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Mechadon

[WIP] Vela Pax (on hiatus)

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Damn. I have no idea how I missed this back in March, but I must tip my hat to you Mechadon. The title PNG alone prompted a download and I was shocked to find a set of massive maps awaiting me—all with stock textures too! I really like the attention you pay to the little areas and parts, expanding out these smaller complexes until they form a vast array of buildings, alleyways and beautiful backdrops. I'm torn between wanting to beta this beast or waiting until its glorious release date; just gotta say though that you're doing fabulous work so far. The hell maps look especially delicious...

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Thanks for the comments guys :). I didn't think a dumb DB shot would really warrant it, heh! With any luck I'll have some proper screenshots sometime this coming week. Unless I just decide that I'm going to be too lazy to do any mapping this week :P

Memfis said:

Obvioiusly it's too early to say at this point, but I think I will not like the changes done to map02. It had such a neat compact layout but now there is a huge "sprout" that will probably feel totally disconnected from that main structure with all the keys. Plus, seems like it will be very different thematically (looks like a purely indoor area). Oh well, I still have the old release on my hard drive, so nothing will be lost I guess.


Most of the action is still going to take place in the "old" map; in fact, probably most of it will. I've changed very little in the way of the gameplay from the map other than moving the start and exit. The new start location is probably the main gameplay changing factor here since you no longer start right in the middle of everything. I'm going to have to tweak some of the monster and weapon placements near where you enter the old map so the difficulty doesn't spike up suddenly. Other than that though, the old map's gameplay is pretty much still the same as before (aside from some balance tweaks I've made since the beta, obviously).

A large portion of the new areas contain, ironically enough, side areas and secrets. There's a very direct path from the new start and to the new exit. The goal is still the same too; grab the six keys and head for the exit. Thematically, yes there is a bit of a contrast between the new and the old. But I was being a bit deliberate with that contrast because I wanted the player to start off deep underground where the teleporters are, and then make their way outside to the more lively part of the map. I probably could have kept a similar mood and design for the new areas, but I like to play with setting contrasts like that sometimes and, hopefully, it won't detract from the experience :)

I hope that you will like the new changes I've made, but of course that may not be the case. I really don't think they detract from the map. The new player start location is the big thing to note here, because that does alter the overall gameplay flow (which isn't something I can comment on just yet since I'm still working on that). I'm thinking about doing another public test candidate after I finish MAP04, so I would love to hear your thoughts on the changes whenever that time comes Memfis ;)

@Ribbiks: Essel explained the sidedef limit thing very well. As he said, it depends on the design of the map. In my personal experience, I have to be very wary of the limit bitch-slapping me past 100K sidedefs. I got to about 105K on this map when it hit the first go round. After I did some optimizations, I started adding some scenic details around the bulk of the map (the "mountains" you see around the outer edges). I drew them out and setup my sector heights before adding textures, and I was able to save without any problems. But as soon as I started adding textures and alignments, I hit the limit again. Those sides could no longer be compressed once I textured and aligned them because they weren't all the same anymore (the different alignment values made them unique). Thankfully I was able to finish up the additions and stay under the map's the limit, which is right around 106K~ish sides. But you gotta be very careful if you do hit the limit, because DB can't save the map until your back under the limit.

Unfortunately in the case of the linedef limit, once you hit 65536, that's it; there is no compression to save you. Thankfully that limit is much harder to hit, and it is also easier to harvest lines instead of sides (since you know 1 line = 1 line, but in the case of sides you may not always know if 1 side will equal 1 side because of compression). I hit this limit in MAP01 the last time I worked on it because I wasn't paying attention :/

Anyways, thank again for the comments guys! I'll have some more worthwhile stuff to show off soon I hope :D

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It's kind of late for another big update post (3am as of this post)...but, eh, I really want to show off some of these screenshots :). I finally finished my gameplay pass and test/bug-fix pass tonight on the new areas. So here are some shots that suck a magnitude less than DB shots. And I took a crap-load of them. Hope that's ok!

New starting area! Notice the teleporters are very similar to the ones at the end of MAP01:

A view of the "control room" slightly above where you start.

The teleporter chamber splits off into two paths; one is for side areas and the other leads to the rest of the map.

The other hallway...slightly worse for wear as you can see.

Just some shots along the way to the map outside.

A little side area with a nasty surprise for the curious.
A terribly taken shot of a terribly insignificant area.

The start and exit are very close to each other, just like in the old version of the map.

SLADWALL 4 LYFE
Let's see...brown, brown, and more brown. Heh, just the start of the tangent area which leads to some goodies if you explored the outer map well enough.

