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spd7693

My Own Doom Wad

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As promised I've stopped spamming my problems and questions in a different thread than this, so I'm gonna just post everything in a thread I'll have for it only. But first I'll explain again what this wad I'm making is: 

 

The story is that one day Doomguy finds his wife and his daughter kidnapped by the demons. He checks around if there have been attacks on Earth like he has been used to seeing every time the demons have attacked. Though this time the rest of the world has been mostly unharmed. He knows the demons are aiming for him and nothing else - they want him and his family in hell so that they can erase him. So, the 32-map journey begins. 

 

Of course, in time I will post my progress in making it. Four maps are basically completely ready, but still nothing is final. I'm open for ideas, criticism and any other offers. 

So, here is one of the ready maps. Map 5, named Boot Camp. The map is named after the tutorial mission in the original Star Craft, another favorite game of mine. Well, not much of a boot camp anyways (and after all, I don't know what that means), but it may turn out to be interesting. 

 

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Here you start - in a room with five UAC doors and a star, whose arms point at the five doors. One is blue as you see, the other are normal. How does this map work? You have to flip..: 

 

One: 

 

5aec5ecc7d6fc_2018-05-04(14).png.de45c27f80524f0a0b2e5b63a6fe18fa.png

(Be careful of the trap.) 

 

Two: 

 

5aec5f1d58dad_2018-05-04(18).png.ab57ed838c9afa99634dceb23ffad426.png

 

Three: 

 

5aec5f576fa76_2018-05-04(16).png.db4725b94fd08792ec3ffe92d1c4375b.png

 

Four switches..: 

 

 

 

5aec5f7c0dea4_2018-05-04(15).png.4f04218d0780c4ddce6d22fc76a78966.png

 

 

In order to open the four walls that block the path to the blue key. Here you see the walls opened: 

 

 5aec5fbbb1ff5_2018-05-04(19).png.b3a7c04f8cbff7d5ae3e07d5afeea616.png

(Two go up, two go down.) 

 

And here you can see the blue key, standing proudly on its pedestal: 

 

 

5aec601decf2c_2018-05-04(20).png.b460843b48df8ad03647fd6533f84fab.png

(You can grab it normally just as it stands.) 

 

Then comes the exit, which must be unlocked by this switch: 

 

5aec60bf89106_2018-05-04(22).png.32d8dac1cc6820bd3c911dd82b4b3f8c.png

 

And this switch: 

 

5aec60ed5652d_2018-05-04(23).png.9728d47c37ee3231f79810c23aff4ad5.png

 

In order to open both exit doors and flip the exit switch behind them. 

 

5aec612abc51d_2018-05-04(21).png.d40ddf05ad46603af7e2b776bff26f46.png

 

 

Other screenshots from the map you may find interesting: 

 

Cacodemons that can actually be tricky - the map has a few. 

 

5aec61934f127_2018-05-04(9).png.a56b91531675d6afeea3bc8ad927cce4.png

 

 

A baron of hell in a very tricky spot - there are four in the map. (The other three teleport in the starting area once you pick up the key.) 

5aec61bb8075d_2018-05-04(10).png.99e459afded62b7584685b2c38fbd00a.png

 

And a sign on the floor - I'll be using a few in some maps. 
 

 

5aec62565904c_2018-05-04(11).png.1c3b5124d68ec50849d9b6fd1d400f8f.png

 

As well as an area that works like E2M2 of Doom and Doom 2 map 12 - The Factory. Here is how it looks once you walk across it over the hidden rising platforms from the elevator: 

 

5aec62d70b7e1_2018-05-04(12).png.70c6170fa3f294fbdc439364149c38cf.png

 

And here is how it looks when you go from the door to the elevator: 

 

5aec632a80b58_2018-05-04(13).png.5f1aa6b7e26b98bbc5083dbb07d7b2e9.png

 

For a final thing, this is how the map looks like on the automap once you finish it: 

 

5aec636ae183d_2018-05-04(24).png.9d07a42fd908d985bc152ea45c2c6d74.png

 

Now, I'm expecting opinions. :) 

 

Also, this map has nothing that doesn't come in Doom/Ultimate Doom. Which means no SSG, no megaspheres, no chaingunners, no revenants, etc... 

