[Now on /idgames!] 3x3 - 3 flats, 3 textures, 3 monsters! community speedmapping(ish) project

[Omniarch]

Congratulations, everyone! I for one am very excited to play all the other submissions. Thanks @MFG38 for organizing this event. I really needed that little push to help get me out of my rut. Really gives me hope for the year ahead :)

[akolai]

I'm with Omni, the deadline was the reason I was able to finally throw together a full level. Now's about as good a time as any to follow up on my promise and give the other maps a shot.

[akolai]

I'll not go into my thoughts on the levels (unfortunately) since I tend to spend so long writing a response that I have hardly any time to actually play the levels. I'll talk about a specific level if asked, but bugtesting is my goal for now. Minor issues are typed normally, while level breakers get a special font.


MAP01: Unwelcome
I found a wierd texture bug on one of the secrets (images under spoiler tags to save on screenspace). Presumably due to the use of a midtexture to create the fake wall.

Spoiler

MAP03: Rocketfest
Sector #77 is surrounded by linedefs that trigger "W1 Floor Lower to Lowest Floor" on Tag #0, which causes *EXTENSIVE* breakage.
The lowering switch lift can be ridden to push the player into the ceiling (visual bug only).

Spoiler

MAP05: Permeable
Sector #299 contains a mancubus that teleports into a wall, making him unable to move.

MAP06: Redwood Grange
Some linedefs on the minimap are not marked as hidden like those around them.

Spoiler

MAP07: Plain and Simple
THE TELEPORTER SECTOR IN THE ARACHNOTRON ROOM, EVEN ACCOUNTING FOR THE RAISING STEP, IS TOO HIGH TO REACH, MAKING THE LEVEL IMPOSSIBLE. ADDITIONALLY (ignoring the previous mistake), IF THE PLAYER MISSES ANY ARACHNOTRONS BEFORE ENTERING THAT ROOM **INCLUDING THE ONE FOUND IN THE SECRET AREA**, THE LEVEL IS ALSO IMPOSSIBLE.

 

MAP08: Realm of the Matriarchs
Sector #36 can be fallen into once the steps are raised. The pit is inescapable (unlike the surrounding pits, which have exit teleporters), making for an extremely unfair death.

MAP09: They Come at Knight
None of the monsters have looping teleports - any enemy that is blocked on all teleport attempts is permanently unkillable.


I'll be back at this later, it's really damn late here.

[Omniarch]

24 minutes ago, akolai said:

MAP03: Rocketfest
Sector #77 is surrounded by linedefs that trigger "W1 Floor Lower to Lowest Floor" on Tag #0, which causes *EXTENSIVE* breakage.
The lowering switch lift can be ridden to push the player into the ceiling (visual bug only)

 

Good catch.

 

@MFG38 here's the fixed version: rocketfest.wad

[Salmon]

@akolai, thanks for catching that!  I remember noticing it could happen but forgot to actually fix it.

 

@MFG38, I moved the teleporters near Sector 170 around to prevent the possibility of a mancubus becoming stuck.  I ran 10 tests on PrBoom+ at the relevant section and the issue seems to be fixed.

 

permeable.zip

 

Good work, everyone!  I'm excited to play through these maps.

Edited January 1, 2021 by Salmon : cleaned up automap from my fix

[InfernalMonsoon]

Hiya, I was inspired to (FINALLY) join Doomworld after partaking in this project having been good friends with MFG for a good few years now. Was so fun getting to contribute two maps to this awesome project! You all did amazing work and hopefully my entries were also up to snuff :D Do let me know if there's any improvements to be made so I can fix issues and touch my maps up with improvements for RC2 and I'll be sure to keep an eye out for issues on other people's maps :)

[Michael Jensen]

Congratulations to everyone who managed to make a map, and to MFG38 for succecssfully managing a community project! 

 

I played through all the maps and enjoyed all of them. It took me around 5 hours on Ultra Violence (pistol starts, obviously). Many featured creative ways of using resources to make the visuals more interesting under the limitations.

 

Most of the maps are up to above average standard, but there are a few amazing maps that truly stood out to me. 

Map 05: Permeable looks beautiful, plays great, and its music, which is as beautiful as the map, fits perfectly. 

Map 06: Redwood Grange has amazing atmosphere, helped be the music and really fun secrets. 

