[Updated to 2.0 - now on /idgames!] Remnant - a large limit-removing map for Doom 2

[Aurelius]

 

Now updated to 2.0 (changelog at the end of this post). 

Also on /idgames!

 

 

• Game: Doom 2
• Port: Limit-removing (more info in the Compatible source ports -section)
• Slot: MAP01
• Playtime: 1 - 1.5 hours
• Difficulty settings: Implemented, moderate difficulty overall.
• Download links:
  • Google Drive
  • /idgames

 

 

About Remnant:

Remnant is the second map I've ever published, somewhat more of a bigger project in all aspects. It is a large limit-removing map for Doom 2, using the OTEX texture pack by ukiro and centered around creating a vanilla-ish gameplay experience within a detailed, atmospheric environment. During it's two month development, I learned a lot about GZDoomBuilder, physical limits of Doom maps, vanilla mapping tricks, how to work with DeHacked, and sprite modification/recoloring. There were a lot of new pieces to put together and it was a lot to handle, trying to make it all work, but I feel like I pulled it of in a decent manner. I wouldn't say it's a masterpiece in the grand scheme of things, but it is a big personal achievement.

The story of the map centers around a palace built on top of a huge mountain, a remnant from an ancient civilization taken over by the forces of Hell, repurposed into a decadent estate for the enigmatic "Master". You are Doomguy, captured and made to fight other captives in a cage, until you take out your opposition and decide to show the hellspawn who the true demon is.

While designing the map I wanted to create large open environments and momentum based battles taking advantage of open space, giving player as much freedom of movement as possible to engage the enemy. Interconnectedness was an important theme as well, and although the map is mostly linear, there are multiple instances where you can approach problems from different perspectives. And while the monster count may be a bit high, the map is not structured as a slaughtermap; monster encounters are situated evenly along the length of the playthrough.

I've drawn inspiration from countless of WADs over the many years I've been playing Doom, but the most recent push to this map came from Hurt by Elend, Avactor by Eradrop and Eviternity by Dragonfly et al. I'd also like to give a big thanks to the Doomworld community for their innovative ideas when it comes to vanilla Doom mapping. Special thanks to Doomkid for playtesting!

Also a big thanks to my girlfriend who had to put up with me during this project and drag me to sleep once in a while.

Have fun with the map, and do let me know if any issues/improvement suggestion come up, I'd be happy to hear!
 

 

Compatible source ports:

Below is a list of the source ports I used to test the map.

• Crispy Doom (versions 5.5.2 to 5.6.3)
• PrBoom+ (2.5.1.4) complevel 9 (Gameplay works on complevel 2 but the sky doesn't. More info below.)
• Eternity Engine (4.00.00)
• GZDoom (4.1.3)  (Software rendering recommended for intended lighting, but hardware rendering has best performance. Softpoly is a big no-no.)
• ZDoom (2.8.1)

 

The map is limit-removing in the sense that the gameplay is completely functional on source ports like Crispy and PrBoom+ complevel 2. However, due to issues with OTEX custom skies and PrBoom+, I ended up using the MBF sky transfer, which then rules out PrBoom+ complevel 6 and below. Basically, if you want the most vanilla experience, go for Crispy.

 

Performancewise, however, Crispy suffers from occasional slowdowns. I had the best performance with Eternity and GZDoom.

The map is meant to be played the 'classic' way, meaning no mouselook, jumping or crouching. Multiplayer is not implemented, as this is intended solely as a single player experience.

The parts of the OTEX texture pack in use are included within the WAD, so it is not required as a separate download. A big thanks to ukiro for this massive and quality resource!

 

Difficulty:

 

If you have played Eviternity on UV, you'll do just fine here. I didn't aim for an insane difficulty in general, just enough to keep it challenging and entertaining at the same time. UV is the most optimized difficulty, as I mainly playtested with that. HMP reduces the amount of hitscanners and some multiples of same enemies in encounters. HNTR aims to make the playing casual, with a lot less bigger monsters, with added health pickups in strategic places. HNTR is aimed at people familiar with FPS games but not experienced classic Doom players.

