Trying to make a Master Levels Megawad, having trouble with tag 666, any advice?

Ok, so what I'm trying to do is combine all of the Master Levels into a full 32 map megawad (with a few extra maps from the same mappers, like Dr Sleep's first two Inferno maps to make a full 32) I know of the Master Levels Menu Interface, but I want to be able to play through all at once and carry over weapons and such. The problem I have is that under the map order I have now, I have Mephisto's Maosoleum (MEPHISTO.WAD) as map 24, but it uses tag 666 to lower the walls when you kill all the mancubi, however tag 666 only works on MAP07 in Doom II. I could of course change my order around to make it map 7, but isn't there someway else I can fix this? I am new to Doom modding and this is one of my first projects, so I essentially just combined all the wads into one file and create a MAPINFO file so far. As for compatibility, I don't care if it works for everything, maybe just zdoom/skulltag/zandronum if possible?

In ZDoom you can set the special map actions for any map.
To get the MAP07 action, for example, add the keyword 'map07special' to the map's definition.

OK, I still can't get this to work.
I had a MAPINFO file in the older style syntax, and tried creating a ZMAPINFO in the newer style, renaming that to just MAPINFO, and all of them work insofar as the maps are in the right order and the proper mapnames are displayed, but I cannot get the walls to lower when the mancubi are killed, any ideas?
For reference, these are the two syntaxes I have tried:

map MAP24 "Mephisto's Maosoleum"
next MAP25
secretnext MAP25
sky1 SKY1 0
cluster 10
Map07Special
music D_SHAWN

and:

map MAP24 "Mephisto's Maosoleum"
{
next = MAP25
secretnext = MAP25
sky1 = SKY1, 0
cluster = 10
Map07Special
music = D_SHAWN
}

I have only been using Skulltag 0.98d so far, should I try in Zandronum or Zdoom to see if that works?

Ahh, another attempt at this. Tried this myself several years ago, I think I had trouble with this too. I gave up in the end, mostly due to frustration over map order and mapinfo errors.

It's been done on the PSX and on Doom 3 ROE for Xbox, so I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. Actually... maybe if they had to change the map for the PSX wad out there, but I could just extract the files from that to replace the original MEPHISTO.WAD

EDIT: Shit, I just checked and that wad only includes 13 Master Levels, not including Mephisto. But I know they still had it on the Xbox, and people have extracted the wads for the secret extra levels from those...

OK, wow, I guess Mephisto wasn't on there either, weird, I thought I remembered it in there, oh well. I'll find a way to make this work

PROGRESS: I tested the wad in Zandronum and it works fine. Does Skulltag not support some of the MAPINFO properties that Zandronum does?

Ok, so I tested in GZdoom, worked fine, so I tested in Skulltag from a new game, and it worked, but still not in the save I had been loading, so apparently when you edit a wad, savegames will still load, but will not reflect changes made? Maybe everyone else knew this and I'm dumb, but oh well, looks like I have it working ¯(°_o)/¯

Mephisto has only ever been on the PS3's Doom Classic Complete, the only collection with every Master Level.

As a heads-up, a full Master Levels collection will go over 32 maps, if your adding other maps from the authors. You've got the other two Inferno maps, the Cabal maps, Jim Flynn's Titan maps, Mustaine's rejected level and Chris Klie's rejected levels

Then comes the fun of making them all flow together.

Actually, I am working on a 2nd megawad due to that reason, how hard is it to combine the two? The only wad I've seen do that (beyond a couple that required cheating to get past level 32) is the "PSXDoom2.0.pk3" that has all 90 levels ever released for PSX

*89 :p Map 60 doesn't exist in version 2.0, in 2.1 the empty slot was filled with Fear from the Lost Levels side project

You cant have more than 32 levels in a vanilla or Boom wad, iirc, but you can have as many as you want in a ZDoom wad, using MAPINFO. When I was struggling to get my own Master Levels megawad working, it went just over 32, still worked. You just need to set which level comes next, that or IDCLEV33 etc. Someone more knowledgable will undoubtedly explain this perfectly, but as someone whos tried doing this myself in the past, I'd still like to help as much as I can.

I eventually lost patience with trying to figure out which level would go where, could never figure out how to set music for each level, and couldn't get intermission texts to not go past the edge of the screen (I used the one from PSX Final Doom's Master Level segment :p) If I were to redo it, I'd probably group things by episodes (ie the Cabal maps, the Titan maps) or force pistol starts for various maps, some of the maps are easy enough as is, to walk in with a BFG and 600 cells will kill a lot of the map's feel.