Map 15: The Tale of Sir Doomalot quickly became one of my favourite maps of all time. While the enjoyment depends on whether you know what it's based on, even without that, the map is very enjoyable. All the details like chainsawing wooden doors, the bow and arrows on top of the castle, etc. are great. 

Map 25: The Gentle Dark is a another immensely atmospheric experience with a very fitting music. Completely dark areas combined with the skin textures give this one a unique and beautiful look.  

 

The bleeding midtexture in Map 01 was already mentioned. This happens when the midtexture is taller than sector it's in. Easy way to fix that is to have different light levels between the sectors. For instance one of the sectors has brightness 176 and the other 175.

[Breezeep]

Forgot to say congrats to everyone who participated! Really nice turnout we've got here!

Quick question though, are all the maps going to be re-organized by difficulty?

[KeaganDunn]

4 minutes ago, Breezeep said:

Quick question though, are all the maps going to be re-organized by difficulty?

Currently I am playing through the WAD and writing down the maps in order of difficulty, from my experience on Ultra-Violence. Except for ones like Plain and Simple, obviously. I'll see what can be done with the map order.

[akolai]

MAP31: Blazing Emerald
One part of an exit pillar doesn't pulsate (can't believe I didn't catch that one, but could've sworn I'd fixed it at least twice - Blazing_Emerald_v3.zip)

MAP25: The Gentle Dark
Wierd texture glitch on or around Linedef #1965.

Spoiler

As for the rest, I either didn't find anything (worth mentioning) or got fed up after dying halfway through and skipped it.

[InfernalMonsoon]

9 hours ago, Dunn & Dunn said:

Currently I am playing through the WAD and writing down the maps in order of difficulty, from my experience on Ultra-Violence. Except for ones like Plain and Simple, obviously. I'll see what can be done with the map order.

That sounds like a great idea if MFG plans on rearranging the map order for the final release.

 

@akolai Thanks for finding issues for us! Muchly appreciated, I'm surprised mine have very minor issues, especially The Gentle Dark which I actually submitted less than 10 minutes before the deadline so I knew there were gonna be some iffyness in it. I'll get onto fixing them asap!

 

@A.H. Sankhatayan Wow I never knew my maps were gonna get special mentions, thanks very much! I'm glad someone enjoyed them :D I've yet to play The Tale of Sir Doomalot (I only did a quick play up to map5 last night) but I can agree Permeable is absolutely fantastic, Rocketfest is another standout for me.

[InfernalMonsoon]

17 hours ago, akolai said:

MAP25: The Gentle Dark
Wierd texture glitch on or around Linedef #1965.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

I been trying to diagnose this issue and I couldn't find anything myself. Texture is set, not seeing this bug in prBoom+ or GZDoom so that's quite an odd one. Currently I'm struggling to figure out why my monster count when doing tests never has all monsters killed. I assume this is due to out of bounds teleport linedefs not working right and I can't seem to fix this one for the life of me when I see no issues on why 1 or 2 monsters won't teleport to begin with. If anyone knows a way around that, I'd appreciate the help, never done vanilla style teleports like that before this map.

[akolai]

@InfernalMonsoon Played it a couple more times - the texture glitch is gone (?).
Couldn't replicate the broken spawners. What port/difficulty were you on, and could you send a savegame with the bug?

[InfernalMonsoon]

@akolai That is really bizarre how that happened - really odd so hopefully that was just a weird one off bug perhaps. And really? Out of all of my tests I've always had one or two enemies not spawn in. I tried it with both the latest version of prBoom+ and GZDoom v4.5.0 and seems to happen on both ports for some reason, I'll try to run some more thorough tests but this is completely stumping me as I'm sure some people may want to get the full 100% so having this problem barring that is something I can't really settle for. Sadly no saves unfortunately, never save my test runs haha.

[MFG38]

Apologies for my brief absence, was at parents' with no computer over the weekend. Anyway, thanks for the updates to everyone who posted them. I'll plop them in ASAP.

 

On 1/2/2021 at 4:45 AM, Breezeep said:

are all the maps going to be re-organized by difficulty?

 

Most likely not.

[MFG38]

Alright, so I made some improvements to MAP09 as per @akolai's feedback. Thinking I'll release an RC2 in the next day or two, and if no further bugs show up, we can call that version final.