 

 

 

Screenshots (new additions!):

Spoiler

 

Known bugs, glitches and issues:

 

• Crispy and ZDoom (not GZDoom) suffer from performance issues from time to time.
• The pistol ammo can, in some instances, drop down to -1 (due to the Dual pistol firing states). This would be fixable by doubling the pickup size and adjusting the ammo and enemy count in the level accordingly, but since I encountered this very late into development and none of the source ports I tested it with seemed to self destruct from it, I decided not to address it. It is a relatively rare instance in any case.

 

If you encounter any other bugs, glitches or issues, let me know!
 

 

Credits:

Textures courtesy of Ola "ukiro" Björling (OTEX 1.0).

Tree sprites courtesy of Enjay.

Dual pistol based on the Angled pistol by Ghastly_dragon and JoeyTD (Realm667).

Chaingun sprites courtesy of Urthar (DotB), with pickup sprite by Tormentor667 and SFX from Quake 4 by Raven Software.

BFG10K courtesy of Ghastly_dragon, Eriance and The Skulltag Team (Realm667)

Secondary boss "Cardinal" sprites based on the Dark Cardinal by zrrion the insect, Jimmy, Espi and Ebola (Realm667), with SFX by Blizzard (Diablo).

Final boss "Master" based on the Haedexebus by Ozymandias81, DeVloek, Eriance and yuraofthehairfan, zrrion the insect (Realm667).

Various sprites and SFX from Heretic and Hexen.

 

A vanilla Doom conveyor belt prefab courtesy of Linguica (ingenious stuff!).

The song "Corrupt, doomed" courtesy of my good friend, Teemu "Forchion" Mastovaara and bespoke for this map (huge thanks!). The song can be used unaltered by anyone in their WAD. If, however, there is desire to alter it, please contact him at teemumas(at)hotmail.com. Link to the song in his SoundCloud.

Changelogs:

 

Version 2.0:

• submission to /idgames enroute
• more vanilla conveyor action! (featuring trapped Lost Souls)
• standardized Boom conveyors so that they behave identically in different source ports
• fixed an issue with ZDoom 2.8.1 where both vanilla and Boom conveyor activated at the same time
• added an arena transformation
• added two new fights, one entirely from scratch that revolves around the Plasma rifle pickup and another heavily modified from multiple previous encounters en route to the red key
• modified some existing fights to make them (hopefully) more interesting, and also removed some enemies here and there to decrease the grinding nature of some of the fights
• added a tactical cyberdemon(!)
• boss fight monster spawns have been edited slightly to bring more challenge into the battle
• multiple visual and technical tweaks here and there (putting the map over 66k sidedefs and almost breaking it down on Crispy)
• modified the Plasma rifle sprites to look more similar to the standard one, albeit desatured and darker color
• modified the Dual pistol frames (based on a modification by Zodomaniac, thanks a bunch!), making it feel much more natural
• changed the lift sound to a Heretic variant
• modified the super secret sigil locations slightly, and made them also somewhat easier to find (but not too much!)

 

Version 1.2:

• reworked the maze to have less straightforward monster encounters

 

Version 1.1:

• health bonus is now fed into the vanilla conveyor to prevent accidental 1% deaths, also it is spat out out into the level in Boom-compatible ports to prevent overfeeding (thanks NineInchHeels!)
• added some more small health packs to the first Cybie fight (thanks Turin Turambar for suggesting!)
• fixed a self-referencing sector visual glitch in GZDoom Hardware renderer (thanks Turin Turambar!)
• fixed the BFG ReFire state, no more incessant clicking (thanks rdwpa!)

 

 

Edited November 9, 2019 by Aurelius : Added /idgames link and some minor changes the the post.

[elend]

Oh my, that looks very nice! Trying to check this out asap.

[BBQgiraffe]

looks amazing!

[Horus]

Is there a glossary anywhere? I see ‘limit-removing’ a lot on this forum but have no idea what it means

[Aurelius]

15 minutes ago, Horus said:

Is there a glossary anywhere? I see ‘limit-removing’ a lot on this forum but have no idea what it means

 

This is directly from DoomWiki:

 

"In regard to the Doom engine, limit removing refers to increasing or removing static limits inherent in the original executables and the Doom source code, which can be considered bugs by players or WAD designers."

 

In other words, it means that while the vanilla Doom had limits regarding certain aspects of geometry and it's rendering, limit-removing essentially includes all the functionalities of a vanilla Doom map without these static limits.

