[WIP] Vela Pax (on hiatus)

Hey Mek

Just a couple more nitpicks from MAP 01 for your consideration.
-Sectors 877, 912, need their light level lowered to 128.
-Sectors 7884, 7858, 7856, 7896, 7897, 7893 also need their light levels set to 128 (There are all in the same place so easy enough)
-linedef 50135 needs some aligning.
The two health packs about linedef 30135 are kinda stuck in a wall and could be moved forward some.
-the stimpack at sector 826 is impossible to get.
-linedef 56905 could use some aligning (once the switch in front of it is lowered that is.)
-Sector 9087 needs effect 16 placed upon it, otherwise you can stand there and not die in that final teleport death thing.

In regard to the RL that is not in a secret that you should get as a part of the progression, could you possibly put a really really obvious one later in the level (which still rewards those observant players by giving them one earlier in the level, but doesn't punish those of us (for example: me) too blind to get the earlier one. :) I had plenty of rockets, but no RL...

Tango said:

I do, however, really hate playing an entire 1000-monster map with nothing more than a shotgun, but that's a stylistic choice.

Only weapons I'm still missing are the double-shotty and the BFG. Though the rocket launcher is found around I'd say the midpoint of the map and the plasma rifle is in a secret which you need the yellow skullkey (or a few lucky archvile jumps) to get.




The rocket launcher secret is just perverse. I loathe secrets that are forever blocked off if you don't do things in a particular order. >:(

DoomHero85 said:

@mek: My friend who was playing your map never died. He loaded it up and within a few seconds it errored out.

EDIT: btw, he did use -clvl 10, and it still happened.

Hmm, I'm not sure what could be causing that problem. I downloaded 2.5.0.9.test and quickly ran through MAP01 with complevel 10 but I couldn't get it to crash. Does it happen on every map or just a particular map? Could you get him to try it on 2.5.0.8? Also try warping to MAP30 since it doesn't have a gazillion sidedefs and see if that map loads properly. If all else fails you could report it to Entryway and have him play it on ZDoom or Eternity.

Tango said:

I do, however, really hate playing an entire 1000-monster map with nothing more than a shotgun, but that's a stylistic choice.

I resisted very hard to keep the SSG out of this map. In it's place there is a RL and a hidden Plasma Gun though. You did grab a Chaingun too, right? It seems that some folks have had a hard time finding a RL, even the non-secret one. So I'm probably going to put one in an easy to grab location much later in the map for those who don't find the secret one or the one that's mid way through the map. Thanks for that bug report on MAP02 by the way :)

KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

In regard to the RL that is not in a secret that you should get as a part of the progression, could you possibly put a really really obvious one later in the level (which still rewards those observant players by giving them one earlier in the level, but doesn't punish those of us (for example: me) too blind to get the earlier one. :) I had plenty of rockets, but no RL...

Thanks for taking the time to find more bugs :D. I guess I just replied to this above, but yea I think that's a really good idea.

Gez said:

The rocket launcher secret is just perverse. I loathe secrets that are forever blocked off if you don't do things in a particular order. >:(

Yea it's completely broken...sorry about that :(. My original intentions when I set it up was to have the bars keep the door from opening if the player didn't find the secret switch; you can lower the floor and jump across, but I wanted to make sure the player found the hidden switch before gaining access to that small room. But the setup now was mostly unintended (now that I think about it, I think that setup was last minute before I shipped the beta out the door...should've tested it!). That's what beta-quality maps are good for, heh.

Findings for map 02 ...

1. Stairs at sectors 567/568 looks a bit odd in comparison to adjacent stairs. I can see why though, by seeing sectors 518/611. Same for sectors 656/696, 520/560 and 703/704.

2. Sector 3759 is tagged # 105 but no corresponding line tag. This prevents the voodoo doll from crossing line 28985, preventing 100% kills.

3. Seems impossible to get to secret sector 2237. I see the arrow sector 978 but that doesn't seem to help. Am I missing something ?

hawkwind said:

Findings for map 02 ...

