Gods&Guardians - Classic 6 map episode (v.1.1 - vanilla release)

[Wraith777]

23 hours ago, Demon of the Well said:

@Wraith777

 

I've been playing this as well, just recently (prboom-plus, -cl 2, skill 4). It seems that m02 has a number of serious bugs in v1.0 of the WAD. Unfortunately I wasn't recording while playing, but I'll try to describe the issues as precisely as I can below:

 

* The small lift on the east side of the central structure in the room with the yellow key is untagged, and cannot be activated (outside of ZDoom-family ports). This means the player can never get the key, and the level cannot be completed. 

* Returning to the central ooze-chamber after taking the YK (via IDCLIP in my case), a number of enclosures in the walls have been opened by means of the peripheral platforms where imps/zombies stood lowering to ground level, to release a number of lost souls and cacos. The walls immediately behind the lowered platforms are untextured, and so there are a number of nasty HOMs now present.

* In the blue key's area, the small lift which leads up to the elevated walkway on the west side of the room is untagged, and so progress by normal means is again halted past that point. The player *can* actually rocket-jump the gap to reach the walkway from near the teleporter to the soulsphere room at the end of the east (secret) walkway once the shutter there opens, but this didn't strike me as being intentional. 

* Also in the BK area, something is wrong with the three platforms which encircle the central enclosure where the BK + an arachnatron are found -- one can hear sector movement once the switch nearby is tripped, but the mechanism jams, and so the three platforms with the hell knights on them never lower out of the ceiling.

 

Bugs aside, I'm enjoying what I'm seeing so far. Will report any other bugs encountered.

#1 - don't know what's wrong, those tags are actually there (even in v.0.9), and they work in original d2.exe
#2 - fixed

#3 - the lift is supposed to be triggered by walking into the sector with blinking light, which is not available because of... #4 - i've changed some geometry in those platforms, but forgot to change ceiling height from 56 to 64, so those hellknights are stuck there...

And there were actually a ton of other bug fixes, tweaks and changes(mostly for vanilla compatibility), so here is a fixed version:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2p7tumsfpm3n3br/GnG.zip?dl=0

Edited July 5, 2020 by Wraith777

[Woolie Wool]

I just finished playing the first map of this, in MBF-SNM because the included doom2-plus executable would cause a reset when trying to save the game on my FreeDOS 1.2 setup. I first went into this thinking "oh, reject DTWID maps that were too fancy, I'll just select UV and waltz through it". Then I found myself surrounded by imps and pinkies with a peashooter and no ammo, got my ass beaten like a Singaporean jewelry thief, and decided to turn it down to HMP. Map01 is an awesome sewer level, quite big and ambitious for an opening map but this is clearly no mere "classic" affair, with a lot of quite clever and vicious fight setups that you have to handle with only pistol and shotgun. Great stuff though the midi is kind of LOUD and the note velocities should be turned way down IMO. Gives me a sort of early-AV feel with the monster density and overall difficulty, but with a newschool mobility where you're constantly bouncing around at top speed to avoid being caught out in these chaotic brawls.

 

Map02 is even better, and unlike map01 it does have a distinct Id Software flavor--like a hypothetical collab among Romero, Petersen, McGee, and Green in which all indulged their most sadistic tendencies non-stop It's a grueling, slow-burning dungeon-crawler and you'll spend most of it absolutely desperate for health and ammo and utterly bereft of armor, and makes great use of all the grungy industrial textures in the Doom II texture set. I was constantly beaten down to 30% health or less, at one point spending a bit of time with 3%, but only died a few times despite dozens of anus-clenching near misses. Absolutely gripping map, and considering map01 it must be downright obscene on UV.

Edited July 5, 2020 by Woolie Wool

[Demon of the Well]

@Wraith777 Many thanks for the fixed version, I replayed m02 and went on to finish the rest of the WAD using this build. All of the issues in m02 seem to have been fixed, including the previously nonfunctional lift in m02's YK room. Another player/mapper I spoke to, who had played GnG on the v0.9 build, confirms that the lift worked in that version, and surmises that a lot of m02's issues in v1.0 were due to a revert mishap (i.e. an entire map gets accidentally rolled back to an earlier build while the author is tweaking one specific part).

