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Soulless

Festering Cesspool - OTEX map

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Map name: Festering Cesspool

IWAD: Doom II
Tested-Compatible: GZDoom
Difficulty: UV only
Freelook: Optional
Jump-Crouch: No

Custom Sky: (Mechadon) Box o´ Skies
Custom Texture pack: OTEX version 1.1 by Ola Björling (Ukiro)
Music: Blood of the Unworthy (E4M5) from Raven MIDI Pack 2020 by Eris Falling


The main purpose to build this map was to get used to the OTEX textures.
I started with stock Doom II textures, but really needed something different and cool looking this time.
Big thanks to Clippy for a much needed hand with technical issues and playtest.

 

The map tries to recreate some sort of residual water treatment plant that connects with a serie of old abandonded factories.
Seems you fell into a manhole, can you get out of that festering cesspool alive?

 

Preview:

 

Spoiler

 

Screenies:
https://imgur.com/a/ZYTRCm9

 

idgames:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/d-f/fest_cess

 

DOWNLOAD:

v2.1 (updated)

https://mega.nz/file/F8ojAAjQ#r1jK7Y73ayIW6B0FpmWte6hP1tEI2OQ1MiWsBWUxNAU

 

Edited by Soulless : new link

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I really liked this one.  I played UV and missed two kills, two secrets, and one item.  The traps here are quite fun--a variety of enemies often attack from multiple directions, so you have to make quick decisions about target priorities.  There's a pretty intricate layout and a good mix of open and cramped areas, too.

 

OTEX suits the map and you used it well.  Having gone back and played the older maps of yours you recommended to me (Bitter Awakening and Riphean Mountains, both of which I enjoyed), I can definitely see you improving in a lot of ways.  You're good at giving your maps a sense of place and sprinkling in some environmental storytelling.  Nice lighting on this one, too.

 

I never got lost and only had to look at the automap for progression once that I recall (after I got the blue key, to find those blue bars, but this is an observation and not a complaint.)  My only nitpick is minor:  You can walk into a lot of the panels on the walls since they're at a low height.  It's rare, but this can mess up fights if you back up into one of them and are suddenly at a different height.  I personally like it when people use impassable lines on those kind of things.  They look nice, though.

 

I was wondering if the BFG was going to be too generous, but I don't think it was since you gated the ammo pretty well.  Nice map!

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Thanks for the feedback @Salmon. Nice to know that you played "Bitter" and "Riphean" too!

Glad you didnt have complaints about ammo, or health, tried my best.

I might block some panels as you mentioned, at least the ones that are just decoration and dont open at any moment, thanks for pointing that out.

About lightning, the more I map the more I see how important it is, it gives tons of atmosphere.

Those 2 kills you missed are inside secrets, probably the mega-armor or the soulphere in the water flooded area.

Thanks for playing!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fantastic map, I loved the realistic environments that mostly didn't hinder gameplay (adding impassable lines like salmon said is a good idea). Ammo and health felt just right, and the layout allowed for really fluid fights. Great job!

 

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Thanks for the video @Snaxalotl, most of the traps worked well. It seemed you were reluctant to use plasma, that made some fights harder,

you and clippy sure are SSG lovers!

Spoiler

One fight in particular (34:50 in your video) can be done easier if you just go inside the right door, the one full of barrels, and block them,

eventually they can get it, thats when you blow the barrels

I already updated link with some block lines on a few vents, and there was one texture giving error in the flooded area, was hard to see.

 

@mArt1And00m3r11339 I was afraid to make the ugliest thing around, theres some marvelous otex maps out there.

 

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Yup SSG is probably my fave weapon   . I have fun using them on Archies will even switch out if a stronger weapon cause I have fun with that stuff for example I really liked when 

 

Spoiler

I was fighting the twins around the two tall crates. I got to use the SSG and punchy arm there. Haha good times. 

 

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45 minutes ago, Soulless said:

@mArt1And00m3r11339 I was afraid to make the ugliest thing around, theres some marvelous otex maps out there.

 

You did great with the visuals. The screenshots that showcase otex typically have vibrant colors and massive architecture, but they don't show how well a more realistic setting could be portrayed like this one. This whole map gave me some half life 1 vibes which I haven't seen in a doom map before!

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Well shit, this map is pretty great. I'm really impressed with how it simultaneously manages to be fairly linear but also very interconnected, and so despite how sizeable it is, there were only a couple moments where I briefly got lost (remembering where the blue door was, for example). There was also a solid blend of very tight spaces with frantic fights and larger open areas without compromising the theme of the map. The constant traps/monster closets also seems to fit the theme very well, since it really does feel like this infested, awful, and dark place that you can't wait to get out of.