1. Stairs at sectors 567/568 looks a bit odd in comparison to adjacent stairs. I can see why though, by seeing sectors 518/611. Same for sectors 656/696, 520/560 and 703/704.

2. Sector 3759 is tagged # 105 but no corresponding line tag. This prevents the voodoo doll from crossing line 28985, preventing 100% kills.

3. Seems impossible to get to secret sector 2237. I see the arrow sector 978 but that doesn't seem to help. Am I missing something ?

Good stuff, thanks hawkwind! I'm kinda happy that you didn't find more than that since I've grinded myself to death on that map so many hours finding and fixing bugs. To address what you found:

1. Yea, this might look a little odd depending on the angle you view the stairs at. But essentially it supposed to look as though the brick wall that wraps around those structures goes through and is part of the stairs.

2. The trigger for that door use to be at the yellow skullkey room. But I recently completely redid that room since it was really ugly before (I ran outta SEGS). I forgot to re-add the trigger line to open that door, so this is a definite bug.

3. Actually it's quite possible! The arrow is a hint, obviously. To get in that sector, it requires some speed and a perfectly angled jump.

Mechadon said:

3. Actually it's quite possible! The arrow is a hint, obviously. To get in that sector, it requires some speed and a perfectly angled jump.

I suspected as such. I'm guessing you mean, say start at sector 585 ( or nearer stairs ), and straferun to the lowest ledge where sectors 620, 593 etc. are. I did try that but failed ... :/

Yea that's basically how you do it. It can take a few tries to get it right. I usually start running from the farthest wall on the other side of the gap (diagonally opposite of the ledge you jump over) and straferun. The trick is planning your angle right, otherwise you'll hit too far right or left and miss the low spot in the wall. I could record a -nomonsters demo of the jump if you still can't get in there.

Hey Mek.

Just a couple of things for map 02:

-linedefs 22376, 22377 and 22874 need to be hidden. Otherwise you get this little triangle appearing on the automap.

-linedef 31406 triggers one arachnotron to spawn in. And I thought to myself "Is that it?" That narrow corridor, with no way out except back the way you came in. It just screams "trap" and when a single arachnotron spawned in, I was kinda disappointed. A handful of revenants, or maybe a couple of barons or something. I just felt like that place needed a good tough fight if you wanna get out of there alive. I was looking forward to a real good fight there. And all I got was one lousy arachnotron. :P Anyway, just a thought.

-The over/under bridges on the level were, frankly, not very good looking. Mostly they were just plain strips of brown. The only one that looked any good was the one at sector 2468. I mean on a level that has such epic, sprawling and beautifully 'organic' architecture, those plain brown strips just looked ugly to me. I know it is a bit harsh to pick out the one thing that looked bad on what is otherwise a map of uninterrupted architectural awesomeness, (say that 10 times fast!) but those bridges really stood out to me. Probably looks fine to everyone else tho.

-hitting the switch at linedef 16930 or 16954 causes monsters to instantly appear,(that floor-instant-lower trick) which looks kinda bad in this case imo. To fix this, I would move linedef 31489 as close as possible to the voodoo doll that runs over it, so that floor raises instantly before the wall in front of it has lowered too much. You could even make those walls lower from another linedef in front of the same voodoo doll, to make sure the floor is raised before the walls in front of it lower.
-linedefs 21739 and 16954 could use some aligning relative to each other. Same with 16939 and 16930.

-I have to admit, I am thoroughly stuck in regards to finding the yellow skull key. I mean I can see that key, I just can't figure out how to get into that section. :( All the other keys I have found, but that one has me pretty thoroughly stuck. [edit] ok I finally had to go into an editor to sort this out. I would make sector 5184 into a row of like silver bars, rather than a solid panel, which would make it more obvious that at some point the player will have to go through there. (Or possibly put some yellow skull markers inset into the walls on either side. Anything to let the player know this is where they should go. I thought that sector was just some more decoration. Also the switch which triggers this sector, linedef 12999, is, well in an hour of searching the level, I didn't find it. And even if you do find it, you still have no idea what it actually does. Seemed a tough ask to me, but no one else seems to mind too much, so again, probably just me.