 

Here's again from DoomWiki, a list of the static limits of vanilla Doom (scroll down for more indepth explanations beyond the table):

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Static_limits

[Noiser]

38 minutes ago, Horus said:

Is there a glossary anywhere? I see ‘limit-removing’ a lot on this forum but have no idea what it means

Vanilla-compatible - runs on everything
Limit-removing - Doesn't work on Chocolate Doom or the DOS executable - the lowest you can use is Crispy Doom
Boom - Doesn't work on Crispy Doom - the lowest you can use is Doom Retro, Eternity or prBoom+
UDMF - only for GZDoom (afaik). Older projects may also work on ZDoom or Zandronum

You can also play Limit-removing or Boom maps on DOS with source-ports like Boom.exe or MBF

[Misty]

6 minutes ago, Noiser said:

UDMF - only for GZDoom (afaik). Older projects may also work on ZDoom or Zandronum

Eternity also has UDMF, so it's not Gzdoom exclusive format anymore. 

[kknot5889]

This looks absolutely beautiful. Can't wait to play it this weekend. Thanks for sharing!

[Loud Silence]

Gorgeous map made for Software renderer... What could be better? I'm very excited to play this on Eternity Engine!

[Doomkid]

Oh shit, I just realized I never sent my recorded playthrough of this to you like a week or more ago.. Crap, sorry about that!

 

Anyway, I playtested a near-completion beta of this and it's simply excellent - a really fun map that's a great way to kill a bit over an hour. The progression is only slightly cryptic at times, but certainly never unreasonable. I got lost once or twice due to poor navigational skills, but that's on me. The environment is gorgeous and I found myself getting really engrossed in the experience. Most importantly, it's a fun challenge that never seems to cross into being unfair.

 

Fantastic map, absolutely recommended.

 

 

[Aurelius]

6 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

The progression is only slightly cryptic at times, but certainly never unreasonable.

 

I actually added a custom texture just for giving some advice on the thing you are talking about, hopefully it'll help with anyone else encountering the same problem!

 

15 minutes ago, Loud Silence said:

I'm very excited to play this on Eternity Engine!

 

Eternity Engine was one of my favourite test ports for this, the performance was excellent!

[Linguica]

Wait, this uses a vanilla conveyor?? I guess I have to download now.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

Wow, the map looks gorgeous! Downloading, will hopefully check this out over the weekend. It'll take some time before I can see large OTEX projects and not think *Eviternity* haha, but this looks wonderful and I'm excited to see how it plays. 

[StormCatcher.77]

I think it’s time for me to stop postponing new projects forever. I will stop on this and try it.
Judging by the pictures, I'll have a great time ...

[Aurelius]

Thank you all for the kind words, it means so much to me as a mapper to see that the time I used to work on this map was well worth the time! Ultimately I was happy just to have learned so much, but to also get such a positive reception is utterly amazing. Hopefully the gameplay will live up to the hype, eagerly waiting for reviews and suggestions on how to improve in the future!

 

2 hours ago, Linguica said:

Wait, this uses a vanilla conveyor?? I guess I have to download now.

 

Reading through the thread about vanilla conveyors, I just *had* to include one. Unfortunately me being neurotic about the damage inflicted to the player on activation, I eventually ended up using it only once and in a relatively small instance. Perhaps in the future I'll make more use of it, 'coz the entire concept of it was dazzling!

Edited September 28, 2019 by Aurelius

[Nine Inch Heels]

Nice to see the vanilla conveyor put to good use. I didn't get around to giving the map a shot yet, but given the presence of conveyor scripts, especially considering it's something I spent some time on myself, I couldn't resist cracking this open in my builder and have a look at the technology at hand. It's just a fun thing to do, and since Ling confirmed I was a nerd, I might as well do what I do... I'll put the rest of this post in spoilers, I guess. Grab a hot beverage of your choice, fire up a chiptune (or some deathcore, if you're a metal head), we're entering the nerd-zone :P

 

Spoiler

 

On a cursory glance, clever map. Using a boom conveyor (alongside a vanilla conveyor) to make sure the map runs in ports other than PrBoom+ and crispy (like GZDoom where the mikoportal trick doesn't work), and "locking" the vanilla conveyor with it, certainly is a good move. Granted, it's also pretty much the only option if you wanna reach all the ports out there, but it's clever nonetheless, since you'd at least need to be aware that crispy for example will simply ignore the boom actions in the map while it still functions properly besides that. I like it, in fact, I like it a lot.

