If your default map format is something other than UDMF: Why?

[ketmar]

5 minutes ago, smeghammer said:

That's really useful info, thank you. I'll go back to my Ubuntu machine and grab that older commit (all the build tools are on that rather than my Windows LT). Understood it is experimental - won't use it as my main editor...

p.s. by reading the code i discovered "--udmftest" option. try this, it may work, and you may not need to rebuild anything.

[jerrysheppy]

29 minutes ago, TheMightyHeracross said:

not to mention way easier for whoever is hosting DSDA. 

 

You can tell how much of an old fart I am because I was thinking "what is the demo community called again?" and my brain immediately went COMPET-N rather than DSDA.

 

Thanks for the reply.  I guess it shows how there can be multiple coexisting sensibilities as to a subjective concept like "convenience".  For any of my purposes, YouTube feels considerably more convenient than downloading and playing a LMP, but thinking about it I can also see how someone might beg to differ if they were, say, laboring under throttled internet.

[esselfortium]

12 hours ago, jerrysheppy said:

At least if you make a pure vanilla/Chocolate map you're challenging yourself and gaining some old-school cred, like the authors of BTSX or URE; with Boom you sacrifice a good deal of that cred anyway, but don't gain nearly as much as you could in the bargain.

Vanilla mapping's not about cred. No one really cares that much if your map runs on a 386. Vanilla mapping is about masochism.

 

Mapping with Boom features opens up lots of useful possibilities and eliminates most of the vanilla masochism, avoids the option paralysis that I get when opening up literally any dialog box while UDMF editing, and ensures people can play your map in nearly any port (and record demos of it).

[GarrettChan]

TBH, I probably won't play any UDMF maps because they just turn me off. It's not the Doom I like to play. That's about it.

 

Boom is the perfect mid point to me, mostly vanilla but with some nice addition to it.

 

Limit removing is almost vanilla except the worry of many types of overflows.

 

I personally will not map in full vanilla, but I do appreciate how vanilla maps are done where you need to figure out engine limits. This type of restrictions made me respect whoever is mapping for vanilla.

 

From a gameplay perspective, limit removing and vanilla are basically the same because they are both -complevel 2 in PrBoom+, but you need to have the knowledge about this. Otherwise, you just use a wrong standard to judge a vanilla map.

[jerrysheppy]

42 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

Vanilla mapping's not about cred. No one really cares that much if your map runs on a 386. Vanilla mapping is about masochism.

 

Mapping with Boom features opens up lots of useful possibilities and eliminates most of the vanilla masochism, avoids the option paralysis that I get when opening up literally any dialog box while UDMF editing, and ensures people can play your map in nearly any port (and record demos of it).

 

Just for the record, when I used the word "cred" I didn't mean to imply anything cynical or purely performative about it.  If there are better, equally concise terms for doing old-school for the coolness (or, indeed, masochism) of it, I'm all ears.

 

"Option paralysis" is another good reason I hadn't thought of.  Personally, I don't feel like I suffer from option paralysis or that I'm compelled to, say, use an UDMF feature when a vanilla linedef action will do the trick. But other people certainly have different experiences, which is again a reason I made this thread.

 

19 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

TBH, I probably won't play any UDMF maps because they just turn me off. It's not the Doom I like to play. That's about it.

 

 

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be talking about "UDMF maps" as a particular style—cutscenes, slopes and 3D floors coming out the ass are, I imagine, the sort of things you expect when you use that term—and not as a mapping format that is inclusive of just about any style one would wish to map in, with the benefit of added flexibility.  Which I would say is at least slightly missing the point of my proposition.

[DuckReconMajor]

1 hour ago, jerrysheppy said:

This was actually one of the potential niche reasons I had in mind for someone selecting older formats.  This sort of passes the buck on my curiosity, though, because now I'm curious about folks' reasons for still favoring the LMP format.  Is it just COMPET-N style speedrun stuff or is there something else?  I'm speaking as someone whose main interest in demos was "I enjoy watching other people play Doom", for which I now have YouTube.

 

This is a valid question certainly, and I have trouble coming up with reasons I prefer demos to YouTube about 80% of the time without coming off as pretentious.

 

At first it's daunting because you're in the command line or a launcher trying to get everything aligned to run a certain demo.

