Doom editors could have a MS Paint like drawing mode

http://imgur.com/Hg99eYs - It seems silly to draw such maps by placing vertices one by one. Maybe there could me a drawing mode where you could get the same thing by just drawing like this: http://i.imgur.com/xKfjjQp.png

And there could be various smoothness settings, so that one mountain wouldn't necessarily eat 1000 vertices.

GZDB has "Draw Curve Mode". Use it. NAO!

Oh. :D I guess that's pretty close to what I described.

Those maps look a lot better when you draw vertices by hand -- lines produced in Draw Curve mode at best have conspicuous small distortions. It's not so hard when you get the hang of it.

And at worst? Also can you provide an example of said conspicuous small distortions?

#1 is something made by Draw Curve mode. It's not horrible-looking or anything, but some stretches are a bit flat. It kind of looks like a deflated blob.

#2 is a rocky area drawn by hand in 20 seconds -- keep in mind that it could be improved even more by sliding some vertices around here and there.

#3 is my attempt to emulate #2 in Draw Curve mode. I stopped because it was already quite futile. I had already exceeded 20 seconds moving the mouse around so that the curve would look acceptable. This is sort of like an "at worst" case.

I've used Draw Curve mode when speedmapping -- it's certainly quite effective at shorter time scales for larger structures with hundreds of vertices. But when you have time to work, drawing manually will be a lot better. A simple example is Ribbiks, who draws by hand. If you want, you can really take your time and stop and keep changing the segment length in Draw Curve mode and also draw vertices more often -- but if you're putting that much effort into it, you might as well draw by hand, which is honestly not that time-consuming when you get the hang of it.

Anyway, I agree with Memfis that an MSPaint-style mechanism would be quite amazing, though maybe I don't want it to exist because it'll cheapen the art of drawing these the hard way. :P

I suppose being able to sketch out organic rock faces with a WACOM would be kinda neat, but for anything precise I'd probably still click the verts for days.

Paint is a bitmap editing program; Doom maps, if anything, are closer to vectorial images.

You know what would be great? If you could draw a map with a pen on a paper, then scan it and convert to Doom Builder map! That would be so much easier! But i sorta doubt this kind of technology will ever happen..

ChekaAgent said:

You know what would be great? If you could draw a map with a pen on a paper, then scan it and convert to Doom Builder map! That would be so much easier! But i sorta doubt this kind of technology will ever happen..

Yeah, you gotta pay for the $666 DLC that comes out in 2116.
Still, we can stick with draw curves.

Has anyone here played line rider?

You can use your scanned pen map as a background image in Doom Builder.

Gez said:

Paint is a bitmap editing program; Doom maps, if anything, are closer to vectorial images.

Could possibly treat each point on the grid like a pixel. Sure, there'd be a lot of verts, but the mapper can delete the ones they don't want. Probably best to use a 32 to 128 grid to rough it out (depending on your scale).

I think a better approach would be to place a new vertex when the mouse was moved x pixels from the last one. Could even tank the angle between the last vertex and the mouse cursor into account, so that you get smooth bend when making erratic turns.

Phml said:

You can use your scanned pen map as a background image in Doom Builder.

Smartest thing I've read today. Man, you're a genius.

That's a trick from the old days. See second paragraph of "Rotoscoping" here:
http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/page_realisation.htm

.

burgerobot said:

select a really small grid size

Or disable "Snap to grid".

.

In a reversal of your idea. I wish there was a free graphics design software that allowed you to plot your design on a grid with vertices and then edit it to make it pretty later.