Doom map making in the 90's

Hey! I just saw, how far back doom map making goes and some were made by 12 year olds, so i just wonder if some OG doom map makers could tell me what was it like, back in the 90's, what was the biggest pain to make, and what were the struggles? 

I'm no 90's map maker, but I do know there were not any of the fancy features we have today. No sound propagation mode, no auto alignments for textures, and most of all no visual mode! Every map had to be made by visualizing the room in your mind and knowing how far down or up a height is. Supposedly testing the maps weren't a picnic either. I don't think the original DoomEd editor made the maps into a WAD for you like Doom Builder does, so mappers had to WAD up the map lumps themselves or something like that.

I could be wrong about some of this so please correct me if I am spouting nonsense.

DEU and DETH had no such a feature to draw lines and sectors as the modern editors do. You created new areas by four ways:

1) Choose from the menu: Create a new rectangle or a polygon shaped area.

2) Draw new vertices, select the vertices in a order you want the walls go, press INS to create linedefs between the vertices, (and while the newly created lines are still selected) hit INS again to create the 1st sidedef and a new sector for the lines.

3) Or if you already have some area, select two vertices and choose from the menu: Add a linedef and split the sector. It only worked if the editor managed to form a new closed sector.

4) Or: Select two lines and choose from the menu: "Split lines and create a new sector". It split the two lines in half and drew a line between them. Sounds nuts but it was a very easy way to start enlarging the map area as new rooms or caves.

One nifty thing was the node building before testing. With DETH you could make limits removing maps and building nodes could take an hour. Small maps go fast but bigger maps took more and more time. (Creating the reject took most of the time.)
 

I, for one, would love to read more about the pains of early Doom mapmaking.

I started my map-making "career" somewhat late (1999), and was privy to newer tools. WadAuthor was my primary mapping editor, and DeePsea was my primary resource-management editor. Personally, I don't recall there being any major challenges (aside from climbing the normal learning curve) with building maps that incorporated the basic elements of DooM. WadAuthor, being a "sector-drawing" tool, made insertion of new sectors relatively quick. [Jack Vermeulen, DeePsea's developer, pointed out to me that all map editors use vertices as starting points, after which the linedefs are inserted. Editors like WadAuthor simply automate this process and insert a "prefab" construct. In other words, there's no such thing as a "sector-creating" editor.] WadAuthor also made it easy to create polygons, such as (up to 32-sided) circles. As others have pointed out, by 1999 texture alignment had ceased to be an exclusively manual task involving the use of arithmetic by the mapper.

I'd say the biggest difference between the late 1990s and today is in the way information is disseminated. In order to learn, I had to rely on forums (such as this one) and email exchanges with contacts I had made in the DooM community. Nowadays, tutorials are available via YouTube, inter-personal exchanges are possible in real time via Discord, Skype, and other VoIP tools, and people can quickly post illustrative images on Imgur and other image-hosting services.

I made levels back in the 90s that I never released.  I started with some really obscure Windows editor that wasn't very good - lots of bugs that screwed up the map.  It wasn't as primitive as something like DEU but I remember there were a lot of things you had to do manually.  I eventually found DCK 2.2 which was my favorite.  That one's a DOS program.  There was also a DCK 3.6 version that had some really cool improvements but was extremely unstable.  I guess the take away is that for a lot of the early level editors, it was not a given that the program itself worked well or allowed you to do everything you wanted.

Generating the BSP tree could take quite a while.  A lot of the early node builders were also very buggy; sometimes you did everything correctly but the map was still broken.  Generating the REJECT table was way more time consuming than building nodes.  That was something you only did towards the end as a polishing step.  And yes, machines were slow enough back then that the REJECT table made a noticeable difference.

I think in general everything took a lot longer.  There were no 3D editor previews back then, so things like aligning textures was a pretty tedious affair (at least you didn't have to rebuild the nodes for that!).  I was also constantly living in fear of the VISPLANES limit and my levels were probably less detailed than they could have been.

I used DCK when I first started map making. It was more of a hassle keeping the editor working than making a wad.

Later I moved to Wad Author which was a bit more stable. ~ also had to know what you could do and what you couldn't to keep the editor from crashing.

Both of which, didn't allow for much of any detail nor map size due to Dooms VPO limitations. ~ Seems how there was only DooM and Doom2.exe. no sourceports yet.

