The worst part of editing in Vanilla

[Dark Pulse]

2 minutes ago, boris said:

That's really something @ZZYZX should add to the official builds.

It is, but whether he can/will is another story.

[Doom_Dude]

On 12/28/2018 at 9:16 PM, Linguica said:

Yeah I think people forget what it was like to be working with a genuinely old and slow computer. I distinctly remember sitting there twiddling my thumbs waiting for a node builder to finish what was a relatively small level by modern standards. It was not something you just did on a whim.

 

I was digging through a pile of old notes and papers I have in a box. I used to write stuff down on scraps of paper and would end up with a mess of random info, passwords, fixes for maps I'm working on, etc... So I found a note from 2000 that it took DoomCad, 9 minutes to build the nodes in this map.

 

I think back then I was still using a Pentium 166, probably with 128mb or ram (or less). I upgraded to a 800mhz machine but I'm sure that would have been after 2000. Anyhow, I thought that was kinda interesting.

 

[edit] Oh and see that rectagular sector in the top left room? I placed that so the nodesbuilder would render the map correctly. I forget if I was getting a slime trail in that spot or what. Sometimes I had to move vertices around or place a sector in any troublesome area and hope that fixed the issue. Didn't have much knowledge of errors and such back then and was working on guesswork sometimes.

Edited January 4, 2019 by Doom_Dude

[Doomkid]

Offtopic, but did you ever release that map? Looks like a beaut just based on the automap

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

4 hours ago, Doom_Dude said:

So I found a note from 2000 that it took DoomCad, 9 minutes to build the nodes in this map.

If I'm not mistaken, the "Build time" section of the Doom/Quake level author template was originally intended as "how long did it take for the tools to compile the map?" but less technical people took it as "how long did you, the author, take building the map?" and that ended up becoming the status quo for how it gets filled in nowadays.

[Linguica]

4 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

If I'm not mistaken, the "Build time" section of the Doom/Quake level author template was originally intended as "how long did it take for the tools to compile the map?"

 

You're mistaken.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

1 minute ago, Linguica said:

You're mistaken.

Was it the case for the Quake one or am I wrong there too?

[Doom_Dude]

Yeah Doomkid that's map 29 of Vilecore. It's not much of a beaut in game. The Vilecore 2 version which I'm still working on is looking much improved tho. I just added some comparison screens to the Post Your Doom Picture thread.

Edited January 5, 2019 by Doom_Dude

[Linguica]

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Was it the case for the Quake one or am I wrong there too?

 

I have no idea, but I assume the Quake template was cribbed from the Doom one, and I am positive the Doom one has always been about how long it took to create, not how long it took to build a BSP.

[Pegleg]

On 1/4/2019 at 5:10 PM, Doom_Dude said:

Oh and see that rectagular sector in the top left room? I placed that so the nodesbuilder would render the map correctly. I forget if I was getting a slime trail in that spot or what. Sometimes I had to move vertices around or place a sector in any troublesome area and hope that fixed the issue. Didn't have much knowledge of errors and such back then and was working on guesswork sometimes.

 

You weren't alone in having to do odd things to avoid problems. In the companion book to the Lost Episodes of Doom, Chris Klie explained that the reason he made the hallway in E1M1 (on the upper right if I remember correctly) run at 45 degrees was too avoid persistent HOMs. A 45 degree hallway was the only way to do it with the tools he was using at the time.

 

[DJVCardMaster]

Finished editing this area, one slight change on this area could make this map explode on Visplane Overflows

[NiGHTMARE]

On 12/30/2018 at 3:33 PM, GoatLord said:

This reminds me of DEEP, if any of you grandpas out there remember it. In the late 90s, it was a pretty hot editor, something of an all-in-one kind of thing, even more extensive than Doom Builder. It wasn't great (thus no one using it today), but it did have a 3D preview, albeit an extremely crude one. It used flat shaded graphics and let you move about in it, though it was so slow and abstract looking that I found it easier to just test it in-game. I didn't touch editors for more than a decade afterward because I just found the whole process too confusing. If it wasn't for all the hand-holding that Doom Builder and the like do, I wouldn't have returned to modding.

 

Actually, I use Deepsea to this day. I could never get into Doom Builder for some reason - maybe because it's so similar to Deepsea compared to other Doom editors I've used, but all the menu options are in different places.

 

Enjay's Waterlab GZD was built in Deepsea too, so I'm not alone!

[pcorf]

On 1/5/2019 at 9:10 AM, Doom_Dude said:

 

I was digging through a pile of old notes and papers I have in a box. I used to write stuff down on scraps of paper and would end up with a mess of random info, passwords, fixes for maps I'm working on, etc... So I found a note from 2000 that it took DoomCad, 9 minutes to build the nodes in this map.

 

I think back then I was still using a Pentium 166, probably with 128mb or ram (or less). I upgraded to a 800mhz machine but I'm sure that would have been after 2000. Anyhow, I thought that was kinda interesting.

 

[edit] Oh and see that rectagular sector in the top left room? I placed that so the nodesbuilder would render the map correctly. I forget if I was getting a slime trail in that spot or what. Sometimes I had to move vertices around or place a sector in any troublesome area and hope that fixed the issue. Didn't have much knowledge of errors and such back then and was working on guesswork sometimes.

 

When I first started using Doomcad in Windows 3.11wg the Nodes builder would sometimes crash the program with a GPF but that pre WIndows 95 version of Windows, once a GPF happened the whole damn thing would collapse. So I started building the nodes in BSP 2.2X. But yeah, load win at the dos prompt, open Doomcad, save without nodes, quit to dos prompt, build nodes and then test.

[Empyre]

15 hours ago, pcorf said:

But yeah, load win at the dos prompt, open Doomcad, save without nodes, quit to dos prompt, build nodes and then test.

It has been so long that I had forgotten about doing that, but it sure does sound familiar.

 

On 1/4/2019 at 4:10 PM, Doom_Dude said:

I think back then I was still using a Pentium 166, probably with 128mb or ram (or less). I upgraded to a 800mhz machine but I'm sure that would have been after 2000.

Back in those days, I used a 486DX 33 with 20mb ram (16mb added to the 4mb it came with).  I think it was in '97 that I finally upgraded to a Pentium 3 500, when they were brand new.  The CPU plugged into a slot, rather than a socket, and it had cooling fins on it, which was new.