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Mechadon

[WIP] Vela Pax (on hiatus)

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Thanks again for all of the positive comments everyone! It's great motivation :)

jute said:

The first shot really reminds me of the Fodrian library dungeons from this Quake episode: http://quakewiki.net/archives/underworld/hofcontractrevoked.html . Everything looks great.


Those shots look really neat. I'd say there's some parallel between the theme in this map and that one, though MAP04 will probably a closer thematic match (once I get around to working on it). I've been looking for some new Quake maps to play too so I'm going to give those a shot. The added inspiration would be nice.

DeathevokatioN said:

I really hope this plays as good as it looks!

You and me both! Gameplay is definitely a high priority and that's partially why I'm doing this project; it's a primer for Supplice. If anyone is interested in playtesting these maps, please don't hesitate to ask. I've already got a few people lined up but more are always welcome.

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That's a pretty cool looking utility. Thanks for suggesting it Malinku, I'll give it a try :D

So while I'm thinking about it, I'd like to get some reactions and comments on the file sizes of the music I'm probably gonna use for these maps. This was something that I was just not gonna bother bringing up since I'm pretty well settled on using the tracks I picked...I guess I'm just curious more than anything.

As I may have stated in an earlier post, I'm planning on using some pretty high quality module tracks. They set the mood of the maps perfectly, at least in my opinion. Also since these maps are pretty lengthy (30 to 90 minutes or longer), and the tracks are fairly lengthy, they don't get repetitive as quickly as some other music tracks (of differing formats) I was looking at. The catch is that they add a good chunk of size to the wad; depending on my final track list, it will be anywhere from 10MB to 19MB. Everything else in the wad (graphics, maps, etc), once complete, will probably take up a little less than 10MB (though that's mostly a guess at this point). So for a 6-map episode, the file size will probably be larger than you'd expect. Personally, I'm fine with that addition in file size given the quality of the tracks and how well they add to the maps' overall atmosphere. Although if I could somehow decrease the file sizes of the tracks without compromising quality too much, that'd be great. I tried doing that in OpenMPT once already, but it became obvious that I had no idea what I was doing :P.

I'm curious to hear thoughts on this. I think that after you play the maps with the music tracks, you'll agree that the added file size was a good sacrifice. Although I suppose that depends mostly on your tastes too. Oh and if any music module savvy dude would like to attempt to reduce the file sizes of the tracks, please let me know :)

*edit*
typo

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I'm going to do the unthinkable and suggest that you try converting the mods into normal audio (record through line out or mixer or something in Audacity while you're listening to them) and then see if you can reduce the file size without compromising quality by saving them to a lower bitrate ogg or something. It might work and it just as well might not, I remember having done that with positive results once but it really depends on the module file, its samples and other technical stuff.

Anyway, if you can't decrease the file size, I don't think many people would mind an extra 10 mb or so. It's not that much these days.



Also, if you want to you can add me to your testing queue, I'll promise to tear the maps into pieces if need be like before. :D (j/k)

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That sounds like a really good idea actually. Not sure why I didn't think to try that :P. The larger tracks run at 2.5MB but others run around 500KB. Some of the smaller files might grow but if the entirety of the soundtrack's file size can be reduced, I guess it wouldn't matter. I assume PRBoom+ supports .ogg or something similar...guess I should check on that.

I think the only real reason why I thought it might be an issue was because of the people who are still on dial-up or slower connections. I dunno how many people are still restricted to that, but I'd feel bad for someone who wanted to download the map set and have to wait a while. But even at the file sizes I'm talking about, it's still not too bad. So I guess I wouldn't feel that bad for them after all :P

Oh and by the way, consider yourself added to the testing group :D

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Jodwin said:

I'm going to do the unthinkable and suggest that you try converting the mods into normal audio (record through line out or mixer or something in Audacity while you're listening to them)


Most trackers should have a "render to wav/ogg/etc" feature, so you won't have to do it that way.

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So...this map is still growing. Somehow I haven't ran out of ideas. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. This is the madness I have to deal with when I open Doom Builder now.




http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101005_024744.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101005_024835.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101005_024914.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101005_025207.png

Sorry, I know the lack of lighting sorta makes everything washed out looking. There are some highlights and details that will be hard to spot until the lighting is done. Also in the first shot, for some reason, ZDoom wouldn't force stretch the sky (maybe I have to force it from MAPINFO or something?).

