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What are the trade-offs between modern and 90's mapping?

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What the title says. Are there any sacrifices that are made when mapping with cool lighting effects, strictly aligned many sectored map boundaries, etc? Is it all good news with the new tendencies, or is there anything worth pointing a finger to that is missed once the needs of the new are fulfilled? Any of the old increasingly bygone charms, if any, that can be included in new maps without reducing their quality to the point where they're stamped as 90's artifacts?

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Mapping takes longer, and staying under vanilla limits (if you want such a thing) is more difficult.

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This mightn't be the sort of response you're after (sorry!) but I figure it's a good place to identify a kind of stumbling block in the doom community vernacular, and maybe talk about it a bit.

Setting out to design a level with either of the words "modern" or "nineties" in mind is probably opening the door to a whole bunch of community-cobbled tropes and falsehoods that prevent you from exercising the full breadth of your creative ability. They're lazy shortcut terms that we use to enter quickly into discussions on design philosophy and to this end they can be quite useful, but to really get at what it is that makes the 90's tick (or the present day) is to simply talk - in detail - about trends and ideas that were popularized by the names that defined that era, and to continue to do so without lumping those ideas under a big umbrella term every time you want to sit down and put the cursor to grid. When I set out to make a map with no critera strings attached I aim to satisfy an idea using whatever weapons of choice I feel appropriate for the task... gradient lighting or solid and with high contrast; sloppy alignment or meticulous alignment; faux-realistic "doom furniture" or abstract and placeless; texturing as detail or minute, bumpy sector proliferation. Inevitably some of the things I do will ring true to the types of moves also made by my mapping compatriots, and that's okay, but I won't be trying to acknowledge these similarities in any way that leads to a knowing evolution of them. That might be obvious, but using terms like "modern" in reference to my own work would in no small way be doing that.

What I mean to say by all this is that there are no trade-offs between modern and 90's mapping because modern and 90's mapping doesn't exist - or if it does then it bloody well shouldn't. These are not moulds to pour your mapping material into. You should be making the map you want to make with whatever kinks and frills you want to see in a level. No adherence to any one book but your own. The Modern Mapper may be Doomworld Times best-seller, but it's still a get-rich quick scheme that, at best, will only find you wealth under an established environment. Stagnation++

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I think a lot of modern maps aim for overly strict stylistic unification, using the same texturing theme proportionately distributed over an entire map (looking at skillsaw and Ribbiks, and their followers AD_79 and rdwpa, respectively). Such maps might be easier to get their visuals "right" to look impressive, but I would welcome more maps with varying themes between areas or even within 1 area. This doesn't necessarily mean randomly or chaotically or mind-screw-esque or in-your-face contrasting, at all - it could be a sensible variation in decent amount, and that's it.

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As with any other medium, greater expectations from the crowd.

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Alfonzo said:

This mightn't be the sort of response you're after


That is exactly wrong.

Personally, I find traps harder to make convincingly whilst tending to concerns that might be project based, or a personal irk. Also, applying the various lighting effect types is harder, in some cases out of reach for me personally, when working with detailed gradients. The simpler sector types generally allow for more of a light show, the newer tend towards screenshot-friendly, static, lighting. Those are my main two complaints, the third being a tendency to reign in the monster AI with convoluted sectors that don't allow passage. Its understandable to want to create stairs that are to scale for the player, but a shame that it should happen at the expense of playability.

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Having been mapping since the 90s and playing maps from all eras, there is a bit of a difference. I reckon Maes is nearest the mark too.

Back in the 90s, it was a lot more acceptable to have unintuitive level progression and arbitrary design. As time has gone on, the expectation seems to have arisen that a player should find navigating through a map blindingly simple and all difficulty should arise from combat balance. This could mean the sort of highly orchestrated monster placement that is designed to whittle away at the player, sheer weight of numbers or resource limitation.

There's also a lot more for people to copy these days, so I think mappers will find their work compared to the players' favourite maps now rather than back in the day where the IWADs were the gold standard. The community seems to have had a few phases where you get people either adapting or just turning up out of the blue aping what's big. This used to be Simplicity and Tormentor667's visual cues and now I'd say skillsaw has quite a following. I guess back in the day everybody was knocking out stuff that wanted to fit into E1 or E2, so this idea of trends isn't a new one.

