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Tuxlar

Exitway - Just some plain, vanilla goodness

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A vanilla map for some mapping practice. Gameplay was the priority over visuals, but expect a few... surprises. ;)

FDAs appreciated. Lemme know if you find any bugs.

Exitway v1.3




Changelog:
v1.3 (August 23rd)
- Improved trickster cyberdemon triggering.
- Modified long hallway a bit.
- Removed a player entrapment spot.
- Improved some minor texture issues.
v1.2 (August 18th)
- Various minor balance and cosmetic tweaks.
v1.1 (August 16th)
- Fixed several bugs, particularly for vanilla-compatibility.
- Small tweaks to balance.
v1.0
- First release.

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Forgot to FDA, but that was a damn awesome map dude. I loved the up/down ledge in that poison room with the arachs. Also, you're evil. More maps like this people.

If you made an episode of maps like this, that'd be great.

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General Rainbow Bacon said:

Forgot to FDA, but that was a damn awesome map dude. I loved the up/down ledge in that poison room with the arachs. Also, you're evil. More maps like this people.

If you made an episode of maps like this, that'd be great.

Hey man, really appreciate it!

I might just try making a multi-map vanilla set, when I get more free time.

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A nice classic-styled map, I enjoyed it very much. It is possible to jump from the yellow key to the red key area pretty easily, however. I did it my first time through because I thought it was a secret. I also managed to break the final blue key door somehow (it makes the sound but doesn't open). Lastly, there is a HOM in the maze area before the blue key.

edit: I played in glboom-plus -complevel 2 btw

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NoobBait said:

A nice classic-styled map, I enjoyed it very much. It is possible to jump from the yellow key to the red key area pretty easily, however. I did it my first time through because I thought it was a secret. I also managed to break the final blue key door somehow (it makes the sound but doesn't open). Lastly, there is a HOM in the maze area before the blue key.

edit: I played in glboom-plus -complevel 2 btw

Ah, thanks a bunch. Will fix shortly.

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v1.1
- Fixed several bugs, particularly for vanilla-compatibility.
- Small tweaks to balance.

NoobBait said:

Oh, also this is possible.

Haha. Nice.

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Ammo is rather scarce on UV. If the player doesn't find the plasmagun and cellpack secrets, it is pretty much unwinnable (unless killing a cyberdemon with a chainsaw isn't your favorite pasttime, that is). And if the archviles get lucky and ressurect one or two monsters too many, not even the plasmagun is going to help...

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Caleb13 said:

Ammo is rather scarce on UV. If the player doesn't find the plasmagun and cellpack secrets, it is pretty much unwinnable (unless killing a cyberdemon with a chainsaw isn't your favorite pasttime, that is). And if the archviles get lucky and ressurect one or two monsters too many, not even the plasmagun is going to help...

Ammo is tight, but it's definitely beatable without plasma on UV. However, I agree the archviles could upset the balance in some situations, so I'll try to accommodate that.

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Hello Tuxlar, I have an FDA for you, as well (skill 4, uses version 1.1).

Excellent use of the cyberdemon, you made him legitimately frightening again (although the final battle with him actually turns out to be rather gentle). That's more easily said than done, these days. I believe it was sheer idiot luck he didn't kill me near the red key (although he did make me spill my drink, the bastard).

As to the ammo issue, I killed everything + some arch-vile resurrects and still had plenty of ammo of all types left, but in fairness I did use the chainsaw/fist and infighting a fair bit, and I also found 4/5 secrets--note that the soulsphere secret and the blue armor secret both show on the automap. I believe I fucked myself out of the blue armor at the last minute, incidentally (you'll see what I mean in the demo), but that's the kind of thing one can probably safely chalk up as a "feature, not a bug."

I'm not sold on the sudden Tom Hall maze out of nowhere, and there are some texturing errors here and there (I think I make a point of staring at most of them in the demo), but all in all a worthy effort.

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Demon of the Well said:

Excellent use of the cyberdemon, you made him legitimately frightening again (although the final battle with him actually turns out to be rather gentle). That's more easily said than done, these days. I believe it was sheer idiot luck he didn't kill me near the red key (although he did make me spill my drink, the bastard).

I originally had that archvile able to run in to assist him, but I decided the PEs were a better substitute to decorate the arena with splash-damage-in-your-face makers. To a competent player, most of this is trivial, still.

