Doom Builder 2 Vs Slade 3

Being someone who has always used Doom Builder and later Doom Builder 2 to make Doom maps, I was wondering how good Slade 3 is compared to DB2.

Can anyone here who has used both programs give their opinion on which is better or what the pros and cons of each program is?

Doom Builder 2 Pros

• Extremely fast and productive, the time it takes to draw lines and sectors, edit and align textures, adjust light levels, and fiddle with tags / line defs and sectors types is the shortest bar none. Definitely the editor of choice for getting things done.
  
• Nice plugin support; Visplane explorer is a God send.
  
• Lots of source port and map type configurations.
  
• Supports empty wads / wads with arbitrary map names.
  

Doom Builder 2 Cons

• While powerful for editing, the 3D preview is a clunky fucking mess. It lags a lot, has input issues, doesn't simulate Doom's FOV, and just sucks in general. The 3D preview in Eureka is better to be quite frank; at least that 3D preview gives you an almost perfect mock up of what your map will look like in a software renderer.
  
• Editing tools can be a little too smart for their own good. If you're trying to replicate some awkward Casali brothers mapping tricks, good luck with that.
  
• 2D map editing feels very modern. This in of itself isn't a bad thing, but seriously, I fell in love with Eureka's method of drawing sectors and lines. Doom Builder 2 feels very "sticky" by comparison.
  

Slade 3 Pros

• Integrated with a full wad editing suite; can't beat that. Need to modify some patch data while working on your level? You bet your ass.
  
• Silky smooth 3D preview; even simulates sky paradoxes!
  
• When highlighting tagged sectors or lines, Slade 3 will draw arrows to the corresponding target, which is incredibly handy.
  
• Very pretty looking interface; very clean and modern.
  
• Natively supports the Doom Builder 2 Camera Thing; handy if you have to work with Doom Builder 2 maps a lot and actually want the damn camera position.
  

Slade 3 Cons

• You know how in Doom Builder 2 you can just right click and do shit? You're outta luck here; Slade 3 has different key presses for everything. If you like modern style map editing (see above), stay away from Slade.
  
• Has one of the world's clumsiest texture browsers. The time it takes me to find and change textures in Doom Builder 2 is absolutely unmatched by comparison.
  
• Still in beta. Not that Doom Builder 1 or 2 ever felt finished, but Slade has this horrible tendency to suffer from peculiar annoying bullshit. For example, if you edit a sector type and fail to press "enter", and unfocus the editing panel, guess what? UNDONE. Consequently, keying in values on certain panels can cause the entire editor to lose focus, requiring you to click somewhere within the map editing panel for even simple hotkeys to start working again.
  
• Several (most?) hotkeys don't work when drawing lines. This is particularly annoying if you're trying to draw a sector and suddenly want to disable grid snapping.
  
• Limited game support; Slade 3 doesn't even officially support Doom 1, only Ultimate (!!!).
  
• Texture alignment can be a chore; I'm pretty sure Slade 3 doesn't even support auto Y alignment.
  

Apart from that, they produce maps and are ostensibly similar. Slade 3 isn't bad, but it definitely has productivity issues. I can seriously do my map mapping faster in Eureka, and that editor has some serious problems. The lack of Visplane explorer integration is pretty much the nail in the coffin for me, since I tend to work almost exclusively with vanilla maps.

BlueFeena said:

• Supports empty wads / wads with arbitrary map names.
  

SLADE too.

BlueFeena said:

• Still in beta.
  

Nope, you missed the memo :p

The lack of responsivity to changes in number boxes is a problem in the underlying wxWidgets library which makes it hard to detect when a value is changed and the focus is still in that box. It can be worked around, though.

BlueFeena said:

• Limited game support; Slade 3 doesn't even officially support Doom 1, only Ultimate (!!!).
  

There's no practical difference between Doom 1 and Ultimate Doom. You just need to make an Ultimate Doom map for episode 1, 2 or 3 rather than episode 4. There you go.

If you complain about the horrible and blasphemous availability of the new Doom II line specials, they've been available in Doom 1 too since v1.666 at least.