 

My only minor nitpicks here would be that your boom conveyor is fueled with an action 252 linedef that is 8 mapunits in length, which means that the speed of the doll won't be equal in PrBoom+ and GZDoom. If that is something you want to do, you will need a 32length action 252 linedef, because it's the only sweetspot where PrBoom+ and ZDoom derivative ports share the same "speed". I've written a short primer about this recently which also explains some of the math that allows you to calculate the timings a bit better (in case you need to make adjustments), and I'll link it here just for convenience's sake:

 

 

 

The small nitpick about the vanilla conveyor itself is that you don't "load" the doll with a health potion. (I've moved the doll here for the sake of having a look)

I've noticed you have a berserk in the map itself, behind the linedefs that would trigger the vanilla conveyor, but somewhere out there might be the one guy at 1% health who gets killed by activating the vanilla conveyor without picking up the berserk pack in time. Also, anybody who approaches the linedefs in question at +100 health would just loose health without any compensation whatsoever. So perhaps that's worth having another look. I further noticed that the barrels in this setup are slightly different from what I worked out to handle the -50% damage taken problem on ITYTD ,which the vanilla conveyors had during their earliest stages. The barrel that is closer to the doll is the backup barrel for ITYTD, because the barrel that is further away won't deal any damage on that setting (assuming you inflict only 1% of damage with it, because that gets rounded down to zero in the damage calculation). So, unless you had intended a shorter timer for ITYTD specifically (in which case a closer barrel would make a whole lot of sense), this might warrant a second look.

 

 

 

There are some more nice tricks to be found here, though. At first I wasn't sure what exactly to make of the highlighted closets in the next screenie, but on a second glance I noticed you bomb the monsters in these "barrel closets" and warp them into the map dead, where they could serve as revive-material for archviles, or just "decoration".

Quite a neat idea to do things like this, since it keeps the explosions and such away from the player's eyes at all times. I like clever stuff in maps, so obviously I also like this a whole lot.

 

 

 

 

Here's something I'm not sure what to make of, on the other hand:

The highlighted monsters in these small cubbies all have a teleport linedef in front of them, many of which have a different tag. The teleport linedefs are, however, facing away from the monsters, which implies to me that the monsters would have to get out of their closets, and then attempt to get back inside them, in order to actually get teleported. I'm curious why you chose to build this setup like that. On a first glance it seems that the idea here was to stagger and slightly randomize when and where certain monsters will show up, but it looks slightly finnicky to me to randomize things like that. So this confuses me a little.

 

 

One last thing, and I promise I'll leave you alone for the moment ;-)

The highlighted linedefs here are part of raised platforms, which have revs and chainers on them. The problem here **can** be that monsters will get knocked off the platforms by incoming damage. This doesn't happen in crispy, but any port that supports conveyors (from PrBoom+ to GZDoom) allows things to get knocked down these platforms. Whenever you use any turreted monster, and you are shooting for boom compatibility or "higher", you need to make sure that you employ monster blocking linedefs to prevent this from happening. It's an annoyance for (casual) completionists, as well as a potential nightmare for people who want to do a UVmax-run on your map. There may be more instances of this in your map, and so long as it's possble that things get out of the player's sight when knocked off, I highly suggest adding monster blockers to be on the safe side of things. A good rule of thumb is that for turreted monsters you can use monster blockers liberally so long as there aren't any flyers around that would be blocked as well (unless you want them blocked, for that matter)

 

 

 

So now that I've emptied my "nerd-sponge", I'll hopefully get around to playing this within the next few days, so I can post something that isn't as boring to read as what my nitpicky self has come up with right now. The screenshots sure look inviting. ;-)

[Aurelius]

1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Grab a hot beverage of your choice, fire up a chiptune (or some deathcore, if you're a metal head), we're entering the nerd-zone :P

 

80s retro synthwave in the form of Daniel Deluxe, Perturbator and Bourgeoisie do the trick for me, when I'm not blasting pagan metal until my neighbours' ears bleed.

 

1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

...something that isn't as boring to read as what my nitpicky self has come up with...

