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Mithran Denizen
Senior Member

Posts: 1093
Registered: 05-10

Nice job with the skies, some of those in the beta were indeed pretty rough. :)

06-20-11 23:53 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

Thanks Mirthran Denizen. I agree that some of the older sky textures weren't that great. The ones before them were even worse. Making the textures has definitely been a learning experience and I think I've got a much better grasp on it now.

So I don't know if any of you recall, but I recorded and uploaded some time-lapse Doom Builder footage a while back (before the test beta was released). I was having some difficulties getting it uploaded to youtube and instead had to resort to zipping them up and uploading them that way. Well I decided to give uploading it to youtube another try today, and it went through! So here's the first video for those of you who are interested:

The February footage is about 5 minutes longer, so I don't know if it will upload as easily. But if I get it uploaded (and I'm going to try it pretty soon), I'll be sure to share it here.

06-26-11 01:43 #

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esselfortium
Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting

Posts: 5268
Registered: 01-02

Cool! Admittedly I was hoping to see you working more on map layout ;)

BTW, I can't tell from the sped-up video if you already know this or not, but if you select a set of lines in 3D mode, autoalign will only affect those lines and not any others. Very useful and can help you avoid the need to do a lot of pain-in-the-ass manual alignment to stop DB from messing up stuff you don't want changed.

06-26-11 02:01 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

I probably could have picked a better time to record than the spot I did because, yea, I didn't do much in terms of making new layout. I think I may have done more layout stuff in the second recording...but I can't really remember :P. I sorta just decided to start recording that day by the spur of the moment so I didn't really know exactly what I would be working on. Same goes for the second recording too, heh.

I'm not sure if I knew about multi-selected texture alignment then or not. I do now though but I still haven't really gotten into the habit of using it. Which is silly because it really speeds up tedious alignments.

06-26-11 03:50 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

I took the time today to get the second video uploaded. It's more of the same but perhaps someone out there will get a kick out of it (I should have waited until I was working on another area...then maybe it would have been a little more interesting). This time I had to split the video because it was a tad too long for Youtube.

Part 1

Part 2

I know I waited a while to get the other video uploaded. Well...I have a good excuse :P. The video was about 40 seconds too long, although I didn't realize it at the time. Soooo...I spent most of the day uploading it to Youtube, only to have it rejected because it was too long. Whoops :[. Live and learn though, heh. I'm considering taking some more footage for the remaining maps. If I do, you guys will hear about it.

By the way, progress on MAP04 has all but halted. I've been really busy the past month-ish with other projects and real-life shenanigans. I'm not sure when I'll start back up on it, but hopefully it'll be relatively soon.

07-21-11 05:42 #

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xvertigox
Member

Posts: 262
Registered: 05-09

Doing timelapse DB videos is a really good idea. It's interesting to see how other people actually work (vs just theory)

07-21-11 06:25 #

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KiiiYiiiKiiiA
Member

Posts: 660
Registered: 04-11

Finally got around to finishing map 05. What an amazing map. I don't know how you manage to make such a level so consistently interesting, and the architecture is epic on a level with Sunder, which is my current benchmark for epic architecture. (Course with Sunder you can never actually stop and look at anything, or you will die, but still.)

No real criticisms of this level. Didn't find any real bugs, no real complaints about the progression. God only knows how this level doesn't become one of those levels where you wander around for ages totally having no idea where to go next.

I guess the only thing I would consider doing would be to put teleporters at the bottom of those inescapable lava pits. I was recording a demo, was going really well, had killed about 1400 monsters, and I fell into one of those pits and died. Not a great way to end a 2 hour demo.

But otherwise awesome stuff.

07-23-11 18:37 #

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Phml
Forum Staple

Posts: 2036
Registered: 06-09

I'm going to second the inescapable lava pits needing some way out. It wasn't a pleasant experience falling down into one of them ~30 minutes into a playthrough, especially as there were no changes of texture or any kind of visual warning that I could see to show I was about to drop in a no escape situation.