[MFG38]

And here's RC2. Should any further bugs occur, I'll take the liberty of fixing them for you all. If no major bugs get reported, I'll just re-release this same build as v1.0. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mtn71nX-MOHYvlpk-dRnecUuFucJSbTP/view?usp=sharing

 

I'll also be streaming a play-/talkthrough of the full megawad sometime next week. Keep an eye peeled for the announcement.

[MFG38]

Okay, I'll be starting the play-/talkthrough stream in an hour or so. Keep an eye on https://www.twitch.tv/mfg38.

 

[Michael Jensen]

23 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

Okay, I'll be starting the play-/talkthrough stream in an hour or so. Keep an eye on https://www.twitch.tv/mfg38.

 

Awesome. I'm glad I'll be able to be there. 

 

Side note, I watched a video of your previous doom stream, and I thought the game audio was a bit too loud, sometimes I couldn't hear you. 

[MFG38]

I'm just about ready to prep this thing for a v1.0 release. Before I do that, though, I have a small request to make: the wad needs a few demos. If any of you awesome people would be so kind as to record a demo or two and send them my way, I'd appreciate that greatly. I don't need a whole lot of demos, just enough to replace the DEMOs that play back by default.

 

Spoiler

"Why don't you just record the demos yourself?" Because variety is the spice of life.

 

[forgettable pyromaniac]

1 hour ago, MFG38 said:

I'm just about ready to prep this thing for a v1.0 release. Before I do that, though, I have a small request to make: the wad needs a few demos. If any of you awesome people would be so kind as to record a demo or two and send them my way, I'd appreciate that greatly. I don't need a whole lot of demos, just enough to replace the DEMOs that play back by default.

 

  Hide contents

"Why don't you just record the demos yourself?" Because variety is the spice of life.

 

ayo tell me which maps to do I'll do it

[MFG38]

32 minutes ago, forgettablepyromaniac said:

ayo tell me which maps to do I'll do it

 

Any map of your choice is good. I should also mention that the demos should be recorded in PrBoom+ to ensure proper playback once they're in the wad.

[forgettable pyromaniac]

Just now, MFG38 said:

 

Any map of your choice is good. I should also mention that the demos should be recorded in PrBoom+ to ensure proper playback once they're in the wad.

let you know when I'm through, should the player still die at the end, or-?

[MFG38]

1 minute ago, forgettablepyromaniac said:

let you know when I'm through, should the player still die at the end, or-?

 

The player doesn't need to die at the end.

[Alper002]

I'd imagine my first contribution would be a good map for inclusion in the demo loop, since it'd in theory allow for mitigating the obtuseness of the openable wall that slight bit more...

Hence, I decided that I'd record a demo of me playing the map awfully for long enough that I pass through said openable wall.

3x3-M10-Alper.zip

[forgettable pyromaniac]

2 hours ago, MFG38 said:

 

The player doesn't need to die at the end.

well i ended up dying a bunch because I'm dumb.
I made a bunch to choose from.

demos.zip

[SilverMiner]

FDA of first 4 maps

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zb50eoeg4ugi6ue/SM3x3.lmp?dl=1

[MFG38]

Thanks to the few people who recorded demos - seeing as I didn't need many of them to begin with, I was able to make the decisions as to which demos to shove into the wad very quickly. Demos included are by @Alper002, @forgettablepyromaniac and myself.

 

With that, v1.0 of 3x3 is now released! It's currently downloadable on Dropbox and Google Drive - the OP has been updated with the same download links. I'll also be uploading the wad to /idgames within the next few days. If all goes well, an /idgames download link will appear in the Download Links section next to the existing ones soon-ish.

 

Enjoy!

 

Spoiler

We should do this again sometime soon. c:

/hintaboutplansforasequelofsorts

 

[MFG38]

Wad's been submitted to /idgames. Now we just wait and hope for the best.

 

*sips coffee*

[MFG38]

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm beyond excited to announce that 3x3 is now up on /idgames! It's located in the following URL:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/3x3

 

The OP has been updated with the same link. It'll reside there alongside the existing Dropbox and Google Drive links - I figure it's a good idea to keep the latter two as alternative download "mirrors" in case people run into problems with downloading the file from one or the other.