However after some setup and already having the most played wads downloaded in your prboom+ folder, it's a super-fast download, a double-click, and you're watching the demo. It's literally faster than it takes for a YouTube video to load, especially if you're loading in a higher quality.

 

Which brings me to my final and maybe most pretentious point: it always seems YouTube has a terrible time compressing video game footage.

I'm guessing they're optimized to show people's faces and real life venues, and not hard color changes along sharp lines you see in games.

A non-doom example where it's really noticeable in an Ace Combat video I uploaded the other week. When you're in clouds or the hud goes from red to green it looks absolutely awful, even at 1080p after it's buffered.

It happens a lot with tiny details in Doom videos too, just not as extreme. Once you get spoiled by seeing it played out in a demo it's hard to want to go back.

[smeghammer]

1 hour ago, ketmar said:

p.s. by reading the code i discovered "--udmftest" option. try this, it may work, and you may not need to rebuild anything.

 

Booya!!!!:

 

Fucking excellent! Thank you!

[ketmar]

2 minutes ago, smeghammer said:

Fucking excellent! Thank you!

glad to help. please, note that Eureka will drop BEHAVIOR, SCRIPTS and DIALOGUE lumps from UDMF maps on saving, so be very careful with editing some scripted UDMFs.

[smeghammer]

Just now, ketmar said:

please, note that Eureka will drop BEHAVIOR, SCRIPTS and DIALOGUE lumps from UDMF maps on saving, so be very careful with editing some scripted UDMFs.

 

Noted, thank you.

[Kappes Buur]

All points are well taken, from 'I am too damn lazy to learn anything else' to 'I enjoy making maps for the old style'. I can accept that. After all, at some time or another I have felt the same way. Until ZDoom came along some years ago, which changed everything for my approach to mapping.

 

To me, creating a map, not just constructing a map, is to bring something new, something that dazzles the mind. Some mappers certainly have pulled that off in grandiose fashion. Examples are: Paranoid, Bastion of Chaos, MMDCXIV, Lullaby, Frozen Time, et al. Not everybody can create such pwads, I understand that, but the human mind having the ability to strive for something better, should reflect that in ones efforts. 

 

Mapping for DOOM/BOOM will forever be relegated to redoing the same things over and over again in a flat geometry due to a restricted feature set, only with a different layout and different actor placement. The only decisions to be made are should I make a hallway go the right or the left, or maybe steps going down or up. Sure, one can use new textures to make the map look different, but overall, maps done in that format have all the same look and feel to it. If you enjoy doing that, well, you have my support.

 

As @Goatlord pointed out, a major aspect of a map is the lighting in all it's different forms. Dismissing detailing in favour of 'gameplay' is nothing short of a copout.

 

I discard points of view such as: 'I want demo compatibility' to 'My hardware is a piece of crap'. They have nothing to do with map construction as such.

 

The reason I like to help those struggling with any aspect of mapping, if I can, is to further their understanding of what is involved in creating a map. And hopefully that will bear fruit in the long run.
 

[AD_79]

10 hours ago, Kappes Buur said:

Mapping for DOOM/BOOM simply is the same from one map to the next, with only the layout and monster placement altered to make it appear as something new. 

 

You could apply this logic to more advanced mapping, if you really wanted to. One doesn't suddenly get brand new-feeling maps each time just because you're using ZDoom features. The creativity involved with shaping new and interesting places is what keeps stuff feeling fresh, which is possible to accomplish in all formats. I could boil down your logic even further and say that mappers have all been making the same map for twenty-seven years, only altering the layout and monster placement to make it feel new. That sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

 

The idea of "there's less fancy features to work with in these formats, which inherently equals less creativity and less reason to use it" is a baffling one, and it feels like you don't care about how features are used and instead just want them to exist for the sake of "more features". That's a sort of thinking that I can't stand, especially as someone whose mapping ethos tends to steer towards "less is more". My mapping is pretty straightforward, and that's the way I like it to be. Everything I want to work with is doable in, say, Boom (or MBF21 I suppose, now that this exists and supports a type of MAPINFO), and as a result I have no reason to use something like UDMF. Being limited to a source port I cannot stand using (GZ) for loads of features I can guarantee you I won't use simply doesn't sound worth it to me.

