Stupid Bunny

When I played TNT for the first time I got stuck for an eternity on MAP18 before I figured out where I was supposed to shoot that one switch. I must have run into every room a million times trying to figure that shit out. Also got stuck in Hexen not knowing I was supposed to run into that bottomless pit you're supposed to drop into. I still think that was a questionable design decision but maybe everybody else was on top of that shit.

I’m glad this ancient ass thread got pointlessly bumped because I had no idea about that pk3 trick. (Well or VULD for that matter.)

Another thing that kind of bugs me is that certain type of schooled detailing that doesn’t actually enhance the architectural composition or layout of a level in any way, but just embellishes the hell out of every available surface in an effort to gussy up what amounts to a flat and boring map. A particular technique I see a lot is just putting 4-8 px trim around everything, which can look nice when done gracefully but often ends up being like “EVERY SECTOR MUST BE INSET” kind of affair. It gets boring fast and makes the player bounce up and down every time he approaches any kind of wall. I’m not sure how I forgot to mention the music thing too, because that’s another thing is I’ve reached a point where hearing Running from Evil on firing up a wad makes me have a small aneurysm and I reflexively go for idmus immediately. I do acknowledge that selecting good map music is an art of its own, but I’ll take anything, literally even dead silence over hearing that MAP01 music, especially when it’s not remotely appropriate to the map. If I’m stalking around some dark catacombs the best thing to complement the grim atmosphere of death and terror is fucking anything but up-tempo rock organs. I used to hate revenants and hate Plutonia for its abundance of them but I’ve come to respect them somewhat as being a versatile enemy and one of the better options for a mid-tier foot soldier when designing maps. (Also Plutonia is the tits so I’ve come round on that one.) I’d still argue though that over-reliance on revenants, especially in horde form, is a mark of lazy combat design. Fighting them ad nauseam gets old like anything else.

Oh shit someone gave Fenriz a sword

If it’s single-level WADs you want then...well I still want to see The Sky May Be but another really ancient classic is RRWARD02.wad, a 1994 map which sadly to my knowledge doesn’t have a punchier name than that but is one of the first custom maps I ever played and still a great one. Plus the soundtrack gives you an excuse to work an Escape from New York reference in there somewhere ;)

Yeah I’d second this one, as someone who used to be guilty of doing the same thing in my maps ;) Like I’m not THAT good at Doom and in any case it would be nice to have different settings for different moods anyway. UV is fun if I want a real nail-biting challenge, but I like HNTR to be there for when I want a more casual play. (I’m not hardcore enough to beat anything on Nightmare)

Equinox is forever my go-to answer to this question

Are you going to do The Sky May Be? I really, really hope the answer is yes

Oooooh definitely gonna have to go with Cães de Crómio there. Love that kinda fuzzed out, repetitive industrial sound. I've actually never heard of this band but I could see them entering my regular rotation if they have more like this. The first video is a band while trying to find every Dune related artist on Spotify I could. Nothing about them actually has anything to do with Dune except for the name but it's still some killer sludge. The other is Current 93. Took me a couple listens to get used to David Tibet's voice but now I love this shit.

1. I haven't been able to see my girlfriend in almost a year because of the 'rona and international travel shit so that would be item #1 2. A Commodore PET

Oooh interesting. That's actually pretty cool that y'all were able to find the sources of some of the murals.

Cool. I might poke around that a bit. (Although I confess to kind of liking the old rough and ugly TNT textures, but that might just be me.) Yeah, I disappeared off the forums back in 2014 I think? Nonetheless I did see at some point that this ended up in Revilution, and actually got turned into one of the more memorable maps by the looks of it. (Though the whole project is full of gorgeous and cool maps, I was really excited about it because, again, I always had a soft spot for TNT.) Lucky for you I actually have the original map fragment that MAP12 was eventually turned into. As you can see, it's pretty unremarkable, and credit goes to Kyka/Megamur/dobu gabu maru for making it as special and atmospheric as it turned out. I originally intended it to be a vanilla-compatible Ultimate Doom map that would carry through the themes of E1-3, but as you can see I ran out of steam partway through E1. I'm glad it ended up in talented hands and being turned into something really original and cool, and that y'all succeeded in seeing the whole project through to a fantastic end result.

It’s not a WAD per se, but I swear I remember years and years ago that somebody was doing a texture pack/texture replacement WAD that featured “cleaned-up” TNT textures? Like I remember a thread where they were posting fences that didn’t look like garbage and the like. Does that actually exist or am I confused and just thinking of the TNT 2 development thread? Specifically I want some less ugly versions of the Egyptian textures, but for reasons don’t want to go find an actual full Egyptian texture pack.

Well, it's not really a map, but I'm still gonna say this shit

My favorite monster/gun combo is the SSG vs the Spider Mastermind. It’s just satisfying how every hitscan reliably hits her enormous frame even from a fair distance, and especially if I have something to duck behind it’s almost unfair. Then again the spood generally punches way below her weight due to her speed and target size and the fact that she starts fights with every other monster on the map without really trying.

That’s very charitable of you :p I think I would too if I was going the extra mile of doing properly vanilla maps, with limits and all...the added design constraint would make a nice challenge. With this particular project I didn’t want to be that constrained so I’m kind of assuming either that infinite actors is off, or that the player can tolerate them being occasionally in the way. Also I like the hanging corpses so I just made them all non-blocking in the .deh for my own convenience.

