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doomkr

Mapping in Doom before Doom Builder

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I asked this recently, before doom builder exist, people mapped with another tools like EdMap. Looking in internet about edmap I could hear was very hard to mapping with it.

I mean, In overall old software to mapping in doom were hard to use it? was hard make maps before doom builder?

 

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it was less convenient and crashier but still perfectly possible to make all sorts of maps with things like edmap, doomed, deu! i've made several maps with windeu524 and think it's a good bit of software.

doom builder's visual mode is the big difference maker i think - there's one less layer of abstraction between you and the rendered map.

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And question of million, were hard use them? especially edmap, I tried make it work in my pc to see how feels map with it (and for curiosity) but don't work me

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Most older editors assume older PC architecture such as DOS; some were ported as far as Windows XP (such as DETH), but I am not aware of any that are still current.

 

They were more labour-intensive than modern editors, but by 1995 they had pretty solid functionality.

 

My Community Chest 4 map was made with DETH.

 

 

 

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Yadex probably still works, which is basically just DEU ported to Unix. Very inconvenient to use these days.

 

IIRC both Eureka and SLADE are based on Yadex and both are a million times easier to use, too.

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Wadauthor still works to some degree, there has been some issues when I tried to use it last time (missing .dll's native to Win32/Win16 systems); but for the most part it still works, though you might have to test your level using a batch file.

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I mostly used DoomCAD for level editing and DEUTEX for archive stuff. DEU as a map editor worked, but I often went into weird problems with it. I can't say I remember exactly what, though, I think it had to do with mouse handling and image refresh. I used HEU for Heretic, though, mostly by lack of choice.

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From the mid-90s to about 2004 I was using DEU. Mostly DEU II 5.21, which was meant to be for Doom II but didn't know about the new flats that came with the game. Naturally, in Doom Builder, the RROCK and SLIME series of flats came as a welcome surprise. Other foibles of the time were actually more down to hardware limitations. DEU would helpfully let you know how much free RAM your PC had, which you needed to know because, if you attempted a save and node build whilst your memory was critically low, it'd give you an error and you'd lose your WAD file.

 

I think it wasn't so much that mapping was difficult back then, as I picked up basic editor functionality as a 6-year-old... It's just that Doom Builder made things laughably easy in comparison. Letting you draw sectors directly - rather than placing vertices, linking them with lines and then adding a sector to the space that the lines enclosed - sped things up in a big way, and the benefits of 3D view can't be overstated. Hell, letting you launch any game engine from the editor, for testing purposes, with any configuration loaded, sped things up significantly compared to saving the map, hoping you didn't lose your work, then typing out the command line for Doom II with the file loaded.

 

The only functionality I kind of miss is the "insert polygon" and "insert rectangle" tools, and even then you could do a LUA plugin for that these days, I think.

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I used DoomCad for years before Doom Builder was released. Like others said, it was less convenient. There was no 3d mode so checking out your texture alignments and things placement meant you had to load the level. The problem with that was the long wait times for the nodesbuilder to do it's thing and you could be easily waiting several minutes just on a medium sized map that really didn't have a lot of detail. The problem with complex architecture in your maps with for example, just a few too many angled walls and you ended up with errors because the nodesbuilder got confused (or whatever). Then you spent time trying to defeat a slime trail by changing a few angled walls or making dummy sectors outside the map in the hopes that fixed things. You also had to place your vertices and then connect them with your lines. You could only draw sectors in a clockwise rotation. You could split a sector only by drawing an adjacent sector, not by going through an already made sector. You could draw sectors inside other sectors only if your lines didn't touch the parent sector. You really had to think of what you wanted to make beforehand. All things placed in the level were represented by colored dots. It was easier to get things stuck in the levels geometry. Then there was the crashes.... I didn't have it crash too often but it was often enough that stuff got nuked. Good times. :D

 

[edit] Oh and I think deleting a sector meant you had to fix any lines that were left behind (the ones shared with deleted sector) because the line(s) would sometimes still be referencing the old sector and the index # would be wrong. Also what was once a two sided line still thinks it's a two sided line so you would have to change that too.

