Hi! I'm a noob making his first map. Help me.

1) I'm currently making a vanilla Doom 2 map in Doom Builder, and I've loaded up an alternate texture pwad for more variety. Can I get Doom Builder to automatically add the textures I use to my pwad, or do I have to do that with another program like XWE?

2) Is joining/merging sectors important for framerate or filesize reasons? I ask this because I'm already over 200 sectors in a relatively small area (I want my first map to have detail), but I could probably have fewer than 50 if I joined all sectors with the same attributes.

Well. for textures use XWE i tried doombuilder to load them in and they dont work.

As far as joining sectors.... i dont do it mainly because if you change your mind later and want 1 sector to have a certain tag, or effect, all the ones its joined with will also have it. i havent had it slow down frame rate and ive had over 1000's of sectors once.
Filesize on the otherhand, i dont know if its sectors or what that increases it more and more.
I wouldnt worry about the size of your wad, it shouldnt get too big.

1) The easiest way to do that is to start on a map (atleast 2 sectors so it will save) and then use the "Save Into" option. Beforehand, make a copy of your texture pwad. When you go to "Save Into", save your map into that copy of your texture pwad. Then close the map, reopen it, and your textures should show up. You could also do that manually with a program like XWE or SLumpEd...either way should be fine if you know how.

2) 200 sectors really isn't that much...though I do believe there are limitations with Vanilla Doom (whether or not sector count has anything to do with it or not is hard for me to remember...I haven't mapped for Vanilla in a LONG time). There are limitations set somewhere for ole Vanilla Doom...if you make your map too big you'll get HOMs in some areas. You may want to wait and see what the others say about the limitations...I can't remember. However, and I use this as a rule of thumb for mapping in general, if you can merge together any sectors, always do it. If you get into large maps like I do sometimes (1000-2000 sectors), then it can be a problem.

Thanks! (Yes, I'm the original poster.) Saving into my texture wad worked perfectly. It's a fairly large wad, over 2 megs worth of textures, but that's not too much to download nowadays.

Also, partly because I was curious, I joined as many sectors as I reasonably could, and that lowered my sector count from 234 to... 44. Heh.

In retrospect, I probably won't make a 'vanilla' map in its truest sense. I'll stick to standard Doom linedef actions, instead of learning any more advanced scripting already, but it'll probably require jumping/freelook etc.

You don't need to merge your sectors, as it has more or less no effect on framerate/size... what really counts is the number of sidedefs, wich stays the same even if yiou join all sectors with the same attributes!

In fact I'd recommend not to merge the sectors at all, since it can have unwanted side-effects, such as messing up your use of block-sound lines.

There is also the visplane limit in vanilla Doom.

But a little comment on 1) if your textures wad is very big, you don't want to merge it with your map wad until your map is done, because Doom Builder makes 3 copies of it for backups. It is also slower for Doom Builder as it has to copy all that information every time it writes the wad file.

Mechadon said:

1) The easiest way to do that is to start on a map (atleast 2 sectors so it will save) and then use the "Save Into" option. Beforehand, make a copy of your texture pwad. When you go to "Save Into", save your map into that copy of your texture pwad. Then close the map, reopen it, and your textures should show up. You could also do that manually with a program like XWE or SLumpEd...either way should be fine if you know how.

That is such a great idea. I really should have thought of that first before putting stuff into my Doom II Pwad instead (lol)