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Dragonsbrethren

PSX Doom: The Lost Levels - New Pre-Beta Available courtesy of Salahmander2

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BaronOfStuff said:

I've been thinking about dividing the final map back into its original parts to get around the RAM limitation (which is killing the gameplay now); thankfully this will be a trivial process as the main work has obviously already been finished.


If you do, please keep the all-in-one too; even if it's just as an "gotta use the console to get there" map. (Or maybe some Easter-eggish "cross the previous map's teleport exit from the other side" effect).

I mean, I understand striving for accuracy in the self-inflicted limitations of the project, but there's nothing bad with having a little bonus map that breaks the limit a bit and I find the concept of the all-in-one boss map too interesting to sacrifice entirely.

Job said:

I have a PlayStation and original copies of Doom and Final Doom. Fortunately, I also have a 72" TV. Do you think I could use these to get you a good-enough quality screen capture of the status bars?

You probably do not have, however, a copy of the alpha version of PSX Doom which featured this older status bar that is not present in the final game. All the data from the games as released is already obtained by direct extraction from the ROM, there is no need for "Never The Same Color" screenshots.

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Gez said:

You probably do not have, however, a copy of the alpha version of PSX Doom which featured this older status bar that is not present in the final game. All the data from the games as released is already obtained by direct extraction from the ROM, there is no need for "Never The Same Color" screenshots.

Yeah, I don't have that one. :) That's cool, it makes a lot more sense to extract the data from the ROM.

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Gez said:

If you do, please keep the all-in-one too; even if it's just as an "gotta use the console to get there" map.

This sounds fair to me, I've no intention of deleting the original map itself in any case though, so I can always upload it as a separate file if it's cut from the LL project.

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http://www.mediafire.com/download/zmkiw260k22b083/lost08.wad

Industrial Zone, now with a harder jump to the secret exit switch. On top of that, fixed a few glitches.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/wob77qd3gglbtrq/lost13.wad

Garrison, Megamur's suggestion.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/943o5v31rw03jcd/lost14.wad

Titan Manor, same as above.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/9jns9ckq5a9a5ds/lost15.wad

Trapped On Titan.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/4f6jrcin2m9vthd/lost16.wad

Bloodsea Keep.

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BaronOfStuff said:

I've been thinking about dividing the final map back into its original parts to get around the RAM limitation (which is killing the gameplay now); thankfully this will be a trivial process as the main work has obviously already been finished.

Of course this throws a spanner in the works regarding map order, and while I think we should still end the set with Icon Of Sin (for obvious reasons), as far as Last Call and Gateway To Hell go I'm not too bothered if they're reshuffled to the end of the Evilution/Plutonia episodes or just kept as one sequence of final maps that flow into each other. What's the general opinion on this?

To be honest I think I like this better than the merged idea. It just seems more authentic to me. I'm totally cool with keeping the original as a console-only Easter egg, I mean I already plan on keeping DeXiaZ's Mesphisto conversion with the boss fight. The only thing I dislike about the plan is having to rename all the map WADs!

(I still think the boss monsters are less important than you think to the combined map, though.)

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I kind of like the idea of having a little "boss rush" at the end of the Lost Levels, where you do all the boss maps in a row to finally top the whole thing off. Besides, they all generally give you loads of power-ups at the start of each, so you'd be refreshed and ready for the next battle, regardless of how badly you were beaten around in the previous.


I can't seem to get my MAPINFO lump for Mephisto working. Looking into the WAD in SLADE, the contents are:

MAP07
TEXTMAP
BEHAVIOR
MAPINFO
ZNODES
ENDMAP


The MAPINFO lump is written as such:

map LOST17 "Mephisto"
{
	music = "FINMUS05"
	sky1 = "SKY06"
	next = "LOST18"
	Map07Special
}
When the map is loaded (along with the regular PSX Doom TC resources), I receive a "No map lost17" notification. It's still set as MAP07, and it ignores my music selection, sky selection and level title info (and probably the MAP07 special, but I didn't check).

Any clue what I'm doing wrong here?

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Yeah, you're trying to define the same map slot twice and you stuck MAPINFO between the map markers. Move MAPINFO above MAP07 or ENDMAP and stick the map in a different slot for testing (ie: lost17m.wad, LOST17M in MAPINFO), edit the MAPINFO lump in your copy of PSXLOST.PK3, or just don't load PSXLOST.PK3 and it should work fine.

map LOST17 in console to get to your map without PSXLOST.

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I already wasn't loading PSXLOST, just the base TC, but it's still ignoring my MAPINFO lump. I've rearranged the order of the files in the WAD multiple times--moving MAPINFO above MAP07, directly above ENDMAP, right below ENDMAP--and it's still not working. I can't imagine what I've done wrong.

