More goodies from Romero (DoomEd source, maps, graphics)

Heh, I wouldn't be surprised if the site pulled down his work thinking it was copyrighted game material, they probably have no idea who Romero is.

He made all those zombie films, innit.

Anyone else think DTWID should have been made using these extra resources?

Randy87 said:

Here is a NextStep 3.3 VMWare "machine" with DoomEd preinstalled and configured.
NextStep 3.3 with DoomEd.7z

Hopefully the instructions are clear, and it works.
The only way I've tried moving maps out of the VM is by floppy image.
Map testing can be done in NextStep if you install NeXTDoom. (but it sucks)

Who will be the first community member to make a map with DoomEd?

The instructions.txt file contains nothing, what am I doing wrong?

DooM_RO said:

Anyone else think DTWID should have been made using these extra resources?

No, because by definition, Doom wasn't "done" using them.

Ledillman said:

The instructions.txt file contains nothing, what am I doing wrong?

Well, thats just great.

Here's the gist.

Create an ISO name "doom" with the following IWADs
Registered Doom - named doom.wad
Doom 2 - named doom2.wad
Ultimate Doom - named doomse.wad
These names are case sensitive.

If you don't have one of the IWADs, you will not be able
to work on a project for that game.

Boot the VM with the ISO in the virtual cd drive.
When booted, double click the computer icon that says MACH on the right bar.

Enter the following commands.
cp /DOOM/*.wad /LocalId/iwad
chmod +rw /LocalId/iwad/*

I recommend you power off the VM using the Log Out button and
create a backup VM snapshot.

You can now run DoomEd from the DoomEd icon on the right bar.
DoomEd has been preconfigure with a fresh Doom 2 project. (/me/projects/mywad)

--New Project Instructions--
Base project configurations are in /LocalId/DoomEd/projects and ~/projects.
Do not alter them.
Copy a folder from inside one of these locations to create a new project.
Using the Edit application that looks like a notepad on the right bar.
Open the project.dpr file in your project directory.
Change the mapwads entry to point to your project directory. (absolute path)
Save.

DoomEd can be configured to load a specific project by default.
In DoomEd's menu, click Info -> Preferences.
Change the default project field and press enter while in the field. (absolute path)

How about a "Doom the way it could have been" project?

Avoozl said:

How about a "Doom the way it could have been" project?

Yes please.

Thanks Randy, got everything working with your instructions. I'll play around with it for real tomorrow.

Randy87 said:

I can't be sure without more testing, I have yet to see a means of joining sectors.
The sector get/fill functions also does not seem to set textures or anything other than sector properties. It's very simple.
It didn't come with a manual, so who knows?

First of all, thanks for your work. What I noticed is that newly drawn lines inherit the properties of the currently selected line. The sector fill function seems to set the sector properties of the back of lines, but not the 2-sided flag.

The way the .dwd map format works, fusing vertices back together shouldn't actually be necessary, except for moving them (or their lines) around in the editor.

Avoozl said:

How about a "Doom the way it could have been" project?

I was thinking the exact same thing! "Doom the way id didn't" perhaps? :p

Linguica said:

No, because by definition, Doom wasn't "done" using them.

If you were to go by that definition, surely DTWID should be exactly the same as Doom, since it also wasn't "done" using DTWID's new levels?

Snarboo said:

I was thinking the exact same thing! "Doom the way id didn't" perhaps? :p

Personally I'd like to see an DTWID-style project where the fact that ID consists of more than just level designers is taken into consideration, therefore allowing for the inclusion of ID-style graphics and music. Heck, even the guys who were primarily level designers weren't above creating their own textures, mainly using existing patches (Romero and Hall in particular).

kb1, for # is a number, add "level:E#M#" (without quotes, case sensitive) to the second line of each DWD, in case you use idbsp 1.0 (level:MAP## doesn't work for whatever reason). the map lump name will be named according to the line added.

in any case, links are working again.

Snarboo said:

I was thinking the exact same thing! "Doom the way id didn't" perhaps? :p

Yeah, a project using only or mostly the unused resources would be really cool. We have unused textures, sprites, and even music.

Super cool to see all this, and thanks all you Doom Historians for the analytics.

