Maps from Memory

Okay, this is how this works.

1. Open your favourite level editor.
2. Reproduce e1m1 from memory as accurately as you can.
3. Don't upgrade the gameplay or the visuals or anything. Resist the temptation to leave your own unique stamp on the product. Just try to remake it faithfully. This is a memory challenge, not a creativity challenge.
4. Don't you dare look at the original e1m1 or any copies of it, not even before you start. The longer it is since you've seen that map, the more interesting the reproduction process will be.
5. When you're done mapping and testing your copy, you can finally look at the real e1m1, and other people's attempts. Either be disappointed by how far off you were, or horrified that your Doom-addled brain holds a pixel-perfect copy of e1m1 within its clutches.
6. Package the wad up with your personal observations, upload, and share!

Here's mine. If you're going to give this a try, don't look yet.

I hope I'm not the only person willing to try this, or else I'm going to feel very silly.

I will try this after i finish the current map i am working on for doom2...which should be done soon.

This could get very interesting. Will try it .... think the textures will be the hardest part to remember.

can we give feedback on people's attempt? I mean some feedback could give hints to those who wanna attempt at remaking e1m1. Just want to make sure before giving my opinion.

Interesting excercise. Shows what I remember from the level, but it still feels kind of wrong ...

http://wadhost.fathax.com/files/E1M1%20Memory%20AB.rar

Archvile78 said:

can we give feedback on people's attempt? I mean some feedback could give hints to those who wanna attempt at remaking e1m1. Just want to make sure before giving my opinion.

Let's hold off on specific feedback for at least a couple days, so that whoever wants to try this can try it with a blank slate. Hints are just as likely to hurt anyone who tries this as help them, anyway - they may just interfere with the mapper's mental images of the map.

AB, I liked seeing yours. I really do find it fascinating to see what information different brains consider important enough to keep.

Me me! I will do it!

Ah shit, if it was something like MAP01, I'd have it nailed down to the very last texture. I might try this if I get really bored.

Here is one I made two days ago (when Creaphis announced this challenge in #zdoom), and slightly modified today just to fix a rendering error and a thing placement bug (when I moved a sector and forgot to move the thing it was on with it.) It's not perfect, of course, or even a stellar example of mapping, but it'll do.

EarthQuake said:

Ah shit, if it was something like MAP01, I'd have it nailed down to the very last texture. I might try this if I get really bored.

Yeah, I was thinking MAP01 might be too easy :) But then again, maybe our attempts would be farther from the real map than we'd expect.

The Green Herring said:

Here is one I made two days ago (when Creaphis announced this challenge in #zdoom), and slightly modified today just to fix a rendering error and a thing placement bug (when I moved a sector and forgot to move the thing it was on with it.) It's not perfect, of course, or even a stellar example of mapping, but it'll do.

Cool! I didn't think anyone in that channel had paid me much heed. Your attempt appears to be the best match so far. Good work.

After playing E1M1 and both TGH and creaphis' versions, I have to say I was so off in a lot of things ... TGH's is definitely the closest. Looks like a good time to do another run through of the ultimate doom **

It's funny, I don't think I could come up with anything remotely decent, but I can immediately spot where your guys' maps differ from the original.

Yeah, it's easy to do that with someone else's map attempt. Our brains have all grabbed onto a unique mesh of facts about that level, and when we have a fact that someone else lacks the error is blaringly obvious to us. Of course, there are also gaps in your knowledge that other people could fill.

Also, even when making my own map I always knew it differed from the original. But, the question that I couldn't answer was, "How?"

Enough Doomworld for today. I'll see how this is coming along another time.

I obviously have a terrible memory - while my E1M1 clone is roughly the right shape, most rooms are the wrong size or out of proportion, there are incorrect textures everywhere and don't ask me about lighting or thing placement. Will do some more after I've had some sleep.

BTW - I'm doing the original E1M1 without the shortcut to the blue armour.

I think MAP01 would be easier. I'm even more familiar with that.

This is quite an interesting idea. I think I'll give it a go. I'm pretty sure that I have a very good memory of a lot of episode 1, particularly the first 3 maps and especially E1M1, having played it to death over and over and over. Although I haven't done it for some time, it's also possibly the standard map that I have DMed in the most so I think I have a good idea of item placement even down to which are flagged as multiplayer.

However, pride often comes before a fall so I'm prepared to be proved wrong. Give me a couple of hours, maybe 3 at the most. I reckon that'll be enough.

/fires up DeePsea.

Cool idea. I did a bit of two rooms yesterday but everything felt wrong.

OK, well, I'm not sure whether to be pleased with this or embarrassed.

I fired up DeePsea after making my last post and set about making as much of the map as possible in a single sitting.

Because of the unusual nature of what I was doing, I adopted a slightly unusual method of doing it. I drew out the shape of the map as best as I could from memory, starting near the P1 spot and progressing logically through the map. I just laid down sectors at default settings so everything was 128 tall and with MARBLE1 walls. What I was trying to do during this phase was get the shape right.

Once I had something that looked as close as possible to my memory of the map, I went back and set what I thought were suitable sector heights. I don't know that the actual floor heights are, but I have a pretty clear image in my head where a step is 16 or 8 units lower/higher than the adjacent sector so I used that mental image as my guide. As I did this stage, I also set light levels.

Then I went through the map, again from P1 spot to the end, and textured the walls using as much of my mental image of the map as possible, then I repeated the process for the floors and ceilings. Finally, I went through the map again in the same order placing items as I remembered them - trying to remember difficulty and multiplayer settings as I went.