I mainly used WadEd, and DEU only for additional tasks like inserting music and bug-checking. WadEd allowed you to draw linedefs pretty easily - I think you would insert a vertex and then just draw a set of lines from it like in DB. However, there was no automatic sector creation, so you'd have to select the linedefs and set their front and back sectors manually as well as their state (single-sided or double-sided) etc. Eventually there was a beta of a newer version (the last one to be released afaik) which had a Make Sector feature that allowed you to click into a would-be sector and it would automatically create it with all proper assignments. And sometimes it would fail, because two vertices didn't get merged before or for some other random reason, and a large part of the map suddenly turned into a single sector. Needless to say: no UNDO.

Oh, and the grid was messed up in all versions except the final beta - it didn't correspond to the actual game grid, but was instead shifted by 8/8 units or so.

The fact that most 90s wads mention creation times in the order of several weeks, even for what we'd consider garbage today, speaks lots. More polished mapsets usually took months, and even those were at a much smaller scale and geometric complexity than what modern editors (and source ports) can support.

I used DEU back in the 90s, and as @dl_simc describes it was pretty convoluted.  No visual mode was by far the biggest difficulty, but also you don't really realize just how intelligent GZDB is when it comes to working things out for you.

For example, little things like if you draw a new sector in the void with the linedefs facing outwards, it knows you really wanted to make a sector on the inside of your lines, so flips the linedefs around and creates the sector.  Or how if you draw new linedefs from one existing vertex to another, it knows to utilize any existing linedefs between those two vertexes in order to create a new sector.

Editors back in the 90s just didn't have that logic built in.  You had vertexes, linedefs, sidedefs and sectors, and it was pretty much up to you to define how each of these related to each other.  Editors today are much more intelligent about automatically filling in the dots.

Hi

I found out about Doom mapping around the time Doom builder 1 was new, and it was my first editor. Ive spoken to many mappers who have been designing maps for years on WXR.

Biggest complaints about level designing have mostly been described here in great detail. Based on how it has been described to me, this is how id summarize it for more modern mappers such as myself.

1. Stability of the editor - The editor would often crash. Sometimes this took place while map making, or worse, while saving! Depending on the editor, sometimes it would corrupt your map and ruin the whole thing, so you had to make a habit of saving often, abstaining from crazy mapping tricks, and keeping backups of your work.

2. Vanilla limits - Not many doom source ports existed in the beginning of Doom, so many people had to test with Doom as it came straight out of the box. This came with a lot of static limits that caused the game to crash or behave erratically when rooms were too detailed or large or whatever.

3. Long nodebuilding processes - When you save or test your map with GZDoombuilder, it builds the nodes for your map. On today's machines, the window might flicker on your screen for a millisecond; so fast you probably dont even notice it. On older machines, this process could take as much as a half hour for larger maps. So most mappers made a habit of thoroughly checking their maps for errors before saving because it was a real drag waiting for nodes to build. So in 1994 youre more likely to get a fully functioning map that looks like ass, rife with ugly minutiae like misaligned textures and whacky themes, compared to today, where you might play a beta of someone's project that looks beautiful but a door doesn't work and breaks the map.

4. Nodebuilding mishaps - node builders today are pretty flexible and powerful today, so generally you rarely encounter any visual errors. Also, today's editors are pretty good at detecting what it is youre trying to make. During the nodebuilding process, sometimes some nasty visual errors would come up unexpectedly. Sectors would be mysteriously unclosed, or create "slime trails" and/or cause your map to lock up during testing. This is an infrequent problem that has been pretty much erased from existence completely today.

5. No community - The internet was a luxury for most people in 1994, so many doom level designers couldn't contact each other as freely as they can here. People could buy discs that third party software companies compiled which included outdated versions of editing software, digital or printed guidebooks, and other utilities that may or may not be useful. Where people today tend to have a filter of what makes a good or bad map, most people just had to ask their friends and family or go on gut instinct. This results in a lot of hilariously inconsistent results, like maps that took years to make and have a massive design log in the txt file that looks and plays like shit, while others say "this is my first map, hope you like it! DOOM ROX MY SOX!" and it could be awesome.

I started mapping on the Mac in May of 1996 or so, using the Hellmaker editor. We only ever had 2 Doom editors on the Mac, and Hellmaker was the native one. The other, Demon, was a Mac port of DEU.

Hellmaker was a relatively easy editor to use and in some ways more "modern" than contemporaneous PC editors. Searching my memory, we made sectors by clicking on the grid and dragging the line behind us, but we had to perform a "Make Sector" function once we were finished.

