What aspect of mapping do you spend WAY too much time on?

[TravyB]

Rooooooooooocks

 

[Spectre01]

Aligning and re-aligning textures is a major time waster for me, as is flying around in 3D mode thinking about what to change.

[Steve D]

Detailing non-playable areas you can see through windows, which mostly means . . . rocks. ;D

[elend]

What @Spectre01 said as well as stupid micro detail.

[pcorf]

Architecture and lighting.

[Scorpius]

Everything. But mostly the layout, architecture and things.

[SilverMiner]

I spend much time just working right on the soul of my wad.

This thing includes:

1) Getting proper MIDI music

2) Making proper resource pack: PLAYPAL, colormaps, patches, flats, sprites... Not to hurt one's eyes.

3) Inventing new patches and flats for special cases (sliding doors, breakable walls, stock patch improvements)

4) Polishing the geometry

5) Balancing the gameplay

6) The one of the most important thing I think is getting right skies for your maps

[Castelia]

Item, enemy, and decoration placement. I can draw up some lines and get an idea for how I want the map to look relatively quickly, but when it comes to placing and arranging things, that's where a chunk of my mapping time goes. After all, things do make up a decent part of the Doom experience.

Honourable mention goes to choosing a MIDI. I could just use MP3s, but using a MIDI feels more fitting, and finding the right one isn't as easy as it sounds.

[Doom_Dude]

54 minutes ago, pcorf said:

Architecture and lighting.

 

Pretty much this. I find with the architecture there'll always be that one area I have to go back to, which I considered done and then start adding the lights I forgot to put in or somethin.

 

Texture alingment doesn't take that long for me, tho deciding on what textures to use in a particular area sometimes take a bit of messing about.

 

[Roofi]

When I make large maps , I often spend too much time with 32pixels grid. Even if don't like starting a map with long and useless detailing , I should use lower grids more often when I draw my layouts...

Edited January 15, 2020 by Roofi

[Arbys550]

For me it's testing. I probably end up playing a map 50 times over the course of building it, then when everything is finished I play it all the way through on each difficulty. I probably spend as much time testing as I do actually making the map.

[Walter confetti]

Having half decent ideas for the map and testing the map itself

[Misty]

Finishing what I started, including balance, checkups, testing and more testing.

[TravyB]

1 hour ago, Castelia said:

Item, enemy, and decoration placement. I can draw up some lines and get an idea for how I want the map to look relatively quickly, but when it comes to placing and arranging things, that's where a chunk of my mapping time goes. After all, things do make up a decent part of the Doom experience.

Honourable mention goes to choosing a MIDI. I could just use MP3s, but using a MIDI feels more fitting, and finding the right one isn't as easy as it sounds.

I always have one hell of a time choosing a MIDI, to the point that I've just started choosing Doom 1 and 2 tracks, usually. 

 

1 hour ago, Arbys550 said:

For me it's testing. I probably end up playing a map 50 times over the course of building it, then when everything is finished I play it all the way through on each difficulty. I probably spend as much time testing as I do actually making the map.

Likewise. I tend to test the map as I build it room by room, making sure one encounter works before I move on to another. It can be awfully time consuming on larger maps...

 

3 hours ago, Spectre01 said:

Aligning and re-aligning textures is a major time waster for me, as is flying around in 3D mode thinking about what to change.

I spend a LOT of time floating around and staring at my map til inspiration strikes. 

 

1 hour ago, Roofi said:

When I make large maps , I often spend too much time with 32pixels grid. Even if don't like starting a map with long and useful detailing , I should use lower grids more often when I draw my layouts...

I've never really used the 32p grid, but then I never made anything really gigantic that might need it. I usually stick with 4p and 2p, 1p if I'm detailing but that one usually manages to irritate me lol 

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Testing in game, I have to be careful not to zone out and just wander around a half finished map when I've already checked the things I loaded it up to check.

[Xyzzу]

Procrastinating.

[[Vitz!]]

^{Thinking about my life decisions and how worthless I am...}

I mean detailing and balancing encounters...

[Aurelius]

7 hours ago, Spectre01 said:

Aligning and re-aligning textures is a major time waster for me, as is flying around in 3D mode thinking about what to change.

 

I think this hits too close to home. I consider myself a somewhat quick when it comes to mapping mechanics, but I'm so frogging overcritical of every single thing I do and redo almost everything at least once or twice. At worst, I can change a texture theme in a room a dozen times during map development. Now while I consider the result to always be better than what I started out with, I wish I had more artistic eye and efficiency to choose something good from the get go, without having to change it later. Or enough belief in the fact that the changes I made make no difference in the eye of the average player. 

Maybe it's part of me and my design process, and no matter how hard I try I can't escape it. I get very anxious if something bothers me visually, and I am hardly the kind of a person who can let stuff that bothers me be. All I can try to do is not let it control my design process as invasively as it has in the past.

[reflex17]

Being extremely concerned with "always doing something different" in terms of my own maps.

Edited January 15, 2020 by reflex17

[VanaheimRanger]

Texture alignment, especially on railing midtextures which I probably use too much of, lol.

[Bridgeburner56]

Flat alignment

[esselfortium]

Thinking.

"What to do next" and "how to fill this gap in an interesting way" still get me stuck, after all these years.

[galileo31dos01]

Definitely picking textures and/or flats that match with each other according to my view, one because when looking at them in the editor, without any changes to the standard light level, I see them ugly, which is only a temporary false illusion, because once brightness is applied I start to like whatever combinations I figure out. And two, it's been about six months since I touched the editor for the first time, so I have yet a lot to learn.

 

 

[Foodles]

the part where you build something, aren't completely satisfied with it then delete it

[DMPhobos]

There's are this moments where i stop making any real progress because i ran out of inspiration, can't figure what to build next, or simply i'm not liking what i had built before, and during this moments i focus on making small changes such as adding detail, making a wall have a weird angle, changing textures, and all that sort of minor stuff that's really time consuming and doesn't really make a big impact on the map.

It didn't used to be a big part of my mapping, but as time went and getting stuck became more common, that's where i ended up spending too much time while mapping

[Novaseer]

Building an area, then trying to make that area good because I'm not 100% happy with it but can't be arsed to delete it.

Also doing detailing first then trying to fit monsters in.

[Arbys550]

Adding to what I previously said, when I have a giant blank wall and figuring out how to decorate it. I hate that and it takes so mich brain power to think of detail. Usually I just make some crappy design and if it's outdoor, I usually resort to the classic cracked outer rock wall exposing a second inner layer.

[Spectre01]

1 hour ago, DMPhobos said:

There's are this moments where i stop making any real progress because i ran out of inspiration, can't figure what to build next, or simply i'm not liking what i had built before, and during this moments i focus on making small changes such as adding detail, making a wall have a weird angle, changing textures, and all that sort of minor stuff that's really time consuming and doesn't really make a big impact on the map.

I can very much relate. I often do the majority of my detailing when I'm stuck thinking what to do next, and hoping for some inspiration to hit me, while making cracks in natural terrain or adding more gradients to light sources.

[silentzorah]

For me, it's working up the nerve and will to actually sit down and work on anything at all.  Most of the time, I'll open it up, draw a sector or two, think "I don't really feel like working on this right now," and closing it down.  Once I get past that, everything else is kosher.

[wolfmcbeard]

pointless details.