SIGIL v1.21 - New Romero megawad [released!]

[Mk7_Centipede]

XD I was like CHOCOLATE?!

 

So I need zdoom to play this continously? I think it would have made more sense for the story to scrap e4, but I'm a shit-on-e4 guy. I've been thinking of sigil as a more canon e4. It doesn't matter I guess.

 

gameplay sounds cool. Hell lightning and m8 air swarm? I'm down.

[NightFright]

It's gonna require doom.wad, so technically it can never be an iwad. What GZDoom can do is to add some convenience feature like it already has for nerve.wad to automatically load the proper iwad with it (if available). Which may or may not happen, depending entirely on Graf Zahl. However if they did it for nerve.wad, sigil.wad should probably get the same treatment.

[Mk7_Centipede]

is dehacked required to add more listed episodes?

 

I guess its only limit-removing as well, so the idea of official support would be silly I would think.

[Jon]

6 minutes ago, Mk7_Centipede said:

is dehacked required to add more listed episodes?

 

I guess its only limit-removing as well, so the idea of official support would be silly I would think.

 

Dehacked cannot add more listed episodes. 

[Master O]

1 hour ago, Gez said:

What reason would there be to consider it an IWAD?

 

That it labels itself as episode 5 and it's created by one of Doom's creators?

[kristus]

But it's not an IWAD

[VGA]

23 minutes ago, Master O said:

 

That it labels itself as episode 5 and it's created by one of Doom's creators?

Dude, in order for it to be an IWAD it would have to contain all the graphics and sounds of Doom. Romero doesn't have the rights to distribute those.

 

It will be loaded as a pwad on top of Ultimate Doom and be a 5th episode after the 4 others.

[Kira]

 

26 minutes ago, Master O said:

 

That it labels itself as episode 5 and it's created by one of Doom's creators?

Quoting the wiki because there is an actual definition of what makes an IWAD:

 

Quote

The acronym IWAD is generally interpreted as "internal WAD"[1] and refers to a WAD file which contains all of the external data for a complete game. In order to be identified as IWAD, a file must contain the "IWAD" (49 57 41 44) magic identifier as the first four bytes in its header. An IWAD file is required for execution of any of the stock Doom engine games. This is in contrast to PWADs, which are "patch" WADs intended to replace or augment the content found in the IWAD.

 

[TheMightyHeracross]

2 hours ago, Mk7_Centipede said:

XD I was like CHOCOLATE?!

 

So I need zdoom to play this continously? I think it would have made more sense for the story to scrap e4, but I'm a shit-on-e4 guy. I've been thinking of sigil as a more canon e4. It doesn't matter I guess.

 

No, you just need a limit removing port. That includes (G)ZDoom and its derivatives, but also Crispy Doom, PrBoom, Eternity, etc.

[Diabolución]

I guess we will finally get the true and actual Ultimate Doom v1.9 to v2.0 Unofficial patch in a certain way, instead of this authentic rubbish featuring computer-generated levels.

 

 

What a boaster, calling that Ultimate Doom v1.9 to v2.0 Unofficial patch when even the very same Romero doesn’t dare to do so.

[NightFright]

The real shock for me is that Romero considers ep.4 "cooler" than ep.3 and doesn't dare to replace it. Then again, considering he made two maps for ep.4 and none for eps. 2+3... this is kinda biased. Cough, cough. A *BIT*...

 

Even though I gotta admit ep.3 had some of the most annoying levels of the entire game in it. Slough of Despair, Unholy Cathedral (OMG) and our beloved teleport puzzler Limbo. Replacing that isn't exactly what I would call sacrilege.

Edited April 13, 2019 by NightFright

[ReaperAA]

2 hours ago, NightFright said:

The real shock for me is that Romero considers ep.4 "cooler" than ep.3 and doesn't dare to replace it. Then again, considering he made two maps for ep.4 and none for eps. 2+3... this is kinda biased. Cough, cough. A *BIT*...

 

Even though I gotta admit ep.3 had some of the most annoying levels of the entire game in it. Slough of Despair, Unholy Cathedral (OMG) and our beloved teleport puzzler Limbo. Replacing that isn't exactly what I would call sacrilege.

 

I will add my previous post again why it replaces E3. 

10 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

My guess is because of the secret level issue. PrBoom+ and some other ports don't support MAPINFO lump. For such ports, it is necessary to have secret level exits in same levels as they are in the IWADs.

