A few questions

How do I
1. Make my own commands (eg W1 floor lower by 150)
2. Make deep water
3. Make own textures (eg purple, black liquid)
4. Make monster statues (not stone, like the real thing but not moving and not killable)
5. Make a surface that kills you (not transports you to a dark room where (you) are and telefrags yourself, I know how to do that)
Thanks :)

1. You can't make your own actions in Vanilla Doom. To be more specific in the action you want your map to do, you'd have to make your map in a different format. Boom format is pretty flexible but it can't do EVERYTHING you could possibly want. Hexen format is extremely flexible and can do just about everything.

2. There's a way you can make shallow water that you can submerge yourself in, but not necessarily go under. Detailed info here. If you want deep water that the player can swim in, you'd need to use a different map format that's specific to a port that supports deep water, such as ZDoom.

4. You could extract the sprites of the monster you want and rename them so that they replace one of doom's decorations. That method works on all source ports.

5. Well the best way to do it is exactly you how you described, unless of course you are mapping in a format that supports sectors that kill you on contact.

ZDoom can do pretty much everything you're thinking of, and is very popular and easy to learn. It uses the "Hexen format" mentioned before, to allow a wide variety of interactive effects, and you can even script the maps. Visit the ZDoom documentation for editing help, or talk at the ZDoom forums.

Note: a cool variant is GZDoom, because it has hardware rendering (though the (former) author has been a bit iffy regarding support with other hardware than nvidia), and it lets you place 3d floors, creating real multistorey environments. Not perfect; see below. Grab the link while it exists; the author had abandoned it because he stopped liking working on it, but it's still a widely used port.


For editing maps, you can use Doom Builder 2, and if you want to add new graphics, description files and/or sounds, use "XWE" or "SLumpEd". DeepSea is great at that too.

Now to answer your questions, you can (provided you use ZDoom):

1. make your own commands through scripting. There are those ACS scripts you can program to make maps do whatever combinations of elementary motions, as soon as you walk a trigger, flip a switch, kill a monster, time passes etc.

2. deep water is done with the Transfer Heights linedef special. Refer to the wiki, search for transfer_heights

3. Import all the new floor/ceiling and wall textures between empty TX_START and TX_END markers in your new wad. For animating them, or creating switches, use ANIMDEFS.

4. Use Dormant monsters. You can even wake them up later, though this has become extremely predictable for players.

5. Use the Instant death sector type. How easy!


ZDoom is still unfortunately a hopelessly 2d port. You're still mostly limited by how much you can see on an overhead map, and even if you may try to fool the engine with 3d floors galore, monsters with their hearing, and numerous other fundamental physics, won't be fooled. But things will change with doomworld.com/vb/eternity]Eternity, which is going to fully implement linked portals that allow different parts of the map to communicate seamlessly with each other, like having windows between them you can pass through. Not only will this allow you to link various storeys to each other to create a fully 3d world, but you could also pull off some impossible architecture while at it, such as the world in the crate. Even now, the linked portals are supported in Eternity. Not fully implemented, but mostly working! Until then, ZDoom is still a very popular choice.