Very little was done in 3D mode (just a small handful of alignments). Most was done in 2D editing mode.

All that took a while and I really didn't know what I was going to get. I ran DeePsea's error checker and it came up clean then I did searches for all the default textures to make sure that I had changed everything. I'd missed a couple of lines, so I changed them. Then I fired up the map in Zdoom.

I have to admit, I was actually pretty damned impressed with my efforts. For a moment, I thought that I'd failed to load up my map and that I was just looking at the default map. Then I noticed that the light level was a little low and the room seemed slightly too big. That seems to be the most common error that I have made. My light settings seem a little dark and I estimate that I have over-sized most areas from about 5-25%. Other than that, it looks pretty spot on.

I played through the map once in single player mode and once with the -deathmatch parameter. Anything that really jumped out at me as wrong got changed. This was minimal. I'd used a texture that looked very wrong on the first set of stairs and on the imp platform. I'd also flagged one of the wrong sectors as secret (which I only noticed because Zdoom makes a noise when you find a secret and it came at the wrong time).

I allowed myself another 20 minutes or so of editing to fix things and just look at the map in DeePsea to see what I could improve and then I decided to call it a day.

So, there you have it. About 2.5 hours to recreate E1M1 from memory. Most of it done in a single sitting working almost totally in the 2D editing mode of DeePsea, followed by 2 short playtests and another 20 minutes of tarting it up.

The result... I have to admit that I think that I have remembered it very closely. I haven't actually checked it against the original yet, but I think that it will compare very favourably. I don't think that I would have got any other map quite so spot on as I did here. Part of that was the fact that I cut my early editing teeth on skinning, skinning and reskinning E1M1 in DEU back in 1994 because I didn't know why every time I moved a vertex the "walls went all funny" (no knowledge of BSP at the time).

So, yeah, enough from me. Here's the map:

http://www.zen64060.zen.co.uk/examples/nje1m1.zip

Right, I'm off to compare it to the original. I suspect the common theme/problem will be that most areas are slightly oversized, light levels will generally be a little dark, sector heights will be slightly off (especially ceilings) and thing positioning and flags won't be quite right.

Enjay, wow. o_o

O_O How the...?

OK, well, yeah, mine is pretty close. Having now played the original, here are the things that struck me as very obviously wrong:

As suspected, light level is a little low in many areas and a few rooms are a bit bigger than they should be.

The start door has the wrong light texture on it.

The tech columns near the start should have pulsing sector lights. I forgot them.

The lower texture on the first platform in the room to the left of the P1 start is wrong.

I think that I put the wrong flats on all of the windows and most are either the wrong width or depth.

The secret tunnel is, for the most part, too bright. I knew that it looked wrong when I was doing it, but I couldn't work out what it was.

The flashing light sector in the second last room doesn't have a TLITE6_5 ceiling. It should.

There are also too many bad guys in this penultimate room on the easier difficulty settings.

I'm better at aligning textures than John Romero was "back in the day". :P

The added DM-friendly door near the start is too small.

I got wrong how the opening DM-friendly computer area works but, I have to admit that I think my mistake works better because you can go across it in either direction. :P

There are also obviously little texture mistakes all over the place and I'd be surprised if any vertex or thing is in exactly the right place compared to the rest of the map.

At the end of the day, however, the map does pretty much capture the feel of the original and is pretty accurate given that it was done "blind". I'm happy with it, but also concerned that I have committed so much of a video game map to memory. :/

Enjay said:

I'm happy with it, but also concerned that I have committed so much of a video game map to memory. :/

Haha, yes! This is the mixed feeling I was hoping to cause.

I was looking for a picture of a Quake door, such as those found in E1M1 of Quake, so I GIS for "Quake E1M1" -- half the screenshots were of Doom E1M1 rebuilt in Quake. (And none of them had that door, so I had to fire up Dark Places to take the screenshot myself.)

OK, having now played the other two submissions, this is a very interesting experiment.

Certainly, everyone has managed to recreate all the important basic elements of E1M1. It's fascinating how different people remember different bits of the map. The basic shapes are all there and the texture theming feels about right for the most part, but some subtle and some not so subtle details have changed. eg, even the very opening scene with the area in front of the player has had 3 pretty different appearances, in regards to shape, texture, relative positions of pillars and so on.

Interesting stuff. A good experiment.

I second enjay when he says its a great experiment, you should do that with others maps too when this one is done. ;)

I ended up finishing it but everything still feels/looks wrong.

http://timeofdeath.wrvids.com/doom/e1m1-tod.zip (map01, play with doom2.wad)

Edit: Now that I'm done, I played the other maps + original map and it was really cool playing everyone's experiment.

Your thing placement seems vaguely inaccurate. Can't put my finger on it.

I was 99% sure there were some doom2 monsters in e1m1 but I guess not.
Is it weird that we all made our maps the same way as the original was made? Like, the green armor room in the west, zigzag walkway in the east, exit in the south, etc.

ToD, there seems to be something else wrong with your map. It's playing the wrong music. ;)

About the NESW thing, I guess it depends how used you are to looking at the map from above. I'm very familiar with the appearance of E1M1 from above because when I'm editing in Doom mode, that's the first thing I see when DeePsea starts up. So, I've seen it hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I didn't even consider orientating any other way.

I couldn't really remember how the map looked from above when I started, but I think I tend to build maps based on the player 1 start facing north, so it was a coincidence.

One thing that really surprised me after I looked at the original map was that there are no monsters in the dark winding secret corridor with the armor bonuses. For some reason I thought I remembered fighting some demons or specters there, but apparently not.