Circuitry... a six level wad

CIRCUITRY


So a while back, in late 2013 I was working on a magawad for the three episodes of Doom. After a year I abandoned the project because of time constraints and disinterest. A few weeks ago I felt that these maps shouldn't go to waste, so I choose a few that I felt were good enough and edited them.

This isn't another "first wad" or "first level" thread, this is a legitimate wad. Although this is my first released work. Circuitry is a limit removing wad, but because of a few unknown textures from Doom 1 that I couldn't catch, it will not work on Boom. It should work on Zdoom and other more modern source ports however.

The first five maps are traditional style maps with lots of blue tech unsurprisingly. The design is loosely based off that of Romero, Peterson, and McGee.
The last level is a special slaughter map which I won't spoil.
And after map 06^, the player is taken to a "post mortem" level which cannot be exited.

The soundtrack is a midi version of various songs from Quake 2 and it's expansions, by Sonic Mayhem.

So far there are only two bugs I am aware of:
- The next level on the intermission screen won't show
- The secret with the red key on map 01 won't register properly sometimes.

Screen Shots:

Sounds great man! I'll definitely play through these maps after I finish my map for Job for Father's Day (so late). I'll post up here my experiences, lol.

I've played MAP01 and parts of 02 and 03 so far. Visuals were OK, not particularly good but not ugly either. I've spotted a few level design problems:

-Too much pistol-only action against relatively tough monsters, like the spectres in the very first corridor in MAP01.
-Monotonous shooting gallery gameplay, where monsters are always encountered from the front side.
-Straightforward progression.
-The player cannot make any choices. You just put all weapons, monsters and items in front of him, directly guiding him what and when to do. It's boring.
-Whenever backtracking was involved, it didn't feature any combat, therefore it was redundant and only took player's time and made him bored again.
-Too many areas were cramped, which uncomfortably restricts player's freedom of movement, as if giving him no freedom of choice wasn't enough.
-A lot of rooms were cheaply filled with enemies, without a thought about the challenge they're supposed to give to the player.

I've played all the maps, and I agree with scifista42, especially on the last 2 points.
About the textures watch for the tiling and the alignments: in many places the height of the sectors make the textures cut-off in a way that's not good to see (especially the startans and the comp); adjust the sector heights, and pay more attention to the texture sizes to see where they can fit well.
Btw this thing gets better on maps 04-05!
I didn't finish map 06, it has the same flaws of the other maps (flat rooms just filled with monsters); and the visual concept itsn't very good imo, and mostly bad implemented.

Edit: since this is limit removing it would be better for you to make this works on others ports, and more important don't test only on zdoom if you did so.

@scifista42.
@gaspe.
Thanks for the feedback.

A lot of the problems you guys mentioned, specifically the tight corridors and "Straightforward progression", were several I was worrying about because they had the same problem when I first made them in 13' and 14'. It was a bit restricting, but I do wish I've done a better job. (I had some time constraints and I couldn't refine the levels that much)

@gaspe. I tried to test on Boom but the source port crashed every time I did because of unknown textures. It worked fine on Zdoom and Gzdoom.


This is stupid of me but I forgot to mention there aren't any difficulty levels. All of them are the same one, which are the equivalent of UV.

"Unknown texture" is the kind of problem that should be better solved rather than handwaved.

I've just found out that your wad contains the entirety of Doom 2 IWAD content. That's wrong, it should contain just your own maps. Remove it!

Learn about proper ways to add custom textures here. And if there's a map specific problem, use Doom Builder's "Check Errors" feature.

By the way, playing the wad with PrBoom-plus didn't give me any errors. Still, remove the IWAD content!

I opened the wad on slade to see how you included the textures. But... it looks like you just put your maps in the Doom 2 iwad. You should create your own pwad, and than include the textures, maps and whatever.

@scifista42 You're right I should of fixed all of the missing textures. My bad.

How do you suggest I just make the maps but with the Iwad stuff? I'm guessing simply remove it from the wad, but maybe there's a different route I should take.

EDIT: Never mind. Thanks Gaspe.

Make a new empty wad, copy only your maps into it, then save it.

Very nice mapset, I sincerely hope you plan to make more maps or even expand this into a full-blown megawad. Personally, I was pretty content with it as it was, although Scifista has some good points. The maps feel "oldschool" the way the're now and I have no problem with that. I also must disagree that "player cannot make any choices" - there are locked areas that the player can completely ignore in the first 2 maps and rush to the exit. In other maps, there are alternate ways to reach certain objectives. Besides, this is Doom, not Deus Ex. Apart from that, there are some minor problems:

-Map04: it seems there is missing texture on linedef 390, there is a HOM when you look up.

-Zdoom produced some warnings:

MAP02 - Shipment Complex

Unknown middle texture 'ASHWALL' on first side of linedef 34
Unknown middle texture 'ASHWALL' on first side of linedef 1936

MAP03 - Formation and Formulation

Unknown middle texture 'STARTAN1' on first side of linedef 61
Unknown middle texture 'STARTAN1' on first side of linedef 90
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 139
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 152
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 153
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 155
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 157
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 158
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 159
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 160
Unknown bottom texture 'SP_ROCK2' on second side of linedef 161

MAP06 - Hell grid

Unknown type 8301 at (21282, 29561)
Unknown type 3378 at (8308, 24941)
Unknown type 26995 at (12334, 2573)

^Thanks. I don't plan on adding more maps for this or redoing any of my older maps anytime soon, but I am working on another project at the moment. Though those maps will be quite different from the ones here.

For the problems you mentioned I couldn't find those two unknown textures on map02 though I did get rid of 3/4th's of the other missing textures on the map. And I wasn't aware of the unknown textures on Map 03 and 06 as well as the missing one on 04.

I was originally planning on this but I never mentioned; if you would like(this goes to anyone), feel free to take all the maps and edit them to your liking. I didn't want to "keep" the maps but I didn't want them to go to waste either.

Did you already succeed to change the wad to a proper PWAD with nothing else than your own maps, instead of having an entire IWAD there? If so, would you replace the link in the OP, please? You know, it's not legal to distribute it.

Okay...? But no I haven't. I've been a little busy lately. I'll pull the link for the time being. But right now I've got other things I need to do.