-I would make the fight against the 2 cyberdemons in the yellow skull key area have more space. Imo was too cramped to be any real fun, just getting caught in cyberdemon crossfire all over. Doable, but not so much fun.

-Didn't like how the exit switches just sort of vanish.

But aside from these nitpicks (and feel free to ignore them, of course), another level of amazing architecture and good, solid gameplay. Neat stuff. Sorry for the criticisms, it was 99.9% awesome anyway.

Awesome, all very good points Kyka :). I'm sure I can work these in without too much trouble.

The Arachnotron that spawns in at that yellow key switch could definitely use a more formidable set of monsters, I agree. I might keep the Arachnotron for the easier skill level and then use either Revenants or Barons there.

Heh, I've had complaints about the bridges once already. The first bridge I made (the fancy looking one) was done before I had to wrestle with the SEGS limit. This was before PRBoom+ got support for ZDoom's node format, by the way. For some reason I waited to make the other bridges when I started adding gameplay elements, and by that time I had to get cheap with details and go for a utility-only style of midtexture bridge. Thus why they look really plain. Now that I don't have that SEGS limit to worry about anymore, I can definitely make them look a little nicer. The only reason why I didn't do it yet was because of laziness :P

The monsters popping out of the floor is yet another cut-corner I had to do because of the SEGS limit. Before this release, there were a bunch more of them, but I replaced them with monsters that would teleport in. Looks like I missed this one, but teleporting that many monsters in all at once probably wouldn't work very well. I'll likely do something similar to what you suggested.

The whole yellow skullkey route will be completely redone or will have some significant hints applied to it. It's setup terribly right now. There's actually not a whole lot you have to do to gain access to it, but the layout in that general area of the map is really complex. To clarify for anyone stuck, these are the steps you take to get into that room:

- When you make it to the room with all of the Chaingunners (southeastern part of the map), take the hallway to the right.
- You'll wrap around to a room with a few more Chaingunners and then an Arachnotron that teleports in the opposite end of the room.
- Looking in the direction where the Arachnotron teleported to, there should be a small lift with some Mancs on the other side. Take the lift up.
- You'll see a switch overlooking the area where the Mancs where. Hit this switch and it should lower to the ground.
- Backtrack a short way back to room you first entered with the Chaingunners. You may notice that a door has opened, leading to a drop-down. Drop down this hole.
- You'll walk across a midtexture bridge to an open-air room with some Macs/Imps/Zombies. You need to go through a door in this area and then make a leap across to the opposite ledge where there's a switch. Hit this switch. (If you've made it this far without help, your doing pretty good).
- This switch lowers a blocking floor which allows you to gain access to the yellow skullkey courtyard. Directly after hitting the switch, the quickest way to get to the yellow skullkey area is to jump down off the ledge into the room below and open the door closest to you. You may notice that a section of the floor is now lowered. Jump down and you can access the yellow skullkey area.

So yea, I can see why people are getting lost. You never realize these things until you see a demo of someone running around for 30 minutes without any indication of where to go next :P. Rest assured though, it will be changed. If anyone has suggestions or ideas, I'm all ears.

Last thing concerning the Cyberdemon fight, I can very easily make that area larger. In fact I've got a really good idea to sorta tweak that whole courtyard so it's a little more interesting. By the way, that area is almost completely new now that I went back and tweaked it after having more SEGS to work with. Before it was probably twice as small as it is now.

Hey Mek. I have just had a play of map 04 of Vela Pax. And here are my findings.

-Could be larger.
-Needs more detail.
-You might want to consider putting some monsters in it to make it more of a challenge. Just a thought.
-I also recommend having an exit switch. I am not an expert, but I have been on these forums long enough to know that many players prefer levels with exit switches.

In short this map has potential, but probably needs a bit more work.