If you use MAPINFO, you really should completely forget about the 32 level limit in Doom II. You could put all the Doom maps ever created into one single clusterfuck nightmare of a ZDoom megawad. (It just would be immensely tedious to do so, especially if you want to address things like texture name conflicts.)

Going by the PSX Doom 2.1 file, you should have Next = "MAP33" up to whatever the last map will be. I don't know the command that triggers the ending though

Not to shut down progress, but there's no real need to do this yourself -- Blzut3's made a patch util that will assemble the maps together for you (as a .pk3 for ZDoom) and let you choose from a variety of different map and music orderings (one of which is a shameless plug on my part). I'd say give that a shot.

I'm curious. What order do you have the maps in and which extra maps did you add to make a full 32?

Nemark: While your question is directed at Tedium, when I had a 32 level wad, I added Dante's Gate and Crossing Acheron, and seven Cabal levels, then for kicks, added the Xbox exclusive levels as secret levels. I had Attack, Canyon, Klies levels, Paradox, the Inferno levels, Flynn's levels, then the Cabal series with the awesome devil face map as the finisher. I never playtested it though so it probably plays bad.

Xaser said:

Not to shut down progress, but there's no real need to do this yourself -- Blzut3's made a patch util that will assemble the maps together for you (as a .pk3 for ZDoom) and let you choose from a variety of different map and music orderings (one of which is a shameless plug on my part). I'd say give that a shot.

While I see what your saying, doing it yourself is a good way to learn bits of wad construction. After being shown how to replace the PSX Doom TC's music with Aubrey's official soundtrack, I've since learned some interesting nuances of the scripting, which I'll be using to complete my Master Levels thing I originally abandoned :p

Ragnor said:

Going by the PSX Doom 2.1 file, you should have Next = "MAP33" up to whatever the last map will be. I don't know the command that triggers the ending though

next = endgame* -- just look at the ZDoom Wiki, MAPINFO section, map definition subpageg.

Ok, first off, Xaser, that is EXACTLY what I was looking for when I started this project. But now that I've started, I'm having too much fun to abandon it. And it's a good way for me to start getting into Doom modding. Anyways, I quite like the idea now of including the full Inferno, Cabal, and Titan series'
Which brings me to Nemark, here's the list I have (asterisk denotes original master level):
Tim Willits

* Attack (ATTACK.WAD)1
* Canyon (CANYON.WAD)2
Kick Attack! (KICKDM2.WAD) 32 [secret level]

Christen Klie

* The Catwalk (CATWALK.WAD)3
* The Combine (COMBINE.WAD)4
* The Fistula (FISTULA.WAD)5
* Subspace (SUBSPACE.WAD)6
* Subterra (SUBTERRA.WAD)7
* The Garrison (GARRISON.WAD)8

Tom Mustaine

* Paradox (PARADOX.WAD)9

John Anderson (Dr. Sleep)

Dante 10
Acheron 11
* Virgil's Lead: 3rd Canto of Inferno (VIRGIL.WAD)12
* Minos' Judgement: 4th Canto of Inferno (MINOS.WAD)13
* Nessus: 5th Canto of Inferno (NESSUS.WAD)14
* Geryon: 6th Canto of Inferno (GERYON.WAD)15
* Vesperas: 7th Canto of Inferno (VESPERAS.WAD)16

Jim Flynn

Oracle 17-18
Interdiction Zone 19

Sverre Andre Kvernmo (Cranium)

* Bloodsea Keep (BLOODSEA.WAD)20
Bloodflood 21
Derelict 22
Watchtower 23
* Mephisto's Maosoleum (MEPHISTO.WAD)24
Temple of Death 25
Arena 26
Eye of the Storm 27
* TEETH.WAD:
o The Express Elevator to Hell 28 (secret exit to Bad Dream)
o Bad Dream 29 (exit to Kick Attack!)
* Black Tower (BLACKTWR.WAD)30
Image of Evil 31

As you can see I tried to organize by author and was using clusterdefs to display author info screens between each set. So essentially I just completed the Inferno and Cabal series' but wasn't able to fit the Titan series, so I put some of Flynn's other maps and have a second megawad with the Titan series as well as Enigma, Willits' Raven maps, and Klie's other maps (I can put that list too if you really wanna see it), but now I'll try and combine both into one wad now that I know it's fairly simple to do. The order however, is a fairly early draft (I didn't even put the Cabal maps in the right order yet), so I'm open to suggestions!

Also, Ragnor, I wasn't aware of the PSX 2.1, thanks for the heads up, and good luck on your project. (BTW, does anyone know how the PSX TC avoids copyright infringement?)