There's absolutely nothing else I need to write in MAPINFO? Not some sort of extra lines that make ZDoom recognize it properly?

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Dragonsbrethren said:

(Honestly it is kinda ugly, cut for a reason.

I think the main reason they cut it was because the bottom part of the status bar went into most TV's overscan area, so you couldn't see some of it. The final one is thinner and just leaves the bottom part of the screen black.

Dragonsbrethren said:

I'd personally be okay with not having a custom one for Lost Levels.)

I don't think we really need one either.

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I've learned two things from editing Mephisto's Mausoleum:

1 - Use GZDoom Builder for UDMF maps. The sector brightness search mode alone makes it worth it for PSX conversions, but even better, visual mode doesn't crash when I adjust texture alignments!

2 - PSX Revenant rockets always track you.

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After a brief detour into actual mapping, I've returned to where I belong. Here's more testing feedback:


[psxlost-prebeta2]

LOST17 - Mephisto's Mausoleum


-The tally screen lists the level's name as "Mephistos Mausoleum" without an apostrophe. (It's correct on the automap.) Perhaps the big level name letters don't have apostrophe graphics?

-Yet again, the brightness values are identical to the PC version's and need to be darkened. (The exception to this are the various sectors affected by lines with linedef action 112--light change--applied, which cause the walkways around the cyberdemon to turn nearly pitch-black if the user's ambient light level is set low.) Coloration could stand to be spruced up as well. (Of course, these are all just optional cosmetic enhancements.)

-Bad misalignments exposed on the walls when the sector 36, 37, 38 or 39 platforms are lowered.

-The red sides of the teleporters in the sector 74 quadrants don't work: the teleporters have no destination targets. In the PC original, the red sides used to teleport the player into the middle of the room. Since that would now get a quick telefrag kill on the cyberdemon, the red sides of the teleporters should probably just be removed entirely.

-Sectors 44, 46, 49 & 50 should probably have ROK06 floor textures.

-The REDSK textures on lines 504 & 670 should probably be removed since the door can't even be opened from that side anyway.

-Nothing is tagged to make sector 126 lower anymore, meaning the sector 23 secret (invulnerability sphere) is inaccessible.

-Sectors 147 & 148 don't need to be marked as secrets. This is a minor bug from the original map.

-The monster-blocking flag on line 417 should probably be removed. It's a holdover from the original map. It had little impact on the original level, but now that monsters can easily walk into sector 9, it's easy for the player to exploit it. And once sector 22 opens, monsters can just walk around the line anyway, so the monster-blocking property is even more useless.

-For balance purposes, consider deleting the thing 143 megasphere. This will encourage the player to seek out the crypt in the northwest quadrant of the map so they can unlock the megaarmor and get easy access to the soul sphere in sector 128.


-----


LOST18 - Black Tower

-Lines 243 & 589 can be removed. They no longer serve any purpose beyond causing a strange-looking strip of light on the floor. (Just make sure to close the hole they'll leave in sector 59.)

-It would probably be a good idea to change all the barons in sector 17 to face east. Currently, they have their back to the player when the player enters the room, making them easy targets.

-How about, instead of making sector 22 a teleporter, it instead turns into a perpetually lowering and rising lift when you click on line 978? (Actually, it'd have to be a walkover line, not a switch, since vanilla Doom didn't have switches that activated perpetually-moving floors. So maybe apply the walkover action to line 973 instead, and just remove the line 978 switch entirely.) Then the player will have to leap from sector 122, onto sector 17. This would better emulate the player having to ascend the staircase and cross the narrow bridge to reach sector 17 in the original map, and would also prevent the player from just telefragging the barons. This modification would also prevent a serious error, where the player can use the teleporter before opening sector 246, which renders the map unwinnable. (If you do make this alteration, you might want to move sector 122 northward so it's parallel with sector 242, replacing the thin bridge from the original map. Also, change sector 122's floor texture, and delete the thing 781 teleport destination, too.)

-I might replace the thing 73 nightmare demon with a chaingunner. At least it would have a marginal chance of attacking the player through the bars, like the arch-vile could in the original map. Similarly, replacing the nightmare demons in sector 135 with barons would be better equivalent to the arch-viles from the PC map.

-All the doors in the areas surrounded by the sector 66 ring are missing door tracks.

-If the "actors are infinitely tall" compatibility option is disabled, players can become permanently trapped in the sector tag 13 pits inside sectors 25 & 63. Even though this wouldn't be a concern in PSX Doom, for the sake of compatibility with modern GZDoom, it might be best to raise those pits up to floor level, and just have teleport destination spots in those sectors. Then when the player crosses line 150, a dummy sector opens and lets the monsters teleport into the squares where the pits used to be. (The ceilings of the tag 13 sectors should probably be raised to meet the height of their parent sectors, as well, since these pillars sticking out of the ceiling seemed to cause slowdown in DOSBox.)

