New map, first-time mapper, using DEU (yes, really)

If you just want to test my lame first map, here you go (E1M3,
tested with Ultimate Doom 1.9 in DOSBox). If you want to know
the hows, whys, and wherefores, read on.

I first played Doom in 1995. In 1996, my friend got the "Tricks
of the Doom Programming Gurus" book and started mapping with
DoomCad. This was amazing to me; I could make my own levels for
my favorite game?! Well, I played with it a bit, made a few
rooms, and filled them with too many monsters. But I didn't have
the patience or attention span to go very far. He actually
uploaded his to the archive.

I got into Doom again in 2003, playing a lot of ZDoom stuff, but
didn't try mapping again.

I got into my third Doom phase just back in April. After playing
the first 3 episodes, I wanted to play the earliest PWADs, to see
what they were like. A fair amount of them still stand up today.
And they were made with DEU! I remembered trying out DEU back in
1996, after playing with DoomCad, and finding it inscrutable.

Now I wanted to see what it was like for those early mappers.
So, I downloaded DOSBox and DEU 521gcc, went through the old DEU
tutorial, and went to work. Yes, this map was built entirely in
DEU. I tested in Chocolate Doom as I worked, and switched to
glbsp as the map got larger and DEU got slower at node building.
Of course a modern multi-tasking system made my job easier, but
this is a good enough approximation of the 1994 experience
for me.

When I was finished, I let DEU build the nodes, play-tested and
recorded demos with Ultimate Doom 1.9 in DOSBox, and assembled
the final WAD with the old DOS deutex 3.6.

I started following these forums again toward the tail end of my
work, in the last month or so. I've seen lots of advice thrown
around about how to make good maps, and my map is pretty
embarrassing in light of what I've read.

Hopefully some may find it interesting, anyway.

If anyone has any good suggestions, I may update the map before
moving on. Up next, I'm playing DOOM 2 and then making another
map, this time testing out other old editors: DETH, DCK, WadEd,
maybe some others. Hopefully I'll do a better job; at the very
least, I'm aiming for better inter-connectedness, less linear
room-hall-room syndrome.

Build time: 32 hours from May 13 through tonight

OK, now, flame away :)

[edited to add episode/level]

My main gripe with it is the apparently near-complete lack of health and ammo. Before I gave up and just used idfa/iddqd, I had spent a lot of time in close quarters with about 3% health attempting to punch imps and demons to death, to vary little success. Later on I found a berserker pack somewhere around the start I think, but it wasn't really obvious enough to warrant all the punching I had to be doing.

Some of the secrets seem almost completely unmarked, and I never would have found some (like the megaarmor in the tekwall area) without using iddt to see on the automap how to get there; it might be worth looking into other ways of marking secrets, like structures that break from symmetry or repetition (even if it's as simple as a row of computers where one is flickering), a walk-trigger secret that can be accessed by a player with open ears for moving sectors in adjacent rooms, or a window into the secret area making the backside of its door visible somehow.

I also got lost at points, including somehow managing to miss the blue key door after getting the blue key. The same again when looking for the yellow key door; it took me ages of running around the map to find that outdoor area with the exit door. I typically try to make important doors really stand out in my maps, and make sure that the player will see them before they get the key and be able to recognize the area the door is located in.

Also on the note of the exit area, windows into outdoor areas give a great sense of place! Your outdoor scene is so separated from everything else. (And the fight in that outdoor area is completely skippable.. if you want the player to have to fight through it, I'd put a switch of some sort on one of the upper walkways that monsters are on, and make the player get up there before they can progress.) Otherwise, though, I really liked the various window and ledge views into lower areas; that's something I wasn't expecting to see. Lots of nice height variation within scenes.

I could've done without the big pits in the floor in the room with the blue key door; stumbling over them didn't really add to the challenge but just make the baron fight somewhat more annoying. When it comes to floor detail, flatter is generally better, and if you have to do some floor detail that will affect the player's height when walking across it, avoid breaking it up like that, so they don't get bumped around so much. A single, larger indentation in the floor makes for a more playable area than having a bunch of smaller ones scattered around.

More lighting contrast in general would probably be good; there were some parts that were rather dark, and some lit-up portions within them would not only aid the atmosphere but also make them easier to see and navigate.

Learn to love the upper and lower unpegged line flags; they do the work of setting Y-alignment for upper and lower textures of 2-sided lines for you. Just match the lines' y-alignment value to that of the adjacent 1-sided lines, and set upper and lower unpegged. No need to screw with weird alignments for that.

Not bad for a first effort; definitely would include more health and ammo next time.

Also, for anyone who hasn't figured it out yet, this is for Doom 1 and runs on E1M3. (I'd point out the intended iwad and map slot next time too.)

I liked it. And I had no problems with ammo.
FDA (recording of playing for the first time) - http://www.mediafire.com/?hqekpt8341p1cw1

I think it was really good and wow great kudos for using DEU to make it.