Seriously, the new line specials used to be kept out of the Doom 1 config and this was changed because people complained about that, arguing this exclusion was pointless.

I cannot agree with the broader "limited game support" criticism since there are configurations for Doom/II, Doom 64, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, Chex Quest 1, Chex Quest 3, and Urban Brawl. Just because you may not personally care about seven of the game configs doesn't mean the selection is limited.

So SLADE3 is not as fast as Doom Builder 2? Damn. I really prefer Doom Builder's no-bullshit drawing pattern, and I miss it on Mac. Opening up Eureka is just not the same UX. I haven't tried SLADE, probably the OSX build made by another guy than sirjuddington is too outdated to have an editor unless I didn't download anything new.

BlueFeena said:

Slade 3 Cons

• You know how in Doom Builder 2 you can just right click and do shit? You're outta luck here; Slade 3 has different key presses for everything. If you like modern style map editing (see above), stay away from Slade.
  
• Has one of the world's clumsiest texture browsers. The time it takes me to find and change textures in Doom Builder 2 is absolutely unmatched by comparison.
  
• Still in beta. Not that Doom Builder 1 or 2 ever felt finished, but Slade has this horrible tendency to suffer from peculiar annoying bullshit. For example, if you edit a sector type and fail to press "enter", and unfocus the editing panel, guess what? UNDONE. Consequently, keying in values on certain panels can cause the entire editor to lose focus, requiring you to click somewhere within the map editing panel for even simple hotkeys to start working again.
  
• Several (most?) hotkeys don't work when drawing lines. This is particularly annoying if you're trying to draw a sector and suddenly want to disable grid snapping.
  
• Limited game support; Slade 3 doesn't even officially support Doom 1, only Ultimate (!!!).
  
• Texture alignment can be a chore; I'm pretty sure Slade 3 doesn't even support auto Y alignment.
  

1. I don't see what is wrong with this - it's something that always bothered me about DB/DB2. In windows, when you right click, you generally expect a context menu to come up, it's a standard windows thing. So that's what SLADE does too.

2. What is 'clumsy' about it? I can't really improve it if I don't get proper feedback.

3. Gez has already answered this, but yeah, it's an annoying wxWidgets problem. It's the main reason I ended up creating proper 'properties' dialogs for each mode rather than relying on the property table control entirely for editing.

4. All of the view-related hotkeys are enabled while line drawing. Grid snap is just one I missed. Are there any others that would be useful to be enabled while line drawing?

5. Already answered

6. What about texture alignment is difficult, apart from the lack of Y auto-align? It can do everything DB2 does in this regard.

You know, this guy asked for a comparison between Slade and Doom Builder 2. I gave him my opinion on it. I should not have to be defending myself from the pitchfork wielding Slade people.

Gez said:

SLADE too.

I just checked, and Slade most certainly does not support arbitrary map names.

Gez said:

There's no practical difference between Doom 1 and Ultimate Doom, plus a needlessly snarky comment.

You know, I voiced a perfectly valid concern. There is no reason for you to respond in the manner that you did.

sirjuddington said:

I don't see what is wrong with this - it's something that always bothered me about DB/DB2. In windows, when you right click, you generally expect a context menu to come up, it's a standard windows thing. So that's what SLADE does too.

The issue I stated was that Slade uses multiple key presses -- and to add to it, uses key presses in a remarkably poor way. The insert key in general is poor choice for a button that I have to hit constantly. A beginner may find the lack of a single contextualized key press (Right click in Doom Builder 2) needlessly intimidating.

I don't necessarily have a problem with using multiple keys; the problem is more deeply seated with Slade's controls specifically. Eureka uses multiple key presses too -- arguably in a less forgiving way -- yet Eureka is far easier to work with simply owing to the way the controls are laid out.

sirjuddington said:

What is 'clumsy' about it? I can't really improve it if I don't get proper feedback.

In Doom Builder 2, with the texture browser open, I can immediately begin typing, and DB2 will both search and filter for a texture containing the letters I type. Slade on the other hand, requires me to explicitly type something into the filter box, otherwise it looks for the exact texture name. This is is frequently less than helpful. Ditto with the quick texture browser function or whatever it's called.

sirjuddington said:

What about texture alignment is difficult, apart from the lack of Y auto-align? It can do everything DB2 does in this regard.

