'Imperfection Has Its Charms' mapset released

Hi all. Since I am waiting on a few people before the Speed of Doom megawad project can be continued any further, I've decided to spend my time dusting off my old maps. The mapset used to be for zdoom, now it is playable on any limit-removing port with the Plutonia Iwad. (Tested with Glboom but would've been nice to have it vanilla compatible but it crashes at certain points and visplane overflows, etc). These are very very early maps of mine, including my first map which is on map03. Fixed it to make it more compatible with most ports, made it more playable and fun, added shortcuts here and there. The design is very old school, and occasionally primitive, hence the title 'Imperfection has its charms' (Would anyone be inclined to agree?). It would be nice to hear your opinions and playtest it before I upload it to the archives. Some of you may recognise the designs of several maps or played them before. Partial layouts of Map02 and Map07 is remade in Speed of Doom. A spruced up version of Map04 occupies the Map13 slot in NewDoom Community Project 2. There is no difficulty settings unfortunately, I would consider these maps to be challenging and not exactly for the faint of hearts. </tl;dr>


Number of maps: 9
IWAD: Plutonia Experiment
Port: Limit-removing
Difficulty settings: No
Co-op: Player2-4 starts (untested)
New music: Yes

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Idgame link:
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=15876
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Enjoy! :-)

Screenies:

Oh shucks, there's a bug I seem to have overlooked on Map07, in the jail area with the cacos and hell knight, the floors don't seem to lower fully. I'll upload the final thing as soon as I and others catch more of the insects.

[ignore wad name]Tsk tsk @ stargray alignment in the last screenshot. ;)[/ignore wad name]

Screenshots actually look great. Has that oldskool charm.

Played to the beginning of MAp07 then forgot if you made more than 6 maps (just read that you did, so I'll get back to them soon ;). Here's what I'll say for those ones.

MAP01; gameplay was decent, pistol only gets annoying at times but it was fine (it was pistol only right? This review is after an hour + of playing maps). There is a problem though, right outside the start room, there is a sector with the 'no upper texture -> sky' trick, that actually cuts off that pillar structure if you're on the other side of it. I'd suggest moving that pillar thing.

MAP02; lots of bridges in this one, interesting since I never got around to learning the trick for them (sector bridges anyway). There were a ton of METAL* texture misalignments, so going over those again might be tedious but would make it better imo. Of course you might have to drop the title then :P Also, the revenant before the exit woke up when I was passing by outside, it couldn't hit me when I was on a slightly higher ledge or something, would suggest raising this thing a little.

MAP03; my notes say squishy, but all your maps so far seemed that way. Also there seemed to be a big jump in gameplay, although only 1 arch-vile, there's a rather interesting fight with a spider mastermind that made me go WTF when I saw it, but laughed it off. For the cyberdemon, there might be too many barons, it only took 6/7 infighting him to kill him, and didn't even bother me. He left 3-4 half-health barons and 5 or so full health ones attacked me right off so more of a baron fight. And another spider mastermind with the yellow key was kind of weird, was extremely constricting for it though so was a piece of cake. Also nice crusher gauntlet for the soul sphere secret.

MAP04; was kinda meh, there was no way out of the blood pit the platform the plasma gun is surrounded by, and I didn't really like having to take 4-5 revenant rockets just to stay on there. The pain elementals in the fight after the next one were the most annoying, and cleaning up the arch-vile after was simple (with mouselook though. Might be harder otherwise but not much imo, those columns are perfect to take it out in). Going through the blue key door, I got stuck on EVERYTHING, there's a bit too much detail there, even the torches in front of the door were grabbing me -.- Recessing the supports might look weird but would be so nice.

MAP05; Squishy in parts, but it doesn't get in the way too much when fighting. When you come back to collect the red key, you can piece-meal the revenants. Would suggest block sound lines there. Same thing with the arachnotrons by the blood pit that goes down a ways (and you die from, heheh. If you could make another voodoo doll telefrag another it'd work better than slow damage crusher. Would have to be timed when to hit bottom though). Throughout, a lot seemed just the wrong side of too dark, although it works well for the spectres. The spidermastermind on the yellow key was a little extreme, if I hadn't conserved that soul sphere from a little before by sniping the arachnos it would've been easy to run out of health. Throughout the maps you've had good usage of spider masterminds though.

MAP06; Was a little tight in places, got stuck on the supports around the yellow key door. Not much else to say except pretty cool, except the final arch-vile was pretty anti-climactic, just open door, shoot SSG 2x, run behind pillar, 2x more SSG, get back on walkway and exit.

Overall, so far there's a bunch of pretty cool maps, after MAP02 they're pretty complex, I've actually only played plutonia to something like MAP05, and it feels kind of the same, but wads can change a lot from maps 1 to 30. If you'd like to leave em as is and upload em I'm sure they'll be well received, touching things up makes things nice but can delay maps indefinitely :P

Also, chaingunner hat :) (I still don't know how to use 3rd person view in skulltag ... *hopes kristus doesn't read this ;)*)

Thanks for the feedback :-) I'll definitely consider some of these suggestions. As for the texture misalignment, I'm afraid they'll stay the same (haha Jodwin). :-) Speed of Doom although is very clean with alignments.

