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wheresthebeef

The Daemon's Castle

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Hey all! I've always loved Doom, and always liked playing custom content throughout the years for it, but never tried to make my own.
I started to learn Doom Builder a couple weeks ago and made a serious attempt this week. This is the result of about 8 hours of work.
It includes a couple custom textures and a new tree from another project I was working on (special thanks to John Barnard for helping with some of the textures). It has a couple secrets, one of which is pretty involved, and the map was balanced for Ultra Violence, although some balance tweaks were made for lower difficulties.
Compatible with Zdoom and PRBoom+
The map is for Doom 2

*2-13-16 Update*
- Made compatible with PrBoom+
- Changed textures to Doom format
- Added more items, monsters, and details
Download here

100% playthrough video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0u7Q1tBjhs





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As other people will tell you, you really need to nail down what the compatibility is when you release content. "I tested it with x" doesn't really tell us anything.

Will check it out a little later.

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PRBoom+ gives me the errors:

R_InitTextures: 7 Errors
Are you sure the custom textures are in the WAD and are defined properly in the TEXTURE1/PNAMES lump?

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Gustavo6046 said:

PRBoom+ gives me the errors:

R_InitTextures: 7 Errors
Are you sure the custom textures are in the WAD and are defined properly in the TEXTURE1/PNAMES lump?


Looked into it; I had some ceiling/floor textures redundantly marked as xtexture.
I've fixed the error and reuploaded the .wad

U.O.D. said:

As other people will tell you, you really need to nail down what the compatibility is when you release content. "I tested it with x" doesn't really tell us anything.

It worked perfect with a clean ZDoom folder and everything worked exactly as intended; should I flat out say to use ZDoom in the original post or is there more to it that just that?

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Very impressive looking for a first official release. I'll download it and give a shot later then will be back with my feedback.

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wheresthebeef said:

It worked perfect with a clean ZDoom folder and everything worked exactly as intended; should I flat out say to use ZDoom in the original post or is there more to it that just that?


As you say there is more to it. ZDoom uses different action specials than regular Doom depending on what format the map is. As such something designed for ZDoom would not work in a port such as PrBoom. And likewise something with Boom features would not function in vanilla Doom.

The map format you specified when you created the map in the level editor usually indicates the lowest compatibility. Doom Builder 2 has formats like Doom 2, Boom, Eternity, ZDoom (Doom in Doom Format). "Doom 2" is vanilla Doom and should be playable in any source port.


EDIT: Played through the map. Pretty enjoyable even though there is a lack of health. When the Archvile was released I found I didn't have the resources to fight so I opted to run to the exit.

The map wouldn't start in PrBoom+ with an error about SKY3 missing. And the DECORATE lump in the wad is exclusive to ZDoom based ports. So you see what I mean by compatibility now?

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^ And that's not even the whole story. Maps made for vanilla (original DOS) Doom, or limit-removing ports, are quite picky about the way your wad is organized and about how certain linedef actions work -- a sector's ceiling can't do anything while the floor is moving, a linedef with an action can block you from pressing use to activate another linedef behind it, etc. Boom format is less picky, and ZDoom is generally quite accommodating.

So for now, wheresthebeef, I'd say you should just call your map ZDoom only.

If you are interested I can help you get it working in other ports, tomorrow, unless someone else wants to have a go at it before I do. But that's only if you want to do that - having a ZDoom-only map is generally fine as long as people know that's what they need to use to play it.

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plums said:

If you are interested I can help you get it working in other ports, tomorrow, unless someone else wants to have a go at it before I do. But that's only if you want to do that - having a ZDoom-only map is generally fine as long as people know that's what they need to use to play it.


That would be great and definitely help for future projects :)

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Now the problem is:

R_TextureForNum: SKY3 Not Found
Don't worry, it is ANNOYING AS HELL, it ALWAYS happens when I try to add a custom sky to one of my maps and test it in PRBoom+. The solution is NOT to use Texture1/PNAMES if you want your map not to be ZDoom-only, or import TEXTURE1/PNAMES from the IWAD so you can use all textures.

I can't find the SLADE3's option to import IWAD's TEXTURE1 config into the existing TEXTURE1 instead of importing into a new one, so I can't help you in this.

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OK, first, actually playing the map. I liked it, pretty solid architecture, decent if small gameplay. A few surprises to keep you interested, nothing too unfair. Quite solid for a first map overall, and would be a good intro map to larger levels in that style.

I felt like the castle textures were just a little bit... crude I guess? Not sure the word I'm looking for. They weren't terrible by any means but they seemed to look not quite as good as stock Doom textures for some reason. How did you make them? The other custom art was all fine.

I made some FDAs (demos of my first playthrough) if you're interested. Needs ZDoom 2.8.0 - one of the downsides to ZDoom maps is that demos must be played with exactly the version they were recorded on. Two files, because after I died I stopped recording and fiddled with ZDoom settings a bit. To watch them, drag and and drop the wad and one of the demos onto zdoom.exe.
https://www.doomworld.com/vb/attachment.php?postid=1557547



Now making the wad compatible with other ports. SLADE and GZDoomBuilder are the tools I used and I assume that's what you have as well (or maybe just normal Doom Builder.) The first thing I did was open it in SLADE to fix the was resources.