 

I also have to say how impressive the visuals are, and this is without even factoring in the OTEX pack. The visual geometry of the different areas was great, and is really what allows OTEX to shine in this map. You also managed to generally decorate the areas without placing too many details that obstruct the player's movement. Overall, it's about the most appealing sewer I've trudged through in a while :P

 

Combat wise, I felt like the map was engaging although maybe a bit by the numbers at times, and there wasn't really a single bad portion amongst it all. Just as a personal preference, I did start to feel like the frequent use of you-know-which-monster started to get a bit repetitive towards the end - in my opinion, when they stop surprising me is when it becomes less appealing to actually encounter them. But otherwise, you seem to command a solid understanding of how to build encounters, and I definitely enjoyed the constant struggle to slaughter my way through this maze of a map and finally escape.

 

A legitimate effort and a very respectable showing of your skills in this map.

 

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9 hours ago, LVENdead said:

Overall, it's about the most appealing sewer I've trudged through in a while :P

Thats music to my ears! Every old school fps game has to have some sewer themed levels. They have a bad reputation thats for sure (civvie sewer count comes to mind), but I love that gloomy atmosphere.

 

9 hours ago, LVENdead said:

I did start to feel like the frequent use of you-know-which-monster started to get a bit repetitive towards the end - in my opinion, when they stop surprising me is when it becomes less appealing to actually encounter them.

Totally agree, I probably shouldnt have added those closet monsters before the exit door, a bit redundant. I might change it.

(edit) Changes added in the new version 2.1, keeping the original link 2.0 just in case.

 

Thanks a lot for playing and for the kind words!

Edited by Soulless

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Solid work, I just want to point out GZdoom 4.5.0 reports these problems when the map loads:

 

Line 4819 (type 11:Door_Open), arg 4 is 50 (should be 0)
Line 4819 (type 11:Door_Open), arg 5 is 1 (should be 0)
Line 4822 (type 11:Door_Open), arg 4 is 50 (should be 0)
Line 4822 (type 11:Door_Open), arg 5 is 1 (should be 0)

 

It's probably nothing, but I've never seen these error messages before.

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@Caleb13 Im using 4.50 version too, but no message errors.

Maybe some doors that I scraped and somehow the speed or delay time was left in the line?

Probably nothing yeah, thanks for letting me know!

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TOO MANY FUCKING HELL KNIGHTS!

 

Right, now that I got that out of my system, let's chat lol. First off, Soulless, this is another incredible map and you should be very proud of your work. While the progression had me a little befuddled at first, it all finally clicked with me that this was a particularly large map that very much looped around itself. The layout and design is terrific, mate. I love this kind of weird, subterranean processing plant aesthetic going on that looks more abandoned and slowly being overtaken by nature rather than being corrupted by Hell's influence. Now combat-wise... sweet buttery Christ, fam, this has to be the one of the meanest maps I've played recently and that's saying something since I playtested for Alfredo's Bloodflow WAD. The constant surprise monster closets packed to the gills with Chaingunners and Hell Knights... so, so many bloody cowmen with their molten-hot snotballs of pain! ACK! Fuck me sideways with a a powerdrill, this had me swearing and hollering like a complete asshole. You reduced me into a grumpy heap shouting a mixture of praise, bewilderment, admiration and spite! Admittedly, this was more of an endurance test for me, though I do ham it up a bit for the video cos I'm a clown lmao. Speaking of that, video evidence is of course supplied and I hope you find my gameplay informative and entertaining. I'm fucking exhausted, you absolute bastard. ;^)

 

 

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I get the same warnings as @Caleb13 in 3 different versions of gzdoom (4.0.0, 4.4.2 and 4.5.0) and zdoom 2.8.1. They are probably benign though since the map plays fine.

 

I did my blind play through using copious saves and reloads in gzdoom 4.5.0. I was able to get all kills, items and secrets after spending an hour or so sweating over the tougher combat and tricky secrets. I got stuck in the bfg room for a while trying to work out what to do. I also got confused after collecting the blue key since I had forgotten where the blue door was. I had almost 300 kills before I picked up the first key (the red one). I was quite worried that I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere for a while but it turns out the path is fairly linear but appears not to be in several places.

 

The fights and encounters are at about the right difficulty on UV, likely to kill the average player a handful of times or two the first time attempted. I'm glad I elected to play with saves in my blind run, especially once the archviles and barons started to come out to play in the traps leading up to the blue key pickup and at the map exit. Mixing up the fights with cramped quarter battles in narrow corridors with the more open encounters works well.