So now some brave volunteers should head to an office in texas, and maybe call it Doom the Way id would have REALLY Did: idedest edition (Period-accturate attire and hairstyles optional)

NiGHTMARE said:

Heck, even the guys who were primarily level designers weren't above creating their own textures, mainly using existing patches (Romero and Hall in particular).

DoomEd has a texture editor built right into it. When you're selecting a texture from the palette, you can double click on it and make changes to its patches. Knowing this, I'm actually surprised there aren't more situational, only work in one place textures in the wad.

I wonder if some textures are based on photographs of buildings near their office. Doom archeology anyone?

DooM_RO said:

I wonder if some textures are based on photographs of buildings near their office. Doom archeology anyone?

IIRC MODWALL is based on the exterior of id's office:

Avoozl said:

How about a "Doom the way it could have been" project?

I don't mind this; it gives an excuse for a "DTWID take 2 of sorts" since DTWID did have its flaws, looking back on it.

There just needs to be a quota of how much gray walls you can use so people quit trying to make maps that look like the alpha versions.

Supposedly there were design notes with this, where can I find them?

Marnetmar said:

There just needs to be a quota of how much gray walls you can use so people quit trying to make maps that look like the alpha versions.

Most of the alpha textures weren't even gray anyway, people are literally designing maps to look like placeholder texturing.

Compare to this from hfc2x's Evil Unleashed project, which is basically an attempt at recreating the game alpha 0.4 was meant to be:

Woolie Wool said:

Supposedly there were design notes with this, where can I find them?

Don't think there were. You might be thinking of the Doom Bible but that's not new at all.

Dave The Daring said:

He made all those zombie films, innit.

https://twitter.com/romero/status/584893654424096771

Woolie Wool said:

Supposedly there were design notes with this, where can I find them?

Most of the alpha textures weren't even gray anyway, people are literally designing maps to look like placeholder texturing.

Compare to this from hfc2x's Evil Unleashed project, which is basically an attempt at recreating the game alpha 0.4 was meant to be:

Not very gray at all.

That's true, I suppose I was referring moreso to the deliberate use of placeholder textures that you see in alpha projects. It's a weird phenomenon.

Also, as someone that's working on EU, it's not supposed to be an alpha project. And that map is outdated and not representative of what Doom EU is now anyway :p

I would love to see a new WAD made by Romero. Tom Hall should also realize his vision of Doom someday.

EDIT: Oh and are there any abandoned monster/weapon/pickup concepts that DON'T appear in the bible? I'm sure the talented people of doomworld could do something interesting with this information.

Remember how some time ago there was this piece of trivia where American McGee was supposedly appalled by Sandy Petersen's early version of "Dead Simple"? Later somebody found a map which could have been the said version, it was generally very flat, like something taken out of Wolfenstein 3D.

Well, I just checked the early version of "Dead Simple" from the map set recently released by Romero. It's a different map to the one which had been posted on this site, but still a rather primitive design (also very flat)... however, I really liked the Arachnotron trap :D It caught my by surprise the first time ;)

fraggle said:

I don't think DoomEd actually even has any concept of sectors. If you look at the file format it saves to (.DWD), all the sector properties (floor/ceiling texture/height, light level, etc.) are just properties of linedefs.

Yet, DoomEd has separate tools for line editing and sector editing. The window where you can copy and edit sector properties is even called "Sector Editor".
What it writes to the DWD file is not apparent in the GUI at all.

The most apparent difference to 3rd party editors is that it has a lot of different windows. Nobody would have coded it that way on a DOS PC back than, due to their tiny resolutions in comparison.


Interestingly, even DEU seems to have gotten some features better than DoomEd.
DEU has hover highlighting, making it easier to select anything.
DEU has tag highlighting between linedefs and sectors.
DEU has texture auto align.
On the other hand, many things weren't optimized at all in DEU. Also the nodebuilder took much longer then IDBSP.

fraggle said:

The .DWD format just has lines, things and nothing else. There are actually advantages to doing it that way - for example you can never have a situation where your level contains unused vertices or unused sectors. If they're not attached to a line they don't exist.

