been at it for a year causes me some psychic damage. :P

I already did, big issue is they don't really get my noggin jogging. Go 2 It kinda comes close, but any of these maps have to abide by the vanilla on screen sprite limit and I need to go beyond that in terms of inspiration.

Yeah, what it says on the tin (which is quite common for the threads I make). I've gotten this idea to make a huge combat-focused map with a brutalist theme while working on another map, but I don't really know how to map that well and could always use some help in getting better. For some context, here's some details about what I want to make. High monster count. I've set an unrealistically 3000 monsters as my goal, but since I'm yet to make a map that contains more than 500 monsters this will likely be changed. Brutalist archictecture. I'm just fond of this style and I find it lets accent colors as well as lighting pop out even more. Combat that isn't overly grindy. I understand some grind is essential if you want to throw hordes at the player, but having barely cleared Sunder's first 5 maps I don't really want to pursue tanky swarms or at least 100 cacos in the sky since I don't enjoy this aspect of slaughter much. A pistol that isn't worthless and is useful against low-level monsters. The chaingun might be beefed up a little but honestly I just don't want the pistol to suck for whatever reason, that's kind of my thing. Scale. I want to go for massive structures and spaces, as most of my maps end up being a bit tight or just kind of focused on smaller areas and I feel like I could learn a lot about outdoors mapping if I just made a massive indoor area instead if that makes sense. In short: this is probably closer to Valiant or Heartland, I have no clue if these are considered slaughterlite at points but the idea is there. Lots of bad guys, big places and some new toys to deal with them. For experience, I've been mapping for around 2 or 3 years now and as of last year shifted fully into Boom/MBF21. I still don't know a lot of the tricks but I like to think I can make a decent map. I'm not too sure why I made the thread, maybe it's because I just want to learn, maybe it's because I'm running around like a headless chicken trying to make sense of my vague ideas. Maybe it'll help someone else who wants to make huge, imposing vistas in Doom? I don't know man, I just wanna make a big concrete killing floor that plays good and is fun!

Eternity has my interest, but I barely use that port myself...kinda feels weird making a project for something you're just not in the habit of using and have kinda no real reason to. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the people who downloaded Eternity did so because of Heartland. :P But yeah, to get it back on track: if I do this, it more than likely will target MBF21 if only because it's a superset of Boom with the added possibility of new stuff through Decohack/DEHextra. Lots of possibilities there.

Yep, I know. I just don't like working with GZDoom UDMF after more or less getting the hang of Boom/MBF21. It might be more convenient for non-standard features like 3D sectors, slopes, colored lighting, etc, but I like the challenge of making something similar without having those tools immediately available. At the same time, it's not like we're forbidden from having two projects with the same premise. In fact, if anything it'd just add to the pool of maps in that particular theme. Oh, absolutely! I really don't think Doom ever needed RoR and some mapping wizards (Mechadon and Jaska come to mind) can make you forget of Doom's more "primitive" toolset with how they set things up. I'll definitely look into the possibilities later this year, I already have an unnanounced project on the backburner that has a pretty similar theme going on - just with a bit of an emphasis on narrative. To be fair, I think the midtex stuff is probably not even super necessary for the vibe, as someone who has dabbled in brutalism fairly often. I'm not very clever when it comes to exploiting the engine's quirks, much less the stuff you can do with Boom and such, so I just try to play by a vanilla-esque approach when I do it. Given the positive reception to this idea, I think it's more likely to materialize now. ;)