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Firstly, factoid: Boot Camp is typically used to refer to basic combat training in the military, though it is commonly associated with that of the US Marine Corps. In the Army, it is always referred to as BCT or (of course) Basic Combat Training, with a few exceptions: infantry and armor training companies actually have One Station Unit Training (OSUT).

 

Now, opinions: Nice concept, the story is relatively unimportant unless this mod is story-driven, but it shows forethought, which is nice. As for the map in question, to my eyes, it looks like a skeleton, or a framework.

What does that mean? Strictly speaking, the map is playable, but isn't very polished, as if intended to test gameplay with detailing and whatnot later.

To further specify, it's very empty, devoid of elements. A little extra time spent adding some lights and a little more color variety (though I'm guilty of monotonous color myself) and this thing would look sharp.

Also, if this map is nonlinear, which it looks like it is, some landmarks would be helpful to assist the player in navigation.

 

I hope I'm not coming across as harsh. You're doing well.

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What do you mean by landmarks? Yeah, the map is non-linear, maybe even circular I must say. I'm gonna play a bit with the lighting, the much it has never made me any impression, maybe I see everything the right way, but still I'm a beginner. So I'm working a bit like "less used, less messed up." As for flooring, sometimes I don't know what to use - most times - so that's why floors sometimes keep looking the same. But thank you anyways. 

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Pros: 

 

- The color scheme is nice. I like the gray and red. 

- The map is probably functional and seems to have some structure to it.

 

Cons:

 

- Texture alignment is blase, lots of ugly cutoffs and errors. 

- Most rooms are architecturally featureless, essentially boxes of some sort. The nukage room is the notable exception. Notice that I didn't say they 'lack detailing': additional inset and surface-level detail won't change much at all in this case -- the architectural form matters more. 

- Most rooms have almost no visual ideas, apart from their basic texturing. Again, the nukage room is the exception. 

- The layout is essentially a set of boxes connected by corridors. Very little physical or visual interconnectivity. One area tends to connect to at most two areas (the area before it and the one after it). 

- Barons will be dull in this layout. The 1st baron is only truly in a tricky spot if the player can't retreat from where that shot is taken. The other barons will likely clump up at doorways as tedious chokepoint fights, or be skipped if the player is lucky enough for them to not get in the way. With four barons, I'd make sure that a rocket launcher and 20 total rockets (at least) are available. 

- Those cacodemons are only going to be 'tricky' if you play without running and strafing. If you are testing this fight and they seem tricky I'd suggest not running around like a headless chicken and careening into their fireballs. Nevertheless, two cacodemons with the shotgun isn't too offensive.

- Lighting variation is nonexistent. 

 

I'd suggest studying maps you enjoy in the editor thoroughly and figuring out what makes them tick. Be more attentive while playing as well.

 

Setting out to work on a 32-map megawad will almost certainly not go well, either. 

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@rdwpa 

 

  1. There actually are more than 22 rockets on the map if you know where to look for them! There are at least 10 in the secret in the nukage pit with the cacodemons. And there are at least two boxes of rockets in the areas. 
  2. The cacodemons are tricky because they can get in the way of the staircase. 
  3. I don't know what don't you like about barons of hell, I disagree with your opinion there. The only difference is that there you can kill them with either weapon. 
  4. I'm trying as hard as I can not to have texture cut offs, but most of the rooms I photographed had actually everything lined up, including with corners. And it took me 10 hours to line everything perfectly up. I don't have this much time per day! I don't know where did you see those cut offs, but I don't see any. I know I'm bad at art - had mostly D's in art classes in school - but I don't think there are. 

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What I mean by landmarks is, for example, in Downtown (Doom II MAP13, to specify), the southwest corner holds the warehouse, outside of which is that huge arrow. In the northeast, you have that structure with the teleporter in it.

The arrow and teleport structure are so notable, it's easy to know where you are at any given time.

