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prower

"The Spire 2" (large SP level for Boom/ZDoom) released

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Crashes PrBoom+, lags the fuck out of ZDoom. I'll pass.

Edit: K played it with GZDoom.

I'll make this short.

Lots of monsters, tons of ammo, TONS of health which makes it ridiculously easy. A slaughter map without challenging fights is immensely boring. I had enough after 1200 monsters.

K thought I'd go through the rest of the map.

The secret invuls in the YSK part are completely unnecessary.

The final room looked promising but it turned out to be a simple bfg spamfest.

DMTHA stats show how unbalanced the map is: 10565 units of health and only 1600 units of armor, and the hitpoints/ammo ratio is 0.53534 (there's enough ammo to do twice the damage needed to kill all monsters).

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Haven't played through it all yet, but I've seen so far was great... that Caco battle really freaked me out :D
There's a bit too much ammo like Belial already mentioned.
Good Job nonetheless!

It did lag a bit, but choosing a different video-mode solved that for me.

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Belial said:

Crashes PrBoom+, lags the fuck out of ZDoom. I'll pass.

Edit: K played it with GZDoom.

What version are you using?
It doesn't crush my gl(pr)boom+

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I used 28, got an I_SignalHandler error every time after a few seconds of movement. One time it was some other error that I've never seen previously but I can't remember what it was.

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prower said:

OK "large" might be a bit of an understatement. Don't try running this on a < 1 Ghz computer, it won't work. Have fun
Feedback is appreciated!

What nodebuilder are you using? zdbsp? Don't use it for non-zdoom maps. You should use it during mapping because it works in 100 times more quickly then others, but don't use it for releases. It builds nodes incorrectly or something. I cannot see the linedef #18764 from the start for example, but after rebuilding of nodes with ZenNodes I can.

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Belial said:

I used 28, got an I_SignalHandler error every time after a few seconds of movement. One time it was some other error that I've never seen previously but I can't remember what it was.

send me your cfg
e6y yahoo.com

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Why does this map lag so much?
My pc should be able to handle it, I think maybe something is wrong with the map.
Anyway haven't finished it yet, but I think the map is kind of cool. Good for coop probabably.
One this that is anoying, many monsters and being difficult is no problem, but pressing a button and than getting hit from every direction by chaingunners is just stupid.

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Dyne said:

Why does this map lag so much?

Because this level has the huge open area in the beginning. It forces all BSP-based algorithms which not optimized for such cases to their knees

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I'm quite sure you can get the same effect in some way that doesn't make certain areas unplayable.
For one do you even go that high in the tower that it needs to be 16000 high?

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:=Th0r's Map Bug Adventure=:

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0001-1.png
I start by thinking this leads to a secret.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0002.png
I continue jumping to the hills

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0003-1.png
I find a nicley placed tree and jump on it

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0004-1.png
Imps sure can see far.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0005-1.png
This is where i know it cant be a secret.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0006-1.png
I start following the outter rim.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0007-1.png
The "far outter rim" and if you clip just outside it you see....
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0008-1.png

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0011.png
ANYWAYS, you can continue almost half way around the giant square, if not more than half.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0012.png
You can even walk around in the grass.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0013.png
More walking, mind you, this whole process has taken at least 5 minutes.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/Sammydawg/DOOM0014.png
Back to the map, im wondering why its not called "nuts2.wad" or "nutsreduex"

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arghh hopefully this gets posted, my internet is being wacky.

Firstly, hi Mord/Kristus!

Secondly, thanks everyone for playing, and I'm sorry that it's performing poorly/buggily for a lot of people. I didn't think it'd run that badly It was built and tested on a P4 2.4Ghz, which I'm now realizing is quite above the minimum specs required for the original Doom...

Belial: Sorry you disliked the map so much :( But thanks for playing and the feedback. I kept dying and running out of ammo while I was testing the map, to the point of it not being any fun, so I guess I went a little overboard in correcting that imbalance.

Entryway: I tried building the nodes in ZenNode, but there was no significant performance increase that I could notice, AND there were a ton of split linedefs that made the map look terrible. I'm 99% sure the reason it's performing badly for most people is the REJECT map. Simply put, RMB3.0 couldn't handle it (it just crashed) and ZenNode's reject map obviously didn't work quite that well. The only place I lag when playing on my computer is the VERY opening area, when facing towards the tower; however, if I play with -nomonsters, the lag is reduced significantly, to about what you'd expect from a huge open area like that. I will try and fiddle around with the sectors to see if I can get the REJECT map to improve itself.

Dyne, I may be wrong but I don't think the ceiling height of the sky/tower/outside area would affect performance at all. Also what area did you think had too many chaingunners? I know hitscan enemies in HR-type maps like this are more annoying than fun, so I tried to limit them to where they were reasonably easy to kill.