Maybe you were expected to have played E1M1 and E1M2 first.

EDIT: I just tried it, and I liked it a lot! Very imaginative and awesome use of light contrast. Do you think you'd consider working on the currently in progress "Doom the Way Id Did" project? It's an open community project that aims to remake Doom using the same design philosophies as Sandy Petersen and John Romero, and I think your simplistic but clean map design is ideal for this kind of project.

Heh, when I was first getting back into editing a couple years back I was using my old favorite, DETH.

The level's a little above average for a just-returning map. It's a bit dark, but I like the classic look and feel. The secrets are interesting... several seem to be nothing, but really contain other secrets. That's neat.

However, it is most certainly true that it's totally lacking in health and armor. I had to IDDQD it.

Thanks for the comments, everyone! Especially Memfl, for the
demo, and esselfortium, for the thorough criticism; that's the
only way I can improve. But also thank you guys for the positive
comments; I honestly didn't expect any. I figured this would be
interesting only for the DEU angle.

Hehe, sorry about the shortage of health and ammo. I bet you're
all playing in Ultra-violence; certainly Memfis is. See, all the
popular PWADs completely kick my ass at UV; probably Knee-Deep in
the Dead is all I can handle at that difficulty. So my theory on
health was that I should not be able to make it to the end alive
on UV, so I scaled back until that was the case. Of course, that
means I only left enough ammo and health for someone who knows
exactly where everything is to survive... Oops.

In the mean-time, try a lower difficulty. While I may have gone
over-board with UV, I did put a fair amount of effort into
differentiating each difficulty level.

As for the berserk pack, well, really I think my demons in the
sewer idea was not a very good one. I didn't want the berserk
pack right in front of the start; seemed to on the nose. And I
didn't want to make the player wade through any demons to get to
it. But, you have to really be paying attention to see it, so
that's a problem. I made sure to highlight it in both demos.

Resolution: add stimpacks to the monster closets on UV.

esselfortium said:

Some of the secrets seem almost completely unmarked

Hmm, I'm pretty sure they're all marked except for the
mega-armor. Oops.

Resolution: use some kind of texture mismatch on the entrance to
the mega-armor hall.

esselfortium said:

I also got lost at points.

Oops. I admitted that I'm unsatisfied with the layout; I'm not
sure what I can do here other than try harder next time.

esselfortium said:

Learn to love the upper and lower unpegged line flags; they do the work of setting Y-alignment for upper and lower textures of 2-sided lines for you. Just match the lines' y-alignment value to that of the adjacent 1-sided lines, and set upper and lower unpegged. No need to screw with weird alignments for that.

Would you mind elaborating on this? I don't think I understand.
I did use lower unpegged for alignment in a few places, e.g. the
stairs out of the sewer, but I'm not sure that's what you're
talking about.

Memfls, thanks for that demo! Watching someone else play is
eye-opening.

40oz, I was aiming for pistol-start. I put it on E1M3 for the
music; that was the only way to select its music until DeHackEd
came along. I don't even know how to react to your offer to work
on "Doom the Way Id Did". Thanks! I have been following that
project with much interest, but there's no way I'm of that
caliber yet. And even if I were, look at the build time for this
map; family and work keep me too busy to map at any decent speed.

I hope to contribute to such a project one day, but I am not
ready for it yet.

NaturalTvventy, I'm glad you like the secrets! They're really
the only aspect of this map I'm satisfied with.

My impressions of DEU:

- It's not bad at all! After a few weeks, I really had the hang
of it and enjoyed using it. Except...

- No undo! I don' t know when (or if? *shudder*) undo appeared
in map editors, but the absence really, really hurts.
I eventually developed the habit of saving and testing very
frequently, even though that slows me down. I lost too much
work to irrevocable mistakes.

This is my number 1 gripe.

- It's very slow in DOSBox. I wonder if it was so slow back in
1994 or if this is just an artifact of DOSBox or the
GUI system.

- Though it requires arcane knowledge of exactly how a map is
assembled (no detail is hidden!), it takes you far. I got a
lot of mileage out of splitting and joining lines and sectors.
It does require a solid understanding of the internals of
a map.

- Some features seem poorly implemented. For example, when I
split a monster closet off the outdoor area, the sector number
that the outer pillar sidedefs were assigned to was moved to
the monster closet sector, with the new sector number being
given to the larger outdoor area. You have to select lines in
the right order in such situations. This bit me a few times.

- Related to this, the error checking functions are strong.
Even if I blame DEU for a mistake in the first place, at least
it's good at detecting it.

- Still related to that, it's easy to change low-level details!
I just shift-selected the pillar linedefs and entered a new
sector reference for them. And boom, fixed!

I've seen screenshots of Doom Builder, or some modern map editor,
that has the floor rendered into the map. That looks so
distracting. And why should the floor get special treatment?
I need easy visibility to the ceiling and walls, too. DEU is the
other extreme, showing nothing until you open two levels of menu.

