Big Map For Doom 1, nice shadow effects, thorough demo

The level is called Corpus Collosum. I've uploaded it to the /incoming section of the id ftp servers, and am now waiting to see what your reviewers think. Anyone else interested?

http://www.box.net/shared/4zv2eztqib

Edit: Screenies

Original Post:
It was meh.

999 monsters may be a tad much (I got tired of the ambushes around 496)

Architecture is good.

I got disoriented a few times (which could be a good thing).

Not sure where the "Nice Shadow Effects" come in, the beginning parts were pretty evenly lit. A little bit of shadowing going on in the later parts of the levels, is that it?

I found it a bit iffy that in the blue armor area, the entire surrounding area and hallway turned into a crusher, but not the platform with the armor. I suggest reversing it, make the crusher on the platform and some of the surrounding area.

Anyway, decent map, could use a little work.

EDIT: The map is looking quite a bit better now, keep it up!

Thank you very much for playing my level.

The trap you mentioned wouldn't be tough at all to survive if I set it up the way you suggested, so I think I'll leave it the way it is; nice and murderous.

There are 1669 monsters in the map, so I'll assume that figure (999) is the number of critters on some lower difficulty. It was tweaked for play at the settings I used to record the demo (UV with -fast makes for an intense hour of gameplay), but of course everyone who picks it up will have different preferences.

It does indeed get darker towards the end of the level, but that isn't the shadowing I was thinking of. What I was talking about occurs for the first time right after the first lava pit you encounter. There are shadows cast from said pit into the hallways directly adjacent.

I added lighting for almost every (indoor) candelabra and torch in the level. There are literally dozens of instances of it, it's impossible to miss, though I could understand a seasoned doomer mistaking them for automatically generated effects (since some ports perform similarly on their own without the aid of the mapper).

It was a fun brainless massacre. Though I finished it with 65 % kills on UV even though I killed everything that showed up. :/

I'm glad you had fun with it!

It gets a little less brainless when you start hunting for the final third of the kills :)

It's been a long time since I've heard that metallica track. I watched the demo up to the 2nd crusher. Shortly after the screen went black briefly then the demo went out of sync and the player died. But anyway this looks a lot better in gzdoom, which I assume it was designed for, than zdoom. Also, this map looks a lot more interesting with the fast parameter and seems it was designed for that. Before I watched the demo I played through about half of the level in zdoom (I think zdoom made problems like messed up lines near the chaingun and rocket launcher) but not with the fast parameter and for that reason it was pretty easy. Well the difficulty was only in the first time experience of not knowing what was going to happen and therefore that difficulty would disappear on any replay. And things like the invulnerability near the caco 'trap' seemed pointless (I basically easily killed the cacos with no need for the invulnerability then had to wait for those poles to go all the way down), but see how it made more sense with fast parameter.
From the point of view of a 1st time player as opposed to the creator, its pretty much walking around with the automap and saving every minute because its easy to die for petty reasons when you don't know what will happen next (like in the crusher or lava when you don't know the bridge will appear there). And the punishment for dying would be to restart from the beginning which was forever ago forcing you to replay the entire somewhat linear sequence. That's one reason I prefer shorter levels. After about half way through I got bored (probably because I had no fast parameter) but walked around with idclip. There's some nice looking stuff and I can appreciate how long it took to create. Can't really give an accurate review since I didn't have the fast parameter or gzdoom, but seemed like a level that wouldn't have much replay value. Also lots of curved lines, though visually interesting, sometimes snag the player when running backwards/sideways. Nice sky texture..

7.8 Meg? What is in that thing?

A couple of text files, a couple of wads, and gzdoom 1.0.27; everything that will allow a person to simply click "download" and play.

@gggmork: Thanks for the beefy reply, it improves my morning immensely.

It's remarkable that you mentioned the caco-trap where the invulnerability is, as I was playing through that just last night on easy and thinking the very same thing. Well, just a moment ago I edited it so that those restrictive poles start to lower from the moment you step off the teleport pad that warps you into the room. It doesn't do away with the strangeness of the presence of the invulnerability on lower difficulties, but at least it cuts out the boredom of sitting and waiting to proceed with the level.

Most of the pwads I download feel much the same to me as you said this one felt to you. That is, they consist of "walking around and ... saving every minute because its easy to die ... when you don't know what will happen next". So I guess that's just become a part of the thrill of it for me, sort of like riding a roller coaster. The greatest moments in Doom for me are the ones where I find myself actually tensing up over the controls, even leaning into my strafing. Gotta bruise 'em up a bit before you can spark that sensation. It's great when my own level can keep me on my toes just by the sheer velocity and volume of fire in the confined spaces (especially towards the end of the level; the very last room with the Cyberdemon was total catharsis when I finally ploughed through him).

And hey, that new sky texture's probably my favorite thing about this wad. Cool that you noticed that, too.

I think you don't need to include these extra stuff (I didn't download it but I hope you didn't include the doom2.wad), imagine if everyone do that?
If you want players to use certain port you can point that on the txt and the place where you "publish" it (this thread for example). Including a link to the download section of the source port web site should be a nicer touch that including the source port itself.
If you could upload a version of the wad and txt alone, that'd be great.

Sure, that sounds perfectly reasonable.

http://www.box.net/shared/4zv2eztqib

I watched the first 11 min and what i saw looks very cool. Keep it up!

