Patrick Versus the DeeP

The question is simple. Is it worth buying DeepSEA? Also, will it work with GZDoom? Can it be configured for GZDoom?

Patrick said:

The question is simple. Is it worth buying DeepSEA?

No.

Patrick said:

The question is simple. Is it worth buying DeepSEA? Also, will it work with GZDoom? Can it be configured for GZDoom?

>Also, will it work with GZDoom?
Yes

>Can it be configured for GZDoom?
Yes

>Is it worth buying DeepSEA?
I love DeePsea. For me, it had done absolutely everything that I needed in an editor for years. It has nice little tools, aligning options, prefabs, lump management and much more besides. Seriously, I didn't need another Doom editing tool of any kind. It has a whole bunch of options - which I actually use - that do not feature in DB (1 or 2).

Why the past tense? Despite some minor changes that I am aware of, it doesn't seem as if it is being particularly actively worked on. As a result, if you have Vista, you will have problems installing it and a couple of very minor problems when switching between projects. More concerning to me is that, because it isn't being worked on particularly actively, there is no support for UDMF and, as far as I know, Jack Vermeulen has no plans to add it.

So, although I'm sticking with it for the moment, I can't honestly advise a user new to the program to buy it.

While its convoluted menus and dialogs scare the living crap out of me, I occasionally use DeePSea for merging texture lumps or doing other heavy work on texture/patch stuff, that SLumpEd and XWE don't let me do.

I've been told that DeePSea has the ability to see which textures in a wad are unused in its maps and remove them, but I haven't been able to find this function. Enjay (or anyone), got any ideas? :)

esselfortium said:

I've been told that DeePSea has the ability to see which textures in a wad are unused in its maps and remove them, but I haven't been able to find this function. Enjay (or anyone), got any ideas? :)

F7
"PWAD Lump arranging and more"
(load the WAD in question)
"Texture deletion" (button near the bottom right)

This will give you the option to list what DeePsea thinks are unused textures/flats and to delete them. Approach with caution. It isn't perfect. It doesn't know about animations, for example, but it can be a useful tool.

Excellent, thank you very much! :D

True, it takes a while to get used to Deepsea's interface, but it is not as bad as most people make it out to be.

I had used Deepsea extensively for a number of years, there are a few quirks though which bother me, for example when saving GZDoom maps, it repeatedly saves GL nodes every time I update and save a map. So I have to delete them before I can do anything else. Another thing is that nobody responds to emails for help anymore. I guess that real life is preventing further upgrades to Deepsea.

Ever since the release of Doombuilder 2 SVNs, I have been using it in combination with XWE, and lately SlumpED.

While Deepsea is an excellent program, I cannot recommend it to anyone, money or not. However, to really make a proper judgement, download the shareware version and see if you like it. If you do not like it for map editing, the other utilities do come in handy.

Kappes Buur said:

for example when saving GZDoom maps, it repeatedly saves GL nodes every time I update and save a map. So I have to delete them before I can do anything else.

Doesn't do it for me. There is an option to build GL nodes or not under the F5 options dialogue. You can also set an entirely different node builder under the nodes tab there if you want. eg, I use zdbsp when I'm working with GZdoom.

Kappes Buur said:

Another thing is that nobody responds to emails for help anymore. I guess that real life is preventing further upgrades to Deepsea.

I have had some responses from Jack Vermeulen, which is why I know some things have been worked on. I also know that he has been very busy with real-life work over the past couple of years. That is why there has been almost no work on DeePsea. However, there seems to be no obvious change to this in the immediate future and my gut tells me that if DeePsea falls far enough behind the curve, JV won't have much interest in catching up. However, that is just a guess and I have no evidence for it. I hope I'm wrong.

esselfortium said:

While its convoluted menus and dialogs scare the living crap out of me, I occasionally use DeePSea for merging texture lumps or doing other heavy work on texture/patch stuff, that SLumpEd and XWE don't let me do.

Oh come on, didn't we have this exact same discussion about Reason with you being on the other side of the argument? :P

Anyway, I bought DeePsea many years ago. At the time, it was the first editor to support large maps (65,536 segs/sides/etc. instead of 32,768), so it was a no-brainer. I'm still using the same version I did so long ago, and it's worked quite well for everything I've tried to do. It did take a rather long time to learn it to the level that I could focus on what I was building rather than how to build it, but I wasn't exactly a dedicated learner either. If you took DeeP as a college course, you could probably cover everything you need to know in 2-3 weeks at a standard 100-level course commitment.

The lack of a 'make sector' function has always bothered me and made things more time-consuming than necessary (though it may have been added in later versions), but otherwise the $20-something was quite worth it for all I've done with it. If you're new to editing, you might be best off with DoomBuilder, as it's apparently a bit more efficient and a bit more common. But for me, it's more efficient to stay in familiar grounds than to try to learn a whole new interface, so I'm staying with DeePsea.

