Making buildings

[Stupid Bunny]

I'm working on a level using Doom Builder and I came to wondering what the best way is to make a building in the middle of a larger sector. The problem is that, in the layout I have, there's some city-type areas where some of the buildings have lots of tunnels and stuff inside, and I don't know whether to it's better to put in the contents of the building and then put the outline of the building and surrounding sector around it, or to draw the shape of the building and then put the rooms and corridors into it afterwards.

[Bucket]

Depends on which you'd rather preserve: the interior or the exterior.

[stphrz]

The best way to do a building is to make a big pillar/column inside the sector you want the building to be located. Then you simply build the interior in the void inside the pillar. You can of course make the pillar any size and shape you want. This also makes it very easy to make doors and windows linking the building's inside to the outer sector.

[Stealthy Ivan]

Make a large sector 512 by 512. Make a square in the sector 256 by 256. Go into sector mode and delete the inside sector (the 256 by 256) that you made, the lines will highlite to a bright white. Then you can add doors and sectors inside that 256 by 256 square that you made.
This is just an example/tutorial, give it a shot. I use Doombuilder to.

[Stupid Bunny]

Okay, thanks. :)

The only problem with that method is that I'm in danger of making the building either too big or not big enough for all the spaces inside. And some of the ones I've designed aren't neatly square but have towers and other fun stuff, and so it's especially important to gauge how big I need it to be.

[Stealthy Ivan]

Well use your grid and imagine 64 by 64 as a closet or a teleporter, so base your level off this scale.

[Stupid Bunny]

That makes sense. I think that thinking should help. Thanks!

This is an unrelated question, also about editing levels, that I'm just curious about: is there a limit to the size a single level can be? And if there is, is it file size or physical (i.e. grid) size? I've seen some pretty large levels before but I'm not sure if there's a limit or not.

[Steeveeo]

There is a gridsize limit in Doombuilder at least, its in between those red lines you see if you zoom all the way out and scroll the screen for a while in one direction.

Although I've never been able to draw a sector that big (or multiple sectors equalling that big) without DB crashing out with "Overflow"

[Creaphis]

Vanilla wads have a size limit of about 14000x14000 pixels, though that's a small problem. Very few maps even get close to that size.