 

For example if you have the secret level exit in E1M5, the player will enter E1M9 just fine, but upon exiting that level they will get thrown back to E1M4, just like in vanilla Doom. This means that E1's secret level entrance SHOULD be in E1M3. Similarly for E2, E3 and E4, the secret level entrances should be in E2M5, E3M6 and E4M2 respectively.

 

Maybe Sigil's secret level entrance is in the 6th level. In such a case, putting Sigil in the Episode 3 slot makes sense.

 

And TBH, I personally actually like E4 more than E2 and E3 :D

[ketmar]

it is impossible to replace E4, as it has only two levels. at least this is how far i managed to progress, and i don't believe that it has more.

[Mk7_Centipede]

Following tradition, E5M8 is Sigil’s final level, with E5M9 stashed away somewhere for players to unearth. Level 8 is perhaps the most nerve-wracking of the campaign. It starts small, with players spawning behind a wrought-iron fence. The environment is dimly lit, though players can see bonfires along the room’s perimeter. The action picks up as players explore. Lost Souls teleport through the fence to harass them, and sibilant hisses announce Cacodemons drifting somewhere in the darkness.

 

“That level doesn't let you just sit there,” Romero said, laughing. “I'm going to do a little modification [before release], just to make it harder.”

 

Visibility can be considered a theme of E5M8. Players rarely see all the environment holds in store for them by standing at one vantage point. As soon as players reach the other side of the fence, they’re running from Imps, zombies, and Cacodemons, racing across rocky ground that pulses with glowing fissures. Like Illuminati eyes, the fissures hold clues: One’s zigzagging trail ends at the foot of a building, subtly directing players to go inside.

 

The final minutes of the level are as memorable as any eighth mission of Doom’s original campaign. Players enter an outdoor environment with high walls on either side, and a Spider-Mastermind far in front of them. Like other parts of E5M8, the encounter seems straightforward: kill the demon, move on.

 

Then players round the corner and wake up a Cyberdemon lying in wait. It marches forward firing volleys of rockets as it closes in. Players’ instinct may be to run back around the corner and regroup, but the Cyberdemon acts like a wall that inexorably moves forward, slowly but surely shrinking the gap.

 

The first level Romero made for Sigil was E5M7. It was originally going to be the episode’s fifth map before he decided its massive size warranted placement closer to the end of the campaign. The first room he designed for the map was not the room where players started. Approximately midway through E5M7, players teleport into a chamber where a body dangles in front of them. When they turn, a door opens, and zombified shotgunners open fire. If players try to put some distance between themselves and the gunners by moving toward the hanging corpse, they’ll fall into a pit of lava and have to scramble to find a way out.

 

E5M7—like most of Sigil’s maps—tests players’ ability to keep their cool as much as it gives their trigger finger a workout. “What I wanted to do was make a room that would be difficult to get out of, and got worse as you moved around in the room. It was almost like, ‘Don't move around too much! You're going to die!’”

 

The room’s layout adds to its challenge. Floors curve, and Baphomet’s demonic mug scowls at them from several angles. Players must escape the lava quickly, but they’ll often rush from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. “For me, it was really different because it's very curvy, lots of curves in that room,” said Romero. “It's got a broken wall you can get through, but there's a Cacodemons shooting in at you. The walls open up behind you and here come two more Cacodemons and a shotgunner. It's so hard.”

 

E5M7 came together in fits and starts, the way Romero has designed all of his maps for Doom and Quake. To get a feel for a map’s flow and challenge, he jumps from the editor and into the game every time he adds anything: an enemy, a weapon, an ammo pack, even a texture.

 

Of all Sigil’s maps, Romero may have iterated on level 7 the most. The fact that it was his first meant he was practically guaranteed to devise more efficient ways of doing things later on, and them coming back to bring earlier maps up to snuff. “When the level's done, I have [accumulated] maybe a thousand plays of the level, because I run it every minute or so that I'm working on it to make sure everything looks good, that I don't have any errors. That's the way I code as well: code a bit, test; code a bit, test. I don't code for half an hour before testing. I've got to see it, got to feel it, got to play it.”

 

In another part of level 7, players are ambushed by Cacodemons that can rise out of a pit in the center of a building. Romero ended up revising that area several times because he forgot to add one important property: Shooting an Illuminati eye to open or close a wall in the room, so that players may leave and re-enter at will. The room’s final design is a nest of line segments connected to architecture, trigger events, or both.