[esselfortium]

8 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

Mapping for DOOM/BOOM will forever be relegated to redoing the same things over and over again in a flat geometry, only with a different layout and different actor placement. The only decisions to be made are should I make a hallway go the right or the left, or maybe steps going down or up. Sure, one can use new textures to make the map look different, but overall, maps done in that format have all the same look and feel to it. If you enjoy doing that, well, you have my support.

Impressively bad take.

 

"Mapping for Doom is just deciding whether a hallway should go left or right. Mapping for ZDoom is deciding whether a sloped hallway with colored lighting should go left or right."

 

edit: The "only" in "only with a different layout and different actor placement" is carrying a lot of weight.

[jerrysheppy]

13 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

 

Mapping for DOOM/BOOM will forever be relegated to redoing the same things over and over again in a flat geometry due to a restricted feature set, only with a different layout and different actor placement.
 

 

While you are correct in the most technical, literal sense, this doesn't at all reduce the enjoyability of the maps one can produce while making a purely vanilla-style map; that is to say, a map that doesn't make any obvious use of advanced features like slopes and colored lighting (whether it is actually a UDMF map or could be played in doom2.exe, or anything in between).

 

As I alluded to in my reply to GarrettChan up the page, I think we get off the track when we start talking about UDMF as a style rather than as a more flexible and powerful map format.  It is explicitly not my intention or desire to neg on anyone for whom, say, Deathless has the most powerfully arousing visuals of the last twenty years of Doom mapping.

[Chris Hansen]

I'm so thankful for some of the comments here as they reassure me that I'm in fact not stuck doing the same thing over and over just because I won't change. I do it because I like it... and well, maybe also because my time is so short that if I dive deep into all those UDMF features then I will never release a level again! I just don't have the time. Instead I just stick with what I know and enjoy it.

 

Also, I think this is a bit like music making. I mean, I like rock'n'roll. Sometimes we just need drums, bass and some guitars. And we have ourselves an amazing track. Even though it's been done a million times before since Presley, Hendrix or The Beatles. If it works, it works. Depends on what we want to achieve, I guess.

[GarrettChan]

47 minutes ago, jerrysheppy said:

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be talking about "UDMF maps" as a particular style—cutscenes, slopes and 3D floors coming out the ass are, I imagine, the sort of things you expect when you use that term—and not as a mapping format that is inclusive of just about any style one would wish to map in, with the benefit of added flexibility.  Which I would say is at least slightly missing the point of my proposition.

Kind of, but I just wanted to say what's in my mind. I suppose you mean, because UDMF supports everything, so there's no point using any inferior formats like Boom?

 

Though, my other problem is that, when you can be done with limit-removing, why use UDMF. Also, I won't download GZDoom to play a vanilla style map in UDMF for many reasons. That's about it.

[Kappes Buur]

Obviously people have different opinions, and that is a good thing.

All I can express is my own take on this and how I feel about mapping.

 

But as I mentioned before

 

Quote

If you enjoy doing that, well, you have my support.

 

and I will stand by that. I'm talking about mapping in any format.

 

But some seem to single out some specific sections of my comments out of context to support their own take on mapping.

It only points out how fractured the Doom community is.

 

 

[SiFi270]

Clearly the best way to solve this is to bring in an impartial third party and see what they have to say.

 

"Doom? Isn't that... old? Why would anyone bother making something for an old game? You should use Unreal, or Unity, or Source."

 

 

[Scypek2]

5 hours ago, MattFright said:

What i want to add to this discussion, however, is that i absolutely HATE. This mentality of "constraints and limitations breed creativity" just as much as i hate the polar opposite.

 

To me, the difference is what you do with those limitations. No Print() function in vanilla, so you create a story without words? Awesome, and likely enjoyable even without knowing the details of the limitations that had to be overcome. No Print() function in vanilla, so you use a self-referencing voodoo linguortal to approximate the effect of a piece of text appearing on the player's screen? Pretty cool for its own sake I guess, but not quite as exciting. Especially if you have to wait five minutes at the beginning on the level to let the off-screen sticky pistons and slimeblocks detonate enough bob-ombs to create singularity.

