Any tips on making drawing 45° structures easier?

[Gregor]

I noticed while rebuilding E1M3 that Romero built the western section of the map at a 45 degrees angle to the rest of the level. As a result all the lines in that structure have non-integer length which makes re-drawing them kind of a pain since an easily recognizable 128 map units line now becomes 127,28.

So i as wondering how you go about drawing these kind of shifted structures where every linedef has non-integer lengths. I'm sure you can get used to this and develop an eye for angles - but is there a trick to make drawing these easier?

 

 

[Dark Pulse]

Other than grid sizes, I don't really think so. But if you use large grid sizes, you can generally make them easier.

 

For example, on a 32-grid, your closest analogue to a 128, totally 45-degree line, will be to go over 4, up/down 4. That's your diagonal 128.

[holaareola]

I can't remember the default shortcut (might be #?) but assuming you are using Ultimate Doom Builder, "Align grid to selected linedef" is life-changing for this kind of work. You'll still get rounding errors, but who cares, you're on a grid is the main thing.

[Gregor]

32 minutes ago, holaareola said:

I can't remember the default shortcut (might be #?) but assuming you are using Ultimate Doom Builder, "Align grid to selected linedef" is life-changing for this kind of work. You'll still get rounding errors, but who cares, you're on a grid is the main thing.

 

Woah... That's actually pretty great. Obviously John, and for that matter all mappers until whenever they integrated this feature into Doom builder, didn't have this tool available. But this makes things a lot easier. Thank you so much!

[Jacek Nowak (jacnowak)]

I recommend @Bridgeburner56's tutorial on the subject:

 

It's focused on UDMF but a lot of the knowledge is also applicable to older map formats.

[Gregor]

28 minutes ago, jacnowak said:

I recommend @Bridgeburner56's tutorial on the subject:

 

It's focused on UDMF but a lot of the knowledge is also applicable to older map formats.

Yeah i'm not sure any of what he's talking about is directly applicable to vanilla Doom format. i'm sure there are some things in there. but shifting through all the things that don't apply to find a few gold nuggets is more confusing than clarifying. he's also going pretty damn fast. it's not exactly beginner's friendly. Still, a good video to come back to at a later point.

[ramon.dexter]

When i want to make angled structures, I jst draw it the normal way under 90°. When I'm done, I select it and rotate it in selection mode.