Tell me some mapping sins

[Captain Ventris]

Revenants.

[pcorf]

On 4/18/2022 at 6:15 AM, Dusty_Rhodes said:

Hot starts can be fun.

 

Surrounded by chaingunners with no cover.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

1 hour ago, pcorf said:

 

Surrounded by chaingunners with no cover.

Oh no, don't remind me of Plutonia Map10. Whichever Casali decided to put a heavy weapons dude right behind the player start should be put in the stocking. Yeah, give me the Entryway method any day! 

[Silhouette 03]

A map with D_Runin played over D_Runnin played over D_Runnin. Come stare into the gaping maw of madness with me.

 

 

[pcorf]

1 hour ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

Oh no, don't remind me of Plutonia Map10. Whichever Casali decided to put a heavy weapons dude right behind the player start should be put in the stocking. Yeah, give me the Entryway method any day! 

 

Only one chaingunner though. I think it was intended to be a joke.

[Luleta]

On 4/18/2022 at 7:04 PM, Captain Ventris said:

Revenants.

reventants are like one of the best enemies im OFFENDED by this. sure they do like to two shot u sometimes if u dont have armor, but many fights get better with the use of revenants :(

[Ex Inferis]

I'll tell you a sin.

 

Abiding by the rules so much it kills every ounce of creativity in your maps.

 

That said: If you like to make slaughter maps, avoid tediousness in big fights. Basically, once you got the herd under control, the fight should be pretty much O-V-E-R, or at least 3/4 through. Few things are more boring than spending 5-10 minutes gunning down a mass of Hell Knights that have stopped posing any real threat.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Ex Inferis

[PeterMoro]

 Non-linearity. When people say they "like non-linear maps" - DON'T BELIEVE THEM!! I've seen playtesters / reviewers loose thier shit because they didn't know the critical path for a few minutes. Despite whats some people might say, they are not really interested in exploring a map and looking around for progress. Even if it's five minutes or less. 

So my sin is: making maps and parts of maps too non-linear. (I blame Dark Souls)

[Ex Inferis]

9 minutes ago, PeterMoro said:

 Non-linearity. When people say they "like non-linear maps" - DON'T BELIEVE THEM!! I've seen playtesters / reviewers loose thier shit because they didn't know the critical path for a few minutes. Despite whats some people might say, they are not really interested in exploring a map and looking around for progress. Even if it's five minutes or less. 

So my sin is: making maps and parts of maps too non-linear. (I blame Dark Souls)

Non-linearity can be a good thing if done right, though. I like to make maps in which you're required to complete several "mini missions" from one central or connecting area, where it's irrelevant in which order you play them, i feel this creates replay value. However, great care should be taken in order to avoid confusing the player or making them feel "lost".

[bofu]

Regarding "rectangular rooms": next time you're in a building, take note of just how many 90-degree angles there are. Even rooms that aren't strictly rectangular usually have them. When's the last time you've been to a warehouse, office building, or apartment that has diagonal walls? Now, if you're doing outdoor areas/caves/fleshy areas/tunnels, that's another matter entirely. You can make a level entirely out of 90-degree angles and still have it look good and distinctive, as long as you change up your grid sizes, use unconventional room shapes on occasion, and add enough details in the map to break up the samey-ness.

 

Things that I think should be considered sins:

• Insta-kill crushers or deathtraps that have no discernible environmental cues
• Pick-a-path where the wrong paths kill you without any recourse (exceptions made when it's part of a puzzle and there are, again, environmental cues)
• Having differing sector heights using the sky texture arranged in such a way that parts of tall walls will disappear (walk behind the little building at the start in Citadel in Doom 2, you'll see what I mean)
• Having MIDI music in a megawad where individual tracks vary wildly in volume from one another
• Not including any light sources in your rooms - there are lamp objects, light wall textures, and light flats for a reason
• Using the light textures (wall or flats) to texture an entire area/room or large wall (there are some exceptions to this)
• Only using floor/ceiling height intervals of 8 (less of a per-map sin and more of a per-mapset sin, you can get away with this in simple enough maps)
• Using a flat with lights on it and cutting it off in the middle of a light (of course, even some IWAD levels do this)

[Jacek Bourne]

Honestly, the only mapping sin is when your map doesn’t function properly.