Mapping today I feel like there is a weight of expectation. I know I'll be putting stuff online and at least one person will give an opinion, so I do end up trying to preempt obvious quality control issues, like inconsistent design and complaints of people getting stuck. I can't imagine how the more popular mappers ever get anything done once they have a following, to be honest. Saying that, if I wasn't contributing to a community project or assuming somebody would play what I made, I don't think I'd bother making anything at all these days.

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Old =
Pros: nice gameplay
Cons: lack of custom stuff, too much corridors and doors (!)
New =
Pros: big, detailed, a lot of custom stuff
Cons: copy paste, clutter, popping up monsters

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I don't get why people think modern mapping, by design, HAS to be repetitive or non-enjoyable. That has more to do with deliberate design choices than modern engines just inherently having those flaws. The reason is that modern assets take a lot more effort to produce and so they take less time to create variety because of the added time spent on the extra fidelity. They also tend to be more taxing on hardware, thus variation becomes less feasible since there are only so many different kinds of high res textures / models you can place in one environment before people's computers start getting overworked. The best solution is a balance between variety and graphical fidelity.

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Seems to me like the main difference is the expectation that players would replay maps a lot more back then, whereas nowadays its expected a lot of players will play it once and move on to the next one. So old maps can have cryptic progression where modern mappers dare not waste their audience's time. You get the same trend with video games in general. The more choice you have the more power goes to the player, authors are more likely to compromise to benefit a wider audience. In the old days the authors had the power, players had to read instruction manuals and get good or die.

As always, both ways can be taken to unhealthy extremes and some kind of balance is probably best.

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One solution is to simply incorporate difficulty settings into more games. Doom made great use of this, Too Young to Die is a completely different ballpark than Ultra Violence, let alone Nightmare. I don't get why more games don't take advantage of this, then everyone gets something they want. Maybe less experienced players can even practice with the lower settings so that they can get good enough at the game to take it to the next level.

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There are a lot of things I agree with in these posts, and I think they are worth highlighting:

- Without scripting or fancy BOOM effects, gradient lighting is pretty much static

- Given the breadth of available new stuff and available internet bandwidth, generally, people don't replay stuff over and over. Personally, I will go back and wander around levels to soak up atmosphere or check out a neat visual effect, but outside of the IWAD levels I usually don't actually "play the level"

- I also find that traps (specifically opening or lowering walls) problematic, since there is usually trade-off between what they look like before and after they have been sprung (i.e. a wall texture may need to unpegged to blend in when closed, but then it looks weird during or after opening). Also, approaching a level with the mindset of a "real place" rarely squares with the concept of a randomly opening alcove.

Finally, I find it amusingly ironic that a comment about difficulty levels comes from a user with the name "MetroidJunkie" since the Metroid games DON'T have selectable difficulty...

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Lutz said:

Also, approaching a level with the mindset of a "real place" rarely squares with the concept of a randomly opening alcove.

It would still look better in a PWAD than it looked in Doom 3 (after more than 10 years I'm still not sure what they were thinking).

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I do think there's still design space to force mazes and puzzles to be "modern" again - it's easy to say these things are unintuitive and therefore anti-fun but, ah, that could partially be a syndrome of streamed gaming culture, where the player naturally wants to keep things rolling rather than look hopelessly lost in front of the viewer. It'd be nice if people warmed to the idea of a locked map as opposed to a rolling megawad map because, frankly, there's plenty of stuff Doom can do that we've eschewed for the sake of the least patient among us

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Lutz said:

Finally, I find it amusingly ironic that a comment about difficulty levels comes from a user with the name "MetroidJunkie" since the Metroid games DON'T have selectable difficulty...


I'll admit that's a flaw within those games, no game is perfect. Also, the Prime series has hard modes.

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scifista42 said:

I think a lot of modern maps aim for overly strict stylistic unification, using the same texturing theme proportionately distributed over an entire map (looking at skillsaw and Ribbiks, and their followers AD_79 and rdwpa, respectively). Such maps might be easier to get their visuals "right" to look impressive, but I would welcome more maps with varying themes between areas or even within 1 area. This doesn't necessarily mean randomly or chaotically or mind-screw-esque or in-your-face contrasting, at all - it could be a sensible variation in decent amount, and that's it.