Just like the end of MAP01, there is a "control room" for the teleporters. There's a little secret side-route concerning the control-room/tele with some goodies if your vigilant enough :D

A view leading to the control room...well, a terrible screenshot of it anyways.

The start of the exit route takes you back underground is an unstable cavernous sprawl. The actual exit is a railway where you'll "ride" out of MAP02 (and "ride" into MAP03).

Much of the underground base has been ravaged by demon flesh and earthquakes.
The caves have some surviving human structures hidden in them.
A semi-decent attempt at a spooky rail cart exit...thing.

Some areas have been tweaked and revamped! In particular the old blue keycard fight and arena is totally new.

A horde of Revenants may or may not spawn from this contraption.
There's the blue keycard smack-dab in the center of this big arena, much like in the old design!
Flesh and ZIMMER and maybe lots of Cacos?

And here are some new additions and other slightly changed areas.

The area around the secret YK switch has been opened up a bit. Also you may notice that the landscape around the map is a lot less sterile now.
Anyone guess where this area is in the old map? Here's a hint - it use to be extremely ugly.
I made some changes with a fake sky ceiling in this area, so I add some detail to break up the big blank wall here.
The old exit at the center of the map. Nothing too special, but that Megasphere is not totally free :P


There are a ton of new areas so I couldn't really contain myself with the screenshot extravaganza. I apologize in advance for all of those huge pictures. Also some of the areas will look really dark, and I think that's because of the COLORMAP I'm using. I need to run some comparisons against Doom's COLORMAP, but I think it's ramping to dark colors too harshly. So try to bear with me there (and if anyone can help me out with the COLORMAP, I'd appreciate it!).

Gameplay-wise, the new areas should be about the same difficulty as the rest of the old map. Of course the new starting bits are significantly easier, and I had to make some minor additions at the point where the new areas meet the old map. The exit has more going on this time as opposed to the old exit too. But just as before, you gotta get all six keys to unlock the path to the exit. The main map has had very minor changes made to it, so don't expect anything too drastically different there. Overall the gameplay seems to have meshed ok with the rest of the map I think.

With this finally out of the way, I'll be moving along with the rest of my map updates. MAP05 is next, although I can be certain in saying that it will not take me anywhere near as long to make bug fixes and additions to it as it has for MAP02. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't because...well, you know, sidedefs :P. So it's going to be purely small bug fixes and additions.

Once all that's out of the way, I'll get back to work on MAP04 again! Which will be great because I don't think I've worked on it for many months now. I'm still going to try my very best to finish this before 2013 is done. Right now it is still hard to say if that is a feasible goal since we are already halfway through the year, and I've got 3+ maps to make still. And assuming the rest of the maps will be as big as the finished three (they pretty much have to be at this point), getting this finished in 5 months is a huge task. We'll see what happens I guess!

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Just out of curiosity: will you be updating beta with reworked maps, or we have to wait until it's fully done now? Sorry if it was asked already, haven't read the whole thread.

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Cool stuff. The new colormap looks interesting, too; the way it hue-shifts the yellows and browns around a bit in dim areas gives the stock textures a familiar-but-new kind of effect.

http://mekworx.the-powerhouse.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20130703_021000.png
A flat similar to LITE3 would look better here, I think. The round lights look always a bit awkward to me when they're wrapped up so tightly like this, if that makes any sense.

Mechadon said:

Right now it is still hard to say if that is a feasible goal since we are already halfway through the year, and I've got 3+ maps to make still. And assuming the rest of the maps will be as big as the finished three (they pretty much have to be at this point), getting this finished in 5 months is a huge task. We'll see what happens I guess!

IMO there doesn't have to be an obligation to make every map gargantuan like you're saying. It might actually be more effective to slip a couple of comparatively shorter maps in between for pacing's sake, and to contrast with the huge ones and really accentuate them.

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Demonologist said:

Just out of curiosity: will you be updating beta with reworked maps, or we have to wait until it's fully done now? Sorry if it was asked already, haven't read the whole thread.

I'm thinking about doing another test release after I finishing MAP04 actually. Before I started making these updates to the existing maps, I was just going to wait until I finished the remaining three before doing another test release (then the eventual full release afterwards). But the updates have been more extensive than I really planned, so it would be great to get some feedback on them before I charge ahead with the rest of the project :)

esselfortium said:

IMO there doesn't have to be an obligation to make every map gargantuan like you're saying. It might actually be more effective to slip a couple of comparatively shorter maps in between for pacing's sake, and to contrast with the huge ones and really accentuate them.