Without doubt, the most fashion-forward feature of Hellmaker was its rotatable 3D isometric view. I credit that for the verticality that typified my maps, because the more vertical the map was, the cooler it looked in 3D view. But the 3D view was nothing like it is in DB2. There was no texture display, no lighting, no visual mode for choosing/aligning textures, etc. What you got was flat grey shading and all you could accomplish was just looking at it. IIRC, the coder, Paul Davidson, had plans to add more features to 3D view, but I'm guessing the teency-weency Mac mapping scene wasn't giving him the shareware revenue he wanted. He closed development with the 1.2b2 beta.

Hellmaker had the same naming convention for its different modes -- vertice, linedef, thing -- as PC editors except for one, Group Mode, which is how Davidson named Tags. I don't think it was an easier concept to grasp, but it was nice having a special mode for it. Also, Hellmaker had color-filled backgrounds, a different color for each mode, and a different color for the map than the background space. This made it easy to visualize the map, and Group Mode made it easy to visualize where all your tagged sectors and triggers were, because they were a different color than the non-tagged parts of the map. When DB2 introduced flats into the map view, that knocked off the last advantage Hellmaker had over PC editors.

Of course, Hellmaker had its flaws. The most notable was its crashiness, though that varied from machine to machine. My fellow Macintosh Team member Rob Berkowitz had a PowerMac 7200 and reported high stability. I had a Mac clone, a PowerWave 604/132 from Power Computing, and Hellmaker was so unstable on my machine that I saved after every 10 sectors. And I always created a new file every step of the way, because nodebuilding over an existing map often corrupted the file. The other major flaw of the program was its tendency to choke on really big maps and turn the file into porridge. Building maps with much more than 800 sectors or approaching blockmap limits was for daredevils only.

Nonetheless, Hellmaker was the editor used for Batman Doom, the big PixeLRex maps like Simply Evil, all the Laz Rojas Wolfendoom maps -- over 100 in all -- and most of Realm of Chaos. Ribbiks and esselfortium both cut their teeth on Hellmaker, and essel is the one who cracked the code and used ResEdit to enhance the program so it supported Boom and Legacy linedef tags, thing types and special sectors. I believe that version is called Enhanced Hellmaker 3.

Although Hellmaker, despite its flaws, was a damned fine editor in its day, one example of how superior DB2 and GZDB are is how much faster I can work in them. Back in the day, it took me about a month to make a 350-sector map in Hellmaker. With DB2, I can do that in 3 or 4 days and the end result is better because of texture alignment alone -- Hellmaker did it just like the old PC editors. So there's no way I'd ever go back.

This page has a picture of Hellmaker in its default color scheme, along with basically every MacDoom utility in one Mac archive. It suggests that Wad Builder was another  level editor. Heh, never heard of it before; http://macintoshgarden.org/games/doom-editing-suite

7 minutes ago, Steve D said:

...Ribbiks and esselfortium both cut their teeth on Hellmaker, and essel is the one who cracked the code and used ResEdit to enhance the program so it supported Boom and Legacy linedef tags, thing types and special sectors. I believe that version is called Enhanced Hellmaker 3.

Ah I remember using ResEdit quite a lot back in my Macintosh days to alter a few games. I got into Doom modding too late to ever use it, but I was always curious if ResEdit could be used to make modifications to Doom in any way. If you ever tried I'd like to know what it was capable of doing to Doom, if anything.

44 minutes ago, Jaws In Space said:

Ah I remember using ResEdit . . .  If you ever tried I'd like to know what it was capable of doing to Doom, if anything.

I haven't the foggiest idea. The only thing I know about ResEdit is that it exists. The guy you need to talk to about ResEdit and Doom is essel.

In DEU and DETH, I'd insert vertices (with the insert key, natch), then select them, and pressing insert again would add lines between them.  Then you'd select the lines and press insert once more to make them a sector.

In the very early days, that was your whole toolkit.  So if you need to split a sector, you'd either need to delete the sector, add the splitting line (by picking two vertices and hitting insert), then manually insert both new sectors ... or you'd need to insert the line, then manually redefine the sectors on a line by line basis.  And if you wanted to insert a new vertex on a line you had to delete the line in question, insert the new vertex, draw two new lines, and manually bind them to the right sector.