:P

In truth, I am kinda glad this was in there because it gave me an insight into how you map. Large, undetailed areas which become more specialised later. :)

Heh, oh right I guess I didn't take out that little spit of a map in the MAP04 slot :P. I was mostly screwing around to see how some textures I had been planning on using in that map would look against the sky texture. What I made was what I was envisioning might be part of the starting area although I don't know if I'll keep it or not.

Anyways, I got my other DB recording uploaded today. So if you don't mind the huge file, feel free to give it a download and/or watch.

http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/wads/vela_pax/vp01-feb02.zip

This time the file is about 216 MB. I recorded that footage sometime in February and I was significantly further along with MAP01 by that point.

By the way, has anyone been able to make it all the way through MAP05 yet? I'm hoping someone will be able to record a demo of it.

Ok, here is my failed MAP05 FDA. - http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/960862
3 deaths: near the start, in the RL battle, and finally somewhere after ~600 kills. The arch-vile popped out of nowhere and I died very fast.
The map lags sometimes (I play in software mode, OpenGL looks ugly to me), so it's a little annoying, but bearable.

Successful FDA would be awesome. Maybe Anima Zero could do it? :)

My findings for map 05 ...

1. The back-sidefs of lines 28051 and 27634 should not have had a Y offset. ( to be precise, should be 0 ).

2. On lines 36038/36036 and 10379/10381 ( and elsewhere ) the ear of the satyr is visible.

3. Imp had teleported to sector 292 before activation of line 17376, temporarily trapping the imp. Not a good look.

4. Problem at floor with lines 12536, 12548, 12614 and 12665. Remove mid textures for these lines.

5. T2390 on easy at sector 1613 stuck at sector 1614.

6. Ceiling of sector 8772 might look better with RROCK10 and floor of sector 8771 with CEIL5_2.

7. T1912 stuck in T1917, T1918 stuck in T1913, T1914 stuck in T1802, T1915 stuck in T1801 ( easy spectres stuck in easy Demons ).

8. Lines 8303, 8313, 7974, 8298 and 8309 need action type 83 - not 831 typo ? - player falls through bridge - SERIOUS.

9. Some MIDGRATE textures near sector 9140 could do with an X alignment tweak.

... I admit to cheating in this level. I found it way to big and found myself backtracking numerous times, which became rather frustrating. Not to detract from the beauty of the level however. I also cannot vouch for all the secrets.

@Memphis: Awesome, thanks for taking the time to record it :). I'll have to hold off on watching it for a day or two. The last demo I watched made me sick (literally). I didn't realize until recently that demos give me motion sickness. I think a complete FDA on that map will definitely be a challenge...hopefully someone can do it though! I'd love to see it.

@hawkwind: Thanks for all of your help with the bug reports! Can you recall which areas where you got lost? Given the map sizes it's probably going to be an inevitability that some players will get lost. But I'd like to tweak any particular parts of the map to make navigation a little easier to figure out if at all possible.

Memfis said:

Ok, here is my failed MAP05 FDA. - http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/960862
3 deaths: near the start, in the RL battle, and finally somewhere after ~600 kills. The arch-vile popped out of nowhere and I died very fast.
The map lags sometimes (I play in software mode, OpenGL looks ugly to me), so it's a little annoying, but bearable.

Successful FDA would be awesome. Maybe Anima Zero could do it? :)

Funny you should mention that. I have a couple demos for map 5, neither one making it to the end.

One gets to about 1k kills before I'm offed by an archie I didn't even realize had awoken (That and I pulled a stupid seconds beforehand that contributed to that death).

The other gets to...~750-ish kills I think? I took a different route with that one to see some new areas I had not yet visited, then died to a monster ambush I couldn't quite get myself out of :P.

I also happen to have a FDA for map 2 that I completed. How I managed to survive at the BK trap after blowing up a bunch of my health & armor with a lovely rocket at point blank range into the side of a wall, I don't know. Hell, my one hand was getting numb as I was fighting the cybies and couldn't take a moment to shake it off :P.

