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Reaper978

Annoying and pointless

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I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make maps\mods for Doom engine games. As with everything in existence, it always goes nowhere and I always exhaust myself trying to figure all this shit out. Invariably some problem always magically appears and blocks my progress entirely. And if I go through the grief of figuring out that problem, there is sure to be another problem very soon. I could just post the problem on here, but I have so many problems and questions along the way, posting each one seems ridiculous. Why can't I just know all this shit already, dammit?

I've made the obligatory basic map in Doom with Doom Builder 2. I'd like to make some serious maps for Hexen. It seems like a logical place to start doing some mapping without getting into ZDoom's features yet. I know there's polyobjects and scripts. Not much info on those for the original Hexen. Polyobjects. There's some somesuch about only convex geometry that moves but can't intersect other geometry, objects placed in the map as anchors for the geometry yada yada yada it will take some time to figure out that mind-bender. Scripts. Alright. Scripts are saved in a "script" file, or something? I can already tell it's going to be an ordeal figuring out how to write a script file (or more than one script file) and tying it all together in a pwad. Ok, so those are more advanced topics. Let's start simpler.

ZDoom seems to be the favorite port for mapping and modding. That's fine. I like ZDoom. There's a few reasons why I don't want to make maps for that at the moment. I'd rather make some maps for the base game with no changes to the engine. So there's Chocolate Doom. Ok, it's a source port of the game that essentially ports the original DOS version of the game to a modern OS with no changes or extensions. Perfect, right? Wrong.

Well, how exactly do I set up Doom Builder 2 to make and test maps in Chocolate Hexen? I choose Chocolate-Hexen.exe in the Doom Builder 2 game configuration options, but when I go to test the map it says that it can't find MAP15. My map is saved as MAP00. I could mess around with the command line and look up the commands in the text files, etc. I have done that. What about the map names within the wad? Do I have to name it "MAP00, MAP01", and so on? What map number should I choose for the first map in a Hexen pwad? MAP00 or MAP01? The text file says to use the "-file" command line parameter to load the pwad. So I do that with my incredibly impressive custom wad file, and I'm greeted with the original Hexen and the original Winnowing Hall. How the fuck do I test the map in Chocolate-Hexen!?

It's probably something totally obvious like I have to save the map as MAP01. Man, this is fun. Or, at least it would be if I could figure out what to do without my skull caving in on itself.

Then if I can figure out these fundamental tasks, of course, there's the question of what do I even create? I can never get the map the way I want it. I can see it in my mind, but when I go to make it I get stuck within 1 millisecond. How do I choose which sky is used in the map? And can I put a sky texture on linedefs, for a skybox kind of thing? Or is that only in sourceports with extensions to the engine?

I guess I would just like to know what I can and can't do when making maps using the original engines for Doom, Heretic, and Hexen. And I'm most interested in Hexen at the moment. I suppose. But there are sure to be more problems coming soon.

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You can define the map: the shape of the areas, the doors, item and monster placement, etc.

You don't change textures, sprites, music, or other things like that when making a map.

Doom Builder 2 has a test feature, go to the configuration and point to the executable and wad files for the game you're mapping for.

And yes, mapping is annoying and pointless but people do it anyway. IMO don't try right away to make something to put on the archives, just play with the doom builder features until you get a good grip on them.

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As it turns out, the map didn't run because it was called MAP00 instead of MAP01. Now it runs. I suppose.

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When I was using earlier versions of Doom Builder 2 (or using Doom Builder 1.68), I was having trouble creating Hexen maps. If I didn't create a script before the first save, the editor would think I was creating a Doom format map, and saving it as such, completely damaging it from playing it or opening it again with the editor. To prevent it, I had to first compile a dummy (empty) script (BEHAVIOR) lump. I hope the current version of Doom Builder 2 doesn't have this obvious bug.

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Reaper978 said:

How do I choose which sky is used in the map? And can I put a sky texture on linedefs, for a skybox kind of thing? Or is that only in sourceports with extensions to the engine?

I guess I would just like to know what I can and can't do when making maps using the original engines for Doom, Heretic, and Hexen. And I'm most interested in Hexen at the moment. I suppose. But there are sure to be more problems coming soon.

For being a game that's famous for it's modability, the original Doom engine made a whole bunch of stuff surprisingly difficult to mod because they hardcoded most of it. Want to have a level have it's own unique sky texture? Whoops can't do that sorry, what sky appears is hardcoded into the engine. Same with things like level names, which seems like a terribly basic thing to add in as a part of the level definition but nope. You can change the sky by providing a replacement texture, but that will replace it for all of the levels the sky is on (Maps 01-11 I think it is?) You will need a lump manager to do this, Doom Builder only lets you edit the level lumps.

To add a sky texture onto linedefs, it works in the original doom engine like so: if you have two sectors with the sky as the ceiling touching each other, then any upper linedef placed between them will render as the sky instead. Example, in this situation, the horribly clashing lava texture will be the sky instead:

Note that these upper linedefs still block line of sight, so you can't make a low ceiling building in the middle of an open area or this will happen:

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Melon said:

For being a game that's famous for it's modability, the original Doom engine made a whole bunch of stuff surprisingly difficult to mod because they hardcoded most of it.


Doom was famous for setting the ball rolling with regards to modability (that some elements were moddable). Wolf3D, Commander Keen, to name a couple of ID's previous games had no proper support for modding at tall.

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I'm getting "Z_Malloc: failed on allocation of 133089784 bytes" when I try to test a map named MAP02 in Hexen, but MAP01 runs fine. Does anyone know why this might happen?

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I think that means that the game has run out of memory, but I can't remember. There might be a command parameter to let you use a bigger heap size, but I'm not sure, and it might be dependent on which engine you are using. Sorry.

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Heh, that's alright. No matter what I do, I can't load a custom map in any slot besides MAP01 in Chocolate Hexen.

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