Not to forget sidedefs. They also can be orphaned, which is not possible in a DWD file.

Randy87 said:

AFAIK, lines do not contain references to sectors. This is handled by doombsp. So certain special effects are out.

That is were dummy tags come in handy, and the very reason they are there on stair builders. Doombsp would make the entire stair after the first step one sector and breaks it.
In a DWD file, even effects like in UACDEAD should be possible, but DoomEd won't allow you to do that, I guess.

Randy87 said:

Map testing can be done in NextStep if you install NeXTDoom. (but it sucks)

Where can I get that?

If there's an easier way of making a line two sided in DoomEd than just manually editing the flags, I haven't figured it out. I haven't found any easy way of splitting a line, or stitching vertices, either (only seem to be able to get vertices to stitch at the end of a polyline). I'm not seeing any indication of line length (and this is suddenly making Sandy's work aligning textures in E3M4 even more impressive to me), either. In those regards, it feels really primitive compared to the other editors I've used.

I really do like the sector editor -- the left click pick up, right click paste improves my workflow, with the panel there to easily make any adjustments I need. I'm surprised that sector editing is its own mode, though. I got the impression from one of Romero's posts while DTWiD was in development that DoomEd didn't have different editing modes.

LogicDeLuxe said:

Where can I get that?

DoomII.app-BWGZ.tar.gz

Rename it to doom.tgz and put it in an ISO.
Boot up and open a terminal.
cp /ISONAME(CAPS)/doom.tgz ~
gzip -d doom.tgz
tar xvf doom.tar
cp /LocalId/iwad/doom2.wad DoomII.app

It's called DoomII.app, but can use doom iwads.
You can make other copies of the DoomII.app for other games.
For example:
cp DoomII.app Doom.app
cp /LocalId/iwad/doomse.wad ./Doom.app/doom.wad

You can run pwads from a terminal now.
/me/DoomII.app/DoomII -file ~/projects/mywad/mywad.wad

You can put this in a script.
echo /me/DoomII.app/DoomII -file ~/projects/mywad/mywad.wad > go.sh
chmod +x go.sh

Now you can just execute the script from the terminal.
./go.sh

Dragonsbrethren said:

I'm not seeing any indication of line length (and this is suddenly making Sandy's work aligning textures in E3M4 even more impressive to me), either.

The line inspector shows line length for me.

Has anyone done a screencap video of using DoomEd? Searching for "doomed" is sub optimal, obviously.

Dragonsbrethren said:

Knowing this, I'm actually surprised there aren't more situational, only work in one place textures in the wad.

They used this approach extensively when the engine was incapable of tiling the textures properly. One of the alphas has a lot of very big textures made for specific walls. The whole texture combining functionality was likely implemented because of that.

Apparently, the developers themselves didn't think it was very convenient - there's a noticeable shift towards simple 64x128 single-patch textures in Doom 2.

Marnetmar said:

There just needs to be a quota of how much gray walls you can use so people quit trying to make maps that look like the alpha versions.

But how can you possibly resist?

Randy87 said:

The line inspector shows line length for me.

Ah, I must've overlooked it. I did see the firstcol calculator, which wouldn't make much sense without an easy way of knowing the line length.

-edit-

Heh, not sure how I missed that. It has a bolder font and everything.

Da Werecat said:

Apparently, the developers themselves didn't think it was very convenient - there's a noticeable shift towards simple 64x128 single-patch textures in Doom 2.

Yeah, and Jaguar Doom did away with patches entirely, making anything that was multi-patch into a single texture. (That may have been an optimization for the hardware?)

NiGHTMARE said:

Personally I'd like to see an DTWID-style project where the fact that ID consists of more than just level designers is taken into consideration, therefore allowing for the inclusion of ID-style graphics and music. Heck, even the guys who were primarily level designers weren't above creating their own textures, mainly using existing patches (Romero and Hall in particular).

It'd be interesting seeing a project that took into account texture, sound and sprite work, too! Would give it a unique feel, especially if cut resources were used.

Reminds me of an idea I was kicking around for 1995TU, where the goal would have been to create a mid 90s style Doom partial or total conversion, like Aliens Doom or Strain.