 

Some of the secrets are quite tricky to find, which is a bonus. I'm not sure how useful the chainsaw secret is (unless you can't find the berserk secret) and the partial invisibility secret.

 

Overall I enjoyed the map although I found it a bit grindy near the end after I started to feel some fatigue after a long gaming session.

 

Thanks for sharing the map, I think a lot of people will enjoy it.

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@Biodegradable

Thanks a lot for the kind words buddy, and sorry for the hellknights man, maybe I should have spared a couple. In the 2.1 version there I deleted previous closets to the exit door, because of the grindy sense, but hey, better than barons right? more ssg friendly, less spongy.

 

Glad to hear you liked the aesthetics, I spent way too much time detailing stuff, to the point I forget totally about combat.

Im going to watch your always entertaining video as soon as I can, love to see mods on my maps.

 

1st of all thanks for passing by and playing my map!

48 minutes ago, tmorrow said:

I was quite worried that I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere for a while but it turns out the path is fairly linear but appears not to be in several places.

 

My maps are quite linear, the layout can make you think it isnt though. I agree after you get the blue key you can get confused for a sec in terms of "where do I go", but at the same time theres 2 paths for the blue bars, one opened shortly after, intented as a shortcut. I agree It could have been more intuitive.

 

Also agree Chainsaw is a bit out of place as it is, sometimes I make too many secrets, because I love to design them, but then I struggle

to put something inside without menacing balance, same goes for blursphere.

 

No idea about the gzdoom warnings as I stated above, and glad you had no issues during your run.

 

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, appreciated.

 

 

 

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Sewer level cou-

 

This is the most fun level i've played this month wow. I might have to check out your other maps because i had a blast with this, you're incredibly talented at mapping, though i almost avoided this map because the screenshots didn't interest me much (could be a mix or just a few of either flat graphical settings, poor angles or just not very good rooms to screenshot? maybe it could've even been that it's all just far prettier and more memorable ingame? i'm not really sure).

 

Onto my actual critique (though there isn't much to criticize here but oh well):

Spoiler

Did i mention that this is really good? Yeah it's really fucking good. Aesthetically it's very consistent though still also very varied which i really appreciate and really helps keeping the player from getting lost, which didn't happen even once for me despite being such a huge and long map. HOWEVER there are a few issues i'd like to point out: Now i do not know if this is your fault or GZDoom's fault, but while playing it i've had some issues i've never ever had with GZDoom, where it'd just randomly slow down then freeze, and when it unfreezes mouse movement would get extremely glitchy and flickery, at which point i'd have to save and restart the game (which is the only reason i saved at all). If it's your fault it could be because of poor optimization of monster closets or maybe finnicky reject tables if you had that enabled? Otherwise i might have to report this to the zdoom team because it's so bad it almost ruined my enjoyment of the map. Either way, here's a few other things: for one, i found it really obnoxious how some of the sewage hurts, and some of it doesn't (speaking of which i noticed you forgot to make a few sewage sectors to be damaging around the room with the 4 crushers around the green armor). And by far the most frustrating part to me was the BFG arena simply because of the awkward geometry (the window at the small room to the left being just slightly too tall to shoot projectiles through but allowing hitscan just fine, the 4 units long little pieces of geometry sticking off the walls easily able to get the player stuck on them, and the outer platforms generally being far too slim, but that's the only part of the map that i didn't find enjoyable.

 

The one thing i would change about the map (an easy one nonetheless) would be to allow the little pillars that get you from the center of the map to the outer areas (pretty much bridges) lowerable so that you don't have to spend 30 seconds backtracking to get back to the point you were in case of falling down. But now onto the positives i'll be brief since i don't want to sit you through an wall of text: the biggest problem most mappers seem to have is to keep encounters feeling fresh and unpredictable though still fair and fun, and you absolutely NAILED it on this. When i opened up a secret, got a soulsphere and had a cacodemon come out of the wall? i didn't expect that. When i grabbed the plasma rifle and the ground suddenly sunk instead of a few monster closets opening in the walls? that caught me by surprise too. Throughout the whole map i had this ever present feeling of constant paranoia and honestly quite a bit of fear (even if i only died 3 times on UV), helped especially by my graphical settings (i like to make my hardware renderer look just like the software renderer) and the EXCELLENT choice of music you had for this map.

 

Honestly i do hope you do more stuff with OTEX (and maybe even other texture packs) because for a first map using OTEX you could've easily fooled me into believing this is your 20th or so map using it because of how well you use it here. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for any of your future releases from now on :)

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Just updated version 2.1 after watching @Biodegradable getting torn apart by too many hellknights.