  • DECORATE is a ZDoom-only lump. If you want to do custom enemies/weapons/etc. for Doom or Boom compatible levels, you have to use Dehacked patches. Dehacked is useful and you can get a lot out of it, but you're mostly limited to shuffling around existing program functions -- it's hard or even impossible to implement a completely new weapon that doesn't behave at all like the existing Doom weapons. You also generally have to replace an existing thing whenever you want to make a new one. So if your end goal is to make maps that have tons of new monsters and give the player 25 crazy weapons, for example, you should forget compatibility and just focus on ZDoom. (Some other ports have more-or-less comparable modding capabilities too, but ZDoom is by far the most popular.)

    As far as your tree, though, it doesn't do anything so you don't even need Dehacked. Instead I just changed the name of the sprite to COL1A0 - the current sprite for Doom 2's existing tall green column, which isn't a thing you used in your map.

  • Next, the other new graphics are all in PNG format, which Doom doesn't support. But first it's important you have your base resources set up. In the top right of the SLADE toolbar, there should be an entry that reads "Base Resource" with doom2.wad selected, and "Palette" should be Existing/Global, or just Doom. if you don't have an option for doom2.wad as a base resource, click the gear button nearby on that toolbar.

    The wall textures need to be changed to "Doom Graphic" format. Select them all in SLADE, right click, select "Graphics -> Convert to...", and then choose "Doom Gfx (paletted)" to convert to, which should be what comes up by default. The flats (floor textures) also need to be converted the same way, but to the "Doom Flat" type.

  • Now you need to make a proper texture entry. Delete the TEXTURE1 and PNAMES entries from the wad. Select all your wall textures, right click and choose "Graphics -> Add to TEXTUREx". Click yes to the prompt that comes up about creating entries. On the next dialog, the format should be Doom, and the source should be IMPORT. Doom's TEXTURE1 entries aren't cumulative, so if you want to use textures from doom2.wad you need a TEXTURE1 entry that lists ALL the textures in both your wad and doom2.wad. (That's not entirely true, but for simplicity's sake, pretend it is. :p )

Save the wad, it's now Doom 2 compatible as far as resources go. You still need to open it up in Doom Builder/GZDB to fix one or two things. It didn't look like it used any ZDoom linedef actions from playing, and you seemed to intend it to work in other ports, so that makes this step easy.
  • Press F3 for find/replace, choose "Thing Type" to search for, enter type 237 (your Decorate tree) as the thing to look for. Select replace with, use thing 30 (the tall green column that uses sprite COL1A0), click Replace. It should replace 3 things. Note that the new tree graphic should show up.

    If you're wondering "How do I know which sprites to replace for which things?", you just have to look it up. The ZDoom wiki has that information, you can also just look through doom2.wad with SLADE to find a sprite name and then figure out the corresponding thing type in GZDB.

  • If you watched the demo in ZDoom, you might have seen a part where the railing went through the floor. Let's fix that. One of the Doom engine's quirks is that similar sectors get "merged" in the software rendering engine, and won't cut off textures like that. So change the light level of sector 0 to 97 - it won't make a perceptible difference but it's enough that the renderer will not merge those sectors.
Everything else looks ok, so save the map and test it. If you're making a limit-removing map, you have to test with a port that respects all the quirks of the original engine, because they are many. ZDoom will let you get away with a lot of things that don't work in other ports - it makes your life easier for making ZDoom-only maps, but this makes it bad for testing maps for many ports.

I recommend PrBoom+ which is a fairly popular port and very faithful at emulating the original engine behaviour. To test a limit-removing (Doom actions only) map, you want to run it with the parameter -complevel 2, i.e. prboom-plus.exe -complevel 2 -file somewad.wad. For Boom maps, use -complevel 9 instead. These can be set as parameters from within GZDB.

Anyhow your map is not overly complex in terms of linedef actions etc., so fortunately there aren't too many things to worry about. When you're all finished, you should have something that looks like this:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/y1urh10uuu00gqe/daemoncastle_cl2.wad

Hope this was enlightening!

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Thanks for all the info Plums! I will get right on that as soon as I can later today and replace the current download link with an updated version!
One question; the tree will replace an existing sprite to work with Doom, do custom textures and patches also need to replace existing textures or can they be their own names?

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Textures and patches can be new. Definitions of stock textures and patches should stay intact in your wad's TEXTURE1 and PNAMES, though - if you're using the stock textures in your maps, that is.

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Updated the original post with an update log as well as the newest version download link.
Thanks a ton again to Plums for the compatibility help! Tested thoroughly several times in PrBoom and ZDoom just to make triple sure.
There are a few more minor things I will update, like a couple texture alignments, some shading, and hiding certain areas from the minimap. I'm also going to create an ultra violence walkthrough on youtube, showing all the secrets and how I typically complete the map.
I have already begun creating my next project, and the level theme will be much different than this one! :)

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