My Mapping Style

I'm just curious, thought this would be interesting to find out. I want to know if anyone likes how I make maps/wads or if I should change my style to something else?

You should practice by drawing actual buildings and architecture. Or building upon fully-imagined gameplay situations.

Dude, do what ever makes YOU happy! When I make a map, I make it how I would like it! If no one else likes it then it's their loss...

It brings back memories of old style doom wads alright. A lot like the 1994 ones we see in many /newstuff chronicles.

There are upwards of 50 quigillion old style maps. No need to make more of them.

Vile1011 said:

There are upwards of 50 quigillion old style maps. No need to make more of them.

Alright, do you have any good wads that you would recommend to take a look at for guidance?

SlatheDoomer said:

Alright, do you have any good wads that you would recommend to take a look at for guidance?

I don't see any reason to not design an "old-style" Wad if that is what you want. Having said that, there is a difference between a good old-style wad and a bad one. I recommend checking out the Blind Alley series by Gene Bird for some ideas. None of his levels were complex or had great (by todays 500 sector per room) detail but they were very fun, and juding by the reviews on idgames and in newstuff, I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

You can find them here

SlatheDoomer said:

Alright, do you have any good wads that you would recommend to take a look at for guidance?

First, don't listen to those OMGDETALE-OR-GAMEPLAY-BUT-NOT-BOTH people. Making maps look good is important, because looks contribute to atmosphere, which in turn contributes to gameplay. Boring, bland looking levels are usually accompanied by boring, bland gameplay.

The first misconception you should throw out is that sector count = good detail. When it comes to making maps look nice, it's 90% texture use and 10% sector count. Take a look at Agent Spork's Simplicity series. There aren't tons of sectors, but he's mastered texture usage, and thus his maps look better than many overly detailed ones.

I looked at your aquafina map, and you could make it look 1000 times better by smarter texture use alone.

It's probably best that you learn by example. What I'll do is, I'll take your map and "fix" certain parts, then post before and after screens explaining the logic behind what I did. I think this would work better than trying to write a "Texture usage" FAQ.

Vile1011 said:

First, don't listen to those OMGDETALE-OR-GAMEPLAY-BUT-NOT-BOTH people. Making maps look good is important, because looks contribute to atmosphere, which in turn contributes to gameplay. Boring, bland looking levels are usually accompanied by boring, bland gameplay.

The first misconception you should throw out is that sector count = good detail. When it comes to making maps look nice, it's 90% texture use and 10% sector count. Take a look at Agent Spork's Simplicity series. There aren't tons of sectors, but he's mastered texture usage, and thus his maps look better than many overly detailed ones.

I looked at your aquafina map, and you could make it look 1000 times better by smarter texture use alone.

It's probably best that you learn by example. What I'll do is, I'll take your map and "fix" certain parts, then post before and after screens explaining the logic behind what I did. I think this would work better than trying to write a "Texture usage" FAQ.

Yeah dude that'd be awesome!

Okay, I found 3 good areas right in the very beginning of the map that I'll use to show you certain texture usage concepts. I did this all fairly quickly, so its not perfect, but I think you can learn well from them regardless.

Probably the most important thing to keep in mind is how well textures tile. Some tile well vertically, some horizontally, some both, some neither. Some work well in thin strips, some work better on large surfaces.

Onto the first area...


The opening room is fairly bland. Silver is a pretty boring texture to use in large areas because it looks the same everywhere. Furthermore, lights really don't look good when tiled horizontally. Finally, you use silver on the back walls too. This makes the whole area like like a big splotch of gray. A contrasting texture would work better.

For the big gray surface, what we need is a grayish texture that's apt for vertical surfaces. The wall isn't large enough to worry about how well the texture repeats. Because of this, we can get away with only using a vertical slice of a texture. The texture I chose was PLAT1, not for the whole texture, but for the pistons on the sides. I offset the texture to get the pistons in the middle. This is a technique I use a lot to get extra mileage out of old textures. Although I don't use it here, another good example of this is in the BIGDOOR series. The bottom 32 or so pixels of the texture has a nice yellow and black warning label pattern that's perfect for horizontal borders.

I only wanted the piston part of the texture, not the rest of it, but the wall was too big. I added vertexes to make one line that was just big enough to hold the pistons, then made that line protrude very slightly from the rest of the wall. For the sides, we want a good thin vertical strip texture. SUPPORT works well here. If I had more patience I would've aligned it better too, but you get the idea.

Finally, I broke the light into two columns, because LITE doesn't tile well horizontally. In the middle, we needed another texture that looks good in thin vertical strips. LITEBLU does the trick, but because of the sector's height, it won't align well vertically. The thin blue lights would get caught inside the floor. So instead I made another sector for the middle column, just tall enough so that the texture repeats exactly as many times as it needs to.


Now onto the crusher...


Once again, silver is a bland texture. The same can be said of the COMPBLU in the middle. Because this room is higher, we need to worry about how well the texture tiles vertically. There aren't too many gray textures that do this well, so the first thing I did was make a boundry sector around the crusher with a lower ceiling than the room. Not only does this give us a contrast of colors, it makes sure the crusher texture doesn't have to repeat much vertically.

Second, I broke up the color monotony by adding vertical columns to the corners of both the crusher and the middle. For the crusher, I once again used the PLAT1 texture, but this time did the opposite thing and offset the texture so that the pistons didn't show at all. For the boundries I used SUPPORT, because the lighter silver color matches well with the darker gray of PLAT. For the middle, a good bronze colored texture contrasts well with the blue in the middle.



Finally, the TEKGREN bordering the first area.


Here is where texture tiling really comes into play. Notice how the bottom of the texture is cut off. There's a nice border about 32 or so units up, so we want the texture to end there. I added another thin sector behind the wall to accomplish this. For this thin sector, I wanted a good horizontally tiling texture, provided by PIPEWAL. I Y-offset the texture to get a thin strip of the brown tech portion, which contrasts well with the TEKGREN.

Another thing is that there's too much repetition here. Essentially we have the same green box pattern repeating many times. Thankfully the TEKGREN series has lots of ways to break up this monotony.

I added extra vertices to make two 64-unit long walls, for which I used a different TEKGREN texture. I made these surfaces protrude slightly, to make the wall look less flat. I wound up with a 64 unit long line between the two new surfaces, so why not use another TEKGREN texture there? The pipe texture worked nicely in this case.