My first map

As you may have seen on today's edition of the /newstuff chronicles, my very first map has been released. And while the review it recieved wasn't anything spectacular, I'd like to have some of you check it out and tell me what you think. The map took me a while to complete, about 2 months of work, simply because I didn't know what I was doing for about a month. But thanks to the technical support and play-testing feedback I recieved from both Job and DoomBoy, I think it turned out alright.

Admittedly, the name of the map is kind of pretentious, but I wanted a cool sci-fi name for the map, so I just looked up some megadeth lyrics. Next time though, it's going to be harder :P

You can download it here: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=12519

As I said in the /newstuff thread, on reflection my review was a bit harsh. For a first release, it is really rather promising. The architecture is well done and shows good taste, and the failings that caused me not to find it too much fun to play are all fixable.

The bad texturing I mentioned seems to depend on the port used. Presumably in the ports you tested it with, it all looked fine. FYI, in Legacy and Prboom a door and a crate in the starting room are a mess.

There are two secret sectors that cannot be triggered in any way that I can see (and I tried in Zdoom too). Having it so the player can be trapped in the room with the berserk is a serious bug.

Regarding the gameplay balance, there are tools you can use to help check this. I see that STAT.EXE gives the ammo balance as a little over 2 (i.e. you have twice as much ammo as you need to kill all the monsters). That doesn't take into account infighting or the berserk either. The berserk is also highly useful in this map, where you frequently face demons in one-on-one situations - these are basically freebies with the berserk.

Grazza said:

The bad texturing I mentioned seems to depend on the port used. Presumably in the ports you tested it with, it all looked fine. FYI, in Legacy and Prboom a door and a crate in the starting room are a mess.

Hmm, everything tested fine in Zdoom and Doomsday as far as the textures go. Any idea what might cause them to be screwed up in other ports? I'm using DoomBuilder, if it matters.

I just don't want it to happen in my next map.

And about the berserker secret - I thought I had fixed that bug but apparently I did not. Funny, it never came up during testing but I always knew it was there. I must of just gotten carried away when I was bug fixing for this release.

But I do appreciate the comments.

I think that occurs in the way certain ports read the Nodes. You may try changing nodes builders.

Zdoom and Doomsday build the nodes for each map before you play it in a way that the engine supports. This way the nodes will be sure to work on the engines. Legacy and PrBoom don't do this, so you need to have good nodes in the map already which will work on these ports.

I know problems have been reported about using zdbsp to build nodes when Legacy is used.