stewboy

This sounds really interesting! I'd like to claim square 5. If the squares are being worked on in order, I'm guessing someone will just @ me once it's my turn?

I'm still very keen on the idea of a 10243 project for Eternity (1024x1024x1024), maybe 'Cubic 1024' or something like that. It'll encourage people to think about verticality in a way that a lot of people won't be used to in the Doom mapping community.

I would guess that such things would have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. A new account under another member's name which immediately starts breaking this rule could arouse suspicion, for example; and although it's certainly not inconceivable that someone with a bee in their bonnet about a specific user might play the long game and start an innocuous account under their name and spend time making it seem legitimate, that's a lot of effort to go to and it would be highly unlikely to happen more than once in a very blue moon.

Are you referring to dew's first comment on matador's status update? Because when I or anyone else who isn't familiar with the whole story reads something like "It really is nothing more than certain people on DW attacking DB repeatedly, then going over to DB and stirring shit up there, then using the angry hornets nest as an 'excuse' to continue harassing them, all with a holier than thou attitude." we think 'Oh shit, that's a pretty serious matter'. And then... what? Crickets? No followup post explaining what they meant? No specific example? Like, that's a pretty big accusation to just drop on the table and walk away. You can criticise his tone if you like, but I don't think you can say that dew's comments came 'out of nowhere' because he just 'didn't like' what someone else posted.

Although I agree it's worded a bit vaguely, my guess would be that 'facilitating' goes further than just association, into active encouragement. Like, going off your last example, someone saying 'I enjoyed this wad' would not be facilitating. Someone saying 'I enjoyed this wad and we should keep making wads with targeted harrassment in them' might be closer to facilitating, even though that person did not directly perform any harrassment themselves. Even then, it seemed pretty clear from the post that this rule isn't intended to be used against every person who makes a one-off joke about someone else; rather, it'll be used when a pattern of behaviour emerges where it's clear that a person is actively, repeatedly, maliciously trying to get the people around them riled up, knowing that it will result in harrassment of a particular user.

You're starting a teaching job in a Catholic school and one of your ideas is to try and play midi files for students to study to? As much as I personally love working with midi, I don't think it's going to be very popular with young people who don't have any nostalgia attached to the format (or who might not even have heard of the format to begin with), and I honestly think there's far better music out there for studying to anyway. I know that the whole 'lofi hip hop/chill beats to relax/study to' thing has become a bit of a meme, but it's popular for a reason. Midis are just too harsh by their very nature, and the people who would be prepared to overlook that are relatively few and far between. I think you would almost certainly get complaints.

I was trying to think through some of my recent maps to find an example I'm really proud of, and I think I'd have to go with MAP06 from my Eternity project - and in particular, this one small section. I made it have complete rotational symmetry around the central walkway axis, and it took a while to make over several mapping sessions. The thing is, there's no particular point to it. You don't have any fights here, because they wouldn't really work. You just walk right through it in the map and might not even notice it. It exists solely because making symmetric things satisfies some inner desire within my weird brain.

There's been a few threads about this in the past - essentially, there's a few free ones out there with varying degrees of usability. Try Sekaiju, for example.

There's a good analogy with music composition here I think - you might ask why people don't use the latest DAWs for every music track (let's assume that there's no affordability barrier here) since mp3s are also supported by certain ports, or why people don't use tracker modules which are also supported. These let you put so much more detail and atmosphere into music, and there are plenty of people in the wider Doom community who use them, so why would anyone stick with midi? As someone who's created music in all of these formats, I can definitely say that the less limitations any program has, the more overwhelmed I tend to feel when writing something. There's even an anagalous point someone could make - "You can still make something simple in these more complicated programs if you ignore a lot of the more advanced features." And they'd be totally right - but it just doesn't feel right when I try doing something like that. So the reasons that I stick with a more simpler music form would be similar to why some people prefer to stick to a simpler mapping format - it's more familiar, it's less overwhelming, it makes me concentrate on different aspects of the creation process, and I do kind of like the challenge of making something sound nice within the limitations.