That is a good point. Originally that was what I was going to do too. I had some plans for a rather large MAP06 by design. The same goes for MAP03, but I was going to focus more on large-scale architecture and large expanses, which would be in contrast with the more cramped first two maps. MAP01 and MAP04, seeing as they were the starting maps for their respective themes, were meant to be a little bit smaller. Of course that didn't happen with MAP01, and MAP04 is shaping up to be another beast. Right now I just feel like I need to make the rest of the map at least somewhat large just to keeps things consistent. But I guess even cutting the average size in half would still be considered big at this point :P. It's something I'll keep in mind as I continue.

About the LITE3 suggestion, I'll have to see what I can do there. One of the grey~ish lights would work well I think, but it would require a custom offset flat. But I do get what your saying :)

The COLORMAP is a tweaked version of one of Sigvatr's works. I think it was the contrasted colormap? Something like that. Anyways, I replaced two unused colors in the palette with darker reds. Then used his COLORMAP as a base for the nicer fade outs for the pinks, greens, and browns. The only thing right now is that light levels below 128 seem to be a lot darker than in the original COLORMAP. But I haven't done a proper comparison yet so it may just be me.

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Just checking in to say that I still love everything about this and you're awesome.

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Thus far I've managed to hold myself to my pledge not to play this until it's done (or at least until there's an essentially complete beta), but you are making it very, very difficult for me, you magnificent bastard.

I'm not really feeling the Chem 101 look to the new health bonus sprites (always have dug that quaint alchemical look to the original), but I can get behind the other aesthetic changes I'm seeing, particularly the palette modifications. In some of the well-lit shots it seems very understated, but in scenes where there are dead bodies or the like, or a lot of shadows, the extra vibrancy and saturation to the reds and the inkier quality of the darkness really stands out--it lends a subtle air of violence and menace to things. I think the one shot that really emphasizes this feeling is the later one with the five distant imps near some crates--their eyes, man, their eyes. Good stuff. Of course, I've commented in the past on the rifle and some of the other changes, and I'm always interested to see how you've tweaked things in each update.

One thing I will say is that while it's true that in megaWADs or other large mapsets it's often pleasing to have relatively larger maps alternated with relatively smaller ones, in the case of Vela Pax, where the sheer magnitude of the adventure is one of the main selling points, it's the bigger the better, as far I'm concerned. Of course, there is the question of things being relative--so if 3 or 4 of the maps are "gargantuan", I don't suppose the contrast would be too jarring if the others were merely "huge."

Anyway, good luck/good work/you the man.

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Just wondering, is the new Demon just a reskin? It's interesting seeing resprites of the critters we all know and shoot in the face. :) I recall some neat reskins of the zombies that I saw in Combat Shock 2 if you're looking for some.

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I think that's just the old demon, and the new COLORMAP makes him appear that way. Could be wrong, though.

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Death Egg said:

I think that's just the old demon, and the new COLORMAP makes him appear that way. Could be wrong, though.


Heh, good point.

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Yea that's just the regular old Demon sprites, heh :). He benefits from the COLORMAP tweaks the most because of the new pink fade range. Instead of fading to an ugly tan-ish color, he fades more to a darker pink/red color.

Demon of the Well said:

I'm not really feeling the Chem 101 look to the new health bonus sprites (always have dug that quaint alchemical look to the original), but I can get behind the other aesthetic changes I'm seeing, particularly the palette modifications. In some of the well-lit shots it seems very understated, but in scenes where there are dead bodies or the like, or a lot of shadows, the extra vibrancy and saturation to the reds and the inkier quality of the darkness really stands out--it lends a subtle air of violence and menace to things. I think the one shot that really emphasizes this feeling is the later one with the five distant imps near some crates--their eyes, man, their eyes.


Well I am glad to hear you, and other folks, like the COLORMAP :). I should probably reiterate that it is mostly Sigvatr's work. I just made some tweaks to work in two darker reds and then convert it to use the normal Doom palette. There are still some bugs that I need to try and figure out, like if the colors are fading out too harsh at light level 112 and some colors are actually too bright in some light levels. Working on COLORMAPs is kind of an interesting thing to do by hand because it is difficult to tell exactly what a change will look like until you see it in game. I'm by no means an expert at it, heh :P

I really appreciate all the comments guys, really! I'll probably do another test release after MAP04 is finished, and I would love to hear some more feedback then :)

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Hey, got another update for you guys :). I'm finally done with all of my map updates. MAP05 has been optimized and bug fixed, thus marking the point where I can finally start working on MAP04 again.

