Kraja Posted December 31, 2022 Well… shit. Where do i even fucking begin? Hi. How’s it going? Hope you’re all doing well. This… whole thing might need some explaining. A while back i promised i’ll release a new map this year and, well - 2022 is about to end in a few hours, so i have to post it now, as buggy and unfinished as it is. It’s a disjointed mess of completely unrelated ideas and styles, barely stitched together to hold shape. What led to its sorry state was a string of unforgiving, unforeseen and unfortunate events that started all the way back in mid 2019, most of which i want to share in the next paragraph. So - if you’re not interested in any of that - feel free to skip to CHAPTER II, but for anyone else that’s still interested - buckle up, cause you’re gonna see a grown ass man lose his fucking marbles. I - MURPHY’S LAW Spoiler Ah, so you’re still here. Welcome. Get comfy and let me tell you a story about hubris, creative burnout, lack of self-control, poor planning and exploding computer hardware. So - as i mentioned before - i started working on this map in august of 2019 as a part of DyingCamel’s Demons 3 community project. My goal was simple - to make a simple rusty techbase-y boom-format map smaller than 5120x5120 map units - which was one of the project rules. So i got to work, crunched a few rooms in a couple of days and then i learned that you can force boom format maps to have multiple music tracks and then switch freely between them. Great! We have our theme and our gimmick - an old, rusty, abandoned techbase that starts off rather spooky and then slowly ramps up in intensity along with the music. The problem is… after a few more days of work it turned out we were supposed to use just one midi per map - as romero intended - while i was aiming for around 3 trackers. That bit wasn’t really stated anywhere in project’s rules, so - not wanting to go back to redo parts of the map - i raised a bit of a stink about it and then angrily left the project like a moody, grumpy teenager. I was a proper twat back then. I know it’s been almost 3 years but again - sorry for that, guys. And thus i put the map on a backburner for a few months while i focused on working on IHNI. After a while i took a break from that and went back to this still unnamed boom-format map thinking finishing it might be a cool little side project and a nice break from all that DUMF bullshittery, but i couldn’t get anything decent going. So after a few weeks of work, back on the backburner it went. Then i thought i might collab with Cornking and split this map into two parts - i do one half while he does the other and then we could just merge it in the middle. But alas - after a few more weeks of work - we dropped that idea too. So at this point my focus was 100% on IHNI, but i still kept this map in the background and used it to test all sorts of shapes and ideas. But - not wanting to start from scratch, i just kept adding those random half-baked ideas and gluing them to what was already there. You might see a recurring pattern here. The map was getting bigger and bigger with random bullshit growing out of it in all directions while i refused to actually give it a proper ending. This went on for over a year - with long breaks between short bursts of crunch. So far this looks messy, but isn’t anything that out of the ordinary. Until 2022 came along and shit really hit the fan. Now - i’ve wasted enough of your time here, so i’m not gonna waste any more explaining how shit this year was for everyone. Let’s just say that personal life had to take priority over doom. But then - a few months in - i gave myself a goal. I’m gonna take this mess of a map, shape it into something playable and actually finish it. And for a while - for the first time in 2 years, after a whole bunch of different concepts and iterations - it was going well. Until… God fucking damn it… So - i don’t map in boom all that much, so i was under the impression that there’s no limit on the amount of sidedefs. Apparently i was wrong. So there was this three quarters done map (at this point already 4 times bigger than the max size of the initial draft from 2019) that couldn’t physically get any bigger. I still had A LOT to go, but couldn’t get any work done without gutting previous parts of the map. This is why this map… doesn’t really have an ending. After the last arena it just kinda… gives up and gives you a romero head for free. And that’s after downgrading every single room to even get to here. Anyway - i got it done. The pacing was shit, ending sucked ass through a garden hose but it was the only way i could do it under such a tight budget. Time to test it with different sourceports. Since i