Conversely, The Citadel (MAP19) has the courtyard and three buildings outside the citadel proper, and inside the citadel proper is a maze of hallways that's ridiculously easy to get lost in.

 

If it helps, make each room unique in its own way so it's easier to maintain a thought process on where the player is. The map doesn't have to follow architectural logic (indeed, many Doom maps don't), but it should follow a path that's simple, easy to navigate, and flows.

Maps using architectural logic can work, but because humans tend to build with some degree of symmetry, it can become easy to get lost in such a map.

 

As an alternative example, @Tormentor667's Ultimate Torment and Torture used unique areas and simple flow all the time so navigation wasn't all that difficult even in those beasts of levels. In short, it was easy to remember where you had been, where you could go, and where you needed to go.

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^

 

I have put two arrows in the nukage room, each of them facing the way you need to go. The road starting from the elevator is marked with smaller lights, that go into the ceiling. The road starting from the door is marked with bigger lights that go out of the ceiling. Also the side lights are bigger. 

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If you spent that long aligning textures in a map of this size, I suggest you work on some maps you don't care about at all (i.e. not ones you want to put in a megawad to be shared) in order to learn the editor better. I feel this is a skill that new mappers overlook: learn the editor! It will probably improve your mapping skills and will undoubtedly save you tons of time

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I like the idea that you have a plot. Whether the plot matters to the actual development or not is a different story, but at least you have an idea of where you'd be headed, which is absolutely essential. That being said...

 

2 hours ago, rdwpa said:

Setting out to work on a 32-map megawad will almost certainly not go well, either. 

 

I agree that you may be getting too ambitious right out of the gate. While your goal of creating a 32-map megawad is laudable, I can say that from personal experience, it can be daunting. I applaud your ambitions, but perhaps you may want to start with a lower target. if you want to create more than just single levels, shoot for a small mapset, perhaps something in the neighborhood of 4-8 maps?

 

With regard to landmarks, in this level, the star in the opening room is essentially a landmark. Other ways to do that would be to add other features to the rooms in the level or change up the textures (I'll get back to the textures in a moment). Since there's not a lot of interconnectedness to the level, landmarks are less important, in my opinion. In this level, you essentially travel down four paths that each end in a switch. These paths are essentially rooms with one way in and one way out (there are a few exceptions), so there aren't a lot of ways you could lose track of where you are while you're playing.

 

I agree with @rdwpa's like of the red/gray color scheme on the floor. It makes it look as though there's red carpeting on top of a gray tile floor. I like that. You could add a 1 or 2 unit height difference between the red and the gray tile, which would further set it off, but I like the overall color scheme.

 

I think some of your rooms are too tall, such as your start room and the blue key room. So your texture looks overwhelmingly monotonous repeated that many times. If you wanted to keep the rooms that tall, you could add a second tier to them, accessed by a lift or stairs, which would add a vertical element to the level that doesn't appear to be there.

 

8 minutes ago, spd7693 said:
  1. I'm trying as hard as I can not to have texture cut offs, but most of the rooms I photographed had actually everything lined up, including with corners. And it took me 10 hours to line everything perfectly up. I don't have this much time per day! I don't know where did you see those cut offs, but I don't see any. I know I'm bad at art - had mostly D's in art classes in school - but I don't think there are. 

Doom Builder (if not all modern map editors) have an auto-alignment features that you can use to quickly align the textures, so it shouldn't take you 10 hours to line up everything. If you're concerned that the dimensions of your rooms will be uneven multiples of 64/128, then add a different texture to the corners (or somewhere else) to break up the long runs so that misalignment are less noticeable.

 

Furthermore, there are places where your wall textures don't line up. Look at the areas around doorways or around your switch "two." The walls of your nukage room look odd, at least in the screenshot, because the green line is above the surface of the nukage.

 

If you look at the ceiling textures, particularly those with lights, you will see that the lights are sometimes cut off in the middle. Examples of this are the nukage room, the fourth switch room, the second computer switch room, and the hallway leading to the exits. You either need to move the rooms so they line up better with the ceiling textures or use different ceiling textures that don't have lights. I don't use Doom Builder, but I'm reasonably sure it has a feature to render the ceiling textures in the editor instead of the floor textures.