07-23-11 19:25 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

Hey Kyka, thanks for sticking it out and finishing MAP05. That one in particular seems to be pretty hard for some folks to work completely through. I'm honestly amazed too that more people who have reported back to me haven't become completely lost, heh. I'm really happy to hear you liked it :D

About the lava pits, I've had previous complaints about them. Honestly I was going to keep them because I need a surefire way to separate the two areas opposite of the pit, and they are the only killer pits in the entire map. I gave it some thought then but I couldn't think of a good place to teleport the player (it depends on which side you drop down from...sort of a conundrum). I don't like inescapable pits but in that case at that time, I wasn't sure what else to do. But now that both of you have brought it up again, I'm just going to have to figure something else out. So count on those being either completely removed or with a way out before the next release ;)

07-24-11 19:57 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

Hiya guys! So it has been a long while since I've made any sort of progress or update about this project. I've been keeping myself busy with a bunch of other projects and so I had to put this on the back-burner for a while. Lately though I've had a strong urge to get back to work on this. So I'll probably be focusing most of my mapping free time back on Vela Pax (MAP04 in particular) so, hopefully, I can finish it before the year ends.

Anyways, my first order of business was to redo the MAP01 sky texture (again...for what must be the 4th or 5th time). My last attempt was a weird, dithered mess that looked sort of like sky boobies. Actually I liked the design but not so much how the coloring or the dithering looked on it.

After what must have been dozens and dozens of attempts, I finally settled on something that I really liked under the color range I wanted.

http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/wads/vela_pax/newbaseskytest.bmp
(sorry, I know it's a huge .bmp image :P)

At any rate, I'm happy with it (for now). Anyone have any thoughts? If I do another test release, it will likely be much easier to give feedback after seeing it in-game rather than from a restricted screenshot.

So anyways, I will be sure to keep this thread updated with new progress and whatnot :). There might even been a surprise or two later on down the line!

04-17-12 02:44 #

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dannebubinga
Member

Posts: 623
Registered: 04-10

Nice to see you picking this up again Mechadon :) PM me if you want some testing done.

04-17-12 17:44 #

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Vermil
Senior Member

Posts: 1224
Registered: 03-04

Not a huge fan of the arms numbers appearing on, what look like vents, on that hud.

04-17-12 17:48 #

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Marcaek
Forum Regular

Posts: 714
Registered: 12-10

I say you should replace the weapon number vents with tiny screens.

04-17-12 19:12 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

dannebubinga said:
Nice to see you picking this up again Mechadon :) PM me if you want some testing done.

I'll keep you in mind, thanks :)

Yea those are vents on the arms section of the HUD. The HUD itself was assembled from COMP* texture (well I guess that's pretty obvious) so its supposed to look like one big computer...thingy. At any rate I'm pretty happy with it as it is. Mostly I just don't want to mess with it anymore :P. But I might mess around with it some more later on. Making each square a little screen might look ok.

Thanks for the feedback guys!

04-17-12 21:38 #

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Vader
Member

Posts: 469
Registered: 02-05

The new sky is great!
It looks realistic, but the blue clouds make it quite surreal at the same time, nice job :)

04-17-12 22:21 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

Sorry Vader, I didn't see your reply. Thanks man :]

I got another slight update that I thought would warrant a bump. A few days ago I made some updates to each of the finished maps from a few bugs I found after numerous playthrus. When I got to MAP05, I was able to free up quite a few sidedefs after leveling a couple of unneeded areas. So I decided that gave me a great opportunity to try and make the large, blank walls a little less...well, blank.

I spent the better part of 3 days making all of the additions. Unfortunately doing this sort of work after the fact made things way more difficult and tedious than I would have liked. I ended up lowering the entire sky ceiling by something like 512mp. Then I added some relatively simple decors and trims to some of the more barren walls. Well, I suppose it sounds pretty simple in sentence form, but it was anything but :P. I couldn't get too fancy because my sidedef allowance was very tight. But hopefully it will make the map look a little more visually balanced.