Oh, and you'd be limited to about 64kb map size, because early DEU only used the base 640kb.  Version 5.something was the first to allow larger maps IIRC.

Later on we got various cool new short cuts - "insert line and split sector" became a command you could select, for instance.  And you could select a bunch of walls with the same texture and hit X or Y to auto-align them.  And you could insert polygons into sectors and the editor would do all the references for you.  We even got some tools that I wish modern editors had, like increment floor/ceiling height (so you could select multiple sectors and easily move them all up or down by the same amount).

5 minutes ago, Capellan said:

some tools that I wish modern editors had, like increment floor/ceiling height (so you could select multiple sectors and easily move them all up or down by the same amount).

GZDoomBuilder can do that. In the 2d view, select the sectors and in the Edit Sector box, use Height Offset to adjust both floor and ceiling in all selected sectors. Or, in the 3d view, select the floors or ceilings you want to adjust, and scroll to move them all up or down the same amount (8 units at a time, or hold shift while scrolling to move them 1 unit at a time).

Back in the 90s, I didn't have Internet access. I got a book called The Doom Hacker's Guide, and on the included CD was DEU, WadEd, and lots of other tools like mid2mus and mus2mid, but the map editor I liked most wad DoomCad. To make a sector, you had to place the vertices first, and then you drew the sector similar to Doom Builder, except you were connecting the dots you already placed. Any instructions on how to use was either in the book, or DoomCad's "on-line" help file, which was actually pretty good, iirc.

31 minutes ago, Capellan said:

 We even got some tools that I wish modern editors had, like increment floor/ceiling height (so you could select multiple sectors and easily move them all up or down by the same amount).

DoomBuilder 2 can also do this; go into 3D view, select the sectors you want to edit, and scroll wheel up or down.  It'll move all of them up or down at the same time, preserving the relationship between the height of the selected sectors.

My first editor was Doom Builder 2, which I started mapping with probably in like 2011/12, so I by no means have any experience with older mapping tools. When I was like six or seven years old I can remember watching one of my older cousins using DeaPsea. From what I remember of what I saw, the editor probably wasn't much different than Doom Builder 2 (I have never used that editor myself, let alone saw it used since then so I could be wrong). I think the level he was making contained a massive outdoor area inhabited with Cyberdemons.

I can remember asking my Dad about Doom mapping shortly after this and he told me about how one of my uncles had attempted making a level for Doom in the '90s. He said the level was nothing but an empty cave with nothing in it... and took months of hard work for my uncle to put together... Needless to say, my dad didn't think Doom mapping was easy or fun so he discouraged me from attempting it, it took me probably ten years to finally try it.

While I may not have any experience with mapping in the '90s, I have unlimited respect for the people who tried it and stuck with it in spite of what I can tell must have been a very complicated set of systems.

26 minutes ago, Cynical said:

DoomBuilder 2 can also do this; go into 3D view, select the sectors you want to edit, and scroll wheel up or down.  It'll move all of them up or down at the same time, preserving the relationship between the height of the selected sectors.

Yeah this specific tool of Doombuilder's is a life saver; so much easier than having to select a bunch of sectors then incrementally adjust the z axis using the up/down arrows (for Wadautor anyways); then going into the level and checking your work only to realize that you forgot to add textures to the backside of some linedef.    I know fundamentally it's about the same number of steps; but being able to see it in 3d mode is, for me anyways, one of the best new features that modern editors have.

Well that and they don't randomly crash.....or take over 15 minutes to compile a 600k map....

59 minutes ago, Cynical said:

DoomBuilder 2 can also do this; go into 3D view, select the sectors you want to edit, and scroll wheel up or down.

I do actually use that feature, but I don't generally like using visual mode for anything except texturing, so I'd really love a way to do it in sector mode.  I am an old man and stuck in my ways :)

6 minutes ago, Capellan said:

 I am an old man and stuck in my ways :)

Ain't that the truth! BTW, Heat Miser called the other day and asked if there's any force on heaven or earth that can alter your sacred map-playing schedule to take her out on the floor for a dance. She said, "I have all these lovely Cacos for Adam, and I know he loves Cacos!" ;D

26 minutes ago, Steve D said:

Ain't that the truth! BTW, Heat Miser called the other day and asked if there's any force on heaven or earth that can alter your sacred map-playing schedule to take her out on the floor for a dance. She said, "I have all these lovely Cacos for Adam, and I know he loves Cacos!" ;D

Can Heat Miser deliver me either 3 more hours in the day, every day, or Scarlett Johansson?  Either works for me.