 

With regard to the two computer switches that you have to hit in order to unlock the exit door, it's a good concept to use them as a switch, but unless there's something to indicate that they are switches, you may have players confused as to what to do. Players are conditioned to see the SW1 and SW2 textures (that change) as switches that do something. The computer screens are typically just decorations. So that may be confusing for players.

 

Overall, the map is a good start. It shows promise and I encourage you to keep mapping.

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Judging by the screenshots it looks like a typical first map. Try to make your rooms less square/rectangle like and use more texture variety.

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^

 

There is one thing I wanna understand. John "Dr. Sleep" Anderson made rooms only of circles and rectangles. Then again he still is among the most loved Doom map makers. Why then? I know he made maps only using C code, but then again his maps don't have that many shapes. Furthermore, his maps rather lack gameplay - something I prefer setting as the main thing - in comparison to maps of less loved creators like Tom Mustaine. 

 

^^

I found that feature and changed a few unnecessary things. I tend to make the rooms tall on purpose in times, but maybe I should still make them smaller. I want the ceiling to look like being 10 feet tall irl - I'm a former civil engineering student after all. At least in Europe a floor of a high-rise building must be 10 feet tall. So if I use smaller heights, the floor looks maximum 8 feet. A door must be 7 feet tall as you know. In another map I'll post a bit later you will see a sector with height of 512. And it's on purpose as well. But the rest will have the same heights as this map. So, I wanna know better when the floor looks 10 feet and when it looks more. 

 

About why the slime line of the wall doesn't touch the slime actually - otherwise it will be the bottom of another poison sign will be visible above which I don't wanna happen either. And lowering the ceiling or rising the floor will intersect the door. 

Edited by spd7693

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If it helps, the thread you were posting your screenshots in before this one...

This one...

Has tons of screens you can use a reference. I've three posts in there that link to tons of screenshots from my own extremely ambitious project.

Might help give you an idea on how you want your architecture, like in more than a few of my screenshots, I added little slopes to the ceiling to make it less boring.

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Thanks. I wanna see the auto align feature since I found it nowhere on the ribbon and in the tools. 

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The only way I know of to use it in DB2 and GZDBuilder is to go into 3D mode, select the walls you want to align, and hit A or (either ctrl or shift)+A.

It should be under configuration.

Also, if you don't have any walls selected when you use auto-align, it will align every wall attached to the one your cursor is on ad infinitum.

So, doing that on a wall that's on the perimeter will align the entire perimeter to that walls' offsets.

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3 hours ago, spd7693 said:

@rdwpa 

 

  1. There actually are more than 22 rockets on the map if you know where to look for them! There are at least 10 in the secret in the nukage pit with the cacodemons. And there are at least two boxes of rockets in the areas. 
  2. The cacodemons are tricky because they can get in the way of the staircase. 
  3. I don't know what don't you like about barons of hell, I disagree with your opinion there. The only difference is that there you can kill them with either weapon. 
  4. I'm trying as hard as I can not to have texture cut offs, but most of the rooms I photographed had actually everything lined up, including with corners. And it took me 10 hours to line everything perfectly up. I don't have this much time per day! I don't know where did you see those cut offs, but I don't see any. I know I'm bad at art - had mostly D's in art classes in school - but I don't think there are. 

 

I do not dislike barons. Barons are tricky monsters to use because they have lots of HP relative to their threat level. So it's a good idea to avoid them when they aren't dangerous, when they can't simply be ignored, and when the player doesn't have the ability to make quick work of them (RL or BFG with ample ammo; sometimes the berserk, SSG, or PR but a lot fewer than what the RL and BFG can support; infighting with another powerful monster while you do something else; etc.).  

 

The way it's setup, none of the spaces in your layout can be dangerous (even in a four-baron fight in the nukage room, the player could simply retreat to a door or hallway), the barons also can't be ignored because there are lots of narrow thresholds they will block, and you have rockets but a lot are secret. Secret rockets are not good enough. Secrets should be a reward that allows for more fun, rather than a necessity to avoid uninteresting tedium. 