I've been planning on trying this at some point. In the maps I've released so far, visuals were secondary, so it felt more natural from a process POV to stay within the bounds of one or two serviceable themes.

I wouldn't consider myself a follower of any one particular mapper (not that Ribbiks would be a bad choice :P), simply because my approach is still rapidly evolving, and I'm always looking to try new things.

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OP, your english is so awesome and polished that I can barely understand with my poorly language skills. I'm such a bad english speaker haha

But if I got it right, yes... I think there some cool balance between oldschool and modern. In fact, not only in terms of aesthetics, but for gameplay measures too.

Just giving a ordinary example: In modern mapping, It's very hard to see something like blinking lights used as a "hazard" element (like the computer maze in E1M2), and I think it's a very cool\interesting way to use environment to influence your pace as a player. But for today standards, this is unfairly rejected because can "annoy" some people. In fact, I think theres a lot of naive\unique ideas from old maps that can be used today to break some kind of uniformity (created by well-known models over the time).

Talking about aesthetics, maybe this is more personal, but I see overdetailed areas as a objectively BAD thing. Sometimes, I think that a minimalistic approach works so better and turn to be more graceful. This is something that can be inspired even from the original game. But I'm only giving my two cents anyway. Seriously, I don't even come close to being a expert (like many of you)... so I could be wrong.

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Modern maps are generally more detailed because of the utilities used to make the levels. Back then you pretty much only had DEU and a few other editors. If back then you did not even have a mouse, you sure were not going to add super detail to your map.

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GhostlyDeath said:

Modern maps are generally more detailed because of the utilities used to make the levels. Back then you pretty much only had DEU and a few other editors. If back then you did not even have a mouse, you sure were not going to add super detail to your map.

Yes, but sometimes limitation can be a better way to create aesthetics. This is what I'm trying to say. When you have too much information in one room, you can totally miss the point. It's just a matter of balance and design, anyway.

And so... I'm not saying that I don't like some well detailed maps. Hell, I love the BTSX design, for a instance. But I think there is a limit to that and sometimes a oldschool approuch looks more stylish\coherent.

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Memfis said:

?!
People mapped with keyboard only?


Yes.

DEU had support so you can still edit without a mouse. You could move in a large or pixel increments, select and deselect objects. It is a bit slower than using a mouse but you can make maps with it. Back in the DOS/Win95 not everyone had a mouse, or they had a mouse which did not work in pure DOS.

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I do agree with Alfonzo that there's a blurry line between 90's and modern mapping. There are too many maps that make gray areas for all maps to be divided exclusively into those two castes. However, we can't have a discussion about it until we agree to understand that there is some distinction to be made, and there really aren't enough universally accepted terms to categorize everything so "modern maps" and "90s maps" will have to do for now.

As someone who has been studying exhaustively all the creative outlets of mapping I can identify, I can say that there not only differences between the two, but doing one or the other certainly has limitations on both sides of the coin, almost like choosing between two different source ports to map for.

When we say the term "90's mapping" we probably associate with the works of Kurt Kesler, (kmetl series) or Haggay Niv (Hell Revealed 1) or more recently, mappers like Nicolas Monti (Erktanne), or joe-ilya (Lost Maps 2). And when we say "Modern mapping," we're probably associating it with mappers like Vader (Thunderpeak) or Fredrik Johannson (Vrack series), or more recently, people like Mechadon (Vela Pax) and Ribbiks (Sunlust). These are the more popular examples I can think of off the top of my head there are probably better ones, but just try to follow me here.

I've spent the better part of the last couple years trying to find a sweet spot that safely balances the essential qualities of the two styles in my mapping, but I think there are distinct differences that make the two styles unable to coexist in the same map, or at least not without hairpulling and migraines and development hell.

The majority of "90's maps" are comprised of maps that were made by someone with a very small body of work. Doom attracted many thousands of people to try and make maps, and many of the releases that are from the 90's and in the archives are the only maps the authors ever made. This is more than likely the opposite in the last decade, in which many of the people that are still here are either not mapping at all, or have released a lot of work in the past and are continuing to self indulge in their mapping addiction. This may be the real cause of the homogeneous qualities people are identifying in projects made by critically acclaimed mappers, and the lack of originality that was seen in the 90's. Back then people were only making maps with what they knew, based on other games they played or what they thought they enjoyed doing in Doom. Nobody really had any general guidelines that what they were doing was the right or wrong way to do it or if their maps were going to be any fun or not. But in the end we were left with some weird confusing maps with strange puzzles and unique layouts.

