Top 10 Worst WAD Cliches

[YMB]

Oh man, that level looks sweet! What is it?

[Jodwin]

printz said:

Stuff about skies

Well, thanks to Doom's renderer skies also have more effect than just giving off the impression of the area/time of day/weather. The sky's colour can indirectly affect lightning and colours on open or windowed areas. So while certain skies can be a cliche, they still may be used intentionally to affect the lightning instead of always being thrown in as an afterthought.

[Maes]

Enjay said:

As for build times in ye olde days ...[omissis]... Kids these days don't know they're born. ;)

That's more or less what I thought from first-hand experience (nope, unfortunately I'm not a kid anymore :-p ). However it didn't really take 5 minutes to build the nodes, at least using DEU and its own nodebuilder on medium sized-maps. 5 to 10 seconds was more like it, at least on my 486 DX/50. It was rare enough to actually see the progress indicator before returning to the editor (at least with no particular tweaking).

However mapping techniques must have remained more or less at those levels until Doombuilder showed up: was there a better/faster way to map than manually laying vertexes/sides/sectors and playtesting while keeping mental (or written?) track of texture misalignment and going back to fix them?

[fraggle]

printz said:

blue skies (IMO not as overused in Doom as the red ones),

[EANB]

I think there was a reason why none of the skies were blue (insane clashing).

[Maes]

EANB said:

I think there was a reason why none of the skies were blue (insane clashing).

Indeed, Doom has a quite poor selection of blues. Nevertheless, there are some good blue and "sky blue" skies (no pun intended, PUEBLO.WAD is the first thing that comes to mind using a good "blue sky+clouds" sky).

For what regards creating new skies out photos...I found out that by increasing the saturation of blue areas in a photo of the sky (in other words, using "richer" or more "pastel" shades of blues) limits clashing a lot when converting to the One True Doom Palette (at least most blues don't turn to grey anymore).

"Water Blue" skies...that's purely a matter of taste.

[Sinfis]

This might belong the category of bad mapping, but this is seen almost every wads which have it:
Oversized furniture! You often see chairs, which are 32 units high and about 64x64 units wide, althought they are built for humans. Tables are often about 48 units tall. Doomguy's height is 56 units, right? You should know what am I talking of. Or do you have to climb on the chair you are going to sit?
I've made a standard to myself with the sizes of furniture designed for humans: Chairs are max 16 units high and 32x32 units wide and tables are 24 units tall.

Furniture made by geometric elements should be avoided entirely, because there's no textures for them in default Doom iwads, so when they are used, they look just ugly boxes. However, they give nice details to levels, when they are used "right".

[printz]

Sinfis said:

You often see chairs, which are 32 units high and about 64x64 units wide, althought they are built for humans. Tables are often about 48 units tall. Doomguy's height is 56 units, right?

Chairs for Barons and Cyberdemons?

[Kristian Nebula]

Maybe doomguy got stuck in a washing machine and just shrunk. Or maybe he was a giant in his previous life, before that good old imp tore his throat open.

Or maybe it's just chairs for cyberdemons indeed. :D

[gggmork]

Enjay said:

"...hmmm, I've just fought hordes of hellspawn, but now I'm descending into hell itself, I'm sure I won't need all this heavy kit that took me all that time and effort to gather."

Metal can't travel through the dimensional gates you see.

[myk]

gggmork said:
Metal can't travel through the dimensional gates you see.

At the end of the Shores of hell it also explains that you put all your equipment in a large crate and send it down to hell with a rope (there were some spare ropes from the recent construction of the Tower of Babel), but unfortunately the rope gets stuck on a spiky tree, the crate falls, and the rockets in it explode, destroying everything except the pistol you had kept holstered and a few bullets you had put in a belt pouch.

Too bad that part of the story gets cut off because the screen is too short for it. Funny no one ever reported that bug...

[printz]

Too bad you cut/didn't mention the part explaining how the rope was so long to reach from Deimos to hell's surface.

Let's feed with another cliche: stacked items. And another: fake walls with shotgunners/chaingunners behind (damn you).

[OmegaJ4]

Some cliche's i encounter way to often (No Order)

-A wad where there is no new music

- Being really low on health and ammo, opening a door, and finding 4 Revenants behind it.

- Picking up a key, only to find that hundreds of demons spawn. (It was okay in Suburbs)

- Hundreds of Cyberdemons... Only 1 Spider mastermind

- General megawad, where the only thing new is levels, no music, monsters or weapons.

[Doom_Dude]

OmegaJ4 said:

-A wad where there is no new music.

Personally I have as of yet to release a wad with new music. I totally suck at making and or finding music for maps. Once I find a place with some tunes and download several, they turn out to be complete crap, I usually give up and go back to mapping. OR you do find something decent but it loops all fucked up and music editing isn't something I can get into. I can't speak for anybody else tho. ;) Thing is, I don't mind not having new music when I play somebody else's map(s).

OmegaJ4 said:

- General megawad, where the only thing new is levels, no music, monsters or weapons.

That's me again. I'm making a megawad like that but it does have tons of new textures. It might end up containing 1 new boss or something. I don't see the problem here and I don't think you need to have new stuff to make something worth playing.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Sinfis said:

Oversized furniture!