 

As far as alignments, look at the sides of the switch in shot #2; the stargray's vertical alignment is messed up. In shot #3, the monitors on the spacewall are cut off strangely at the right corner. In shot #4, the ceiling lights are cut off abruptly, The sides of the switch are also noticeably different in y-alignment than the same material in the switch itself. A few shots below that, the computer panels are cut off abruptly on the right. The same is the case for the shot below. The walls bordering the exit door have different y-alignments. In the nukage room, the ceiling lights are cut off in places, and the light textures on the side are also misaligned in places. On top of all of this, the stargray walls throughout have questionable alignments in general, as in shot two where part of it sinks into the floor and there is an x-alignment mishap on the right side of the switch.  

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Well, this is because I've worked on a 16 pixel grid. (Yes, I've worked on 16 and 8 pixel grid in the entire map.) I know most textures are made to be created on a 64 pixel grid. But that grid makes my maps awkwardly large for myself even. So I can't fix that in any way since the floor already is placed. Same as the other panels, but what is the way? Making lines that aren't necessary? Better less artistic than feeling awkwardly while playing. So this causes sometimes an uneven factor of 16 to make some places. 

 

Also, I've hidden all these things on purpose to make the player think. Sometimes secrets may make use making the player feel more comfortable as well. And there are a lot of shotgun shells on the map as well, which means you can kill all barons with the shotgun as well. I call this tactics, you call this uninteresting tedium. Alright then. Opinion. 

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In UDMF, you can manipulate various properties of the flats and textures in your map directly, which is why I use it almost exclusively, for its user-friendliness.

Here the properties include alignment, scale, rotation (if I'm remembering properly), and, in the case of flats, glow color and height.

 

Most players don't like fighting barons with a single shotgun. The SSG is fine for me, personally, but the single shotgun makes such fights tiring. However, use of other monsters to invoke infighting can make such a battle interesting, as the baron will generally win against nearly anything, and it doesn't act as an ammo sink, which is what most people seem to have against them.

 

Also, what @rdwpa is saying about secrets adding to the fun is that secrets shouldn't be necessary to complete a map (though I apparently couldn't complete E1M3 of Double Impact the non-secret way). Imagine, if you will, a secret area with a shotgun, shells, and green armor, and when you collect the shotgun, you get swarmed by low to mid/high-tier enemies in a tight courtyard. If you don't get this secret, you may not have the ammo you need to complete the map, but if you do, the trap might screw you over worse than before.

Even without the trap, this secret is still borderline mandatory unless the player feels like punching hell knights and revenants. Secrets are intended to make gameplay more interesting and perhaps a little easier, and it's easy enough to do with a light touch.

 

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11 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

Secrets are intended to make gameplay more interesting and perhaps a little easier, and it's easy enough to do with a light touch.

 

 

That's why the secrets I have have a soul sphere, a green armor, a box of rockets, a blue armor and a bunch of rockets and health potions. Also the rocket launcher is out of the way. If you don't pick it up and grab the secret behind it, you still can finish the map because you have tons of shotgun and chaingun ammo. Furthermore, you have to fight one baron less. Then the only actual hazard is the number of shotgunners by switch three. 

 

Besides, I fixed the misaligned wall textures. The feature helped a lot. 

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32 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

Also, what @rdwpa is saying about secrets adding to the fun is that secrets shouldn't be necessary to complete a map

 

I wouldn't go that far. If a map is strongly built around the idea of needing secrets to beat it or kill all monsters or anything like that, then that is cool. But occasionally maps with more conventional and straightforward aims will make a secret a prerequisite for enjoyment (the 'SSG is a secret, have fun tediously plinking away at lots of mid tiers with the SG if you don't find it' sort of map comes to mind as a prominent example), without such higher concepts in mind. That is a problem not because such design is bad in principle, but because it almost certainly conflicts with what the mapper would want (I doubt most people want to penalize not finding a secret with tedium, rather than reward finding a secret with 'even more fun'). 