-The thing 128, 133, 138 & 143 imps are unable to move or attack, due to the angle of the sectors they're standing in. I believe this is an issue in the original map as well. It may be best to just delete those imps entirely.

-Line 876 no longer has any sort of texture clue that suggests it might be a hidden door.

-The thing 263 hell knight is partly stuck in the walls and can't move. (This may vary depending on compatibility settings, but occurs with Doom Strict.)

-Since there's not enough "RAM" for a cyberdemon, at least add an extra baron to sector 140. There's room if you move the existing one to the side.

-Consider removing the thing 723 & 724 piles of gore. They serve no real purpose, and just clip into the walls and float oddly.

-The line 1378 linedef action, the line 1218 switch, and sector 207 are all now pointless. The switch used to reveal a hidden soul sphere right before the exit of the map. Now that the exit has been altered and the soul sphere removed, the switch does nothing. Either restore the secret soul sphere, or delete that sector/switch.

-Obviously, the exit room can't be exactly replicated from the original since it involved such a tall space, but why not have an ending room that at least resembles it somewhat? Make the room 256 units tall, dump the player in the lava, and have them fumble around, looking for a secret door as their legs burn off. The western wall is the true exit, but the wall lowers really slowly and they have to hope they survive long enough to escape, just like in the original map.

-Some feedback on lighting:

*This map shares the same brightness levels as the PC map. However, it's already fairly dark in many locations, so while I still think it should be darkened in some of the brighter spots, be cautious with it. There's also several light-changing lines late in the map that dim sectors, so be mindful of their settings as well.

*The sectors with key pickups need appropriately-colored lighting.

*Sectors 165, 177, 188, 191, 192, 198, 199 & 238 need their lightcolor set to F5D777.

*The sectors with BLOOD1 flats could probably use some red-tinged lighting.

*Maybe some greener lighting for sector 131 because of all the vines and green torches? Same for sector 163.

*Perhaps more blue-tinged lighting for the sectors with WATER01 flats? Also for sector 242 for the soul sphere.

*The sector 67 area and all the attached sectors have no colored lighting and should probably have some applied.

-Detail reduction ideas:

*You might want to tone down the number of strobe-light sectors--formerly the spiral staircase in the PC original--around sector 0. Having so many might have caused difficulties for the PlayStation, and since the staircase is gone anyway, they serve little function to gameplay.

*Sector 18 is divided up into four walls. I'd consider splitting the northeast and northwest walls off into new sectors, separate from sector 18, and removing the sector tags from them so they no longer lower when the line 1441 switch is pressed. (And also move/remove the thing 671 shotgun shells since they will no longer be accessible.)

*Consider greatly reducing the size of sector 22, as it doesn't offer a lot of gameplay benefit but allows the player to see a large amount of viewable area. Maybe just draw a line between vertices 544 & 547 and delete the remainder of the sector below it. (Just make sure to move the health pickups, the shotgun and as many enemies as you can into the remaining space. The thing 405 cacodemon can probably be moved down into sector 243. The deathmatch start can be moved at your discretion.)

*All the battlements in the sector 132 ring probably wouldn't have been nice for the PSX. They should probably be reduced in number.

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From what I recall, the map has all three zombie types, imps, pinkydemons, lost souls, cacodemons, knights and barons. All together, that's 26 points on the dot--the maximum allowable amount. A cyberdemon would need 12 points. The pistol zombies could easily be removed, and the knights swapped for barons (or vice versa) which would free up 6 points right away, but that's only halfway to the 12-point gap you'd need to make for the cyber.

If you really wanted to push for the cyber, you could go further and replace all the knights/barons with cacodemons, which would free up 4 points, and also swap the chaingunners for shotgunners, which would free up another 3.5 points and make the cyber available.

Still, I think it's fine as is. Yes, the cyberdemon is missed, but it's merely one fight amongst the whole map. The rest of the map remains largely intact. Besides, all the arachnotrons in the map have been replaced with barons, so the big arachnotron rush that used to be placed before the cyber battle has been beefed up, which makes up for things a little.

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Ah well. Guess it changes from "ascend tower to assassinate cabal cyberdemon then escape the angry minion hordes" to "Clean out this important cabal-infested castle"

What was Bloodsea Keep's ruling Archvile changed to btw? A Baron?

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Megamur said:

Certainly no rush. I know I tend to ask for lots of changes. :)

Meh, all these changes are seriously great though, and I sure love doing them. :)

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Megamur said:

Certainly no rush. I know I tend to ask for lots of changes. :)


And this is why I am going to allow somebody else to make the changes to Express Elevator, Steel Works and Administration Center. Hopefully it is not the case.