Lüt said:

Oh come on, didn't we have this exact same discussion about Reason with you being on the other side of the argument? :P

All of Reason's menus and dialogs are organized in a way that actually makes sense. Want to place a device, pick it from the Devices menu or the Devices palette. Reason's interface looks scary when you've got a lot of devices loaded and you don't know what an LFO is, but if I was new to Doom mapping and I opened up Deus Vult or something in Doom Builder I'd probably be afraid of it too. But the paradigms of it are well-organized and easy to understand.

In DeepSea, on the other hand, you get this, and feature organization that's completely nonsensical.

Inside the program, everything looks as though it was just thrown into whatever menu Deep had selected at the time he added the feature. Why is "Save and Make an IWAD" in the edit menu instead of with the other Save options? Why are there cryptically-titled options to enable or disable supporting the abilities to use different port features instead of just having different map configs for those ports? Why is there what appears to be a colormap editor in the preferences dialog, of all places? Why does every dialog have a billion awkwardly tacked-on notices and warnings to make up for how little sense the interface design actually makes?!

I've been using various Doom editors since 1998 and Hellmaker, Doom Builder 1, Slade, Doom Builder 2, and even my brief stint with Yadex were all relatively easy to pick up and get mapping with. DeepSea seems to just go out of its way to make as little sense as possible to anyone other than its creator.

>Why is "Save and Make an IWAD" in the edit menu instead of with the other Save options?

Fair question, don't know :/


>Why are there cryptically-titled options to enable or disable supporting the abilities to use different port features instead of just having different map configs for those ports?

I have found that useful in the past... but i can't think when or why. :P

>Why is there what appears to be a colormap editor in the preferences dialog, of all places?

It isn't a colormap editor - its a color preference editor so that you can pick the colours of different lines (etc) in the editor.


>Why does every dialog have a billion awkwardly tacked-on notices and warnings to make up for how little sense the interface design actually makes?!

Many of those are actually "are you sure you want to do that" warnings that can be switched off with "expert mode". The other notices that form part of a dialogue I, generally, found useful when I first started using the feature. Not because the feature was particularly difficult or illogical to use but because the task it was doing, and the arcane nature of some Doom editing, was.

>I've been using various Doom editors... DeepSea seems to just go out of its way to make as little sense as possible to anyone other than its creator.

As have I (well, not Yadex, but... yeah) and conversely, I actually found DeePsea one of the easiest to pick up after migrating to it from WinDEU.

Enjay said:

It isn't a colormap editor - its a color preference editor so that you can pick the colours of different lines (etc) in the editor.

No, that's not the thing I'm talking about. This is actually called "Colormap Edit", and it opens in a small separate dialog, out of one of the preferences dialog's tabs. :S

And DeepSea was actually even one of the first editors I tried. It didn't make sense to me then and I gave up on it and went back to Hellmaker, and it didn't make any sense to me still when I tried it again recently. :(

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

It was the best $35 I've spent in my entire life.

esselfortium said:

No, that's not the thing I'm talking about. This is actually called "Colormap Edit", and it opens in a small separate dialog, out of one of the preferences dialog's tabs. :S

Oh, you mean this?



That, as you may be able to guess from my screenshot, is for defining colours that can placed on a line like a texture, for deep water etc. eg, in my pic, the WATERMAP word can be used by Zdoom to emulate Boom's built in WATERMAP palette/colormap. However, it doesn't exist as a real texture, so you can define it there. So, I reckon that putting it in the preferences beside the other texture preferences is, at least, a fairly reasonable place to put it.

I paid for it back in 2003. Of all the cash I've thrown away at games, software and other computer crap, spending 35 bucks on Deepsea was really nothing, and since I use it still to this day I think I got my moneys worth.

I liked using it when I did - it had a bit of a learning curve due to how easy I found it to somehow mess things up within my map, but I agree that it's got nice little functions here and there.

However, that was over 3 years ago. I only use Doom Builder 2 and SLumpEd now. :P

Enjay said:

there is no support for UDMF and, as far as I know, Jack Vermeulen has no plans to add it.

I seem to recall him getting into flamewars over the creation of a new map format in the past...(unless Jack Vermeulen and RandomLag aren't the same person?)

WildWeasel said:

I seem to recall him getting into flamewars over the creation of a new map format in the past...(unless Jack Vermeulen and RandomLag aren't the same person?)

He is and your recollection is correct.

In fact he repeatedly sabotaged such discussions. Presumably to save himself some work.

esselfortium said:
While its convoluted menus and dialogs scare the living crap out of me, I occasionally use DeePSea for merging texture lumps or doing other heavy work on texture/patch stuff, that SLumpEd and XWE don't let me do.

Yeah, it's rather clunky to use, but I use the free F7 feature to extract and add graphic resources ever since I found color 255 better for the background than cyan, which visually distorts adjacent colors with a good amount of red. Deepsea is about the only graphics editor that lets you define both the index and the color for the background. XWE also has some TEXTURE handling bugs which make me wary of using it for textures.