Th0r, lol! To be fair you had to use jumping to get there which I didn't really intend for the map :P But I'll be sure to fix that.

Anyway, thanks everyone for playing. I'll probably get around to releasing an improved version that improves lag issues at some point in the near future. Also as far as gameplay goes... I'm thinking maybe 2 separate levels, one that's a tweaked version of this (less ammo and health, possibly), one that's a more 'normal' level of ammo/monsters. Plus new areas and tricks and traps of course! Not to sound vain but I really think the architecture of this map captures the grand, epic feel I wanted it to, and it'd be a shame for it to go to waste because of technical issues.

Again, thanks for the feedback, everyone.

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prower said:

I'm 99% sure the reason it's performing badly for most people is the REJECT map. Simply put, RMB3.0 couldn't handle it (it just crashed) and ZenNode's reject map obviously didn't work quite that well.


Don't overestimate the effect of REJECT. The only thing it is used for is to speed up monster sight calculations and they make up only a fraction of time (when starting this map it's less than 10% of all time with ZDoom.) It's the renderer that slows this map down and REJECT doesn't have any effect whatsoever there.

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Well, to be honest, you should get people know there is no jumping, or at least use MAPINFO to disable jumping on the map. And who says I would have had to jump up there? I could have just as easily rocketjumped ;-).

Not a bad map, my comp took it fine with no lag using skulltag.
A little excessive, but for what it is i guess its not all bad.

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Th0r said:

Well, to be honest, you should get people know there is no jumping


'Boom-compatible, limit-removing' in the txt file should be enough of a hint.

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Belial said:

'Boom-compatible, limit-removing' in the txt file should be enough of a hint.


Not really. I rarely take the time to read readmes in the first place, nor do i have any idea what "limit removing is"

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Th0r...jumping should just be assumed to be a bad idea unless the readme tells you it isn't. I can't really think of any WAD off the top of my head that was meant for jumping.

I loved the original Spire, and this looks to be a good time too. I have to admit, however, that I got my ass kicked about 400 monsters in and didn't at that moment feel like starting over. I'll play through the whole thing at some point and then give my full reaction.

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After lowering the ceiling height on the outer sectors to 4800 and removing the empty area to the east the map no longer crashes PrBoom.

And since you're willing to rerelease this, I suggest reducing the size of the sectors that house teleport destinations for the caco horde in the north (corpses hanging in midair look funny). I've also noticed that in the room after the red door the sky is visible, even though it obviously shouldn't be :P

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It's ok, but I only saw about 3 rooms that resemble Gothic 99. I agree with the sentiment of too much health and the number of 2-sided lines in the intro area is a bit much. You're better off making it ZDoom only and using a skymap portal to create the effect of the huge tower, so you can make many of the areas shorter in height with more 1s impassable lines to take advantage of the BSP structure.

... and can you reset my frad dot email pw? :P

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Belial said:

After lowering the ceiling height on the outer sectors to 4800 and removing the empty area to the east the map no longer crashes PrBoom.

It crashes prboom (not glboom and only in release) in this place

void R_DrawColumn (void)
{
#ifdef RANGECHECK
  if ((unsigned)dc_x >= (unsigned)SCREENWIDTH
      || dc_yl < 0
      || dc_yh >= SCREENHEIGHT)
    I_Error("R_DrawColumn: %i to %i at %i", dc_yl, dc_yh, dc_x);
#endif
I still don't know the reason of a problem and how I can fix it

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Thor - if a souce port isn't specified, then you can assume that jumping isn't allowed since not all ports have the jumping feature.

As for the level itself, I got lost at one point and just got bored and gave up after roaming for 10 mins or so, still with over 1000 monsters killed I think I did reasonably well. I liked this level up to where i got stuck, there were some really good fights. I think the only fight I didn't like was the one with the seemingly unlimited supply of cacodemons floating down from above (its near the start), I just found that fight boring after a while.

Still very good level!

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I tried it in EDGE in a pretty high resolution, am i mad? yes, do i have an ubersystem? not really*, but it ran fine apart from the very start (looking away from the tower helped) and the caco battle when you get the rocket launcher (lots of dynamic lights, specially when i returned fire with the plasma gun). I was on the easiest skill level though, as i went by the text file's description of it being "very hard" rather than the post in this thread stating there is enough ammo to kill everything twice. I was killed by the arch vile you meet after getting to the 'back' of the tower (where the cacos spawn on an invisible platform), but its excellent fun so far, though just after getting inside for the first time i saw a room in which you could see the sky through a grate despite the fact there should have been a mile of solid wall directly above

*Athalon 2GHZ, 512mb of (SD)Ram, 256mb graphics card, but a cheap one, and cheap two years ago to boot

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Pretty boring ultra-slaugher map, IMO. I played through about half of it, then got so bored I charged into a room and suicided. :(

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