I don't have the demos on this comp right now. They're on the other one that I usually use to record demos. I can get them all packaged up and sent off tomorrow morning...unless I try to see if I can actually make it to the end of map 5 :P.

Mechadon said:

Can you recall which areas where you got lost?

Unfortunately no, sorry.

Since the zipfile is too big, I'll have to upload my failed attempt at clearing map 5 to sendspace. I had a couple other attempts last week that ended much earlier than this as I've mentioned before.

Time for the demo is around 2 hours & 25 minutes. I get to 2197 kills before a revenant decides to ruin freaking everything.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/g16s78

Ugh, sorry. I've been neglecting the project threads lately. Thanks for recording that demo Anima! I'm sure it will come in handy once I start doing bug fixes for these maps :)

I tried this, and it is so nicely detailed that it's mindblowing, and in a good way. And the gameplay is satisfying. But I can't help but feel that maybe instead of 6 gigantic maps, that maybe you should have made 32 normal sized maps, with 5 levels dedicated to each theme. If you divide the monster count in each map by 5, you'd still end up with 200+ monsters per map, cuz geeze, w/o saves this is exhausting. :P

Each time I try playing another one of these maps I get myself into that too-badass-to-use-saves mindset and end up making a stupid mistake after 500 monsters.

I too would love a Mechamegawad.

I watched your demo last night Anima. I can't believe you got that far only to have that Revenant ninja you :[. You were one big fight away from unlocking the exit door and finishing the map too! I did catch some minor bugs and some other things worth changing though. Thanks again for doing that demo.

It just so happens that I have a megawad in progress (or it has been in progress for over a year now). The maps in it won't be nearly as gigantic or complex; they'll be more Iwad length maps but with the same sort of layout concepts I'm using here for Vela Pax.

I'm playing through map 5 right now. The architecture is very impressive I must say. But the maps are way to big for my taste. I like big maps, but this is big in both an "open area way" and in a "takes a long time to progress way cause you have to walk around in medium sized hallways for hours". (Does that make any sense?) I'm a much bigger fan of the first category.

The battles are often very challenging and balanced, but they aren't rewarding enough IMO. There are alot of battles that ends with no reward at all for the player, and that gets tiresome after a while. In Sunder for example, you can see a switch you need to press or a key behind a big horde of enemies. You know what you have to do to progress and after you've killed the horde you feel rewarded, cause you got to progress.

I didn't mean to sound as negative as I did. I actually like this wad very much. But I think it's sometimes easier to point out bad stuff when there is so much good stuff. 4/5

There are so many beautifully detailed areas that after a while you stop noticing all the cool stuff cause you get used to it. You are totally spoiling the doomers with theese inhumanly detailed maps. How do you think we mediocre mappers will get any attention after this? ;)

Just found another bug in map 05, I fall through the 3d bridges in the left building.

Which one? The really big, ornate bridge? Or the smaller one? Seems like I ran into a bridge bug on the large one a while back and forgot to fix it, so that might be the same one.

@dannebubinga: I would say that the overall gameplay is much like a normal map, except that the scale is just way bigger. So only key areas are fights that give the player a goal. The rest of the encounters are just to keep the player on their toes along the way. So instead of a string of large segmented fights with a goal at the end of each, I focused more on search and explore with fights inbetween in key areas. Granted that's a design choice that probably doesn't appeal to everyone because a sense of progress or satisfaction is usually delayed, sometimes for quite a long time. It's just the sort of progression I like I guess, but I definitely understand where your coming from. Thanks for taking the time to play and post your thoughts :)

Yeah the really cool ornate one doesn't work. How do you make 3d bridges btw? I've always wanted to know.

DoomHero85 said:

Just found another bug in map 05, I fall through the 3d bridges in the left building.

I've already mentioned it - guessing you mean the building at bottom right ? If not could you be more specific to help Mechadon out - sector ? linedef ?