I was able to squeeze about 8000 sidedefs while optimizing MAP05, so I made sure to put them to good use. One thing I was disappointed with in the first iteration was how the outdoor lava areas came out. I didn't have enough sides to really make them how I wanted. So that was the first thing I did, and now they are more or less how I imagined them from the beginning.

Some other rooms also got some additions and, in one case, a complete redesign. While I was at it, I made some changes to some texture themes too. I think there were too many brown/city~ish tones, so I tried to inject more reds and hellish things in placed (for example, the STUCCO texture has been completely replaced with the grey marble, which worked out quite nicely). You can see the screenshots for the updated areas below. I figure you guys are probably tired of seeing screenshots of the same maps over and over, so hopefully this is the last time :P





Rocks
More rocks
Even more rocks

The only thing I didn't get to do, that I really wanted to do, was to play with more contrasted lighting. I tweaked the lighting for both MAP01 and MAP02 and I was very pleased with the results. However in the case of MAP05, there are light transfer tags almost everywhere. It was a nightmare to get them all working right the first go around, and I just decided I was done with that self-torture :P. Some areas got slight lighting changes, but overall not much has changed there.

Oh, I also updated the statusbar again. I added some bits to the ammo, health, armor, and did a bit more minor editing. There are some new key icons to match the new key pickup sprites. And for the hell of it, I made some new ammo/arms number graphics. It should be done now...but I'll probably end up doing more editing on it later on down the line if something starts to bug me about it.

I'm a bit sick of mapping right now, so I'm gonna take another short break before getting back to work on MAP04. Thankfully I've had months and months to think about what I want to do with that map, so it shouldn't be too difficult to start roughing out areas. Of course, I'll be sure to keep you all updates as I make progress on it :)

@Demon of the Well: I forgot to mention in my reply to you that I'm planning on (or, more precisely, going to attempt to) redo the health bonus sprites. I had an idea for Supplice a long time ago to make a sort of crystalline, decanter-style flask design. But I couldn't get the details right (and we eventually replaced the flask design with something different entirely). If you or anyone has interesting ideas for a health bonus replacement design, be sure to toss it my way!

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That second shot is marvelous. Love how the vines take the traditional green-red complementaries and add a little flavor to them, blending in easier and fitting the more sinister theme than the traditional MARB textures. I'm a big fan of hell episodes and this looks absolutely fantastic.

Also minor niggle but I think for the status bar the bullet icon would look better next to AMMO as opposed to the shells since the other items next to the titles are monochrome, and a spot of gray would balance out the bullet on the right and gray lighting in the portrait.

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Thanks mouldy :). The third shot is sort of the lighting level I wanted to work into some of the other indoor areas. The area in that shot is brand-new, so I was able to light it that way without any issue. I may go back at a later date when I've got more initiative and adjust the lighting in some of the other indoor areas so they look similar to that shot.

dobugabumaru said:

Also minor niggle but I think for the status bar the bullet icon would look better next to AMMO as opposed to the shells since the other items next to the titles are monochrome, and a spot of gray would balance out the bullet on the right and gray lighting in the portrait.

I thought the shells might be a better choice just because they seem like they would represent "ammo" more than the other ammo types. Mostly because you actually see shells lying around; you never really see bullets since they are in clips or boxes. I'll give it a try and see what it looks like though, thanks for your input :)

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Hey guys, I've got something that I could use a bit of input on. I'm working a bit on cleaning up some of the sprites I've made. And in particular I've made an attempt at redoing the health bonuses in a different style. I finished up a set tonight and it looks pretty good...buuut, I think it might be too big (plus I screwed up the animation because I forgot that it ping-pongs...though this is easily fixable in dehacked).



I can take a better screenshot if necessary as I'm not entirely sure there is enough context to tell its size. On the right is the updated armor bonus which is slightly bigger than the older one. But it is a 21x23 sprite if that helps. The old health bonuses were 14x18 and much closer in size to the vanilla sprites.

Anyways, any feedback you guys can muster will be greatly appreciated :)

Oh by the way, big thanks goes to Vader with helping me out with the logo edits!

*edit*

Ok, here's a better comparison screenshot that I forgot I took.

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Hey, I'm always elated to see work progress on this, and always glad to offer an opinion.