One of the biggest trade-offs I've observed between 90's mapping and modern mapping is that people are able to play a 90's map -- released either by a mapper in 1994 or by a new mapper today -- with the preconceived notion that the mapper doesn't really know what they're doing and that anything can be anything. 90's maps can sometimes be difficult or confusing to play when they aren't following generally accepted mapping norms, however the process of "solving the puzzle" can be very rewarding. This has a lot to do with the way 90's maps are perceived by the player. Sometimes what the player sees in his imagination can appear much cooler than what a modern map can deliver with sectors and vice versa. Unfortunately, there really isn't a fair way to build a detailed techbase with metal supports, beams, teklites, and computers, and then a random FIREBLU and somehow coax the player into thinking "That must be an interdimensional teleport" before making them think "That's fucking stupid."

Director of Pixar Films Andrew Stanton once spoke about The Unifying Theory of 2+2 -- Don't give your audience 4, give them 2+2. They like to make the connections themselves. An audience wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know they're doing it. I think that mantra applies very well to 90's maps, in the way the limited detail of the map allows the player to fill in the holes themselves and create a more fulfilling experience for themselves that isn't forcefed to them with the mapper's detail.

The other major tradeoff which is less subjective is that a conventional 90's map generally features better applications of linedef triggers than a modern map does. The issues usually lie in the fact that excessive sector detail can make more specific actions like Donuts, Stairbuilding, and changing light values and blinking effects near impossible, and large moving structures are broken up into many smaller sectors. Structures such as the nukage pit in E1M3: Toxin Refinery, or the long bridge in MAP29: The Living End, or the glowing light maze in E1M5: Phobos Lab can't be adequately implemented into a modern map without reducing detail or creating a vast network of control sectors to keep it from doing anything you don't want it to do, which is often more stressful for the mapper than it is fun for the player. Moreover, excessive ceiling and wall details means walkover-linedef types, especially ones that are only supposed to be used once, have to be broken up into many segments unless you reduce detail, or place the line elsewhere to remove the possibility of the player bypassing it. And of course there's the most common tradeoff in that once a map is detailed and the textures are fully aligned, its now too late to make any significant gameplay changes to your map. If you decide that you need a monster closet here or to transform the shape of the building, your map is too much of a tangled net of sectors and linedefs to make the changes, which often leaves mappers to pretend they never thought of it and move on without it.

I may be speaking too highly of 90's maps here, but it goes without saying that a 90's map doesn't and most likely won't take attractive screenshots to entice people to play it. They're simply not as impressive to look at as a modern map would. And the author of the map doesn't have much control over creating what they want the player to see. So depending on the activity of the players' imagination, the author can receive wildly different aesthetic-related feedback that can be difficult to decipher and improve his mapping with, while the information a modern mapper might receive on improving their visuals might be a bit more concrete.

I think that covers all the trade-offs between the two that I can think of.

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Just to clarify... I prefer don't even use the term "nineties", because there is a lot of ugly stuff from that era that I actually don't like (principally random pwads like Maximum Doom\D!Zone stuff). With "oldschool", I'm thinking more of something basic but effective, like the first Doom episode (and some other levels), Memento Mori 2 maps... that kind of stuff.

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An important thing to remember is that player expectations have skyrocketed as a result of the high numbers of quality maps currently being produced. The reason for this is that Doom tools (map editors, graphics, MIDI, etc) are FAR better than they were in the 90's, allowing us to do more, faster.

There have always been bad maps, you see them today and you see them in the archive from the 90's too. I think, in terms of numbers, a lower percentage of low quality stuff is publicly released today, but you still see it often enough..

mouldy said:

Seems to me like the main difference is the expectation that players would replay maps a lot more back then, whereas nowadays its expected a lot of players will play it once and move on to the next one. So old maps can have cryptic progression where modern mappers dare not waste their audience's time. You get the same trend with video games in general. The more choice you have the more power goes to the player, authors are more likely to compromise to benefit a wider audience. In the old days the authors had the power, players had to read instruction manuals and get good or die.