[Dragonfly]

22 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

 

Mapping for DOOM/BOOM will forever be relegated to redoing the same things over and over again in a flat geometry due to a restricted feature set, only with a different layout and different actor placement. The only decisions to be made are should I make a hallway go the right or the left, or maybe steps going down or up. Sure, one can use new textures to make the map look different, but overall, maps done in that format have all the same look and feel to it. If you enjoy doing that, well, you have my support.

 

Never before have I read a paragraph as insanely ignorant and brain dead as this. 

[Kappes Buur]

3 minutes ago, Dragonfly said:

 

Never before have I read a paragraph as insanely ignorant and brain dead as this. 

Well, thank you for that.

We have stood on opposite sites before, but that is a cheap shot.

[esselfortium]

"I'm not being rude!! I said you have my support to make your samey identical boring maps! Why am I being attacked?!"

[Major Arlene]

7 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

But some seem to single out some specific sections of my comments out of context to support their own take on mapping.

It only points out how fractured the Doom community is.

 

The reason it gets fractured is because we have this take of "all DOOM/BOOM maps look the same".

We don't have issues with people talking about how they like to map, it's the unwarranted putting-down of other people's maps that is an issue.

You don't have to like a format, but don't insult a whole group of mappers to prove your point.

 

Cool? Moving on.

[Noiser]

I started making maps and mods for ZDoom, but once I found vanilla I never went back. The main reason is because I had much more fun working with limits (and using dehacked was way more enjoyable than decorate as well). Also because I like how the game looks on low res and I like the fact that people can play my map on any other port they want.
 

If you think people go for other formats because they want "old-school cred" (whatever that means) you are way out of touch. Part of that disdain is what put people off when talking about these subjects. Which is unfortunate because there are a lot of cool projects being made on UDMF and that's a format I would like to see growing as well.

Edited June 19, 2021 by Noiser

[Tristan]

36 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

Mapping for DOOM/BOOM will forever be relegated to redoing the same things over and over again in a flat geometry due to a restricted feature set

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/m-o/moonlght

[nrofl]

5 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

"I'm not being rude!! I said you have my support to make your samey identical boring maps! Why am I being attacked?!"

I mean I agree with him though, look at these:

Quote

Completely the same as you can see. No differences just a difference from left and right hallways.

[jerrysheppy]

1 minute ago, Noiser said:

If you think people go for other formats because they want "old-school cred" (whatever that means) you are way out of touch. Part of that disdain is what put people off when talking about these subjects. 

 

I understand that it's hard to digest every reply in a 3-page thread before responding (not sarcasm!) but I did address this and say that I was open to other terminology!

 

And I can't speak for folks like Kappes Buur, but if you think that (all else being equal) I feel disdain towards the accomplishments of vanilla mappers, then you've misunderstood me.

[TheMightyHeracross]

12 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

But some seem to single out some specific sections of my comments out of context to support their own take on mapping.

It only points out how fractured the Doom community is.

 

Doesn't look fractured to me. Vanilla, Boom, and GZDoom mappers have united in this thread to call out your lame take!

[Dragonfly]

14 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

Well, thank you for that.

We have stood on opposite sites before, but that is a cheap shot.

 

You're welcome.

 

You can call that a cheap shot all you want but your idle minded sentences just took a huge metaphorical shit on 50%+ of all the work this community has ever made, but for your own sake, let's disregard the offensiveness of your statement for a second, and reiterate the fact that your statements are objectively false. 

 

I say this as someone who has released works ranging from vanilla up to UDMF projects that exploit the latest in feature sets. 

[esselfortium]

Really, though, if you can see no possibilities in Doom beyond making hallways, that is a limitation of your own creativity that no engine or mapping format can rectify.

[1Destro3456]

20 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

Obviously people have different opinions, and that is a good thing.

All I can express is my own take on this and how I feel about mapping.

 

But as I mentioned before

 

 

and I will stand by that. I'm talking about mapping in any format.

 

But some seem to single out some specific sections of my comments out of context to support their own take on mapping.

It only points out how fractured the Doom community is.

 

 

It's fine that you don't like those maps, or that you don't like that format, it's just that your "hot take" is based of your balls, like how can you say that they all look and play the same if they're made on that format. Have you played them? If you did, how can you think that. And I'm not sure where's the fracture in the Doom community, just saying, but mostly UDMF mappers are also against what you're saying. Please stop pulling arguments out of your ass, it's not a reliable source.