That reminds me of the oversized Wolfenstein levels in Doom 2. Is there actually a known reason why they didn't use them 1:1 in size?

[Ichor]

Joke wads where the main joke is mind-numbingly horrid mapping and dialogue.

Picking up a soulsphere or megasphere, which triggers a trap that always leaves you worse off than before.

Hour long switch/key hunts.

[ReX]

OmegaJ4 said:

-A wad where there is no new music
- General megawad, where the only thing new is levels, no music, monsters or weapons.

You will find relatively few wads with new music. Also, this hardly qualifies as a cliche, which is defined as "a trite or hackneyed expression or idea" [hackneyed = made tedious or commonplace by frequent repetition]

Many good megawads contain no new monsters or weapons. Again, the lack of new stuff in a megawad does not meet the definition of a cliche. This may be your personal pet peeve, but I hardly think the majority of the DooM community shares your opinion.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Concerning music:
- Random midi's downloaded from the net converted to mus. Rarely do those classic, rock, heavy metal, movie themes, whatever really fit.
- short cues. Heaving a huge map playing for hours and a music repeating every minute is anoying. I wish, the great music in Eternal Doom would be at least half an hour per map (except for map 13 of course).

[YMB]

I don't even know of any MIDI software that goes up to 1/2 hour... unless your song is 5 BPM.

[skadoomer]

Monster Closets.

[printz]

LogicDeLuxe said:

That reminds me of the oversized Wolfenstein levels in Doom 2. Is there actually a known reason why they didn't use them 1:1 in size?

Perhaps they (the textures) went through the Mac process before being imported into Doom 2. I think Mac Wolfenstein 3d had textures and sprites twice the DOS size, though the view offset was adjusted as well. The author(s) of Wolfendoom had used Mac as their base OS for making that mod, that's where they took the other Wolf textures from. Finally, the Mac Wolf sprites lacked rotations, so the Wolfendoomers probably had to keep using the little DOS ones. Doors and sides are grey in Doom because this game doesn't have any cyan nuance, unlike Wolf.

Wads with no new "gimmicks" (I saw that word on a text file of such file) can be explained by the fact that all those hundreds of kilobytes have been spent on the levels, not on looks and jaws.

I've always been wondering how the hell can monsters in closet breathe. Inconsistency.

[Vegeta]

Megawads with the Icon of Sin at map30.

[printz]

Note that normally they only work properly in MAP30.

[myk]

LogicDeLuxe said:
Is there actually a known reason why they didn't use them 1:1 in size?

There's this.

[printz]

Were the walls taken from Mac Wolf? (y/n)

[BoldEnglishman]

This is just on the note about Doom Guy and his keys etc... (which is basically just unrealistic-ness .. I know thats not a real word)

How come you see on the intermission screen that you are "now entering" a new building, yet when you start the map your actually in the middle of the building (or at least not on the edge). How did you get in?

Doom2 doesn't make much sense either. How do you get in alot of these areas? There's sometimes a door behind you (whoop-te-doo), sometimes your just there in a room. The level's just don't seem connected at all (on a geographical level). You hit a switch at the end of one level, then the next thing you know your in a dark room with no way in (other than progressing through the level). If the entire planet is supposed to be over-run with demons, how can you travel from say Entryway to the Underhalls without encountering something on your journey?

Then again, how does the Doom Guy carry 100 of those rockets (all about 2/3 the size of him) with just a measly backpack? How does he carry his stuff around without any backpack? And of course, why does his fist show up as a big rifle?

Anyway, Doom cliches...
1. Finding the only new sounds/textures in a WAD are ripped right off another game (such as Heretic/Hexen)
2. Secret level containing Wolfenstein SS men
3. Fighting through a whole room of enemies who ended up guarding a single Ammo Box (wasting more ammo killing the guards then what you are rewarded with)
4. Secrets being just the traditional "different" wall texture.
5. Finding monsters in a secret. Excuse me but I thought this place was meant to be SECRET, yet its already populated by half-a-dozen enemies...

Once again though I guess alot of these cliches come down to personal taste.

[EANB]

Been brought up before:

Powerups/ammo where the cost of getting it is more than it is worth.

[YMB]

It's more of a technical bug, but:

HOM.

Easily avoided while mapping, often encountered while playing.

[kristus]

Which maps are you playing?

Anyway, my number one disliked Wad cliché is something that has been pretty common the last few years.
*Mimic of Agent Spork's design style.

I don't mind Agent Spork's style at all, I quite like his maps. Temple of Chaos2 for instance, great map. But all these people mimicing it cause they got nothing to offer on their own, or are just plain lazy is just horrible.

[Dr. Zin]

kristus said:

Which maps are you playing?

Anyway, my number one disliked Wad cliché is something that has been pretty common the last few years.
*Mimic of Agent Spork's design style.

I don't mind Agent Spork's style at all, I quite like his maps. Temple of Chaos2 for instance, great map. But all these people mimicing it cause they got nothing to offer on their own, or are just plain lazy is just horrible.

I think this applies to anyone apeing other mapper's technique. Unoriginality is always immediately obvious and it sucks.