It is impossible to exit.

Sometimes teleporters don’t work.

 

Things such as those.

 

Everything else is just preference. For example:

Inescapable death pits

Non-linearity

Linearity

Using textures in certain ways

Mandatory secrets

Puzzles

Secrets that don’t give you significant reward

Scarce Ammunition 

Abundant Ammunition 

It being impossible to backtrack 

Hot starts

No secrets

Speedmapping

“Revenants”

Repetitive level design

All of these features and more are subjective. Some players will like them and others will not. I don’t see the point in labeling any of them as “sins”. As long as the map functions properly, everything else is based on personal opinions.

 

 

[Roofi]

When mappers add new textures doors with a knob but they open vertically as a regular door . It has just no sense. The screen come from a Shadowman's wad I don't remember the name.

 

Also, I can no longer see items on lava or other dangerous liquid without being puzzled. How come I melt and the items don't?

 

 

[bofu]

1 hour ago, Roofi said:

When mappers add new textures doors with a knob but they open vertically as a regular door . It has just no sense. The screen come from a Shadowman's wad I don't remember the name.

 

Also, I can no longer see items on lava or other dangerous liquid without being puzzled. How come I melt and the items don't?

 

 

This reminds me of another thing that bugs me: warped sense of scale thanks to custom textures. The player is 56 units tall. If you're going to rip door textures from a Build game or something, resize the dang textures. First of all, in Build engine games, textures are usually resized downward in the maps themselves to make them look more detailed close up, and second of all, most door textures in Build games are 128 pixels tall, which is more than twice the player's height. There's a reason that there are several Doom stock door textures that are only 72 pixels tall.

[boris]

On 4/21/2022 at 5:54 AM, PeterMoro said:

 Non-linearity. When people say they "like non-linear maps" - DON'T BELIEVE THEM!! I've seen playtesters / reviewers loose thier shit because they didn't know the critical path for a few minutes. Despite whats some people might say, they are not really interested in exploring a map and looking around for progress. Even if it's five minutes or less. 

So my sin is: making maps and parts of maps too non-linear. (I blame Dark Souls)

 

People often use the term "non-linear" incorrectly. What they usually mean is a "looping" design, where you return to previously visited areas, giving the impression that the map is more open and dynamic ("non-linear") than it really is. The progression in looping design can be - and often is - completely linear.

[deathz0r]

@Xaser and @Ex Inferis are both utterly correct in that you shouldn't let creativity be stifled for the sake of accessibility. If you want to make MAP2356 of setpiececombat.wad, then nothing is ultimately stopping you. There's a surprising amount of untapped potential of voodoo doll manipulation with Boom format mapping and it's a sin to do little more beyond "monsters teleport in at set time periods".

On 4/17/2022 at 6:02 PM, Zulk RS said:

-Map partially or totally broken: Unaccessible secrets, impossible fights, unreachable switches, Untextured surfaces etc. Basically these are less "Sins" and more "Opps! I forgot to test this part" so it's more like a mistake or a bug if anything. I don't think anyone, regardless of skill or experience, does this intentionally. It's always something that's a mistake that the mapper made by accident.

Send me to the lowest circle of mapping hell for intentionally doing all four of those in a single map in the current year (though the fight in question is only applicable for speedrunning)

Edited May 1, 2022 by deathz0r

[Frost-Core]

Don't try to be MAP24.

[Zulk RS]

28 minutes ago, deathz0r said:

Send me to the lowest circle of mapping hell for intentionally doing all four of those in a single map in the current year (though the fight in question is only applicable for speedrunning)

 

Why? Why would you intentionally have secrets that can't be tagged by the player in any way (Without cheats), surfaces that are just not textured and switches that can never be activated? I am genuinely curious on why a mapper might do this if it wasn't by mistake.