Slade requires me to hit NUMLOCK when I want to nudge textures 1 pixel as opposed to 8. As someone who uses the numpad for data entry, this is incredibly tedious.

BlueFeena said:

You know, this guy asked for a comparison between Slade and Doom Builder 2. I gave him my opinion on it. I should not have to be defending myself from the pitchfork wielding Slade people.

I didn't think I was being particularly 'pitchfork-wielding' in my replies. Sorry if it came across that way.

BlueFeena said:

I just checked, and Slade most certainly does not support arbitrary map names.

It does as long as you select a port that supports arbitrary map names.

BlueFeena said:

The issue I stated was that Slade uses multiple key presses -- and to add to it, uses key presses in a remarkably poor way. The insert key in general is poor choice for a button that I have to hit constantly. A beginner may find the lack of a single contextualized key press (Right click in Doom Builder 2) needlessly intimidating.

I don't necessarily have a problem with using multiple keys; the problem is more deeply seated with Slade's controls specifically. Eureka uses multiple key presses too -- arguably in a less forgiving way -- yet Eureka is far easier to work with simply owing to the way the controls are laid out.

I think the right click context menu thing is something we're just going to have to disagree on. Either way, all controls are configurable in SLADE, apart from the left and right mouse buttons. The controls for SLADE 3 are based on previous versions of SLADE, I have no plans to change the defaults.

BlueFeena said:

In Doom Builder 2, with the texture browser open, I can immediately begin typing, and DB2 will both search and filter for a texture containing the letters I type. Slade on the other hand, requires me to explicitly type something into the filter box, otherwise it looks for the exact texture name. This is is frequently less than helpful. Ditto with the quick texture browser function or whatever it's called.

That's fair enough, I should be able to have it default to changing the filter when typing with the texture browser open. Eventually I'd like to completely redo it anyway, but it might not be any time soon.

BlueFeena said:

Slade requires me to hit NUMLOCK when I want to nudge textures 1 pixel as opposed to 8. As someone who uses the numpad for data entry, this is incredibly tedious.

As above, all these keys are configurable.

Either way, this should probably be continued in PMs if needed, we're kind of derailing the thread :P

As for the original question, DB/DB2 definitely has more features than the SLADE map editor at the moment, so if you need them it's probably best to stick with that. Otherwise it really comes down to preference - SLADE works differently to DB2 in some things, and if you're used to DB2 SLADE will take a bit of getting used to.

BlueFeena said:

You know, this guy asked for a comparison between Slade and Doom Builder 2. I gave him my opinion on it. I should not have to be defending myself from the pitchfork wielding Slade people.

On the contrary, I think it's great that Slade's developers are active and available to respond to comments and complaints, take said complaints as feature suggestions, and clear up confusion about their software. They've certainly been more receptive to your needlessly crass dismissals than I would have been in their place.

Further, more information from more informed parties makes for a more effective and informative comparison. I'm going to assume that you don't know everything and that other people might have knowledge that could contribute meaningfully to the thread.

Doom Builder 2 is stable. But I prefer SLADE3 because of cross-platform, all-in-one editor and its perspective.

I didn't even know that you can build maps with Slade3.

Learn something new everyday.

I've often used both. I'll save a .wad in one editor and re-load it into the other, mess around, save, and then its back to the first one. Excited to try this new version of Slade though.

Thank you for this topic as was wondering this just now.

 

I'm quite new to DB2 too but having learned mapping with DEU originally, DB2 is a... definitely more intuitive and productive, lols.

 

I wish you could set the elevation changes with mouse scrolling in 3d mode to select only. The times I've accidentally altered sector height on something I have on cursor...

 

Haven't had any lag so that's perhaps better now than in 2014. The perspective is still off though yeah but luckily testing in your engine of choice is just a mouse click after configuration.

This is a good discussion.

It's also a 9 year old discussion. DB2 hasn't been updated in 11 years