20 minutes ago, Capellan said:

 

Can Heat Miser deliver me either 3 more hours in the day, every day, or Scarlett Johansson?  Either works for me.

 

You don't ask for much, do you?

I just got off the phone with Heat Miser, and because I'm old, I used the land-line. Heat Miser conducted intense negotiations with God and/or The Laws of The Universe. She was a little unclear on who she was speaking with, or if there is even a difference between the two, but their answer was emphatic, "No can do, but call us back in 3 billion years when Earth is a lifeless, burned-out cinder and maybe we can work something out." Alas, that won't help you in the world of today. So then she called Scarlett Johansson's agent -- as an aside, I well understand your enthusiasm for ScarJo -- and he was more accommodating. He said he'd be willing to sign Scarlett over to you if we -- Heat Miser and myself -- agreed to pay her his estimate of her future earnings. He was a self-interested party, because he gets 10% of that. His estimate for ScarJo's future bankability was $150 million USD. As you might guess, Heat Miser thought that was a bit steep. I mean, how many X-Men movies can she do? But that rat-bastard agent held firm. So we went and broke our piggy-bank and we were short by approximately $149,999,999.99 -- yeah, it's been a bad month.

So I guess poor Heat Miser has to wait a little longer for that dance, 'ey Adam? She did say, though, that if you eat your Vegemite and come in at top shape, you might beat her in 15 minutes on a UV pistol-start. 15 glorious Caco-filled minutes. And one thing she can promise you, is lots of Cacos. ;)

I used DCK for my early mapping, it did have an alignment function but sometimes the editor crashed so I went back and forth between two of the editor versions.

Used to map in a DOS program (WADED) in the 90's.  It was fun, but I wouldn't go back to it.  DoomBuilder is too god damn convenient.
I remember having to draw the sector lines clockwise or counter clockwise to control normal direction.  If you could flip them I didn't know how to do it.

Everything required a lot more patience.  Even testing took time, typing out file paths and commands etc, so you couldn't just pop in, see things were dicked up, pop out, attempt fix, repeat.  Took a lot more thoughtfully staring at a screen.  Youtube didn't exist, so tutorials were harder to come by and only came in textual format.  Luckily the community was pretty forthcoming with tips and tricks, which were aggregated for me by family.

I was eight or nine probably.


Aligning textures was garbage, to the point that people usually only did it for special instances.

DoomCad 6.1 was the first editor I messed with back in 2003 years before I ended up with Doom Builder & DB2.

7 hours ago, Capellan said:

We even got some tools that I wish modern editors had, like increment floor/ceiling height (so you could select multiple sectors and easily move them all up or down by the same amount).

Sometimes in GZDoombuilder, ill plan out an entire map layout all flat, then ill select a huge portion of the map and change the floor and ceiling heights to ++128 which bumps them all up an additional 128 units. This pushes me to convert at least a couple rooms into lifts or corridors into staircases. Its a cheesy way of faking height variation when you didn't plan for it ahead of time.

I agree though, there are some instances where older editors just did it better. The stairbuilder tool in WAD Author made much more sense and was easier to use for me than the one in GZDB.

it would be cool among the list of "modes" you can switch to in GZDB, there could also be emulator modes of different editors, like a HellMaker mode, a DEU mode, a DCK mode, etc. without the horrors of its instability. GZDoombuilder seems to be an all encompassing editor, it just has a really convoluted interface IMO. If you could just select the type of editor mode you want, it would shake up the UI a little bit to best resemble the editor youre used to using. It could give us newbies a taste of the past as well.

All I really want from Doombuilder is a separate visual layer that you can sketch on. So you can plan a map to scale. Nothing fancy, no opacity options or cutting and pasting, just draw and erase. Maybe 2 or 3 brush sizes.

Otherwise it has features I've only recently learned about. Probably some I'm unaware of.

4 minutes ago, Revae said:

All I really want from Doombuilder is a separate visual layer that you can sketch on. So you can plan a map to scale. Nothing fancy, no opacity options or cutting and pasting, just draw and erase. Maybe 2 or 3 brush sizes.

Otherwise it has features I've only recently learned about. Probably some I'm unaware of.

I haven't used it myself, but I have heard that there is a way to use a custom image as a background, which could be used to do what you are talking about. You would have to make the image elsewhere, though.