Thanks for the second upload.
I just tried it, I'm very impressed, nice architecture. Denotes a lot of work and dedication.
Yet giant maps are not my choice, but people who enjoy this kind of maps will like yours.

I noted some missing textures (I'm using Gzdoom), perhaps they were included on one of the wads you didn't include on this version.

hardcore_gamer: I'll do my best man, thanks for the compliment.

Vegeta: I can't find what I missed, would you mind giving me some specific directions so I can track down those missing textures and fix them up?

a very large, complex, nice classic style map. BTW some things will needs a fix (like lowered doortraks, for example). Oh, and the music used for title\intermission isn't reallly cool.... i said this after playing the first release of this map. BTW excellent work, keep it!

I expressed it wrong. Invalid textures (missing the graphics for them). You can see some of them close to the starting area, there are a few more around the map.

Thanks, daimon!

Vegeta; I'm wondering if you might be loading the map up using the doom2 iwad instead of the one for doom1 (that would indeed be the wad I took out of this newer archive, as you suggested above)? When I start gzdoom up normally, I see nothing missing, but when I start it using doom2's iwad, then I see lots of them right from the very start.

Some aesthetic changes are included in this upload (link remains in the first post), reflected in the screen shots below.

i really like the sky. The rest seems pretty Meh TBH. The lighting COULD be better, but still, not half bad.


EDIT: Yeah, it's *******ely a grower. Keep up the good work.

Excellent. Good to know.

Very last upload. A new 12min01sec demo is included that reveals an ultrasecret of sorts that allows the player to bypass the last cyberdemon entirely (or kill him from behind impenetrable cover); it autoplays right before the normal 1hr3min demo detailing a total clear of the level. Demo1 has been replaced by an cheat-enhanced run for the secret exit lasting less than a minute (thanks to gggmork for pointing out to me that gzdoom will record cheats activated during a demo).

Has anyone watched that hour-long demo through to the end? and seen the trippy coda just prior to the cyberdemon confrontation. Or found it yourself. Did anyone see that, and if you did, what did you think of it?

Edit: A grainy video of the part I am talking about : http://youtube.com/watch?v=WQbFd6W88XM

Edit: Screens again

Saw both demos now (maybe the computer screen saver somehow caused it to go out of sync the previous time). Using invisibility to sneak past the chaingun spiders was cool and it looks more fun with the fast parameter. I guess I prefer shorter maps so you don't have to backtrack so far when you die (for someone who doesn't like to save) and don't get lost as easy. You had 1 percent health at one time and if the cyber hit you or something you'd have to start all over. I usually like having a map memorized before seriously playing it for speed or whatever, but its hard to memorize this even after watching the demo since its so huge unless you're the creator. On the other hand, for long levels, knowing that dying will result in starting completely over makes the end scarier/more nerve wracking since dying is then a more serious punishment (like in contra for snes, etc.)

Man that is one bigass map.

I kept thinking, Jesus Christ how many monsters are in this thing. Then I hit the automap in zdoom and went "oh."

What you have here is practically an entire episode packed into one map. I quite liked most of it. It does start to get a little tedious though. If it takes you an hour to finish imagine how long it takes someone who hasn't seen the level before. At least double I'd say.

I also liked the classic episode 2/3 styling. The level of detail was a little sparse by today's standards but I'm ok with that. A lot of recent maps have way too much detail imo.

A good level overall, I wish there were more like it being made, maybe a little smaller though.

I like the lighting in some of those screenshots. I'm downloading this now =)

Awesome. Whatever you enjoy and whatever you don't, be sure to let me know. I look forward to any comments or suggestions to help with future wads.

Along the same vein, thanks for the encouragement, stphrz. I hear what you're saying about the tediousness that can ensure after you've been run around a couple of times by some of the extraneous branches that are included. I wanted to see how big I could make a map, and that drive spawned this sucker. I had actually considered breaking it up into eight tiny levels just prior to release, but that wouldn't do justice to the original impulse.

I just noticed that my wad was rejected from /newstuff back at the beginning of this month for having the wrong txt file format. Hopefully, now that I've fixed it, corpcoll will make it into the next round of reviews.

I know, I know, I said the last upload of this wad was going to be it... but after playing Sigvatr's early beta release of Last Man On Earth, I can't help but feel my own wad is lacking in the absence of this simple, yet elegant, effect. So, I took a couple hours last night to learn how to use the DOOMDEFS lump. I customized the death sequences of several monsters with fireworks displays, as well as setting the scale and shade of candelabras and torches.

additup said:

So, I took a couple hours last night to learn how to use the DOOMDEFS lump.

Could you explain a little bit more about this? Because this lump looks like it adds a lot more realism to a map.

MORE UNNECESSARY SECTORS PLZ.

@the iron hitman--- You may find these two pages useful, they're the only reference I had:

http://zdoom.org/wiki/GLDEFS

http://zdoom.org/wiki/Classes


Of course, that's "only reference", other than this: http://www.box.net/shared/3d91ndhny0

That's the GLDEFS lump from Last Man on Earth, which I found invaluable, both as a source of motivation, and inasmuch as this GLDEF lmp served as a template for my own modified code (which I knew literally nothing about prior to nine or ten o'clock last night) http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/41750-last-man-on-earth/2/

If you need more to get you started, PM me about it and we can talk.




Here's some more screens whoring out those thousands of extra sectors... Just for you, Kaiser.