Most games are quite repetitive when you boil them down to their very basics - in fact, if a game wasn't repetitive at its core, it would likely be confusing and inconsistent. The 'gameplay loop' is what you're talking about - the basic cycle that you end up in. Different people will enjoy different sorts of gameplay loops. I personally quite enjoyed Doom 2016 and found it very engaging, because I liked the basic gameplay loop. It didn't really matter to me that there's ultimately only a limited amount of monsters, weapons, and environments. If you didn't enjoy it, that's fine. I've tried plenty of well-received games that I gave up on because I just didn't end up engaging with the gameplay loop, and so it just became really repetitive.

There are no good mods for Doom Check out the 2020 cacowards as a good place to start. It's unlikely that you'll have played all of them already. Also see threads like this one.

I don't think I ever really shared anything about this but I made an attempt at creating a chess game in ACS 10-11 years ago and I just remembered it today, so here's a shot from it. It's mostly functional - you can make moves, capture enemy pieces, and you can't leave your king in check. I don't seem to have implemented castling or en passant though.

Well, as someone whose music has definitely been 'covered', whether it's just people running midis through a different soundfont or literally arranging something for live performance, I tend to lean more towards the fingernail gnawing. I do love that my music resonates with people enough for them to want to put it in a different form, but there's also always a voice in my head yelling 'That's not how it's supposed to sound!' I generally find it almost impossible to listen to other versions of my music for that reason.

Playing more maps is the easiest way. Other things you can do, in order of how abstracted they are, include: - Playing other 3D games, and looking closely at their level/gameplay design - if you dislike a particular game, figure out exactly why that is - Watching video essays on game/level design - e.g. Game Maker's Toolkit, Adam Millard, Joseph Anderson, but there'll be plenty more - Looking at real-life architecture in general - different styles/periods, famous examples, and also just normal architecture around where you live - Looking at art in general - go to galleries, look up random artists online that you hear about, see which sorts of art inspire you and which sorts you hate - Looking at life in general - think about how people work, figure out the purpose of existence, prove/disprove hard solipsism

Can you maybe post a simple test wad that just has the monster that you're trying to include, and we can see if UDB displays it for us?

Once you've added something to the wad in SLADE, you put the DoomED number in the 'Type' field when you edit a thing in UDB. If UDB doesn't recognise it, it'll show as ? on the map, but that doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't exist, just that UDB doesn't recognise it. If you want it to actually show up as its own thing in the UDB thing menu, with a sprite, that requires editing the UDB config files. If you do want that, I'd recommend just duplicating an existing gametype config, and in some editor (eg wordpad), giving it a unique title after 'game = ' adding another 'include' line, and creating another file in the 'Includes' directory (look at Doom_things.cfg for a guide). It's a bit of work, but if you plan to use a lot of custom resources across multiple maps I'd definitely recommend it. This is based off me adding new things for an Eternity map - I've heard about UDB doing things automatically for ZDoom gametypes, but I wouldn't know anything about that. Edit: Well, I guess you learn something new every day!

Going to submit what I've done just so I can stop worrying about it and work on everything else that I've been putting off the last couple weeks. Apologies for the relatively large filesize, I couldn't figure out a simple way of just including the textures I needed from OTEX so I ended up including almost everything. Name: Alfonzo Does Shrooms and Contemplates the Nature of Soft Drink Map Format: UDMF Ports Tested: Eternity (Required due to portals. I mainly tested on a devbuild, but there's no reason it wouldn't work on the official 4.02 release) Build Time: Maybe 30-40 hours? I lost count, but probably not more than that Credits: Textures from OTEX, and various decorations from various places that I've been gradually compiling for a while, see 'credits' lump in the wad for details Music: 'Whirlwind', original midi by me External PWADs: :^) Requirements: No jumping or you'll escape the map, and freelook is highly recommended or you'll have a bad time. Download There may be some occasional FPS drops on older computers due to the amount of portals, especially when trying to view most of the map at once. I've got a pretty decent PC so I can't test for this. If it's badly affecting you, try a smaller resolution just for that section. There will be some occasional visual glitches with monsters/sprites only half-appearing when they're on an edge portal, which there are a lot of. This is not an easy thing to fix, from what I've heard, so just try and ignore it. I haven't prevented the player from just jumping off at the end of the map, but there's no particular reason for you to do so, you won't access any special secret areas. Screenshot: Edit: Reuploaded to fix minor portal bug and a couple texture alignments

