Is this writing ? (E3M5)

I recently came across E3M5 again and as always I was wondering, if this is supposed to be some form of writing on the walls. You know, I´m talking about the strange fiery symbols on the walls of the inner circle and the courtyard. Do these have a meaning or is it just some random "hellish symbol stuff"?

Runes perhaps?

Yeah I've always imagined they're a small sample of demonic writing. I suppose you'd have to ask the person that made that map to know for sure, but it's a good conjecture at any rate.

Ya know, I've been pondering about the same thing since I was 9 years old...And I still ponder about it today.

From what I can make out of it, the letters on the walls are: F, L, and O.
Can anybody here guess what F, L, and O could possibly stand for???
I'd really want to know :)

F-fire
L-lucifer
O-Obscene
??

http://www.johnromero.com/phpubb/viewtopic.php?t=2019

And still, nobody knows.

DarkJedi188 said:

Ya know, I've been pondering about the same thing since I was 9 years old...And I still ponder about it today.

From what I can make out of it, the letters on the walls are: F, L, and O.
Can anybody here guess what F, L, and O could possibly stand for???
I'd really want to know :)

It could be a name. The possible references I can think of are:

FLOEdit
Flo from that cheapass movie
Maybe a girl that Sandy knew?

They seem to be a cryptic way to make the textures used in them look good... like there's a fiery substance, or writhing faces, within the walls. They also have a function; to mark the secrets in the map. They might not mean anything else in particular...

E3M5 is possibly the most solid looking map Sandy Petersen made, and also possibly his first one... it shows up in the beta release, even (where it's buggy.) It doesn't have the rushed feel shared by many other maps he made, although it's playability isn't among his best... it looks like here he concentrated more on the visuals and on design tricks, and later on he moved on to playing attention to specific ways of giving each map a different playing style. He can be considered a messy designer overall, but also quite innovative or varied in the way he mapped.

Texture placement in E3M5 is too good to be one of Sandy's maps..


edit: looks like I've been owned again..
http://www.johnromero.com/lee_killough/history/designer.shtml

I never realized Sandy Petersen made that many maps.

I'm suprised he made some good ones. Nearly all of his UDoom maps were good, so what the hell happened with Doom2?

I thought E2M2 was Tom Hall?

Shadowfox said:

I thought E2M2 was Tom Hall?

Tom hall worked on it, and Sandy did the rest.

DooMBoy said:

I'm suprised he made some good ones. Nearly all of his UDoom maps were good, so what the hell happened with Doom2?

Maybe since the Ultimate Doom maps were so good, some of the creativity just drained out of him. Either that, or since the Aliens TC well underway, he figured if people didn't like the maps, they could make their own with DEU 5. So there wasn't really a point to making the Doom2 maps good anyway.

Some bad Ultimate Doom maps come to mind as well, such as E3M3 (Note FWATER on the ceiling all over the place) and E3M8 (the sector count isn't even in the double-digits IIRC).

Plus, where does FLOOR4_8 belong in an E3 map?

Tom Hall did a bunch of the maps often listed as Petersen's. Sandy finished them off, but the layouts are for the most part Hall's... except E1M8 (50% each.)

Speaking of Tom Hall, I really wish they would've stuck with some of the cooler ideas in the Doom Bible. There really was some great stuff in there; one thing that comes to mind being the Unmaker.

Tom Hall owns. I'm fairly sure he's responsible for the layout of a lot of the E2 maps, which are pure awesomeness.

Darkhaven said:

Some bad Ultimate Doom maps come to mind as well, such as E3M3 (Note FWATER on the ceiling all over the place) and E3M8 (the sector count isn't even in the double-digits IIRC).

Plus, where does FLOOR4_8 belong in an E3 map?

I don´t find the E3 levels so bad. The FWater ceiling would not be used in a modern pwad, but it was supposed to be some "hellish influence" which was responsible for binding the liquid to the ceiling.
And E3M8 is great! It´s a great slick final level. I hate complex final levels where you have to perform thousands of switch/key puzzles, so < 10 secs is perfectly ok here.

You should be banned for saying E3M8 is a good level.

Deathmatcher said:

And E3M8 is great! It´s a great slick final level. I hate complex final levels where you have to perform thousands of switch/key puzzles, so < 10 secs is perfectly ok here.

Err....great and slick are NOT the words I would use to describe E3M8. More like rushed and half assed. It couldn't have taken Sandy longer than 10 minutes to map out this atrocity.

E3M8 is good when you warp to it from the launcher, cause then you start out with nothing.

I don´t care how long it took him. I actually find it pretty and always found it to be a very worthy final map for Doom, sorry! (And yes, I did play 1000s of custom maps)

Calm down, guys, he's entitled to his own opinion. If he thinks the most half-assed map in Ultimate Doom is good, then so be it. Or something like that.