How to make a good Vanilla Heretic map?

I am not PRO at mapping but also i am not a noob. As title says i want links for some Heretic Map building guides or suggestions how to make PRO Looking Vanilla Heretic map. I want to start with small projects first then i want to start with massive resource replacement projects. :) I want to make cool Vanilla Heretic episode in Doom Builder. ;)

P.S. I am using DB1 cuz DB2 requires freakin Netframework and other shits. :(

In terms of looks, it's really not all that different from Doom. You can squeeze in a few more visplanes and there is a rendering issue with skies to be mindful of:

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Vanilla_Doom_engine_mapping_reference#Tutti-frutti

In Heretic, the sky tiles and this causes a tutti-frutti effect on the lower half. The height of a sector with a sky ceiling must be at least 56 units taller than the highest floor the player can stand on to prevent the tiled section from becoming visible to a grounded player. Additional care must be taken if the Wings of Wrath are available in the map, since the player will be able to fly up to 56 units below the tallest sky. As an example, if a section of a map with the sky visible contains two sky sectors, one with its height set to 72 and a taller one set to 128, the player will easily be able to see the tutti-fruiti sky by looking into the shorter sector while flying in the taller sector. From testing, 15 units is the maximum additional height one sector can have without the tiling becoming visible.

Basically, if you want to have a Doom-style outdoor section, don't put the Wings of Wrath in your map. That item is the reason why Heretic's outside areas are all surrounded by huge walls.

Thank you for info dude ;)

Ick -- that's awful. How am I supposed to abuse the hell out of skyfloors, then? D:

*ahem*

We now return to your regularly scheduled non-hijacked thread.

Dragonsbrethren said:

Basically, if you want to have a Doom-style outdoor section, don't put the Wings of Wrath in your map. That item is the reason why Heretic's outside areas are all surrounded by huge walls.

So THAT'S why the first level has a bigass wall surrounding it, yet is supposed to be a dock. To me, that always seemed like a wierd design decision to make.

Ehm, jsut out of curiosity but: Every level in vanilla Doom/Heretic/whatever has to be surroudned by a wall, isn't this right? How would you create a sector without walls? I know Zdoom gives you the possibility to flag a linedef as a "plain" but vanilla??

Sector without walls is not sector. It's NOTHING! ZERO! Anyway, you're right ZDoom has features that Vanilla don't have. So my maps will be 100 % Vanilla but it will be compatibile with Vanilla too.

Yeah, thats what I thought as well, but I am still curious what DragonsBrethern meant with:

That item is the reason why Heretic's outside areas are all surrounded by huge walls.

A wall is not necessarily the same thing as a linedef. He was using it in the architectural sense.

You can perfectly make a sector without walls. Look at the nukage pool in E1M1: it's a sector, it doesn't have walls.

Most IWAD levels in Doom and Doom II have their outside zones surrounded by low walls, using the sky hack effect. But Heretic has very tall walls to prevent flying players from looking under the sky...

I was using walls in the traditional sense, not referring to linedefs surrounding a sector. Go look at the courtyard outside of the start of E1M1 in a map editor. The Doom engine doesn't draw upper textures on linedefs surrounding a sector with its ceiling flat set to F_SKY1. When you have a taller sky sector bordered by a lower one, you can take advantage of this to make walls look shorter or even non-existent (horizon effect).

ZDoom can do horizons without having to make large sectors via a special line type, but it's completely possible to doom in vanilla Doom if you make a sector large enough for it to be convincing. You don't want to do it in vanilla Heretic because of the aforementioned tiling issue.

Edit: Ninja'd

Yes i know. :) That's only way to make a sector "without walls".