[deathz0r]

9 minutes ago, Zulk RS said:

 

Why? Why would you intentionally have secrets that can't be tagged by the player in any way (Without cheats), surfaces that are just not textured and switches that can never be activated? I am genuinely curious on why a mapper might do this if it wasn't by mistake.

It's a puzzle map. Why should I not punish the player for doing the wrong actions?

[Zulk RS]

2 hours ago, deathz0r said:

It's a puzzle map. Why should I not punish the player for doing the wrong actions?

Ah! But then they CAN be activated if the player does everything right...

Also I'm not sure what Textureless HOM walls accomplish as far as punishing the player goes.

[Nefelibeta]

On 4/21/2022 at 11:47 PM, Roofi said:

When mappers add new textures doors with a knob but they open vertically as a regular door . It has just no sense. The screen come from a Shadowman's wad I don't remember the name.

 

Also, I can no longer see items on lava or other dangerous liquid without being puzzled. How come I melt and the items don't?

 

 

Making all of the doors move horizontally is pretty painful and tedious, the only way to realize that is probably the method that Death-Destiny has used in Elysion. But implementing a voodoo doll sequence for every freaking door sounds not fun at all unless there's something like a lua to do it. Wish it could be a thing though.

 

(Also vanilla silver door has a door handle and opens vertically)

[deathz0r]

20 hours ago, Zulk RS said:

Ah! But then they CAN be activated if the player does everything right...

Also I'm not sure what Textureless HOM walls accomplish as far as punishing the player goes.

Yes, but talking in a strict sense

Spoiler

if you opened the map in UDB you'd see inaccessible secrets and be confused as to why they even exist in the first place. There's also "unreachable" switches in the sense that they explicitly require speedrunning tricks to activate, made even more difficult than usual because of how silent teleporters can very slightly screw over the player angle in complevel 9. They're all easter eggs and don't count towards the secrets in the map. One playtester figured out that it was impossible to zero press certain switches for speedrunning purposes because the silent teleporters had screwed the player angle enough to make it impossible to achieve.

As for textureless walls, it all makes sense in context :)

[Solmyr]

Killing the player by voodoo doll telefragging.

[Kyka]

On 4/19/2022 at 8:04 AM, Captain Ventris said:

Revenants.

 

 

Pretty sure you meant Hell knights. :)

[ReaperAA]

7 minutes ago, Kyka said:

Pretty sure you meant Hell knights. :)

 

Pretty sure you meant barons :)

 

... since they are just hell knights with twice the tankiness.

[ZombiemanMastermind]

giant rooms with nothing in them except randomly placed monsters

[Solmyr]

• Using a Voodoo doll conveyor belt to give the player all the weapons, a fuckton of ammo, and a fuckton of medkits since the start of the map, so they can pretty much cruise through the map, no matter how hard it gets.

 

• Making custom monster replacements which can harm the player while invulnerable and also allowing resurrection states for the Arch-Viles, Cyberdemons and Masterminds.

 

• Giving the BFG9000 splash damage proportional to its main ball blast, and making BFG9000 decoration which explodes upon contact with the player.

[Keykhosrau]

Misaligned textures. Very easy to fix now with Doom Builder - Shift+A in visual mode on the texture you want.

[Koko Ricky]

Neglecting lighting. Overly simple or just plain absent attention to lighting can ruin even a well-constructed map. 

[Eugene Krabs]

This

[Eugene Krabs]

On 4/21/2022 at 11:47 AM, Roofi said:

When mappers add new textures doors with a knob but they open vertically as a regular door . It has just no sense. The screen come from a Shadowman's wad I don't remember the name.

 

Also, I can no longer see items on lava or other dangerous liquid without being puzzled. How come I melt and the items don't?

 

 

Or, alternatively, doors with knobs that don't open at all. Or conventional door textures that don't open.