I started up DETH earlier today, and I like the way it does these
things better. It shows the images in the bottom right when you
mouse over an object; this seems to strike the right balance.
I'm looking forward to using it for my next map.

i made about a dozen maps with deu in the early-early days...and i remember the pain of it all as if it were yesterday.
good job.

epg said:

I've seen screenshots of Doom Builder, or some modern map editor,
that has the floor rendered into the map. That looks so
distracting. And why should the floor get special treatment?
I need easy visibility to the ceiling and walls, too. DEU is the
other extreme, showing nothing until you open two levels of menu.

There's an easy toggle between the standard wireframe display, floor texture overlays, ceiling texture overlays, and brightness level overlays (depicted with shades of gray).

But for texturing, really, there's Visual Mode. Within it you can set brightness levels, sector heights, and textures and flats all while flying around the map seeing pretty much exactly how it will look ingame.

Don't knock it 'till you've tried it.

(It also has lots of customizable hotkeys, most everything you need to see about any map structure right in plain view, some great functionality for automatically splitting lines across sectors, and a mode to fix broken sector references with a single click...)

I remember working with DEU 5.21 (although it sold itself as DEU2, as it worked with Doom2) from the mid 90s until mid-2005, where I then found DoomBuilder. I'd never go back to DEU now - DB is just much easier to work with.

I remember trying DEU in the older days and I just could not get over building sectors vertex by vertex then connecting them manually. Never again could I build maps from such tediousness and having a size limit based on the first 640K of memory and all that jazz.

I used DCK in the days before Doom Builder because of the easy line drawing mode it provided.

It took me a while to make the upgrade to DB2, but it's totally worth it. Nothing can match it's stability and ease of use. my efficiency improved drastically, if not my overall quality.

Mr. Chris said:

I used DCK in the days before Doom Builder because of the easy line drawing mode it provided.

I started with DCK, and then moved on to WadAuthor which I think was really buggy. Then I started using DoomBuilder 1, which I still use - some day I'll get off my ass and upgrade :P

epg said:

- No undo! I don' t know when (or if? *shudder*) undo appeared
in map editors, but the absence really, really hurts.
I eventually developed the habit of saving and testing very
frequently, even though that slows me down. I lost too much
work to irrevocable mistakes.

Yeah, that's also my #1 gripe with Yadex (Unix/X11 editor based on DEU 5.21). Saving a lot helps, but you have to remember to backup the old save file, so it's still a hassle... But it also shows thing and sector floor/ceiling picture when you hover on it, and has a 3D preview mode where you can walk around the map to check textures, etc.

Your map is pretty good already, at least in HMP. I died very quickly the first time, but managed the finish on 2nd try (was at 4% health right before getting the soulsphere!) It's not a map you can approach guns blazing, you have to go slow and carefully, but that's not a bad thing. And the moody lighting seems to fit.

esselfortium, sorry, I did not mean to knock Doom Builder, as I
have not tried it :). It does sound interesting.

Mr. Chris, I was using the DJGPP build of DEU 5.21, which has no
such memory limitation thanks to DJGPP's old GO32 extender.
DETH uses it, too.

hex11, it's disappointing to hear Yadex doesn't have undo/redo either. WTF?
What about Doom Builder? And thanks for the kind words.

Doom Builder does have undo/redo functionality.

Neat little map, by the way, barring the handful of issues already brought up. I started out with DEU myself, and I sure wouldn't want to go back and experience that type of anguish all over again. :)

Mithran Denizen said:

Doom Builder does have undo/redo functionality.

Indeed. And not only that, but an entire undo history tab you can open.

Again, thanks for all the feedback. I have the second (and probably final) version ready.

Changes:

* added some stimpacks and ammo on UV

* made two secrets more obvious with off textures; I maintain that the other secrets are already sufficiently marked. You just have to be paying close attention.

* recorded new demos which reveal two secrets

* placed multi-player starts reasonably (maybe?); earlier I had them all clustered in the sewers just to shutup DEU's warnings when they're missing

Finally, I added a text file; since the response wasn't "this is irredeemable crap", and this generated some interesting discussion, I thought I'd try for a larger audience.

magicsofa said:

I started with DCK, and then moved on to WadAuthor which I think was really buggy. Then I started using DoomBuilder 1, which I still use - some day I'll get off my ass and upgrade :P

I also started out with DCK. I tried several other editors alongside, but either they felt akward and frustrating, or somewhat hollow. I never did like the feel of Wadauthor. When the first Doombuilder came out, I jumped to it right away, because it felt so much like DCK.

I wonder if I could get DCK 3.62F to work in dosbox.

rf` said:

I wonder if I could get DCK 3.62F to work in dosbox.

http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/doom/dck22-f.zip

It at least started and loaded a map under DOSBox; I haven't tried to edit anything. I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Anyone who has the patience to make a map using DEU has my respect by default.