 

I'm a math teacher by profession, nitpicky and boring is what they pay me for. Besides, to me these kind of posts that you just made are the ones I spent hours upon hours reading deep into the night when I wanted to learn how to surprise and dazzle the player in vanilla Doom. Threads like the vanilla conveyor belt one, and some of Dehacked ones with guys like Scifista and printz breaking Doom open like a can of worms were the most exciting for me. I remember staring at one instance where Mechadon had series of threads regarding turning a Lost soul into a projectile. At first glance, I understood none of it. I kept staring at it though, and after countless of hours I started to pick up on things, understand things. It made me more aware of the inner workings of Doom, and even after all those hours spent I have to say I haven't had this much fun in years.

 

Doom mapping/modding is something my creative, problem solving and optimization-crazed mind can find immense pleasure in.

 

Now to respond to your tech comments:

Spoiler

About the boom "backup" conveyor:

 

This is pretty much because I did not study Boom conveyors enough for this, focusing on vanilla Doom stuff. I actually found your thread long after I made my conveyor, and around the same time I also picked apart Hatehammer which had pretty neat stuff with Boom conveyors, but I was so intent on just finishing the project I left it as it is. I tested it extensively with different ports to get the timing 'close enough' with different ports, which I was happy with at the time. I will definitely do much better work with Boom conveyors in the future, since my next project might very well be Boom related.

 

About vanilla conveyor:

 

About the vanilla conveyor, I actually used a direct prefab from Linguica because for the love of me I could not make it work when I made it myself (the voodoo doll didn't 'slide' like it was supposed, even when I thought I had all the details covered). Removing the health bonus was a cosmetic choice, since I didn't want the pickup flash to be visible. On retrospect, the berserk would mask it, but I was still bothered by the pickup message of the health bonus (I'm creatively picky, that's the problem here :P). And the prefab I used from Linguica wasn't necessarily the latest iteration, but since it worked I was happy with it.

 

The monster closets with barrels:

 

Arch-Vile fodder was the idea. I wanted to have an arch-vile trap where they resurrect enemies the player hadn't killed (and maybe take them by surprise in the process). A downside to this approach was that on GZDoom, the monsters crossed the lines before they took enough damage, so some of them didn't die and were left wandering in the area. I eventually ended up using LOADACS and making an ACS script for ports that support it that kills off the original monsters in the closet, spawning the same monsters in the places they were supposed to teleport to, and then instantly kill them. This worked nicely, and while some of the monster weapon pickups were present, I didn't mind this. 

 

Monster closet linedefs facing wrong way:

 

A blunder, simple as that. Not intended at all, so your confusion is very much well placed. As with most of the stuff I did here, if it worked I was happy. But controlling the monsters more precisely is something I will be doing more work at in the future, and this comment you left is the best kind of criticism I could hope for! In general, my monster closets and dummy sectors are a steaming mess, I just didn't have the energy to make them look better, as they did function as I intended.

 

Blocking monsters from falling:

 

I'm so dumb. I actually did notice the monsters falling down when I blasted them with a rocket launcher, so I made a self-referencing sector to block them. Why I didn't use a Block monster flag is beyond me. Over-complicated thinking is my undoing. I actually struggled a lot with impassable and blocking monster linedefs in this map, because I often opened up areas that were previously closed, this way warranting better movement for monsters who ended up being blocked by the Block monster flags that I had needed in the previous form of the area. If you look at the two Cybies in the middle of the maze, you should notice that I used invisible walls to prevent their movement in other directions. These walls would later lower so that it wouldn't block anything in the future.

 

 

Excellent criticism and commentary, keep it coming!

[Nine Inch Heels]

Okay, a few more things, then I'll shut up, hopefully... :P
 

Spoiler

 

3 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Reading through the thread about vanilla conveyors, I just *had* to include one. Unfortunately me being neurotic about the damage inflicted to the player on activation, I eventually ended up using it only once and in a relatively small instance. Perhaps in the future I'll make more use of it, 'coz the entire concept of it was dazzling!

Here's what you could do, if you wanted to "load" anything into the doll in crispy doom, while avoiding to "overfeed" the vanilla conveyor doll in other ports where your boom conveyor would lock the vanilla one, assuming you don't mind the cosmetic drawbacks:
 

 

Since you can load the doll with anything you want, including weapons, armour, invulns, or if you're really nasty a blur sphere with lots of projectile monsters around, this may come in handy.