Funny you said the maps are similar to Plutonia, since I played Plutonia first before Doom2. It has influenced my mapping greatly. You can't miss map07,08,09, I believe they are the pinnacle of the mapset. Map08 is probably my personal favourite out of them.

Pretty fun, feel kinda iwadish. Noticed a few homs with prboomplus, forgot where they were.
9. I think I remember the beginning from speed of doom. Wouldn't be that hard to max, but like almost any map, hard to max fast. Not sure if the end pit is inescapable (the floor tiles kinda suggest you can jump in there, and the 'stair ice' (going down stairs is slippery in doom) can slip you in).
8. u can nab the yellow key, not sure if intentional. Just my own pet peeve but unusable doors almost always annoy me, even doors that appear like you can press spacebar on but really require a trigger somewhere else. But this map even has door decorations, heh (but just my opinion.. it seems like a common thing people do- I guess to supposedly increase immersion/ apparent level size or something, but not worth it for gameplay imo).
7. one of the 4x or whatever hanging things blocks in prboom.

Some of the end maps in speed of doom are awesome and would be great to max fast (you mentioned you're waiting on people, did you mean me by chance?)

gggmork said:

Pretty fun, feel kinda iwadish. Noticed a few homs with prboomplus, forgot where they were.
9. I think I remember the beginning from speed of doom. Wouldn't be that hard to max, but like almost any map, hard to max fast. Not sure if the end pit is inescapable (the floor tiles kinda suggest you can jump in there, and the 'stair ice' (going down stairs is slippery in doom) can slip you in).
8. u can nab the yellow key, not sure if intentional. Just my own pet peeve but unusable doors almost always annoy me, even doors that appear like you can press spacebar on but really require a trigger somewhere else. But this map even has door decorations, heh (but just my opinion.. it seems like a common thing people do- I guess to supposedly increase immersion/ apparent level size or something, but not worth it for gameplay imo).
7. one of the 4x or whatever hanging things blocks in prboom.

Some of the end maps in speed of doom are awesome and would be great to max fast (you mentioned you're waiting on people, did you mean me by chance?)

Thanks for that morky. :-) About that keygrab, it was sort of meant to be intentional but the grab was wayyy too easy.. so, I've got that fixed. Can't do anything about the doors though, heh. I've made final fixes, and all should be just fine (apart from the imperfections of course :P) Now uploading to archives.

Nope, I'm not waiting on you, you've done a great job by the way. :-) I am waiting for Darkwave0000 to finish off his remaining maps as well as Mechadon for nice graphical replacements and 2 more midi's from Jimmy (probably my fault since I was too picky with the midis to start with :3).

I saw a HOM on map 01 near sector 49 when the floor lowers.

These maps are fun, but damn confusing. More than once I found myself running in circles wondering how I ended up back at the place I started.

Nice bridge though. It looks great.

sparerib1968 said:

I saw a HOM on map 01 near sector 49 when the floor lowers.

These maps are fun, but damn confusing. More than once I found myself running in circles wondering how I ended up back at the place I started.

Nice bridge though. It looks great.

What port were you using? Hopefully it was a minor HOM, not a big one. Glad to hear it was fun. :-)

The HOM on map01 is large, but partially obscured by the ceiling overhang. It is hard to see in the static images below, but obvious when moving the player. (Click the images for a larger view.)

View from sector 251:


View from sector 49 before floor height change:


View from sector 255:


Yes, I had to noclip to get the third snapshot. The HOM is still quite visible from sectors 251 and 254 before the floor height change, and from sector 49 during the height change.

I believe the HOM originates from sectors 118 and 119. The two sectors overlap eachother though, so it is difficult for me to figure out the exact cause of the HOM.

I am able to see the HOM in Eternity Engine and PrBoom-Plus.

:3

Hate lasers

MAP 03 ...

In some ports, like prboom+ and Risen3D, it is possible, while at sector 252, to bump line 1837 to obtain the blue keycard. Also a nasty HOM with the latest prboom+ when at sector 252 and looking north.

MAP 06 ...

Line 806 is not flagged impassible. The player can run from sector 189 , over water sector 150, and land at sector 159, thus avoiding much of the map and exiting quicker.

MAP 08 ...

In software engines, MIDSPACE at line 13 is seen rendered below and through the floor. To fix just give sector 4 a light level of 127. This phenomena may appear in other levels.

The wad now has been uploaded to the archives. Here is the link: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=15876

Hope you enjoy it, it'd be nice to hear what you've got to say about it.

@hawkwind: those shortcuts were intended although I'm not sure what I can do with those HOMs. I'm away from home ATM but I think it's okay enough for now.