Are editors dumb, or is it my parent's fault?

Ok, I've dug out my Starwars Legacy back up CD, and have been doing some catching up on some old maps. Of course I have a MILLION (oh I'm being quite literal here!!!) and one errors per map, and it really pisses me off to think that I have to go through and figure out a way to fix half the crap without chucking the whole thing and starting from scratch.

So anyhow I figured I'd start doing a little experimentation, and I realized that both DeepSea and DOOM Builder seem to hate it when I for example draw a room witha floor at 0, and a ceiling of 128, then draw another, toss a couple crates in the room, then draw a square around those crates, raise it to 256, then adjust the crates ceiling to 256 as well. For some reason there appears these little "invisible sectors" that still have a ceiling height of 128. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM!??! Oh WOW, sector so and so is not closed anymore, how come!?!?
For another example, I have a series of sectors that increase floor height each sector, like stairs. Ok, well I highlight all there walls and drag them back a bit to make the room larger. Well now all of those stairs have become unclosed sectors too! Absolutly amazing!

Here's a good one, I go into DOOM Builder, need to divide a wall into 2 so I can have a switch on each side. I simply drop a Vertice in the center of the wall, make my switches, save load up the map, and now for no reason what so ever, half the wall has became a hallway of mirrrors.

For my last example, I make two small quares that reach to the celing on either side of a hall way, between them I create a new sector, I highlight it after hitting the C key, goto Misc in DeepSea, select Make Door Out Of Sector or what ever, then it tells me that it has 76 rather than 4 sides. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?!?!

After fucking around for just a few minutes, I begin to realize real quick why I have over a million errors on my old maps. So I ask of you all:

Am I imbread, or is there some settings in the DOOM Map Editors that i have over looked that could save me a world of trouble?

What about Wadauthor?

Dunno, I don't usually mess with the old stuff, I figured things got better with time, perhaps I'll mess with it sometime.

The new doom builder (1.0) has many improvements regarding drawing. Its been tested for a while and works very expectable. Please try it again when its released (shouldnt take more than a few days now).

I'm looking foward to it, been so pretty damn good so far, considering it is even beta and all.

XDelusion said:
For some reason there appears these little "invisible sectors" that still have a ceiling height of 128. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM!??! Oh WOW, sector so and so is not closed anymore, how come!?!?

Probably because those crates' outer sidedefs still refer to the old room's sector instead of the new sector you've just drawn around them. You'll need to adjust these references.

yeah i pointed that error out to gherkin and it's been corrected for 1.0 :) strange deepsea doesn't have such a simple thing as that yet...

You have to place the sectors in a specific order with most editors (ie make a sector, place sectors within this sector).

Think of it as building the house then placing the furniture inside. I suppose editors could sort the sector references to prevent problems, but I doubt it's a feature thats been requested before.

DB 1.0 will allow you to draw a surrounding sector and it will references that 'furniture' inside correctly (and make it doublesided).

strange deepsea doesn't have such a simple thing as that yet

It looks very simple to us. You look at it and say "Oh it should go this and that way" very logic. But to make a computer understand this logic and to make him work correctly with it is a real braincracking puzzel!

yeah, i suppose so :) but i'm glad you took it on, it's certainly a very nice thing to have at my disposal.

Waded is really cool for drawing sectors.

But thats about all it's good for. :P

Actually DeePsea was supposed to work on enclosed areas, but I forgot to change the function call to a newer one:) It does partially though - just not on the example given. Use the Split sector tool where a bunch of objects are within one of the split sides and you'll see it fixes all of them.

As noted, there are some logical sequences you should alwways follow, regardless of editor. This will save you a lot of rework. Plus once you get a bad sector reference, all subsequent drawing can go bonkers. Plus bad sector references can make many other tools not work properly either. You have to fix mistakes before you continue. So run the error checker often for closed sector mistakes.

Changing the #of sides of existing lines is something that drove many level makers nuts a long time ago. Thinking about it some more I agreed! The problem is that the author knows exactly what is going to happen, so of course these weird things never were a problem for me. And that's the hard part in all of this - anticipating the experience level of a user.

No way will it always be correct though, since you can draw and automatically slice across sections of a level and that can create sections too complicated to get right (within a reasonable response time). It's always a goal though.

Now I'm REALY excited about 1.0! I'm one of those people who often times move into a house, then decide I want to remodel the entire house... :)

Very useful for people who'd like to remix there old maps and what not.

Invisible sectors? I asked that a while back. If you just flip the offending line (the one where you walk off of but don't fall like you should), it works ok. Of course I'm only speaking for WadAuthor; I dunno how it works in other editors. But 99% of the time that works (and the other 1% of the time it's some other line).