What level editor to use?

I've generally stayed out of the loop regarding the developments of the various ports and tools available for Doom after it's glory days in the 90's. The only real concession I have made since then is installing Doom Legacy so that I can play the game on modern hardware/operating system.

Anyway, as there seems to be a wide variety of ports (and I am assuming tools) that have been developed since, I was hoping for some advice to push me in the right direction, rather than trying to trawl through them all myself.

Basically, I would like to take a stab at making some levels which would likely be vanilla Doom compatible. I am hoping since the days of DEU and Waded, someone has developed a Build-like editor that gives you a 3D preview mode, as well as a nice 2D user interface. Is this the case? What editor do you recommend?

I could probably go back to using Waded if need be, but after using Build, as well as editors for other games, I get the feeling that it would seem incredibly tedious and stifle my limited creativity.

Thanks!

I use GZDoom Builder + whatever the latest SVN happens to be almost exclusively.

This, despite the fact that I very rarely play/test with GZDoom, and lately have been favouring Chocolate Doom. It works fine as long as you don't mix up your flats and textures.

Doom Builder 2 is basically the only level editor you ever need these days. GZDoom Builder mentioned above is just a fork/"extension" of Doom Builder 2 anyway, so might as well just start off with the original Doom Builder 2 if you're not looking to use the additional complicated features granted by GZDoom.

So, GZDoomBuilder can be used to create non GZDoom levels too? I've been thinking I'd start use it too, since it gets updates more often.

I highly recommend it. Based on Melon's post I decided to reinstall the latest version of DB2 to see how it measures up nowadays. So while it is still a great editor I found that it lacks many of the features I now take for granted.

Like hitting Ctrl+Shift+D to create a rectangle, which is almost as second nature to me as pressing C to clear; the option to sync camera position between 2D and 3D modes, so you just point where you want to go, press W, and you're there; the ability to sync selection between 2D and 3D; fully customizable linedef colours, now with grey checks (that I requested, and were added within a day (!)), because Max is awesome.

The list goes on, and the tech help in that thread is freaking fantastic.

P.S. Although newbie mappers might feel less overwhelmed by DB2, so maybe it isn't a bad idea to recommend it out of the gate.

Jimi said:

So, GZDoomBuilder can be used to create non GZDoom levels too?.

Of course! There was no reason to change the underlying architecture which allows to use pretty much any configuration.

While most of the features that have been added to GZDB will not be very useful outside of GZDoom modding (though some of them at least could be adapted to other ports such as Legacy or Risen3D); there are some that should be universally useful. Also MaxED is very reactive currently and might add new, simple features upon request in the ZDoom forum thread.

I use original DoomBuilder...

...don't kill me.