 

The Illuminati eye is a centerpiece of Sigil. It appeared only a few times in the original Doom, and served as mere set dressing. In Sigil, it’s combined with another little-used building block of Doom’s level design: The ability to open a secret wall by shooting it. “I only used it once, the line segment where you shoot a wall and it does something,” Romero admitted of the original game.

 

The first map he sent was M7 and I ended up complaining about a game mechanic I found too cryptic, but it turns out it's present across the entire episode and it's properly "explained" in M1, oops. The map itself is exactly what it should've been - a long journey through a marble fortress in the middle of lava-drenched hellish landscape. Vintage. What did surprise me was how mean some of the traps and environmental hazards were. John is surely aware that the community doesn't consider the original maps difficult at all these days, so he spiced things up to the point where I had to ask him to tone the nastiest parts down a notch. If I had to liken my experience to an existing community project, I'd say Romero could instantly become a partner in the No End in Sight megawad known for its strict vanilla visual style, unforgiving gameplay and cruel death traps.

 

Of all the rooms and stages in Sigil, Level 6 hosts Romero’s favorite: A maze straight out of Greek mythology, with a Cyberdemon standing in for the Minotaur. Enemies walk paths atop the maze, shooting and throwing fire as players navigate. A soaring tower holds a Baron of Hell, like a prison guard monitoring the grounds. But the most stressful part of the maze may be the fact that players can hear the Cyberdemon stomping around as they search for a way out. That ominous stomp is terrifying on multiple levels: it’s a sound that makes even the heartiest of Doom players quake; and it communicates that the monster isn’t content to sit and wait for players to come to it.

 

Level 5 is peppered with what Romero calls hell lightning, red lightning that flashes and ripples along the sky. “It's just strange, and the music is really weird, which plays into the mystery of, what is that stuff? I only did that on that one level.”

 

On one map there's this winding cavern full of lost souls and it really drains your ammo reserve, so we added a chainsaw, because it's very effective and relatively safe against the skulls. But on the UV-skill we added a berserk pack instead - it's technically more powerful, but much more awkward and dangerous against them. That's a cute one, I think.maybe this is map 2

 

dew: E5M4. It features a deadly crusher maze that I hoped could get tweaked a bit, but after several revisions I realized we were trapped by a Doom engine limitation that doesn't let you change the damage proprieties of crusher sectors once they get "initialized", even if you stop and restart them with a different action. Oops.

 

Level 3 reveals itself in layers, a nod to Romero’s E1M4b.

 

dew: E5M3, because it sings to my inner speedrunner. It's so tempting to dart past as many monsters as possible with daring moves, cause infights and then clean up the rest with the rocket launcher you grab later.

 

Areas of level 2 are tight, almost oppressive; in other regions of the level, players must backtrack through dark rooms and corridors to advance.

 

Sigil’s E5M1 holds a secret Romero claims is his most devious yet: A triple-nested series of hidden areas. “Level 1 has an area that is probably as big as the whole playable space that you can see only from the first secret area,” he said.

 

The space, a massive field, holds five pentagrams, symbolizing each of Doom’s episodes. Once in the second secret area, players are bombarded with details: decorations, paths, and, observable only to a keen eye, a sliver of blue pixels—a Soulsphere, the glowing blue head that boosts players’ life points by 100.

In a way, the act of uncovering E5M1’s nest of hidden areas is more satisfying than looting those areas. Catching a glimpse of a room or item they can’t reach incentivizes players to explore rather than rush through a map. Journey over destination. “It's kind of like an escape room,” Romero said. “When you get in there, now there's another weird puzzle. If you look really closely, you'll find another secret. That's the third secret, but you can just barely see it. I do this stuff all over the place: I want to give the player just a hint of something so they'll go and figure it out.”

[Dark Pulse]

6 hours ago, Master O said:

 

Will SIGIL.WAD be labelled as an IWAD for GZdoom?  GZDoom allows for a wad file to be labelled this way so it will appear in the IWAD Selection menu when GZdoom is run.

 

https://zdoom.org/wiki/IWADINFO

No way, because it still requires an Ultimate Doom IWAD to run and isn't a totally standalone game (won't have the graphical lumps, basically).

 

What *MIGHT* be possible is loading it as an "extra episode" automatically if it's detected, à la how No Rest For The Living is added to the episode menu if you run the BFG Edition of Doom II.