 

Continuing on, I can confirm only one more definite bug in the rest of the set: at the end of m05, the lift which the player can raise to get back out of the pit with the exit teleporter/spider mastermind enclosure cannot actually be used or activated once raised (the medikit next to said lift is also 'floating' in prB+, incidentally). This is a minor issue in the scheme of things, since the player can actually get back out of the pit without using the broken lift by straferunning across the gaps/ledges back to the entrance from atop the lift at the back of the room (concealing a blursphere and some lost souls, IIRC), but a noticeable blemish nonetheless.

 

I have some uncertainty about secrets in m06, as well. I was able to find 2 of the 3 the map officially registers -- 

Spoiler

the BFG platform which one can straferun over to early on in the map, and the megasphere as double-hidden by the tiny switch in the dark secret 'basement' area on the east side of the map

-- and I suspect the third 'secret' might be an unreachable/unregisterable sector (i.e. the aforementioned tiny switch nook), but haven't looked in an editor and so can't confirm this. Given how cleverly concealed some of the WAD's secrets are, I'm fully aware that one of them might have just flat-out defeated me here, heh. Other than this, I was able to achieve maxkills and find all other secrets on all of the maps, even including the unofficial 'secret' in m07.

 

I had a lovely time playing Gods & Guardians (skill 4, pistol-starts). Even though the references to id and id-adjacent maps and authors are generally pretty clear where they appear here, one can surmise why these levels wouldn't have fit in one of the DTWiD projects, as they are much more clean, orderly, complicated, and generally carefully reasoned out to ever be credibly taken as 'authentic' in the capricious, sometimes chaotic mid-90s sense that those projects aimed for. But this is no bad thing! Each of the maps had a strong sense of individual theme and identity, communicated not only through texture scheme but through central progression concepts. While the overall look and feel of the environments is largely "classic" in thrust, there's a strong sense of location to each level, and overall presentation hangs in that somewhat rare atmospheric niche where most of the geometry is pretty nonsensical/abstract Doom stuff but nevertheless hangs together in such a way as to suggest 'real places', i.e. a water treatment plant, a dilapidated sewer system, a disused maintenance junction, an abandoned city quarter, a garrison in the canals of Venice, and so on. Other than m06's track, perhaps, I felt the music selections were spot-on and made a fine compliment to proceedings, providing an extra something-something to differentiate the experience from mapsets that trade primarily on nostalgia.

 

Navigating the complexity of these layouts, working out the puzzles of each location while immersed in that kind of fetching 'classic redux' atmosphere is the set's main pleasure, but I was pleased with the action as well. Generally speaking I'd consider the pacing of the mapset to be pretty leisurely/comfort-food kind of stuff, but I was never bored -- there's no shortage of things to shoot all in all, and the sense of escalation of stakes is carried off pretty well over the course of the six main maps, with the odd occasional toothy trap to add just a touch of sass. A number of the pistol-starts are fairly unconventional/interesting in how much they ask a player to put some thought into resource management, and in some cases how long they ask a player to go with little or no armor and limited armament; not everyone will appreciate this kind of thing, but for my part I felt these unexpected complications mostly played off well against the set's carefully metered handling of monsters/combat and general non-linearity, also helping to differentiate the feel of levels from each other (i.e. m04's pretty conventional loadout vs. m05's deliberate small-arms + chainsaw skew vs. m06's early BFG + prolonged ammo shortage). In the interest of practicality I would probably suggest an earlier/much more obvious placed chaingun pickup for m05, since it's possible to have to do quite a lot of pistoling over the course of what is probably the game's longest map otherwise, but truth be told I didn't really mind doing it all that much while playing myself.