I barely even scratched the surface of new stuff with those screenshots. Thankfully school hasn't been much of a time suck so I've been able to get some good chunks of work in on this beast. And I don't use the term beast lightly; this map will probably take almost twice as long to blast through than MAP03. And MAP03 is pretty damn huge. To give you a few statistics for the structures - 37591 linedefs, 64249 sidedefs, 5565 sectors, and apparently I'm well over the SEGS limit since XWE isn't reporting it anymore :P. Thank god PRBoom+ got support for that new node format; it saved my ass here. Even though the map is turning out to be so massive, I'm still keeping the gameplay flow in mind. Initially I was going to keep it mostly linear, but with the new areas it'll will likely be more non-linear (though not to the same degree as MAP03). Although with the huge expanses I'm working with, balancing out visuals is turning out to be a big job. There are still some areas I need to go back and balance out a bit :X. I'm slowly making my way to the last quarter portion of the original map and hopefully I'll have the structures done with another weeks worth of work.

If your wondering if the remaining 4 maps will be this big, the answer is probably not. Not that I don't like making big maps...it's just that they tend to grind on your sanity after a while :P. That and I wasn't planning on them being massive to begin with (to be fair, I wasn't planning on this map becoming as big as it is now). MAP01 will likely be 20-30 minutes in length, MAP02 maybe be a bit longer (and I may end up switching out MAP03 with MAP02 in the end). MAP04 will about the same as MAP02. MAP06 will likely be pretty big but may not take as long to complete (this one is up in the air at the moment). All in all your probably looking around 5-6 hours worth of gameplay on the whole.

By the way, thanks for the tips on the music situation guys. I haven't messed with it yet and I'll likely take a look into it once I finish this map.

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stewboy said:

The white rock on the stairs looks a bit out of place, but other than that it looks good!

Hmm, yea I think I agree with ya. The red rock flat or something red would probably look a lot better there. Thanks for the critique stewboy :)

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Mechadon said:

37591 linedefs, 64249 sidedefs, 5565 sectors, and apparently I'm well over the SEGS limit since XWE isn't reporting it anymore :P. Thank god PRBoom+ got support for that new node format; it saved my ass here.

You may hit further problems after 65534 sidedefs. I don't think the wad format can cope with more.

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RjY said:

You may hit further problems after 65534 sidedefs. I don't think the wad format can cope with more.


No, for the binary format that's the hard limit. For more, UDMF would be needed but then it'd not be comnpatible with PrBoom anymore.

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You should be able to exceed 65535 sidedefs and keep going because DB2 will automatically compress sidedefs (i.e. any identical sidedefs, with the same textures, alignment, and sector references will be merged into one in the map data) when saving. (This is done transparently to you, and you don't need to worry about editing one sidedef and accidentally affecting others.) That will give you quite a bit more freedom to work with, but then..sidedefs lighting sectors generally compress the best, since they typically involve a lot of identical lines without any textures set on them. And you haven't done lighting yet. So I dunno how much you'll get back from it. Either way, yeah, you might be actually butting up against a hard limit relatively soon, but not quite yet.

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I know I haven't commented on this yet, mostly cause I'm stewing in my own jealousy. The fact that you're using stock textures makes it that much sweeter. This is probably the only wad I'm looking forward to this year, well this and CC4...(crickets chirping).

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The sidedef limit was something I actually meant to ask about (and probably something I should have researched before going this far :P). When I hit 50000 sidedefs a few days ago, I decided to test out the limit. So I copy/pasted the entire map to check and see if PRBoom+ would run it. It did and I thought that maybe that limit had to do with something else. Of course after reading essel's post, I'm going to assume Doom Builder just compressed my sidedefs and basically made that exercise moot. I'm really not sure how many more sidedefs I'm going to end up using to finish the map, but...my estimate yesterday was somewhere around 80000 :P. There's the whole north-west portion I have to finish up, and little bit in the center of the map to build, and then there are some rocky structures I need to build around the south to east sides of the lava fields.

Well if it wasn't the SEGS limit I'd have to worry about, I guess it was eventually going to be something else. I'll just have to work around it if need be.