 

[edit] Looking at my olde notes. DoomCad took 9 minutes to build this map. Doom Builder is quite a bit faster. haha

 

Lo81stk.jpg

 

[edit] Speaking of texture alignments. Back in the early 2000's somebody released a calculator program for figuring out the values of what your offsets should be depending on your texture size and the length of your walls. At the time I thought that was a big help. lol

Edited by Doom_Dude

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1 hour ago, Phobus said:

The only functionality I kind of miss is the "insert polygon" and "insert rectangle" tools, and even then you could do a LUA plugin for that these days, I think.

I'm pretty sure they're already there. In SLADE you have that with shift+space.

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Doom Builder had an absolutely profound impact on mapping.

 

WadAuthor was arguably the simplest editor to use before 2003, but Doom Builder changed everything. It was the first editor with a real-time fully texture mapped 3D mode that took less than a second to load, and you could even edit values while in 3D mode. This was huge. You can see a substantial increase in detail overall from 2003 onward and that is in no small part due to Doom Builder and the family of editors that branched off from it.

 

I'd wager a guess that we would have substantially less active mappers today without Doom Builder - or more accurately, a widespread cross-platform editor with a highly intuitive UI, where you can simply draw your sectors then easily preview and modify them. It's just so absurdly easy compared to everything else. I felt that way when I first tried it back in the day and that opinion has been reinforced every time I've attempted to use clunkier/older/different editors just for kicks.

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I used DCK back before Doom Builder (only switching because I upgraded my computer to the point where DCK would no longer run at all). When I made a room, I had to use my imagination as to how it looks, and actually test the map when I want to see it. For larger maps, I had to move the player start so I would start in the room or general area. And then there was the texture alignment. In those days, you had to align each texture maually, which can be a chore at best. Nowadays, you just need to hit 'A' or 'Shift-A'.

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3 hours ago, Doom_Dude said:

Lots of good stuff

Exactly my experiences too!

 

I still cant believe I made Helpyourselfish using only DoomCAD. I must have had infinitely more time and patience back then!

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3 hours ago, Gez said:

I'm pretty sure they're already there. In SLADE you have that with shift+space.

Well shit, turns out there is "Draw rectangle mode" and "Draw ellipse mode" amongst others in GZDB. Goes to show how unadventurous I am with the editor. No idea how to change the vertices on ellipse mode, or change any of the other stuff, but I'm sure it's easy enough once one looks it up. Pretty cool!

 

EDIT: Sure enough, there's parameters and extra functionality at the top. Not as in your face as back with DEU, but definitely more powerful. I almost feel like I've been wasting time drawing sectors all this time now...

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And I don't know if its me... but with doom builder you dont need build nodes with vanilla configuration, my maps works fine

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Two possibilities here:

  1. Maps are vanilla, but your test port isn't, and it is able to build its own nodes when loading the map.
  2. Nodes are built, but the process goes so fast that you don't notice it.

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DB builds the nodes when you save by default and, for most maps, that process is indeed so fast that you don't notice.

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2 hours ago, Gez said:

Two possibilities here:

  1. Maps are vanilla, but your test port isn't, and it is able to build its own nodes when loading the map.
  2. Nodes are built, but the process goes so fast that you don't notice it.

Welp, is chocolate doom :b

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I used DCK and then DEU from about 1995-2000 (then I took an extended break from mapping until 2016). If you look at a number of the "classic" megawads and mapsets made during that time, you'll find many were made with DEU, DETH, Deepsea, and Edmap. Mapping, particularly relatively complicated mapping, was more labor-intensive to make, not least because of the lack of an integrated 3D visual mode that seems to be taken for granted now.

 

9 hours ago, chungy said:

Yadex probably still works, which is basically just DEU ported to Unix. Very inconvenient to use these days.

 

IIRC both Eureka and SLADE are based on Yadex and both are a million times easier to use, too.