I think it was me that complained about the look of the health bonus items from some of the past rounds of screenshots--apart from looking slightly flat in a depth of field sense, I felt they looked too much like a cheap plastic gewgaw out of a kid's first chemistry set or the like, lacking that subtly esoteric cast that made the original sprite so delightfully recognizable. This new version, in comparison, looks vastly improved; simply put, it's back to looking like some kind of mysterious magic potion (as it should!), with the much more pronounced faceting on the bottle lending it a more hi-def look than the original sprite, in keeping with the general character of your other sprite redesigns for things like medikits, armor vests, and the like; I can only imagine that it looks even better when it animates. That being said, while it's only a very minor concern given that the art itself is so attractive, I think you're probably right in your suspicions that it seems slightly oversized. It's not so much a question of the sprite itself appearing incongruously large for what it's trying to represent, I suspect, but rather that its proportions seem a little 'off' in relation to some of the other items, e.g. the main well for the liquid appears similar in dimension to the interior space of the armor helmet (if not slightly larger), and that's a helluva potion if you think about it that way....kind of a 7-11 'UltraSupraTetraWe'veReallyGoneTooFuckingFarThisTime'-GULP thing, heh. By contrast, while the new keycards are evidently quite a bit larger than the originals as well, that's an example of an item where any size incongruities are likely to be far less noticeable (since you're probably only going to see one or two of each key per map, anyway).

That is a very minor thing, though, and it might not even matter at all depending on how the item is actually deployed. For example, if you're going to use the approach where what appear to be individual bottles are actually stacks of them (so that a player gets 5% health or the like instead of 1% for collecting them), the slightly larger aspect might seem like a logical twist on a game system that's likely already very familiar to the vast majority of Vela Pax's audience.

Nitpickery aside, your work is looking as lovingly-crafted as usual. Keep it up!

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Mechadon said:

I'm working a bit on cleaning up some of the sprites I've made. And in particular I've made an attempt at redoing the health bonuses in a different style. I finished up a set tonight and it looks pretty good...buuut, I think it might be too big.

I approve of Mechadon brand mouthwash. I shall be switching from Listerine at once.

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Thanks for you input Demon of the Well! It's much appreciated. I did go ahead and make this health bonus sprite design smaller. And while I was at it I fixed the animation so it will ping-pong (that way I don't have to screw around with dehacked). Here's a new comparison screenshot.



It's still bigger than the previous or the vanilla sprites, but not so much that it looks too ridiculous. And its better than the "my first chemistry set" bottle designs of the older sprites :P. I attempted to do a similar sort of crystaline decanter-style bottle design a long time ago for Supplice, but it ended up looking terrible. I'm glad that I suck a little less now at making sprites because I'm quite happy with this design.

The lazy side of me thought that it might be interesting to have them be worth double or 5x and then just keep them the larger size. It would have made some sense and, in my opinion, made the pickups a bit more worthwhile...or atleast easier to place in maps. I kind of hate stacking items though because the pickup flash can be overwhelming for a player, depending on the port. I wanted to do this via dehacked for Supplice, until I realized that you can't change the pickup values per bonus.

DooMAD said:

I approve of Mechadon brand mouthwash. I shall be switching from Listerine at once.


Good man, I'm glad your able recognize a superior product when you see it!

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You can change soulsphere health though, so if you're really desperate you can sacrifice it to get 5 hp potions or something like that. :)

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Not a fan of the 2 lights on the armor bonus, maybe it'd look better if the visor just lit up a bit.

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Memfis said:

You can change soulsphere health though, so if you're really desperate you can sacrifice it to get 5 hp potions or something like that. :)

Heh, yea I didn't think about that! Although I'm pretty sure I would have to be extremely desperate to get rid of the Soulsphere at this point :P

Marcaek said:

Not a fan of the 2 lights on the armor bonus, maybe it'd look better if the visor just lit up a bit.

The lights are supposed to be ghostly eyes of some mystic design. Or something.

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Nice update Mechadon, good to see you're still working on this beast. Doomguy must feel so tiny when wandering through these areas :p

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Rip-and-Tear-Sphere?



It's the berserk for those wondering :P. I had three empty frames from using up the Pain Elemental resurrect state, so I thought why not. I made one for Supplice and I thought it might be cool for this too. The sprite still needs a bit of cleaning up though.

The animation is a beating heart by the way. It's probably hard to see that from a still screenshot.

Dutch Doomer said:

Nice update Mechadon, good to see you're still working on this beast. Doomguy must feel so tiny when wandering through these areas :p


Thanks dutch :D. I'm really glad to see you posting around here again...hopefully you are still mapping!

*edit*

Fixed a typo that I noticed way later than I should have :P

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Mechadon said:
[BThanks dutch :D. I'm really glad to see you posting around here again...hopefully you are still mapping! [/B]

Doom doesn't love me anymore :( Still trying to map and keep showing up around here.

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An update! And so soon after the last update too!

Seriously tho Mek, you know I love this shit. Much regard for your work I have. Keep at it. :)

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