@darkreaver: Well my plan for COOP was pretty much just put COOP starts in. The main focus is singleplayer. Although once testing comes around, if any of the testers want to put COOP through some rounds and give feedback on how to improve it, I'm all for that :)

@dutch devil: I think the lighting will make it look 536% better. Yea the sky doesn't tile vertically. Without mouselook it works great; once you enable mouselook (ZDoom software) then yea, it borks :S. ZDoom didn't want to force stretch my sky for some reason and I'm thinking maybe I need to override it through MAPINFO or something. I haven't checked yet though. For that particular sky texture it would actually be pretty easy to tweak it so that it tiles vertically, which I may do. For the remaining 5 sky textures...I'm not so sure it would work as well.

Thanks again for the interest guys! I'm planning on having the next batch of screenshots to have lighting in them. So that might be after another week or two of work, we'll see.

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Graf Zahl said:

No, for the binary format that's the hard limit. For more, UDMF would be needed but then it'd not be comnpatible with PrBoom anymore.


Is there a list of UDMF's approximate limits anywhere?

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Vermil said:

Is there a list of UDMF's approximate limits anywhere?

Your operating system's maximum file size. The Doom engine's own limits.

Since it isn't a binary format, there's no hard limit. Instead of referring to sidedefs or vertices by a number that's restricted to being written on 8, 16 or 32 bits, you can use as many bytes as needed to express the value. Technically, a linedef could refer to sidedef number 999999999999999999999999999999 and it would be legit. Though a map with such a ludicrous number of stuff probably wouldn't be able to be loaded at all; but that would be a limit of the engine, not of the format.

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This is an amazingly detailed behemoth of a level, and I cannot wait for lighting to get applied to this. I'm sure it will be far more amazing then.

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ZDBSP, since it's using ZDoom's non-compressed extended node format.

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Whoops, I didn't notice your post Insane_Gazebo. Gez got it right though, I'm using ZDBSP (with a tweak so it builds the REJECT).

I did a quick test today to see what sort of sidedef buffer I'm going to have to finish this map. So I copied half of MAP03 (Doom Builder freaked out when I tried to copy/paste the whole thing) and pasted it into MAP05. That put me just over 90000 sidedefs. I ran it in PRBoom+ and it didn't crash or give me any error messages. I imagine it could deal with maybe 100000 sidedefs, but I don't plan on getting that outrageous if I can help it :P. I don't know if that test is really definitive enough to say how much farther I can keep going, but it gave me a little peace of mind. If I can stay somewhere around 80000 sidedefs, I'll be happy.

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Mechadon I should make some textures for this so you don't have to use any Doom ones, then it will be awesome. PM me.

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Sigvatr said:

Mechadon I should make some textures for this so you don't have to use any Doom ones, then it will be awesome. PM me.

Stock textures are awesome. Durrrrrrrr.

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Jodwin said:

Stock textures are awesome. Durrrrrrrr.


Yeah they are, but an awesome map needs awesome new textures.

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Mechadon said:

Whoops, I didn't notice your post Insane_Gazebo. Gez got it right though, I'm using ZDBSP (with a tweak so it builds the REJECT).

I did a quick test today to see what sort of sidedef buffer I'm going to have to finish this map. So I copied half of MAP03 (Doom Builder freaked out when I tried to copy/paste the whole thing) and pasted it into MAP05. That put me just over 90000 sidedefs. I ran it in PRBoom+ and it didn't crash or give me any error messages. I imagine it could deal with maybe 100000 sidedefs,



It depends on your mapping style. The map format still can only store 65534 sidedefs so to get more it needs to use compression. With sidedef compression only unique sidedefs are counted so you may get to 100000, maybe 120000, but be prepared that some tools won't be able to load maps with compressed sidedefs anymore. And depending on the compression tool used it may even cause problems if it merges switches or animated textures into one. That's an issue only for non-ZDoom derived ports though.

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Well my base targeted port here is PRBoom+ with ZDoom and Eternity being secondary targets. Beyond those ports though, I really don't know how things will hold up, but I'm honestly not concerned as far as other port compatibility that is concerned. Unless it's a problem that I can easily fix, that is.

I'm not sure exactly what tool is doing the compressing. Is it Doom Builder 2 or is it ZDBSP? As far as loading the map is concerned, the only tool I'm really using for that is Doom Builder 2. Unless I'm mistaking what you mean by tool. I wasn't aware that the compression could mess with switches though...yikes. That's something to keep an eye on.

@Sigvatr: I got your email and I responded. I don't think there's anything we could get together on for Vela Pax, but perhaps we could work together on something else :). I'll be waiting on your reply.

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