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Ragnor said:

What was Bloodsea Keep's ruling Archvile changed to btw? A Baron?

Yes. It was placed directly on the throne to look more imposing. :)

pcorf said:

And this is why I am going to allow somebody else to make the changes to Express Elevator, Steel Works and Administration Center. Hopefully it is not the case.

Pardon me? Do you not want me to test those levels?

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Welp, you guys are probably gonna hate me, but I just determined some more limitations for the original engine:

  • Only 16 unique flats can be used in a map. Animated textures only take up one space, no matter how many frames they used.

  • The maximum width of all wall textures used in a map combined can't exceed 1536 pixels. This includes the sky texture, which adds 256 unless the map is using the fire sky, which is only 64 wide in the original engine.

  • While animated textures still only take one slot each, switch textures take two. This explains why less switch variety is used in the PSX maps.

  • There's also a limit on the maximum number of sprites that can be on screen at once. Since sprites are loaded dynamically, it's nearly impossible to determine if we've gone over so I'm not too concerned with this.
I'll be adapting my maps to conform to these "new" limits in the next couple days. I wish I had looked into this sooner.

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Oh, wow, things just got a lot more complicated. I'd appreciate if the first post was amended to make note of these newly-added limitations. I often check that post to keep track of what style errors I'm supposed to be looking out for.

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Job said:

I respect your dedication to authenticity, Dragonsbrethren.

Thanks! The authenticity is half the fun to me, staying within the same limits the original developers had to.

Megamur said:

Oh, wow, things just got a lot more complicated. I'd appreciate if the first post was amended to make note of these newly-added limitations. I often check that post to keep track of what style errors I'm supposed to be looking out for.

I already added them (except the sprite thing, since it's kinda pointless) under Texturing. Sent you a couple PMs, by the way, in case you missed them.

It's pretty interesting going over the maps and realizing how many "pointless" textures there are - ones that only get used on one line, or the back of lines you can't even see. Find and replace makes it pretty painless to drop the texture counts in these situations, it's when you actually have to start cutting textures that give certain sections unique themes that it gets hard.

-edit-

Done Power Control, Well of Souls, and Caged. None of them were too bad, just combining similar textures and Caged lost its wood and marble areas. I also implemented Megamur's suggested Caged changes while I was at it. I'm probably saving Bloodsea for last, have a feeling a lot will have to change, that map uses a ton of textures.

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...ouch.

Anyway, due to being busy and having holidays and so forth, I cant really test further maps, not that I'm really needed. Sure I might have found a couple things Megamur didn't, but he's the right kind of person for this. I don't have anywhere near the same grasp of authenticity, and with this new REDO EVERYTHING thing going on..yeah.

I do have a suggestion for Trapped on Titan though, the original outdoor area is far far too bright now, I'd prefer that to be darkened quite a bit with the sky changed to the night sky (which is the original sky for that map, was it changed on purpose or by mistake?) Feel free to ignore it though, what with this new sudden benchmark and all. I'll play this next when its done. Ive greatly enjoyed the project up till now, and I hope I did actually find things that were useful.

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Hey guys, am gonna take a break from doing improvements, my motivation isn't there at this minute, it's not to do with the new limits or anything in case people are wondering. So I won't be touching up LOST17 and LOST18, thought I'd announce it should someone want to have a pop at the improvements. Sorry for any inconvenience.

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I understand. You've been a great help, take all the time you need. I'll try to take over for a while.

If anyone is concerned with the new limits, keep in mind that my primary goal with this pre-beta is to make sure the episode is playable from beginning to end. Taking care of the other stuff while we do that makes perfect sense, but no one should feel they need to go back and make sure every map conforms to every limit right now. I care about the limits, but more so about the ones that'll actually affect gameplay (like height differences, line actions that don't exist in vanilla/PSX, etc.). The others can always wait.

That said, I'm probably going to go over to early maps and check them out anyway.

As for Trapped on Titan, I probably just made a mistake copying and pasting definitions or the original conversion had a MAPINFO that defined that sky. We can go back to the night sky.

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Well, do you want me to actually try to modify the levels instead of just testing them? Or do you prefer I maintain my current role of merely relaying feedback for consideration? I think most of the changes would be easy enough to make on my own, but I'd understand if you don't trust me to have free reign to change things.

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Nope, no trust issues, if you want to give it a shot go for it! One thing though, when you offset textures, use the old texture offset field, not the one unique to UDMF. You couldn't offset upper/mid/lower separately in vanilla. I don't think your Mephisto conversion actually used them in a way that wasn't vanilla-like, just letting you know.

Just keep in mind, I've got a partially updated copy of your LOST17 conversion if you want me to send it over (I wasn't 100% sure I was done with it), and I'm currently working on LOST18. I think we can put the Tower back into Black without breaking any limits, if you know what I mean.

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