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1 hour ago, spd7693 said:

I found that feature and changed a few unnecessary things. I tend to make the rooms tall on purpose in times, but maybe I should still make them smaller. I want the ceiling to look like being 10 feet tall irl - I'm a former civil engineering student after all. At least in Europe a floor of a high-rise building must be 10 feet tall. So if I use smaller heights, the floor looks maximum 8 feet. A door must be 7 feet tall as you know. In another map I'll post a bit later you will see a sector with height of 512. And it's on purpose as well. But the rest will have the same heights as this map. So, I wanna know better when the floor looks 10 feet and when it looks more. 

 

About why the slime line of the wall doesn't touch the slime actually - otherwise it will be the bottom of another poison sign will be visible above which I don't wanna happen either. And lowering the ceiling or rising the floor will intersect the door. 

 

You should read the Unofficial Doom Specs and Level Design Patterns since you are very concerned with size and space. According to these documents, the scale in Doom tends to be 1 foot = 16 vertical units and 10 horizontal units, which would mean that a 7 foot tall door would be ~70 units. I would say your 72 unit high door textures would work well for this size. And if that's the case, then it wouldn't at all be cut off by a 128 unit (or even 96 unit) high ceiling. Either way, your slime strip would be at the bottom and your poison sign would not be cut off.

 

And by that logic, 128 units would correspond to 11 or 12 feet.

 

With regard to a 512 tall unit room, there's nothing inherently wrong with a tall room, provided you use the space. That much height would give you a lot of room to do other things (terraces, windows into corridors at different levels, stairs leading up to landings, platforms, etc.) If you take advantage of the space, there's nothing wrong with that tall a room (or any height of room).

 

1 hour ago, spd7693 said:

There is one thing I wanna understand. John "Dr. Sleep" Anderson made rooms only of circles and rectangles. Then again he still is among the most loved Doom map makers. Why then? I know he made maps only using C code, but then again his maps don't have that many shapes. Furthermore, his maps rather lack gameplay - something I prefer setting as the main thing - in comparison to maps of less loved creators like Tom Mustaine.

John Anderson is well-regarded not for the shapes he used but for what he did inside them. He was quite good at using lighting in realistic ways to add detail and for creating encounters. He also designed his levels in 1994, but they have largely held up because of setup, both in encounters and detail.

 

The criticism of making your maps out of squares and rectangles is that two of the advances of the Doom engine is that it allows for verticality and non-orthogonality. So you can have things happen on multiple levels and rooms don't always have to have right angles. If you add non-orthogonal rooms (which you have some of), it adds variety and makes the map more memorable. Of course, you still have to have good encounter setup or all the weirdly-shaped rooms in the world won't help your level.

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I may have misinterpreted to a degree, and I do agree with the idea of maps revolving around secrets (D2 Reloaded MAP32 comes to mind here), but such maps seem to be few and far between. Really, my thesis lied more in the example than anything else I said, because that one comes from straight experience.

 

One thing I find often and hate is secrets which pose any danger to you. In my view, a secret needs to act as a reward for seeking it out, and even if its only a health bonus and a little closet to set up in and chill out for a moment, it works.

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Just dropping by to say that the STARGRx vertical alignment hurts. Badly. It wouldn't even be such a problem if it wasn't almost every wall in the level. 

 

That should be your main focus. Play with the textures and create different, more interesting room shapes with a dose of life in it. That is how you create interesting and memorable designs. So far it's very monotonous and there's not enough variation whatsoever (neither floor, height, texture, shape...). That should be your first focus. 

 

 

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6 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

One thing I find often and hate is secrets which pose any danger to you.

 

Tell it to Milo Casali. I keep telling him I hate revenants lol. Again, I'm always testing the maps and until I complete them without grabbing any secret stuff, I don't stop editing. So the rocket launcher is placed out of the intended way to finish the map and is just a bonus. In a map that has three barons, actually four and the fourth is guarding the rocket launcher. Meanwhile, the other three aren't that hard to kill with the regular shotgun or the chaingun. All the other secrets are pretty calm. 

Anyways, are we gonna talk about this map only or we're gonna talk about more later on? 