Your 'showcase map' is a bit underwhelming. I would definitely advise you to get some more experience making any sort of maps for a while, and becoming a bit more known in this community, before attempting to run a community project. Plus, the misspellings and grammar errors give the impression that this isn't something that you're prepared to put a lot of effort in to in general. Projects based around making a map under a certain size limit have been done before, and I'd recommend checking them out for some inspiration: Claustrophobia 1024 Claustrophobia 1024 2 Congestion 1024 MAYhem 2048 2048 Unleashed Your specific choice of 768 units is probably not advised - it's too large to be considered a 'fun' novelty at this stage (like Congestion 64 maybe) but also too frustratingly small to really get anything creative into it.

Everything will be forgotten eventually Everyone will die The universe will become void But until then, I don't think it's anything to worry about. Doom's had too much of an influence to be truly 'forgotten', but it could still get mostly relegated to a footnote in history. But, that's not the worst thing ever. Culture always has its time. We enjoy it while it's here, and then it moves on and we enjoy the next thing. Lots of great things existed, had their time, and then stopped being important.

The midis are in the .pke file along with everything else, you don't need to buy the soundtrack to have it play ingame!

Seeing as Cyriak wrote his own music for it, it would be a bit rude to decide as a community that it wasn't 'good enough'. Like I said before, the point of these community midi packs is to write new music for a project whose original authors didn't really give much thought to the music. If there's a wad with bespoke music or music already picked out by the authors, and you don't like their choices, you should probably just grab an existing midi pack and just play the wad with that loaded instead.

That should definitely be enough to spawn it. You might want to use a 'map spot' rather than a 'map marker', as the marker appears on the automap, but both should definitely work - in fact, you can direct thing_spawn at a bunch of different types of thing. The only thing that generally stops it from working in my own mapping experience is if the map spot isn't flagged with the correct skill levels, which can happen if I'm inserting new map spots while working on gameplay elsewhere. (Or if I'm testing with -nomonsters, of course.) If it does have the correct skill flags, can you take a screenshot of the ssg with the 'action/tag/misc' tab open, to make sure that there isn't some weirdness set there by accident?

Working on the next map for my Eternity project!

Yeah there's a difference between 'the mapper didn't think much about the music for it' and 'the mapper didn't ask for a completely original soundtrack, but still carefully selected music they thought would fit'. Especially in Valiant's case, as it uses 9 tracks either written or co-written by me, and I feel a bit weird at the thought of someone deciding that those tracks aren't good enough! I do realise that a lot of the thinking behind these custom midi projects isn't just 'the music in this wad just isn't right' but is also 'let's all get some motivation to write some music for something' - but in that latter case, there's plenty of ongoing projects that could also use some new music!

There's a couple YK-triggered lifts that take you to the required level to avoid having to go all the way to the top again - I'll make them a bit more obvious, so you're more likely to spot them as you go and think back to them later on. Re: knowing where to go after grabbing a key, it's becoming a bit of a running theme in these maps that there's a couple paths at the start of the map to go to each key, but it doesn't seem clear enough that you need to then go back to the start and pick the other path. I'll try a different way of indicating this. I've reuploaded the zip to fix these things, thanks!