[Ferk]

14 hours ago, NightFright said:

It's gonna require doom.wad, so technically it can never be an iwad. What GZDoom can do is to add some convenience feature like it already has for nerve.wad to automatically load the proper iwad with it (if available). Which may or may not happen, depending entirely on Graf Zahl. However if they did it for nerve.wad, sigil.wad should probably get the same treatment.

IMHO, it would make more sense for the WAD to include a GAMEINFO lump for that, instead of hardcoding logic specific for it in every port.

If a well known WAD like Sigil added that lump, it would be a good incentive for other source ports and PWADs to use GAMEINFO too. Sometimes it's a bit of a pain to have to keep track of which PWADs work in which IWADs.

[Nootrac4571]

On 4/13/2019 at 1:33 AM, captain crunchy said:

I found this new article about the development and design of Sigil, as well as some background on how Romero got around to mapping again. Be advised, some  spoilery content in a couple sections if you want to go into the wad totally blind.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/110199/icon-of-sin-doom-and-the-making-of-john-romeros-sigil?page=2

 

Only read the first few paragraphs because I don't want to be spoiled, but from that early section, and because I'm a massive pedant:

 

"Doom is widely considered to be id Software’s opus."

 

Well yes, it's widely considered to be that because it's unequivocally true. Nobody disputes that Doom is a thing which Id made, which is what "opus" means.

 

I suspect the writer meant to say "magnum opus" meaning "greatest work." But the word "magnum" is pretty vital - you can't just leave it out - the difference is the same as saying "Doom is Id's best game" vs "Doom is Id's game."

 

/END OF NEEDLESS LATIN PEDANTRY

Edited April 14, 2019 by Nootrac4571

[Gez]

If you want to be pedant, they consistently called this site "Doom World".

 

I saw a few other minor mistakes, such as when they say Sigil will appear as a fifth episode "because Romero knows Doom's code". No, if that was the explanation he'd have to distribute a custom exe because knowing the code is not the same thing as going back in time to change it in the 90s.

[Dark Pulse]

Claiming Buckethead's music would be a free download is a pretty big no-no too.

[drygnfyre]

Wow, haven't been here for some time and this is really awesome news. So a full-fledged fifth episode in place of Episode 3 (if necessary)? Sounds good. Had fun with Romero's last two maps.

Edited April 15, 2019 by drygnfyre

[DoomKid423]

A return of doom ll's music would be cool

[VGA]

43 minutes ago, DoomKid423 said:

A return of doom ll's music would be cool

Hmmm.

 

 

 

What?

[DoomKid423]

2 hours ago, VGA said:

Hmmm.

 

 

 

What?

In sigil?

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

D_runnin should stay in DOOM II.

[KVELLER]

7 hours ago, DoomKid423 said:

A return of doom ll's music would be cool

 

...Why though? It's not like we can't play Doom 2 if we want to listen to that music. Besides, it's already been more than confirmed that we'll get custom music regardless of what version of the WAD you get, so it's a moot point anyway.

[Dark Pulse]

12 hours ago, DoomKid423 said:

A return of doom ll's music would be cool

To replace the post I'd put here that was too meme-y for one mod (not mad mind), that'd be a pretty controversial decision, especially since paid users get a Buckethead soundtrack, and free users get Jimmy's music. I'm not sure why you'd want Doom II's music over that, especially since Doom II's music was mostly nothing to write home about.

 

Doubly since this is a mod for Doom/Ultimate Doom, meaning he'd have to pirate/get permission to use the Doom II soundtrack in the first place.

 

So yeah, for it to happen, you'll probably be replacing the music lumps yourself.

[seed]

4 hours ago, KVELLER said:

...Why though? It's not like we can't play Doom 2 if we want to listen to that music. Besides, it's already been more than confirmed that we'll get custom music regardless of what version of the WAD you get, so it's a moot point anyway.

 

+ It's a wad for UD. It makes zero sense to have Doom 2's music in it.

[Megalyth]

4 hours ago, seed said:

 

+ It's a wad for UD. It makes zero sense to have Doom 2's music in it.

 

The Plutonia Experiment is a WAD for Doom2 that uses music from Doom1. It's almost like mappers have been using MIDIs from other games for decades.

[Kira]

You could use Doom 2 music near the end as a cool transitional nod but yeah, it won't happen for legal reasons anyway.

[noisebloom]

Am I SOL if I didn't order one of the Sigil boxes and want one? Doesn't look like you can get on the mailing list anymore. 

 

I'm usually not one to want extravagant merch, but I'll probably pay over-the-top eBay prices for it, unless there's another way to get it at a reasonable price down the line.