 

 

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4 minutes ago, NaZa said:

Just dropping by to say that the STARGRx vertical alignment hurts. Badly. It wouldn't even be such a problem if it wasn't almost every wall in the level. 

 

That should be your main focus. Play with the textures and create different, more interesting room shapes with a dose of life in it. That is how you create interesting and memorable designs. So far it's very monotonous and there's not enough variation whatsoever (neither floor, height, texture, shape...). That should be your first focus. 

 

 

 

I already fixed this. The texture remained on just a handful of places. 

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How incredibly ironic is it that Plutonia is my favorite IWAD?

Regarding the topic, this is the only map we've seen on the thread so far. I'd like to see some more.

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1 minute ago, spd7693 said:

Anyways, are we gonna talk about this map only or we're gonna talk about more later on? 

You only posted screenshots and details about this map. And in the OP, you said you were "expecting opinions." And you've gotten opinions, but again, you've only posted the 1 map.

 

If you post more here or in a different thread, I'm sure you'll get feedback about the changes you made to this level and any new levels you post.

 

One suggestion: if you're going to post a lot of screenshots, hide them. That way the post isn't that long. If someone wants to see screenshots, they can open the spoiler and see them.

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1 hour ago, rdwpa said:

 

I do not dislike barons. Barons are tricky monsters to use because they have lots of HP relative to their threat level. So it's a good idea to avoid them when they aren't dangerous

 

I want to expand on this comment a bit.

 

Barons are basically tanks. They are best used to flush the player out of certain areas so that he can't just camp in one spot and kill all the monsters as they pop up. This means they are best used in smaller spaces while using them in larger open spaces tends to be pointless and a waste of the player's time since it means he will just circle strife them until they are dead.

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6 minutes ago, hardcore_gamer said:

Barons are basically tanks. They are best used to flush the player out of certain areas so that he can't just camp in one spot and kill all the monsters as they pop up. This means they are best used in smaller spaces while using them in larger open spaces tends to be pointless and a waste of the player's time since it means he will just circle strife them until they are dead.

Allow me to expand it a little further.

 

They can also be used to distract larger opponents (Tricks and Traps, you know the room) and crowds, allowing you to thin them out through infighting. Using them this way allows them to be used in relatively large areas without reducing overall effectiveness by spicing up their encounters.

 

It's also likely because of their massive health that the knights were introduced in Doom II, which are really of the same threat level, but aren't ammo sinks to the same degree and thereby could be considered more fun, albeit in a different way.

 

However, they can also be used as boss-type monsters, but even so, this should be done only sparingly, and in relatively tight areas to maintain a real threat.

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8 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

Allow me to expand it a little further.

 

They can also be used to distract larger opponents (Tricks and Traps, you know the room) and crowds, allowing you to thin them out through infighting. Using them this way allows them to be used in relatively large areas without reducing overall effectiveness by spicing up their encounters.

 

It's also likely because of their massive health that the knights were introduced in Doom II, which are really of the same threat level, but aren't ammo sinks to the same degree and thereby could be considered more fun, albeit in a different way.

 

However, they can also be used as boss-type monsters, but even so, this should be done only sparingly, and in relatively tight areas to maintain a real threat.

One more addition.

 

@hardcore_gamer is essentially right, barons (and hell knights, too) are typically best used (as the primary monster) in small spaces. Otherwise, you can just circle strafe around them and hit them while they can't hit you.

 

There are basically two ways to effectively use a baron (or hell knight) as the primary monster, in order of effectiveness (in my opinion):

  1. In a narrow corridor (or at least one not much wider than the monster), where you have very little room to dodge. The encounter can be even more deadly if the player effectively gets locked into the corridor by some means (teleport into the corridor, door locks after you enter the corridor, etc.).
  2. In a larger area that is filled with other enemies so that you can't judge weave around them all. Unless the other enemies are all barons or hell knights, there will be infighting, which is the downside to this method of implementation.

Otherwise, they're useful for:

  • Distracting other enemies (i.e., infighting)
  • Turreted monsters for suppression or denial
  • Bullet sponges to simply delay you

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