Hey guys! I took a break from this project after releasing the test beta, but I just recently started to work on bug fixes and tweaks from feedback a few days ago. I just finished up work on MAP05 so I'm all caught up on what people have reported to me. Apart from all of the suggestions I implemented, I also went through each map and removed/redistributed health and ammo so they aren't so rich. By the way, I just want to say thanks for all of the positive support and feedback. I'll be sure to mention you all in the readme :).

I was thinking about releasing another test beta with the fixes and tweaks in place. But I don't think the changes really warrant another release right now. The biggest change out of the three maps was the yellow skullkey area in MAP04 and the route you take to get there. I completely redid that area; it's much, much larger and there are also a few new routes to/from it. The path to get there was also simplified. All of the other changes, while important, probably don't warrant another test release. Most likely I'll just wait until the other 3 maps are done before I do that.

So I'm officially resuming work today, starting with MAP04. There was a very, very small taste of MAP04 in the test beta, although it wasn't enough to give you an idea what the map will end up looking like. I wrote up some short descriptions of each map on my blogosphere...so it will essentially be that. But my focus will be on a sort of gothic/pre-hell cityscape. So there will be lots of buildings, bricks, wood, metal...and probably lots of brown :P. I'm thinking about making the layout and flow use the same concept as MAP02. That is, it will be a very porous and open-ended layout with a ton of different possible routes and side-areas. Then again I may change my mind...it all depends on what I'm feeling while I work on the map. So we'll see how it works out. I'm excited to see where it goes and I'll be sure to post some screenshots soon :D

Thanks again for all of the support and I hope I can keep the remaining maps as good or better than the first three!

*edit*

Oh, I almost forgot. Kyka, these two bug reports for MAP01...

-linedef 51695 needs its frontside midtexture set to SHAWN2
-The two health packs about linedef 30135 are kinda stuck in a wall and could be moved forward some.

The linedef number you referenced me didn't seem to have anything do to with the bugs they were describing. I tried searching sidedef references thinking you might have gotten confused or something...but that didn't help me either. Could you double check them so I can get them fixed?

I've been having a really hard time concentrating on mapping (or anything else really). So progress on MAP04 has been sporadic and slow. I picked up on it again today and, so far, progress has been a little smoother. So I figured it might be a good time to take some screenshots. Just like before, ignore the lack of lighting, any HOMs, and any unclipped midtextures. I took these really quickly in PRBoom+ while testing, so they aren't clean...but they'll do for now.

An unfinished outdoor area, probably going to be near the start.
Some rocks and a GSTONE thingy!
A more finished walkway area with a vine texture clipping into the ground.
This big chamber I made as a test map for Supplice. Will likely be a central area and possibly the exit.

The past two days have kept me busy with texture work. I decided to try and redo some of the sky textures that I thought were less than great looking; specifically MAP01, MAP02, MAP03, and MAP04. If anyone dug around in the test beta then you probably saw the older sky textures. The new MAP04 sky can be seen in the shots above...so here are the other three.

MAP01...slightly darker and more contrasted than the older one...plus a lot more dithering :P.
MAP02...probably not a very good shot of the sky, but it also shows off the new yellow skullkey area too.
MAP03 with a ton less suck. Seriously, the old one made me want to cry.

So this makes the 4th or 5th time I've re-made sky textures because I can't stay satisfied with my work. If you folks could let me know what you think of them, I would appreciate it. Although I understand that they would be easier to comment on if you saw them in-game...but that'll have to wait.

Anywho, I'm going to keep on grinding :)

Looks awesome Mech. I really like that wip outdoor shot, I take it your gonna be able to explore the outdoor area there or is for show? I hope it's the former. hehe Once the full version comes out I'm def gonna have a save / reload adventure. Trying to be a hero and doing complete run attempts got me no where on the 3 map beta build. :P

Yea you'll definitely be able to explore that area (and probably any areas similar to it as well). I thought about trying to weave some paths around parts of the rocky cliffs too...maybe to hide some secret areas or something. Actually I'm thinking about taking the layout in the same direction as MAP02. That is, have it be extremely non-linear, open, and exploration-friendly. So we'll see how that turns out :)