As a user of Eureka, yes, it is based on Yadex. Having used DEU back in the mid-90's, it's easy to see to similarities and it does have a similar feeling. I agree with you that it is easier and more user-friendly.

 

4 hours ago, Ichor said:

I used DCK back before Doom Builder (only switching because I upgraded my computer to the point where DCK would no longer run at all). When I made a room, I had to use my imagination as to how it looks, and actually test the map when I want to see it. For larger maps, I had to move the player start so I would start in the room or general area. And then there was the texture alignment. In those days, you had to align each texture maually, which can be a chore at best. Nowadays, you just need to hit 'A' or 'Shift-A'.

 

DCK was, in my opinion, the best editor back in the mid-90's. I only stopped using it and switched to DEU because DCK became crippled shareware (that you had to pay to register, as I recall) instead of uncrippled freeware, which was a deal-breaker to my teenaged self. However, I remember DCK as having an auto-alignment tool, because I remember using it. I think it was added in version 2.6 (which isn't available anywhere anymore, from what I can tell).

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My first editor was RGDOOMED v2.86 de Luxe which came with the book DOOM Game Editor. Didn't like it, the book though was a good read. Then I tried DEU, DCK, DoomCad and then stuck with DETH, HETH and DETH v4.24 (DETH and HETH in one program) until I became aware of ZDoom and used ZETH for a number of years. There was also an attempt for a windowed version called WINZETH, but that was a bit of a failure. When Doombuilder2 was published I adopted that and have stayed with the DB2 family since, now of course GZDBBF.

 

 

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I think an excellent thing for a Doom streamer to do would be to try and remake a simple map in several different period-era Doom level editors in a DOSBox window.

 

Back in the day I used DETH primarily although I no longer can even remember what it looked like. If there was one upside to the difficult tools, though, it's that it forced me to have a proper understanding of how Doom levels worked and what linedefs and sidedefs were, etc.

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My brother used DEU and I used DCK. He would make fun of me because DCK was a little more simplified and user-friendly. Jokes on him that Doombuilder turned out to be very much like DCK was lol.

 

"If there was one upside to the difficult tools, though, it's that it forced me to have a proper understanding of how Doom levels worked and what linedefs and sidedefs were, etc."

 

Yeah exactly. It's because of the old editors that to this day I am particular about which way 2 sided lines are facing, for example

 

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My father recently restored his NeXTStation TurboColor, and the first thing I'm really gonna do with it is install DoomEd for some old-school TWid mapping. Learning all the old editors seems too masochistic even for me, but there's definitely something intriguing about trying out the very first editor.

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10 hours ago, Ichor said:

In those days, you had to align each texture maually, which can be a chore at best. Nowadays, you just need to hit 'A' or 'Shift-A'.

 

By '96, DETH and DCK both had auto-alignment.  In DETH, you'd select all the walls to align and then hit either X or Y, depending on what you wanted to align for.

 

I still use X and Y for the function in GZDB.

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I got started on DoomEd. Then when that got in my way I migrated to DCK and DETH. Eventually I just used DETH. Once you learn how to work with it. It's not a bad editor. But when I started using radiant for Quake. It got hard for me going back into DETH.

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On 9/4/2019 at 6:45 AM, Ichor said:

I used DCK back before Doom Builder (only switching because I upgraded my computer to the point where DCK would no longer run at all). When I made a room, I had to use my imagination as to how it looks, and actually test the map when I want to see it. For larger maps, I had to move the player start so I would start in the room or general area. And then there was the texture alignment. In those days, you had to align each texture maually, which can be a chore at best. Nowadays, you just need to hit 'A' or 'Shift-A'.

 

That might work for rocks and caves, but for wall textures, there is no substitute for lining everything up yourself so the edges of things like courses of bricks, metal panels, or decorative trim match the geometry...which is a hell of a lot easier in Doom Builder's 3D mode than it would be in an older editor.

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WinDEU then DeePsea, DeePsea had quite a few useful features (rotation, mirroring, multiple sector height changing etc). I switched to gzdoombuilder which turns out hasn't been updated in two years, how time flies.

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