Neo Hell Keep - a Remake of E3M1

http://wadhost.fathax.com/files/neo%20hell%20keep.rar

i finished this level today.

it is a kind of "remix" to E3M1 : Hell Keep, as it is not 100% faithful to the original level, also using zdoom and skulltag features.

i added some rooms, and took some original rooms away. not everything will be exactly the same!

i have gotten a lot better at mapping since i posted my first level (and a lot more patient).

requires skulltag, due to used textures.

any constructive critisism well appreciated.

Now for the map. I liked it :D the zdoom features were a little clunky at times but didn't really get in the way. I didn't really pay attention to texturing and stuff too much as hell maps are always a little vague in that department, but there was a point when you get a HoM on one of the door tops, think it was the one before the icon of sin block with the demons on the railed wooden platform. There was also an invisible barrier that was pretty large in the middle of the starting area, not sure what that was about =/ And finally the baron fight at the end can be completely avoided since you have the invisibility sphere beforehand and you can waltz right between them without them waking up. I'd suggest getting rid of the sphere entirely, as it's just an oddity for regular doomers and a liability for the speedrunners >.< Also that megasphere makes the rest of the level too easy, just a green armor or blue would work better.

EDIT: Now how did this get moved? :P

For a second map it's not too bad, though it's still in the beginner ranks.

Your areas were really large, like too large. taking pot shots at distant imps and circlestrafing Cacos and Arachnos with the SSG is not really that fun, it gets kinda tedious and makes things too easy, I only got hit like 2 or 3 times in the whole map. The scaling was strange coming into the last two rooms, which were really big in the original and really tiny in your remake.

I found HOMs at the start, same on the other side of the ramp. There's some strange rendering error here in the middle, though it appears okay from other angles? And you missed a roof texture here.

Theme-wise it was pretty good, overly fleshy for just the entrance of hell but there wasn't any massive clashes like oddly-placed techbase textures or whatever. Having some fancy "projectile auto defense system" technology in a location made out of bricks and intestines seemed a bit out of place.

Sadly, I found your map unfinishable without using idclip as the final door into the Baron room (Linedef 664) would only open for me once. I backed away then couldn't open the door again. I assumed you'd just used a D1 instead of DR, however I see this is a Hexen linedef and I don't really know anything about Hexen format so maybe someone else can offer some tips here.

One thing I really did like is the flesh tunnel in my second screenshot, for such a simple construction it looks quite impressive, if a tad garish on the eyes. I paused to look at it and ran up and down it a few times cos I thought it looked pretty cool!

Keep up the mapping and learning, my advice at the moment would be to stick with Boom format until you get things like area size and monster/thing placement a bit better. All the slopes and scripting in the world won't make a flawed map any better.

Also, can Skulltag/ZDoom read rars? Zip is the idgames standard for distributing maps. Keep under 8 characters for your filename and don't put spaces in it. Also, include a text based off UPLTEMPL so we can tell it's MAP01 instead of me wondering why it's not E3M1 or E1M1 and having to open the file in XWE to see how to play it :)

thanks for the comments.

@armoured blood: i have changed the megasphere to a blue armor, got rid of the invisibility, removed the soulsphere at the beginning and moved the green armor. hopefully this should make the map more challenging. the invisibility was something to lure players into opening the arachnotron trap door as the linedef which opens it was at the bottom of the slope. i will move this linedef elsewhere.

@super jamie: the first 2 "HOM"s you found are okay whenever i play the map. are you using software render or a different version of skulltag? the HOM on the door is a problem though. thing is i had put a texture that wasnt F_SKY1 there, so i dont think there is anything i can do about it :/

and also, i forgot to flag the last door as a repeatable action. that is now fixed as well. the "projectile defence system" was supposed to be more of a "trap", but i couldnt think of anything else to print when you deactivate it.

if anyone is interested i can post the fix.

EDIT: oh, and that small impassible box at the start was made impassible because if you walked back into that sector (you start in it, and the script makes it impassible when you walk out of it), you fall into a untextured "hole" which you cannot get out of without using IDCLIP. i didnt know how to fix it, as it said it waas fine in the builder (i used DB2).

For some odd reason you lift OUT of the sector but once out and no-clipping in it's a deep pit. Finding out why that you still raise would be a good idea but I know why the pit is still there. The sector is still not raising >.< Or at least, at the end of the script it is still at -256. You can fix this by making a dummy sector of it and putting a sector with height 0 next to the dummy sector. Next time you make a lift with line actions in it though you should 'join' the two sectors lifting, unless you have some sort of ceiling heights going on. Then the lines are still there but it's now one sector.

Ultraboy94 said:

@super jamie: the first 2 "HOM"s you found are okay whenever i play the map. are you using software render or a different version of skulltag?

Skulltag v0.97d5 - SVN revision 2275 - SDL version
And yeah, software renderer under Linux.

I thought this was impressive, but there was a couple of HoM's that i noticed. Now after playing through this map on Skulltag, I'm thinking of reconsidering my port choice of gzdoom... one thing that annoys me with this port is the duke nukem syndrome. Whenever you look up, it feels weird and distorted, which is fixed in gzdoom.

Yeah, that's called perspective correction, most software ports don't do it. Doesn't Skulltag's GL renderer do it just like GZD's?

DelphiDoom does what it calls "fake 3d" perspective correction in software mode, but it's essentially just a win32 port of Vanilla with some larger limits so it's not really that useful.

Seriously, provide at least some screenshots if you want your wad to be tested. Without any clue what to expect, there're going to be only few people downloading your mod!