do most of my mapping in UDMF, my usual sourceport of choice is GzDoom - which runs this map well. But since this *was supposed to be* a boom format map i was hoping it might run well with GLboom and PRboom. Well - they don’t. One barely runs it with all sort of bugs while the other just straight up refuses to run it at all, and fixing that would take another few months. Fuck it. GzDoom it is then. So at this stage i was done. I just wanted to post it and get it over with. It’s good enough and it runs on one sourceport. Keep in mind that i skipped a whole lotta other bullshit that happened along the way. Anyway - i gave JohnSuitepee an early build to test out, he streamed it, liked it (i think), i just had a few things to fix and balance the whole thing for difficulties other than UV. I was this 👌 close - the end was within my reach. Just a few more days… …AND THEN MY FUCKING LAPTOP’S GPU WENT UP IN FLAMES. Gaming? Out of the question. Work? at about 3 frames per second. Testing? Forget it. Promised 2022 deadline? Just around the corner. The map? Done only for UV. So… here we are. I can hear fireworks going off outside, and all i can do is reflect about how little actual proper mapping i’ve done this year - for this and IHNI. I’ve been doing this since 2016, and yet there wasn’t a single project that went this bad. I’ve skipped a lot of details here - there was a lot of other things that went wrong, but i don’t want to bore you to death with details. All i can do is hope that 2023 will be the year when i get over my burnout and actually get some work done. And hopefully - with some new hardware and more experience under the belt - all of it will go better than this mapping hell. Happy new year! 🍺 II - AUTOMATA INFERNALIS Spoiler So - now with that out of the way - what is this map anyway? AUTOMATA INFERNALIS is a single, two hours long MBF map featuring a mix tight combat in rusty old techbases mixed with large, outdoor, borderline slaughtery battles. It makes heavy use of OTEX 1.0 and a whole bunch of different tracker modules from my beloved modarchive.org. After many trials and tribulations i used this map to test myself - to see if i can make a decent map without relying on fancy UDMF stuff while cranking up the challenge way above what i’m usually comfortable with. It’s singleplayer only, requires GZdoom and OTEX1.0 (included in the zip file) and - so far - it’s balanced for UV only. III - THE STORY SO FAR Spoiler During your long and thankless quest of cleansing the earth of demonic forces you get a lead on Collis Lab - a home base of a top secret branch of UACs R&D department. Forgotten by time, hidden from prying eyes this heavy-industrial facility has been a home to one of the earliest and most dangerous occult finds - a massive, acid spewing artifact, dug up from the deepest reaches of hell itself. With comms down and no way out the remaining UAC staff was decimated in mere hours - leaving this rusty man-made maze a new home for demonic forces. Over the years they’ve been using this place to regroup their troops, resurrect the fallen and refine their means of corrupting the earth. Using the long abandoned heavy machinery the demons have been diluting and processing hellslime into something more... palatable to a human tongue. A substance that - when ingested - would corrupt our hearts and minds first, before dealing unimaginable pain and suffering second. Your objective is threefold: I - infiltrate the mountainside facility and find your way to the refinery II - shut down the infernal machine III - find the artifact and destroy it once and for all Good luck, Marine. You're gonna need it. IV - SCREENSHOTS Spoiler V - DOWNLOAD LINK AND OTHER STUFF Spoiler https://mega.nz/file/G25ACA4Q#hJR65PzoPpGc7FeYfZzNfLhGnuCAodFImEsKsUemxIA GZdoom and OTEX1.0 (included in the zip file) are required. Jumping and crouching aren't recommended (though i still left them unlocked for mod support) This map is singleplayer only. It features a lot of different music tracks - all credits are in the README.txt Feel free to run it with any compat settings, however - i recommend sticking with standard - infinite tall actors can get a bit annoying at some points. UV only in this build. If you find any bugs - post them here and i'll try to fix them once i get some new hardware. Cheers 🍺 6 Share this post Link to post
Arcterezion Posted December 31, 2022 Glad to finally see an official release!.. Even if the ending is abrupt. :) 0 Share this post Link to post
Dynamo Posted December 31, 2022 Great to see another release for you! Hopefully your quest for new hardware yields results soon so that we can see more of this and I.H.N.I. :) 0 Share this post Link to post