 

So yeah I deleted like 3 hellknights, and two more were switched by lower tier folks. Also added just a tiny bit of health and bullets just before the toxic damage area.

I also tweaked a line action since I saw how you can probably softlock some monsters, not allowing you to get 100% kills.

 

Was unexpected to see how you left enemies in the 1st area that later on were a serious danger, intentional but rare to see,

since most players will clean everything before make progress, I guess things got frantic hey?

The video itself was so much fun, laughed my ass off madly, you can call me whatever man!, I deserve it haha, Thanks you so much buddy.

 

@MattFright I have no idea what caused your freeze/flickery on gzdoom, Im using latest version 4.5.0, and havent

encountered any performance issues.

Toxic slime (green) is the only damaging floor on the map. Theres water and mud but those dont hurt.

Also theres a rad suit there to make it more intuitive.

That room in particular is all about how fast can you get the bfg to get rid of the pain elementals,

is optional and isnt tied to progress, comes with a price though.

 

Glad you liked the combat, I had to nerf it slightly in the last update,

but nothing that changes that feel of paranoia I love to induce to the player heh

Thanks for playing!

 

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1 hour ago, Soulless said:

Toxic slime (green) is the only damaging floor on the map. Theres water and mud but those dont hurt.

Also theres a rad suit there to make it more intuitive.

 

Ah, i guess i didn't pay much attention then, because i do know OTEX has a few "new" liquids that from a glance look somewhat similar, the green one might've been one of them

 

1 hour ago, Soulless said:

That room in particular is all about how fast can you get the bfg to get rid of the pain elementals,

is optional and isnt tied to progress, comes with a price though.

 

I honestly found it much safer and easier to just snipe them away from that little window with the chaingun or plasma rifle then more aggressively clean out the cacos before going for the BFG. I guess i cheesed it by accident?

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Played it with fast monsters for funsies, and it was still well balanced. (no commentary partially because my computer refuses to take any audio input for some reason)

 

Spoiler

 

 

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17 hours ago, Snaxalotl said:

Played it with fast monsters for funsies, and it was still well balanced. (no commentary partially because my computer refuses to take any audio input for some reason)

 

No worries for the audio! That was absolutely impressive, I havent tried myself on -fast mode,

and watching you survive this was something special buddy, many thanks!

 

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Glad your map is doing well it's quite well made and a lot to take in - amazing work

 

Here's vid of my very first attempt, on an older version of the map

 

 

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Thanks for sharing Clippy, your run helped me a lot, specially with the exit area, and with balance overall.

Also helped with that secret you couldnt find, now I feel is way more intuitive.

Another player that survived version 2.0 a.k.a (Too many fucking Hell Knights)!

 

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Finally got round to playing this map (been quite busy recently, small matter of moving country lol) and it was worth the wait! You're a great mapper as it is but this is your best work yet.

 

I've never personally felt inspired by the OTEX base/construction textures but maybe I should give them a second look because you use them to great effect here. The combat is also done really well, a lot of the fights keep you on your toes without being too brutal, quite like your Close Quarter Slaughter map. The MIDI is god-tier and suits the map perfectly.

 

After the red key door, I got lost for quite a while, eventually I found the way to go which I should've found sooner lol. Getting lost kinda stopped the immersion of the map for me, it wasn't quite the same to me after that, even if it's my own fault for getting lost! Though I would say the intro of the BFG and the amount of hell nobles also had an impact, I don't think the BFG suits this map well. 

 

I found all of the secrets (the last 3 I used the computer map for), that last one by the BK bars was especially hidden! Video here, but no audio commentary this time unfortunately.

 

 

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@Horus Thanks for the kind words buddy.

-As an Otex rookie I would say concrete textures are great, at least for what I was looking for, Im not so fond of doom II concrete ones.

-The midi is great, I was lucky searching through doomworld, I will surely check more from Eris Falling.

-I agree the action is similar to Close Quarter Slaughter map, its quick and not too brutal as you said, I was more focused on the texturing/layout.

1 hour ago, Horus said:

After the red key door, I got lost for quite a while, eventually I found the way to go which I should've found sooner

-Since the vid has no commentary, I thought you werent lost, just looking crazy for secrets!

1 hour ago, Horus said:

I don't think the BFG suits this map well.

-You are right about BFG, thats why theres not so much ammo for it, most in secrets. Its all about Shells and Rockets!

1 hour ago, Horus said:

that last one by the BK bars was especially hidden!

-It was fun watching you inspecting every corner for that last secret, hope it wasnt too obscure hehe.

 

Thanks for playing!

 

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