I also redid the exit room. But I ran out of sidedefs by that point so it's relatively simple (but definitely better than before in my opinion).

So maybe you guys would like some screenshots of the slightly newer looking areas?

http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/wads/vela_pax/Screenshot_Doom_20120522_020553.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_020615.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_020643.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_020657.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_020707.png

I didn't bother to take any before/after shots due to laziness. But you might be able to do some comparisons from the screenshots here before I update the page again.

I also made some minor gameplay adjustments too. The only one worth mentioning is the removal of those inescapable lava pits that some of you pointed out ;)

Progress on MAP04 is still pretty slow and sporadic. Although the last few times I worked on it, I started getting a really good feel for it again. Rest assured, I'll post some new shots when I'm able.

05-22-12 07:29 #

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Vordakk
Forum Regular

Posts: 862
Registered: 07-10

Mechadon said:
(screenshots of MAP 05)

Those are amazing, especially shots 2 and 5. Brilliant!

05-22-12 07:37 #

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Alwaysdoomed
Junior Member

Posts: 129
Registered: 03-11

I love this project, keep up the good work =D

05-22-12 08:09 #

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dutch devil
Forum Spammer

Posts: 3160
Registered: 05-04

Looks great, that last shot is really nice.

05-22-12 10:42 #

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DeathevokatioN
Forum Staple

Posts: 2089
Registered: 03-10

Amazing and inspirational work so far... good luck finishing this man.

05-22-12 14:14 #

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KiiiYiiiKiiiA
Member

Posts: 660
Registered: 04-11

It doesn't look that different from the original to me. Don't get me wrong, it is just as magnificent as it was then, but I can't see a lot of difference from the beta I playtested like a year ago.

But any progress is good progress, and I am so looking forward to this. Just by coincidence I posted this a couple of days ago, so this project has been on whatever part of my mind deals with Doom related stuff.

Periodically I try and record a demo of this level, but I always do something dumb and get dead before I finish it.

05-22-12 14:42 #

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darkreaver
Senior Member

Posts: 1111
Registered: 05-08

Extremely inspirational and actually kind of demotivating at the same time hahah

Awesome stuff.

This also reminds me I need to get my ass in gear and install DB2 on my desktop computer. My laptop is REALLY struggeling with my latest map. I can only imagine trying to load Vela Pax maps hahah

05-22-12 16:33 #

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Mechadon
Senior Member

Posts: 1787
Registered: 12-06

Wow, thanks for the comments everyone! It's always great for my motivation. I'd really like to get this finished before the end of the year since I've got a couple other big things in the works that I want to focus my attention on.

@Kyka: Yea, the changes are probably pretty subtle to anyone who's not me :P. Lowering the sky made the entire outside space a little more personable...or something, I'm not sure what the correct word would be. But it makes the map look and feel a lot better in my biased view. I dug up an older copy of the map to take some before shots so you guys can see the changes (probably should have done that from the get-go).

http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_141011.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_141034.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_141436.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_141513.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastu...0522_141527.png

By the way Kyka, if you do happen to sucsessfullly record a demo of MAP05, I would looove to see it! I've tried to record uv max demos of MAP02 and MAP05 a few times, only be to utterly destroyed about an hour in :P

Last edited by Mechadon on 05-22-12 at 20:25

05-22-12 19:27 #

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KiiiYiiiKiiiA
Member

Posts: 660
Registered: 04-11

Darnit Mek. Ur making my bad memory look even badder! The new shots do look way better, now that I actually look at them side by side. The high overhangs and new borders on some of those outer areas do a really good job of breaking up some of those huge wall expanses.

05-22-12 20:24 #

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Doomworld Forums > Classic Doom > WADs & Mods > [WIP] Vela Pax - MAP05 got a haircut

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