The irony is, games designed to have better replay value have.. Well, better replay value, from the NES days (and before I presume) til now there have always been "trashy" games, as I call them, meant to make a quick chunk of money and entertain the player for a few hours, then never be touched again. My main gripe is that even the 'quality' titles we see these days are often not designed with replayability in mind, which is a damn shame.

Maybe Doom just set my standards too high for that kind of thing.

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40oz said:

The other major tradeoff which is less subjective is that a conventional 90's map generally features better applications of linedef triggers than a modern map does. The issues usually lie in the fact that excessive sector detail can make more specific actions like Donuts, Stairbuilding, and changing light values and blinking effects near impossible, and large moving structures are broken up into many smaller sectors. Structures such as the nukage pit in E1M3: Toxin Refinery, or the long bridge in MAP29: The Living End, or the glowing light maze in E1M5: Phobos Lab can't be adequately implemented into a modern map without reducing detail or creating a vast network of control sectors to keep it from doing anything you don't want it to do, which is often more stressful for the mapper than it is fun for the player. Moreover, excessive ceiling and wall details means walkover-linedef types, especially ones that are only supposed to be used once, have to be broken up into many segments unless you reduce detail, or place the line elsewhere to remove the possibility of the player bypassing it. And of course there's the most common tradeoff in that once a map is detailed and the textures are fully aligned, its now too late to make any significant gameplay changes to your map. If you decide that you need a monster closet here or to transform the shape of the building, your map is too much of a tangled net of sectors and linedefs to make the changes, which often leaves mappers to pretend they never thought of it and move on without it.


There are workarounds for these issues, but then you need to go whole hog on the modern features and abandon Boom compatibility.

For example:
* moving structures made of multiple sectors: use Eternity's attached sectors or ZDoom's linked sectors (different names, same thing).
* split walkover linedefs: you might be able to replace the walkover linedef entirely by a actor enters sector action, or you can make a script that will make sure that a W1 effect repeated several times on a split linedef will only take effect once even if the player triggers the other linedefs from the line.
* Scripting allows advanced effects. A wall with a niche containing a decorative console would generally not be used as part of a secret passage in vanilla because there are all these decorative sectors in it. But with a script you can flatten everything, change the lighting, change the floor and ceiling textures, etc. and make it look like the decoration was never there. Or you can go completely the other way around and have a very detailed-looking structure appear instead of just a big cube growing out of the ground.

Of course it's still a lot of work and that might discourage people. But I have seen some impressive scenes with detailed, dynamic structures so it's still possible in "modern" mapping if you want to commit to it.

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Doomkid said:

The irony is, games designed to have better replay value have.. Well, better replay value, from the NES days (and before I presume) til now there have always been "trashy" games, as I call them, meant to make a quick chunk of money and entertain the player for a few hours, then never be touched again. My main gripe is that even the 'quality' titles we see these days are often not designed with replayability in mind, which is a damn shame.


I once read that a major reason for the replayability in older games, particularly in "Nintendo Hard" games is that there's an extremely small amount of data you can cram into those cartridges, so in order to get a game to have more than 20 minutes of gameplay, you had to make the game really difficult, and the player's punishment for losing was to play it over again. Now that games have a limitless amount of data at their disposal, handholding in the form of autosaves and easy gameplay is more prevalent because the makers of the game don't want the later portions of the game to go unseen and they don't want their players hung up on whatever they're currently playing and miss out on the debut of their next game.

I think the tools that make mapping so much faster and easier today have made maps much more disposable, so focus on replayability has diminished in that regard. However, I am certainly in agreement with you in the feeling that maps that are fun to play the first time, and work the second is disappointing, and that there is a much more novel quality to wads that can kill you as many times as they want and still motivate you to try again. Sometimes there are maps that bring me joy after they have killed me because I had so much fun playing it, I was almost worried it was going to be over!

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40oz said:

Sometimes what the player sees in his imagination can appear much cooler than what a modern map can deliver with sectors and vice versa.


I don't agree with all that you said (e.g. self indulgence), but that was a really insightful post 40oz. Valuable views, from someone who has trawled the archives. To me the above quote was the core of the post, and carries over into the Doom vs modern FPS'es subject, which I'd say is a subset of this debate. One of the more unique features of Doom is its capability to play into abstraction. I don't think Doom 4 will do that, nor any CoD, nor any Fallout.

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