 

You have two options here to avoid overfeeding, both of which I have not yet tested, but maybe they're worth trying regardless:

Either you use a boom action to scroll the potion next to the doll away from it, or you raise the potion up high enough so the doll can't reach it when making checks for the pickup. Personally I'd try raising the potion, even though that may come with the caveat that you'd need to make some  minor adjustments to the ceiling geometry to make sure the potion can move far enough.

 

1 hour ago, Aurelius said:

Monster closet linedefs facing wrong way:

A simple and easy to implement fix:

The highlighted linedefs are set to "block monster" to prevent things from going MIA. If you want to, you can split your teleport linedefs here in the middle with a vertice, and flip one of the two resulting linedefs, so the teleport works independent of the direction the monsters move. Also useful for when you want certain monsters to have priority over others by giving more chances to check for an "open destination", or to make the side-effects of blocked destinations less intrusive for your monsters by offering them more than one tag to make a check for.

 

EDIT: oh yeah, and for the barrels you could detonate a single barrel to "fuse" a huge stack of barrels. This would allow you to deal far more damage to the monsters in the barrel closets, meaning a stronger "impulse". You can stack hundreds of barrels, so this way you might be able to place the teleports further away, and therefore sidestepping loadACS as a "last resort".

 

 

[Aurelius]

All good, I appreciate all the information and suggestions!

 

Spoiler

43 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Here's what you could do, if you wanted to "load" anything into the doll in crispy doom

 

One of the reasons I removed the health bonus was to prevent it from becoming a problem when trying to get 100% items in other ports where the vanilla conveyor was blocked out. I could of course make it scroll down and maybe teleport it somewhere to the level at the start of the map?

 

45 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

The highlighted linedefs are set to "block monster" to prevent things from going MIA.

 

I figured that their radius would prevent them from being able to move around vertically (in the builder perspective), but blocking linedefs would be a good ensurance to keep them from accidentally spilling into unwanted places. Like I said, those closets are reeeeeallly messy, a lot of it should be cleaned and streamlined.

 

46 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

...for the barrels you could detonate a single barrel to "fuse" a huge stack of barrels.

 

This would probably be better. I did experiment some with it, but somehow was put off by the idea of stacking literally hundreds of barrels. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a vanilla Doom thing limit, but considering what I'm mapping for it shouldn't even be an issue I should worry about.

 

I'll collect all these improvement suggestions, and once I get some gameplay feedback I'll try to fix and improve as many things as possible in one go, unless something game breaking is discovered (hope not :o).

[Turin Turambar]

This map looks great! And inspired by Hurt, Eviternity and Avactor? That sounds promising!

 

I will play it on the weekend.

[Aurelius]

2 minutes ago, Turin Turambar said:

This map looks great! And inspired by Hurt, Eviternity and Avactor? That sounds promising!

 

I have to say here that it was a playtester who told me it reminded him of Avactor, and I just then realized that I must have unconsciously used it as inspiration (even as far as using some of the same Heretic/Hexen sprites for torches! Spooky.). Consciously, I was just so mezmerized by Hurt when it came out that I had to start something big and detailed.

[Nine Inch Heels]

17 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

One of the reasons I removed the health bonus was to prevent it from becoming a problem when trying to get 100% items in other ports where the vanilla conveyor was blocked out. I could of course make it scroll down and maybe teleport it somewhere to the level at the start of the map?

Sure, you can scroll the item on a teleport linedef, and stack it on top of any other item in the map, or give it a seperate location. Items will stack on other items when teleported, but they won't teleport if the destination is blocked by a player or a monster, for example. So that's something to have in mind when setting this up. Also useful to have in mind for when you want to teleport in timed items during fights where the target destinations may get blocked. If you read my looping conveyor primer, you can just use one of the examples there, replace the player start with any item you wanna scroll, and put a teleport linedef in that leads into the map, if you want timed items to warp into a busy area guaranteed (also works for monsters and other objects like lamps and whatnot).

[Forchion]

Was very happy to compose music for you Aurelius :) Hope you guys enjoy playing the map!

