Melon's Fail Pile

Melon's Fail Pile is a set of 4 old maps I made that were sitting around on my hard-drive and would never see the light of day for various reasons, so I thought why not release them? They do no good hiding away on my PC. They'll never be improved on any more by myself, but it never hurts to get maps out into the open and hear everyone's scathing feedback.

The zip contains 4 individual wads and each map is on MAP01. They are in Boom format and were tested exclusively in PrBoom+ using complevel 9. Please see the text file within for more information on music and texture credits where its necessary.

I have no plans to upload this wad onto idgames due to the nature of mlnfail3.wad which I believe fails the "no modified official maps" clause.

]DOWNLOAD

(You can click on the images below for a bigger version)

=== mlnfail1.wad - REBIRTH ===

A small E2M1 themed map that was to be part of a personal megawad that won't ever happen. It's OK but its unpolished.

=== mlnfail2.wad - RIVER 'N' BLUES ===

This map started off life as part of a series of concept maps about trying to approach non-linearity in different ways. This map involves progressing through a mostly linear level, but you can take a different set of paths from the start that visit most of the same locations but at different heights. While I'm happy with the result the design of the map itself is a bit of a room --> corridor --> room affair so in future rather than fix up this map I thought I'd be better off just starting again.

=== mlnfail3.wad - LEURC EHT OTNU ===

It's E4M8, UNTO THE CRUEL, except backwards. And with Doom 2 monsters. And harder. Silly concept, silly map.

=== mlnfail4.wad - HADEPHOBIA MAP30 REJECT ===

Hadephobia needed a MAP30 that ended the story in a satisfying manner and brought the wad to a close. I made this map that proceeded to do neither of these things and so it was rejected. (The fact that it's a bit shit doesn't help its cause either!) But look on the bright side, I ended up taking over MAP25 instead and apparently that was one of the most memorable in the wad, so hooray for that.

This map is presented in the status in which it was originally submitted to purist, an unfinished first draft. See if you can guess the moment where I realised I was too lazy to carry on texturing it. Also, I apologize in advance for thinking that the final fight being 3 cyberdemons in a tiny room was a good idea. Sorry.

Fun fact: The triple-archvile fight (the green room) ended up being salvaged for MAP25.

Sorry if the loud midi ruptures your eardrums.

===

Well those sure were some maps. As long as someone out there gets some enjoyment out of at least one of them then it was all worth it. Enjoy! Or don't. Whatever.

The second map sounded interesting, here's my first (failed) playthrough and my second, successful one. I enjoyed it, but I felt it could have had more ammo. I liked the aesthetics of it.

The first one gives me about 30 texture errors, something is missing here?

meapineapple said:

The second map sounded interesting, here's my first (failed) playthrough and my second, successful one. I enjoyed it, but I felt it could have had more ammo. I liked the aesthetics of it.

Hey, thanks very much for the demo! I rarely get the opportunity to see other people play my maps so this has been very useful. Looks like in future maps I should consider adding extra ammo upfront instead of spreading it all thinly throughout the level. I don't think you'd have ran out completely if you'd explored the whole level but you'd have probably ended up really low so I'm clearly under-estimating the amount of ammo people need.

Your demo has been very useful, thanks again!

Memfis said:

The first one gives me about 30 texture errors, something is missing here?

Oh dear, that's not good. Unfortunately I don't understand what issue you're having because I'm unable to replicate it on my end. It all works perfectly for me. I've tried the wad in GZDoom, GLBoom+ and PrBoom+ and they are all fine, GZDoom doesn't report any issues either.

However I've just noticed that something really nasty seems to be happening if you carry on to the stock maps in all of the wads, the levels are all not showing any wall textures! Weird. I used the in-beta feature of Slade 3 to remove unneeded textures and it looks like it completely wiped all of the stock textures that weren't being used.

Hmmm... looks like I need to go back and fix this and reupload the maps, but the actual MAP01s in each wad should work without issue, I'm not sure why it's giving you problems, sorry. Let's see if correcting this other mistake fixes the problem for you.

This is what I'm getting in stdout.txt: http://pastebin.com/WGwsJyis
It's strange that we are getting different results in prboom+...

Memfis said:

This is what I'm getting in stdout.txt: http://pastebin.com/WGwsJyis
It's strange that we are getting different results in prboom+...

Ah, these are all Doom 2 maps so I'm not sure why it's saying it isn't compatible with The Ultimate Doom. The first map does use textures I imported from The Ultimate Doom but it's a Doom 2 map. Are you trying to load it in The Ultimate Doom?

Anyway it looks like SLADE did in fact nuke all of the textures in the textures1 lump that weren't directly used by the map itself. This needs fixing so I'll be uploading a new version anyway that hopefully solves your problems.

Bah, sorry for the false alarm then. Yeah I read E2M1 so I assumed that it's for doom.wad heh.

OK, I've reuploaded a new zip file to my server that has the new wads. The levels are totally unchanged but the texture1 and pname lumps aren't totally busted. I double-checked meapineapple's demo and it didn't desynch so it should all be good.

Also I noticed meapineapple had trouble activating the switch in his demo. Did I put it a little bit too far away? I will have to keep that in mind.

Actually I was just pressing the wrong key, ha. The switch was fine.