This is what I’m trying to figure out in my current map project...I have a couple of pits that are supposed to be “bottomless” death pits where the player will die instantly on falling in, but the trick is differentiating them from the other, not bottomless pits that will merely inconvenience the player but allow some means of escape. Because it’s definitely annoying to be playing a map for the first time, get near the end and then get killed by a blind drop that you thought was just another annoying nukage pit.

Yeah for the most part it’s amazing how seamless the vanilla experience can still be when playing any limit-removed map, no matter how sophisticated it may be. But the infinitely tall actors is a glaring exception to that. I hate bumbling around a seemingly wide open empty floor trying to dodge cacodemons floating 2000 feet above me where I can’t see them, and getting bit by the fuckers to boot. The maps I’m making now are theoretically designed to be vanilla-limit-removed-compatible but at a certain point I refuse to even try designing around the infinitely tall actor problem.

One trap I feel like I fall into sometimes is getting too focused on how I want a part of the map to be played, without thinking about how somebody else might approach it. I can make an area with a bunch of cool set pieces and areas where the enemies can flank me, making for what seems like a great tactical challenge, only to realize that an obvious way to break it would be to, for example, just run into an adjacent room and let the poor monsters bottleneck their way through a small doorway I never thought about, and gun them down as they Three Stooges their way through. As such I make an effort to try different approaches on different playsthrough, and if a really challenging area suddenly becomes lame and redundant then I'll think about ways to adjust it. One way, as others have said, is to lock the player into the area where I want the battle to happen, but there's other ways to, an obvious one being to have more monsters emerge or spawn in adjacent areas, or shifting geometry throughout the level so that monsters trapped in another area can emerge and start punishing the player for avoiding them earlier (which is another thing to watch out for: if the easiest way to beat the map is just to run past everything, and the player has to contrive to actually fight something, then something is clearly wrong.)

That did the trick. I also have the ceiling for this same sector rise again later in the level, so I just did it up in stripey bits like in the picture below to ensure that every sector is adjacent to the one at lower left, which has the highest ceiling available and which I want the rest to rise to. The ones at the top, which don't abut the bottom left sector, I've merged into some of the sectors that do. For posterity's sake and also so anybody can correct me if I've got this wrong, it seems that dividing and merging this into two alternating sectors doesn't work, no matter how narrow the stripes are. In other words, it seems that Doom cares about how many discrete sectors are crushing at a time. Good to know I'll have to do this every time I want a crushing floor. EDIT: Wow @TimeOfDeath666 that sounds way easier. I actually didn't realize until searching for a solution to this problem that any type of stair is capable of crushing. A little embarrassed it didn't occur to me to use that as a workaround :p Although does that only work with the fast-rising stairs or do the slow 8-step stairs crush too?

Interesting. That's what I was afraid of (I was hoping the answer was "the sector can't have a floor height higher than 4096" or some arcane shit like that). How do you mean? Like to divide the sector into a gridwork of sectors so that actors are getting crushed by multiple sectors at once?

The title more or less explains it. When I test my map in Crispy Doom, the rising floors harm any enemies stuck on them but don't actually kill them outright. For that matter, it doesn't kill me either, at least if my health is sufficient for it not to; it just rises until it's 8 below the ceiling, and then stops doing anything. And then I and all the monsters are stuck. If I test it in Prboom+, or anything else, the floor crushes anything on it like it's supposed to.

idk I agree with jerryshappy that Odyssey of Noises pulled it off pretty well. It does a good job of suggesting an expansive city without really trying to replicate an actual building’s floor plan. Besides maps modeled after actual floor plans are usually boring and redundant anyways, as evidenced by every map modeled after somebody’s house or workplace. On that note Suburbs doesn’t resemble any suburb I’ve ever seen, but I won’t say I hate it because gameplay-wise it’s pretty fun. To be honest I kinda like Downtown too. Nirvana is shit though, it’s supposed to be our introduction to Hell in Doom II and it’s a clashy mishmash of non-Hell textures spread out over like 12 sectors of nonsense. And Countdown to Death is a poor choice of music for the map too. At least Hell Keep feels like it’s supposed to be in Hell, even if it’s also a pretty disappointing start to the episode in a lot of ways.

I'm planning to hopefully finally finish my 11-map WAD. Then again I've been planning to hopefully do that since 2010. So we'll see. I at least finally finished my Atari 2600 homebrew project this year (except the manual and artwork but those shouldn't take too long) so I'm somewhat optimistic I've found a way to make myself get things done. Oh yeah and finish getting my Master's, I guess that's the main priority

I think the main reason is that people who hate GZDoom blame it on certain poor practices in mapping that they associate with GZDoom. A feature-rich port like GZDoom allows a whole lot of creative freedom, and nearly limitless possibilities, but it also allows a mapper to bury a poor, unbalanced, boring map under heaps of custom monsters, scripts and visual gimmicks. And of course sometimes the custom monsters and scripts and gimmicks can be the worst part, where if they're not used right they break up the flow of gameplay and make the whole level a confused tedious mess. Obviously it's unfair to blame a really cool sourceport for the most disappointing maps made for it, and there's a long history of fantastic ZDoom maps out there, but there's a school of thought (which I don't entirely disagree with) that says mappers should cut their teeth making regular Doom maps, learning the fundamentals of gameplay flow and balance, before building on that with everything GZDoom has to offer. The other thing is what therealdrgray said where GZDoom doesn't play quite like Doom, which I'm personally able to overlook but is still periodically distracting (rocket blasts are SO much more satisfying in vanilla); and Noiser's thing about people used to GZDoom being like "ur map is brokem" because they had jumping and freelook enabled while playing somebody's vanilla map.