[Turin Turambar]

I found a small visual bug near the starting area, in a closet that had a Cacodemon

https://i.imgur.com/kUBGCL4.jpg

[Aurelius]

1 hour ago, Turin Turambar said:

I found a small visual bug near the starting area, in a closet that had a Cacodemon

https://i.imgur.com/kUBGCL4.jpg

 

What source port are you using? That looks like a visual bug present in the GZDoom source port if you are using Softpoly rendering. Software rendering is recommended for best lighting visuals, hardware rendering comes a good second. I didn't test it with mouselook, since I did not intend it to be used with the map.

 

EDIT: Apparently it's a bug with hardware rendering. To prevent it, use software rendering (which obviously makes mouselook kinda wonky). I'll look into fixing that.

 

EDITEDIT: Fixed it, will include it in the next version. Thank you for letting me know!

Edited September 28, 2019 by Aurelius

[baja blast rd.]

On 9/27/2019 at 10:45 AM, Aurelius said:

• PrBoom+ (2.5.1.4) complevel 7 or higher (Gameplay works on complevel 2 but the sky doesn't. More info below.)

 

I'd suggest changing the non-parenthetical bit to 'complevel 9 or 17' (or even just 'complevel 9').

 

The other complevels in the 7-17 range are, in order: buggy versions of complevel 9, essentially [7-8]; an obscure port no one uses or emulates [10]; MBF compat (changes infighting and has bugs that have to be designed around -- so not to be used unless you've mapped for it specifically) [11]; and prBoom+'s default complevel when none is set, but for older versions of prBoom+ [12-16].

 

(cl 17 is the last of these but for the current version of prBoom+.) 

 

So, some of those are risky to use, and for some there is no point.

[Aurelius]

4 minutes ago, rdwpa said:

I'd suggest changing the non-parenthetical bit to 'complevel 9 or 17' (or even just 'complevel 9').

 

The other complevels in the 7-17 range are, in order: buggy versions of complevel 9...

 

Thanks for the info, I never looked that deeply into PrBoom+ complevels. Made the appropriate edit to the original post.

[JDR]

Finished this one within an hour with 8 secrets.

Spoiler

The 4 purple sigils one would be nigh impossible to find, since the map is so huge. 

Avactor comparison is pretty fair, it's quite simmilar in terms of pacing, sprawling layouts and detailing. Hilltops/trees detailing at times felt like it had been setup very specifically to make it feel cozy (as though hiking-wise). Very much great texturework and architecture. The only complaint i could have is that i don't really like when liquid textures mesh.
Also map probably shouldn't have ended after a final boss (which should've been the afrits instead :p), but that's a minor issue.
Other than that - amazing map. Loved that there is always a new path to go, plenty of cool secrets.

Edited September 28, 2019 by JDR

[Aurelius]

Thanks for the review, @JDR, I'm glad you enjoyed the atmosphere and detailing. I tried to make a satisfying flow to it, and give you a feel of being outdoors and exploring stuff there. I hope the things that bothered you didn't take too much away from your experience!

 

Could you perhaps put any parts of your comment discussing secrets behind Spoiler tags, so that other players will have the choice whether to find out about them or not? Thanks!

[Turin Turambar]

Finished. I nailed your estimation of "90 minutes" of play.

https://i.imgur.com/7sl9dlY.png

 

A great map. Beautiful, cohesive but still with some different areas in both feel and gameplay, well balanced (I played on HMP, and it felt engaging but not super hard, which imo is what you want from HMP), a big map but not confusing to get lost or stuck. Great use of OTEX testures. Performance was as expected for a map of this complexity (a few slowdowns in the most open areas, then again I play with all the gfx cranked up in GZDoom).

Some balance comments:

-The first Cyberdemon fight was a surprise, as up to that point the map was more 'chill'. It was perfectly doable still, but it is clearly a more 'advanced' encounter where you have to move fast, clear the lane, prioritize targets while also avoid the CD rockets. Maybe put a pair more of small 10hp medkits in the outer path of the circle arena so the difficulty spike is lessened.

-On the other hand I thought the maze area just before the final arena was too easy, with blue armor and health, plentiful ammo and enemy that can't flank you. Here I would teleport a few knights or a dozen of imps behind the player at some distance in a pair of fights, so he has to be aware of attacks in two opposite sides if he isn't careful.