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Cybermaarten

HOM... I don't get it!

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Hi all,

I've made some wad's back in the nineties, but switched to Duke Nukem 3D after that, just to pick up making Doom levels again recently. Working on my first wad as a neo-noob... :)

Anyway, I'm having troubles with the Hall of Mirrors effect. I have this outdoor area with a few stairs in it and the HOM effect is just gigantic. Is this only because I use too much sectors? 'cause imho, there are a lot of other levels with equally or more sectors/sidedefs in an outdoor area (e.g. map11 (nemesis) in Alien vendetta, or even map14 in the original Doom2) that do not have that problem.

Yes, I'm just using Doom Builder for editing and Doom95 for playing, but it works just fine for me for all the other levels I play...

I put my level here: pinxten.net/download/MP01c.wad. If anyone wants to have a look, i'd appreciate is very very much!! (the are I mean is outdoors, west of the start. You need no-clipping to reach it :)

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The original Doom engine, as well as Doom95, has arbitrary limits on a lot of things, and one of the effects of this is that complex areas will tend to either HOM or crash out with a visplane overflow error. You can either try to simplify the geometry in the area, or add some strategically-placed big walls so that less stuff is being rendered at a time.

Alternatively, you could use a source port such as prBoom, Eternity Engine, or ZDoom, all of which substantially increase Doom's limits to the point where you're very unlikely to ever run into any of them. The vast majority of Doom players today use source ports other than doom2.exe or doom95 for most of their playing, anyway. If you make your map limit-removing (going beyond doom2.exe's hard limits, but not using any additional features), it will be playable by pretty much anyone in their port of choice. Boom-compatible is also a good choice, if you want a bit more freedom but still be compatible with a lot of ports.

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Thanks for the quick and thorough reply!

I've installed ZDoom and now it looks just fine. The HOM is gone!! I'm gonna miss the nice GUI that Doom95 had though... It's kind of a pain in the * to either go to the command line prompt to start my map, or the make a .bat file for it (which I have to edit each time I rename my map). There is no such thing as a GUI where I can select map, skill, etc. like Doom95 has?

Being able to play my map is good start though. Thanks again!

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Though I don't use it myself, a lot of people use a launcher called ZDL. Personally, I just drag and drop the wad files onto zdoom.exe.

Glad you liked the music, by the way :D

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Cybermaarten said:
There is no such thing as a GUI where I can select map, skill, etc. like Doom95 has?

Check here.

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Maarten Pinxten!? :o

Damn! I liked your Duke maps. Hell, two of them (MPPOWER and MPRESORT) were among the maps I speedran before coming here (available easily as YouTube videos; look through my video archive for them.) I hadn't tried any of your Doom maps, though... I should sometime.

In any case, welcome back to Doom! As for the question... Well, I'd just like to add that attempting to view that area in vanilla Doom II specifically results in a visplane overflow. All the ports essel suggested are good choices, although ZDoom has some gameplay differences (e.g. Arch-Vile attacks launch you a lot higher than before.) If you want to try PrBoom at some point, though, you should grab PrBoom+, as it's more up to date than regular PrBoom. Either way, your choice!

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The Green Herring said:
Well, I'd just like to add that attempting to view that area in vanilla Doom II specifically results in a visplane overflow.

The VPO (more than 128 floor/ceiling fragments in view) will exit the game. A HOM occurs whenever there are more than 256 two sided lines in sight (unless it's caused by something else, such as a missing texture).

Cybermaarten said:
Is this only because I use too much sectors? 'cause imho, there are a lot of other levels with equally or more sectors/sidedefs in an outdoor area (e.g. map11 (nemesis) in Alien vendetta, or even map14 in the original Doom2) that do not have that problem.

Yeah, but what they did is hide the sections behind walls, so that optimally from any single point you wouldn't be viewing more than 128 visplanes, or 256 segs. I remember comments during development expressing that for Map11 of AV it took quite a lot of effort to iron out possible HOMs or VPOs.

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Haha, I even get recognised here! I never tried searching for my name in YouTube :). So, yes, I am that Maarten Pinxten!

Thanks for the tips. I'll try ZDL, although the link on doom.wikia is dead. I'll find it someplace else. Your drag-n-drop method sounds good to. Have to try it.

And I don't think I will cut back on sectors in my map. I'm actually not making it for the community or to get famous or anything, but just as a hobby and as a way to be creative. I'll release it, sure, but you might need a worthy source port :)

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Cool. Its good to see a great Duke mapper getting (back) involved with DOOM.

I used to map for Duke too back in the day, though my maps were mostly for Dukematch.

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