Does he still charge $9 or whatever it was for each and every patch?

If you're getting into Doom editing for the first time evar, just get Doom Builder 2 and stick to it.

I started with Wadauthor, which used a different method of sector creation to almost every other editor, but i finally got myself used to the change.

Enjay said:

I have had some responses from Jack Vermeulen, which is why I know some things have been worked on. I also know that he has been very busy with real-life work over the past couple of years. That is why there has been almost no work on DeePsea. However, there seems to be no obvious change to this in the immediate future and my gut tells me that if DeePsea falls far enough behind the curve...

I think DeePsea fell behind that curve many years ago to be honest. Updating DeePsea to modern standards would be a monumental undertaking and frankly, it would be completely wasted effort. A much more viable prospect would be porting the logic for some of it's more useful features to Doom Builder 2.

I just came back to mapping after a ten year hiatus and the first editor I tried was Wadauthor. A scripting,etc...tutorial was available which was geared more towards Wadauthor and I had alot of catching up to do but I couldn't draw sectors the way I remembered doing before. So I tried Deepsea and quickly ran it to it's trial limit and then paid for it's registered .exe but then I try to import patches and got so frustrated that I almost punched my monitor! I got it to recognise transparencies after several attempts but can't tell you how. Something to do with converting it to what the program wants but I was importing graphics that were already doom pallette. Yeah...it's the whole 0,255,255...thing (gotta tell it what to see as transparent)but this convert option also destroyed the color of regular Doom graphics on several attempts. It's easier to import with SlumpEd by far.

Enjay said:

I also know that he has been very busy with real-life work over the past couple of years.

But...I paid for this! Real-life money! But don't get me wrong...I should've noticed the year on the website (2006)! And I love the map editor aspect only because I've gotten familiar with it? Throw the graphics manipulation into the trash. Couldn't be much work to change the menus? Oh that Doombuilder2 looks really nifty, though! Doombuilder2 and SlumpEd! Use those and get familiar with 'em before spending money on Deepsea. All my praises go to those individuals who maintain and offer ports and editors for free! True fans that are keeping this Doom 'community' alive (site moderators, too!). And I would never tutor someone on how to use a program that another is charging money for! You have all these people putting alot of work into some great programs seemingly for the love and glory without charging a dime. Refer them to the website. "RandomLag"...fitting.

aw darnit there i go after six months of perusing this forum and promising myself that i wouldn't screw up on my very first post and look what i do...like i'm gonna tell a regular producer of quality levels like Enjay to NOT give help on an editor?! I've got a small handful of other's work on my computer that i refer to for help which includes two sets of levels by Enjay! It's an indication of how frustrated i've let myself get while trying to use DeePsea. grovel grovel let me do this right and stop babbling......I do NOT recommend DeePsea (even though it does MORE than any other map editor I've seen) because It's so damn hard to figure out! i'll crawl back into my hole to work on my mental issues now. you're welcome.

One thing you gotta realize, back when most of us bought Deepsea, it literally was the best option. Doombuilder didn't exist yet. If it had, I would have probably been using it to this day. I was using Deepsea since the DOS version (called DOSDEEP something or another). Then I found a windows version called Deep97, and that's what version I ordered, although the version sent to me was Deepsea. I've used it for over a decade and I have no regrets about buying it. As I've said countless times, it was the best $35 I've spent in my entire life.

Yeah I don't really understand the 'Deepsea is too hard' thing. I taught myself how to use it without looking at it's documentation or anything. Granted I've used some archaic editors and I'm fairly computer savvy but really, if you have any experience with any editor it's not rocket science.

It's not so much Deepsea is too hard. It's more, Deepsea is a mess.
But to each their own. I'm personally too cheap to pay for something that I can get as good as or better for free. (10 years ago I was using DETH and I was loving it. :p)

From what i have seen of DeepSea it reminds me a bit too much of ye olde DEU.
But that might be just myself...

I started with an old editor called "DoomCad" years ago, some of you old timers may remember that one! Then I saw a Map made by "Dr. Sleep" and he recommended DETH and a little node builder called ZenNode and I loved it. When ZDoom came on the scene I went to a modified version of DETH called ZETH and still enjoyed it.

I then read some interesting tidbits about DEEP and I just liked the way it looked but I was reluctant to switch to a different editor. Then DeepSea arrived on the scene and it included just about everything in one package. I tried the shareware first and I had no problems using it, I then ordered the registered version and I've had no regrets.

I have no issues with Doombuilder and consider it a fine editor but I love Deepsea.

I'm running Vista Home Premium 64-bit with 12 gigs of memory and I'm having no issues running Deepsea. Granted, you can't install it like usual because it being 16-bit. I just extracted the files into the proper directories on the hard drive, started it up and it worked fine.

I personally enjoy using it and I find it very easy to use, but that's me.