As to the ammo issue, I killed everything + some arch-vile resurrects and still had plenty of ammo of all types left, but in fairness I did use the chainsaw/fist and infighting a fair bit, and I also found 4/5 secrets--note that the soulsphere secret and the blue armor secret both show on the automap. I believe I fucked myself out of the blue armor at the last minute, incidentally (you'll see what I mean in the demo), but that's the kind of thing one can probably safely chalk up as a "feature, not a bug."

Yeah, you clearly worked the infighting quite well. I have to resist the temptation to see this as a map flaw, though, and consider balance for players more direct playstyles.

This map would be a good use of the 'super-uv' mode I mentioned a while back.

I'm not sold on the sudden Tom Hall maze out of nowhere, and there are some texturing errors here and there (I think I make a point of staring at most of them in the demo), but all in all a worthy effort.

Aw. It looked like you were having so much fun in there. :(

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Well, the sudden revenant trio was a nice little heartstarter, I guess, they seemed to show a decidedly pronounced degree of unction at being disturbed. Makes you wonder what they're all doing together over in that dark corner while they wait for the marine to happen along....

What's the super-UV mode?

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Demon of the Well said:

What's the super-UV mode?

Exactly as it implies. Shifting down the skill options and using skill 4 as a challenge mode, rather than the usual UV.

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Ah, I see. Well, ideally I reckon that's the way things would more often be, though of course there's always that tug-of-war in the community where many players refuse to play on any skill level other than UV, but also have no qualms in feeling wronged (typically expressed in language like 'cheap', 'bullshit', 'unfair', 'badly-designed', etc.) when what they get is something stressful or persistently demanding/unforgiving that kills them a lot (e.g. a 'hard' mode).

It is unfortunate to think that some maps get released that aren't as engaging or versatile as they could be because they implicitly acknowledge the above tendency and so treat UV as the 'normal' difficulty level, but I guess I'm not as terribly troubled by this as it might sound.....action that's not constantly demanding can be fun as well (in fact, constant stress wears thin after a while without a break period, I think), after all, and there are generally enough mappers active in the community at any one time who feel that UV gameplay should be very challenging to keep things from becoming too one-sided; one simply needs to know where to look.

Still, good to know that there are always more folks who view UV as 'hard mode' and not the gameplay baseline.

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Demon of the Well said:

Ah, I see. Well, ideally I reckon that's the way things would more often be, though of course there's always that tug-of-war in the community where many players refuse to play on any skill level other than UV, but also have no qualms in feeling wronged (typically expressed in language like 'cheap', 'bullshit', 'unfair', 'badly-designed', etc.) when what they get is something stressful or persistently demanding/unforgiving that kills them a lot (e.g. a 'hard' mode).

Yeah, I even tried re-assigning the graphics for the skill settings accordingly in a previous map that did that, but I guess people use .bat files or something and play maps with '-skill 4' unthinkingly. I'm almost tempted (for my boom maps) to put the skill select in-game, somehow.

I'll be looking into zdoom custom challenge modes at some point, but I don't think I'm quite ready to venture into zdoom mapping with so much vanilla/boom practice still needed.


Edit:

v1.2
- Various minor balance and cosmetic tweaks.

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Just got to playing this, pretty good. The start was a bit hard, that arachnotron kept hitting me at least once making the next bits a bit dangerous, but once I got through it it wasn't too harsh. Lots of traps but nothing too dickish, kept me on my toes.

I haven't looked at the map in DB yet, but I think your cyberdemon suffers from the Targets not preserved in saved games bug. Even though I was playing in a port that fixes this bug, there was a time when a bunch of far-away arachnotrons hit him right before he teleported, and then when I killed the arachs he went back to his idle state I guess? Anyhow a good rule of thumb especially for vanilla and limit-removing maps is to always let a teleport closet be woken up from the area the monster is meant to teleport to, even if he should already have been alerted somewhere else.

No problems other than that, had fun, good job.

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Thanks! There is a fix I could try for that with dummy sector sound propagation. Thanks for pointing it out.

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joe-ilya said:

Easy map, the only thing that killed me was the teleporting cyberdemon in that hallway, the only frustrating thing is the red key jump and the cyber.
FDA: https://www.mediafire.com/?rah5hkgjyujn9vq

That was fun and very fast-paced!

That was certainly an interesting run! While I was aware of those sequence breaks, I'll admit I hadn't fully planned out some of the contingencies for exploiting them. Of course, the difficulty shown in getting that skip makes me think I should leave it unpatched...

Sorry about the cyber. That was just rotten luck. He usually takes a moment before firing. :P


Edit: v1.3 (August 23rd)
- Improved trickster cyberdemon triggering.
- Modified long hallway a bit.
- Removed a player entrapment spot.
- Improved some minor texture issues.

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