 

So, yes, fine stuff. The vein of big, elaborate adventure-ish maps as seen through a sort of classic/old-fashioned lens that you've been working in since "Alpha Accident" is something that really works for me, and I hope to see more from you someday.

Edited July 7, 2020 by Demon of the Well

[Wraith777]

Nice to hear this all turned up to be.. nice)).

 

Now for some comments on the maps:

Map01 - Obviously (or not so), this a tribute to Tim Willits. Not that #$%^.. e-em.. not so nice guy we've heard recently, no, that other older guy coming out of our peers and one of the first to gain an official recognition. I associate his design work mainly with industrial theme (Q2 has a lot of influence on me here), so that's why we have a technical installation here.

Map02 - For me Shawn Green equals  D2 Map25 - that one (and Map27) scared the most of my childhood. So, it was no-brainer for me to make my tribute similar (two other maps from Ultimate Doom also featured getting around a lot of liquid) - tense and thrilling, only this time we have a mix of industrial/old house theme.

 

Map03 - Just like many of Romero's maps this one is self-centered, deep and has a higher detail per inch count. Well.. may be it's a little bit cramped...

 

Map04 - Sandy's city (like you've heard it in the popular song) - large, outdoor, totally corrupt/corrupted..

 

Map05 - For this recipe of American McMap we take 1 map05, 1 map14, throw bits of map22 and map04 and get a large flooded old city, lots of break, stone, metal and some rocks and wood.

 

Map06 - John Anderson's style was always clear to me - The Divine Comedy HELL, lots of "right" architecture, structural symmetry.

At first it was named "Sleeping Tower"(pointing the fact that you need to wake up it's cyberskull to destroy it), but when a SAD( thing happened I thought it'll sound like a bad out of place/time pun...

Map07 - Someone probably noticed this looks familiar.. and it is. When I saw that harbor section from map13 beta I really liked it, that's why it is here. Same goes for stone ships on which all those imps and demons are trying to stow away (but, thanks to player they fail miserably) - a stone ship is a ship of the dead in ancient Scandinavia and Baltic folklore. Also mentioned in a really bad joke here the Man and his booK (which he can keep for himself and take it to hell, because it caused so much pain/trouble/drama in our community).

[Redneckerz]

I gotta appreciate @Wraith777 here for pushing the envelope and developing these things specifically for Doom/Doom2P to start with. Until someone corrects me, that makes your WADs in that sense one of a kind. These may come in handy in due later time for an article in planning.

[Terminus]

Hi there, apologize for bumping but congrats on winning a Honorable Mention in the Cacowards!

I clicked the link in the OP and the link is down.

If anyone could reupload the mapset I would gladly appreciate it as I'd love to try it out.

[Loud Silence]

Dropbox says that file is deleted. Please, fix it.

[Linguica]

I added a download link in the OP, hopefully it's the most recent version.

[Wraith777]

Wow, now that's really surprising!

Well, thanks everyone for feedback, sorry for inconvenience with wad versions - I've always had a problem with self level testing and that causes a lot of bugs and constant fixes-on-a-fly..

Anyway, here is the FINAL V.1.0 (mostly HOM, texture alignment and demo desync fixes..)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yhae67xwl2ccrt1/GnGv10.zip?dl=0

[Diabolución]

Mirrored on DoomShack, just in case...

 

I think I should replay this until the very end, I had not realised before that you are that expert on layouts of Doom maps and the author of Wonderful Doom. Enough said.

[Wraith777]

Alright, I think it's time to finally wrap it up for DW release.

 

V.1.1

GnGv11.zip

 

 

- Maps 5, 6 are modified to remove visplane and drawseg overflow, making GnG a vanilla release.
 

- GnG.exe is still patched, but only to increase savegame limits because of maps 4 and 5 (I've decided NOT to go that far and act destructive, chopping those maps to fit them in this single stupid limit).

 

Any feedback before final upload would be really appreciated (just in case I've missed something again while modifying maps).

Edited March 2 by Wraith777