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Jon

NeoStoic (DM Map released after 20 years, was Lost Village (DM Map))

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RELEASED

Renamed from Lost Village to NeoStoic

 

New screenshot:

Screenshot_Doom_20190717_133816.png.7f322cd777799e411b550bd3254ed069.png

 

File: neostoic.zip

Also at https://jmtd.net/doom/#index2h2

Presently in INCOMING

 

Thanks @elend for the sky

 

(old post content follows)

 

I started this in 2000 and hope to finish it soon, kind of like an exorcism. It's a DM-only map for limit-removing ports; sized for 2-4 players but I think would cope with up to 8. No BFG.

Most of the textures are new (well, 18 years old) and unreleased except a few @kristus stole (for Nimrod, if I'm not mistaken) when he beta'd it back then :)

Inspirations were a Half Life DM map "Lost Village" (hence the name, but I might change it) and "wupass1.wad", a fairly underrated Doom 2 DM PWAD from the 90s.
 

Screenshots with gamma 2 or so; I still need to tweak light levels a lot. I think I'm going to try for a custom sky before I'm done. The main thing it could probably do with is playtesting, but my life style doesn't afford the luxury of multiplayer at the moment. I could/might release a beta PWAD if there was any interest from others to playtest it!

 

The PWAD, as it stood in 2000, was 54 things,  793 vertices, 136 sectors, 853 linedefs, 7 new patches, 9 new flats.
It's currently 40 things, 2036 vertices, 429 sectors, 1735 sidedefs, 10 patches, 12 new flats.

 

So... starting a thread because I could use some kind of pick-me-up to get this out the door. It's killing me at the moment.

 

Old screenshots

Spoiler

doom08.png

doom11.png

doom10.png

 

doom09.png

 

 

 

 

Edited by Jon

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Nice textures, can't comment about the DM-appropriateness but I'm sure you'll get some feedback from the DW DM crew :) Are you gonna release a texture pack when you finish the map? 

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That hole in the floor tiles is problematic, it will produce uncomfortable screen shaking for anyone running over it, which is a very unpopular side-effect in DM. Since you can't use Boom selfref sector magic, I suggest you put a tile (or a bunch of chopped up tiles) in the center of the hole so that players run smoothly over the visual effect.

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Eh?  I'm not a DM player, but I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to use an old-school vanilla self-referential crystal sector there to keep it smooth.

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I’m actually making the hole much bigger, so most of that floor region will be at the lower height, but I’ll bear that in mind for after I’ve made the change. Thanks!

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23 hours ago, Big Ol Billy said:

Are you gonna release a texture pack when you finish the map? 

 

I'm not sure; the WAD will be licensed liberally so people could rip them if they wanted to. There might not be enough for a stand alone texture pack.


Experimenting with different skies now. Swapped some floor tile textures to reduce the visual noise in the outdoor areas and expanded the dirt (for the same reason).

 

 

doom12.png

doom13.png

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Screenshots makes it look like the map is rather flat and boring, aside from the potentially bumpy floor (blah). I'd love to give proper feedback but given there is no download, I can't. Why is there no download? We can't help you make a better map without actually at the very least strolling through it.

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13 hours ago, Decay said:

Screenshots makes it look like the map is rather flat and boring, aside from the potentially bumpy floor (blah). I'd love to give proper feedback but given there is no download, I can't. Why is there no download? We can't help you make a better map without actually at the very least strolling through it.

 

Thanks for your feedback. There's no download, yet, because I don't feel it's quite at that stage, yet, although maybe I should re-evaluate that. Despite that I've already got helpful feedback from this thread.  I was thinking a private alpha before a public beta, and was starting to think about who I could approach for the former.

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5 hours ago, Jon said:

 

Thanks for your feedback. There's no download, yet, because I don't feel it's quite at that stage, yet, although maybe I should re-evaluate that. Despite that I've already got helpful feedback from this thread.  I was thinking a private alpha before a public beta, and was starting to think about who I could approach for the former.


You are going to want to have people test the layout(s) before finishing detail because any major changes that need to be made to a layout will nullify the work that was put into detailing of an area that now has to be undone. Also it's better to do that early and give some insight into how to develop the map - early layout changes and design decisions are much easier to make now rather than later.

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40 minutes ago, Argent Agent said:


You are going to want to have people test the layout(s) before finishing detail because any major changes that need to be made to a layout will nullify the work that was put into detailing of an area that now has to be undone. Also it's better to do that early and give some insight into how to develop the map - early layout changes and design decisions are much easier to make now rather than later.

 

you're right in general, but the layout of this map was set down nearly two decades ago, and I'm not going to mess with that too much anymore. So any flaws in the layout are largely going to be there forever now. Luckily I don't think the layout is too bad (and I did playtest the map in around 2000 in real DMs too), my main gameplay concern is item placement.

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Textures look nice, maybe it'd be nice if there were more variants of the concrete because it seems the primary texture (one without stains, one with stripes or a logo, one with more ribs like a dump truck hopper https://www.imanpro.net/pub/co/tcm/photo/1012/4.jpg)

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On 5/10/2018 at 3:55 PM, Vorpal said:

Textures look nice, maybe it'd be nice if there were more variants of the concrete

 

Good catch. The primary texture in the WAD is one I created whilst following a tutorial on creating textures back in 1999-2000. I took a photo (on a film camera) of things out and about, including concrete slabs in my parent's back yard, then scanned it in on a flatbed scanner. The slabs were mossy. Anyway the distinctive moss pattern looks jarring when you see it repeated over and over. So I need to make a lot of variants of that. As a first step, I've deleted the moss altogether. The map looks much plainer now though. So I'm looking forward to getting the mossy variants back in.

 

Also another placeholder sky. I wondered if a yellow-coloured sky would fair better in Doom's palette, and if that would nicely contrast with the green/grey. so I quickly mocked one up (it's actually "17 Ghosts II", Nine Inch Nails fans) for this shot. It's a rough mock-up, you can clearly see I've mirrored it to get it to tile...

 

doom00.png.e7c5f31d93bc7817023090b1b4a206c1.png

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OK; the time has probably come (probably overdue) for a public alpha/beta of this map, so here it is

 

https://jmtd.net/tmp/brkdown.zip

 

TODO list is still pretty long: find a suitable sky; more variation in main texture; fix a couple of sky clips; fix light levels worldwide; replace placeholder TEKLAMPS with more sector based lights; more I've probably forgotten

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OK this is basically done except for the sky. I've got a NASA pic of the sky from Mars, originally sourced by Enjay but converted to vanilla palette and dimensions that I'm playing with, but I think it needs major work, possibly retracing entirely. I might go back to that blue one which was pretty good.

 

DOOM0000.png

 

I've kept that ZIP in the prior post updated.

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I never saw the post that linked this back in May, I'll be sure to get a couple rounds in soon and let you know how it goes

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That's a cool looking level, kind of darken2ish.

The texture of the blue sky is better, if it were just gray I think.

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You are very welcome. That looks great so far. Although I am not a DM player, I gotta check this out regardless.

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