Classic Doom Editing

[Cadman]

Hiya guys and gals! I just wanted to share, I guess you could say a kind of revelation for me when it comes to the editing world.

I've been looking for a little bit of a kickstart to continue my love for making classical Doom maps!

Lately I've been attempting to create anything from Doom3 maps to Left 4 Dead maps to see if I could do this stuff. With my long time experience in making Classical Doom maps and being a member of TeamTNT over the years I figured that it can't be that hard, can it? Man I was wrong! All this did was give me a greater appreciation for Good Old Doom & Doom2 mapping!

As stated in these same forums you wonder how come there haven't been many mods and mapping for the more modern games and 3D engines...it takes to damn long to do it! All of you have stated this obvious fact throughout these forums. Look at the latest Hexen project using the Doom3 Engine, it looks great, but man the years have passed by since that team stated to work on it. (Of course the next installment of Mordeth could challenge that length of time!...just kidding...:)

I now have the renewed sense of purpose for my map for the upcoming Community Chest project and other projects in the future.

What do you think guys? What is your take on all this? Just wanted to throw my meager 2 cents in on this.

[andrewj]

Wolf3d editing is even easier/quicker than DOOM, but there are a lot less people making levels for it than DOOM nowadays.

So I think DOOM is in some kind of the sweet spot between easiness of editing and the quality of visuals the can be achieved.

[ReX]

Cadman said:

As stated in these same forums you wonder how come there haven't been many mods and mapping for the more modern games and 3D engines...it takes to damn long to do it!

Of course, many of the great maps for DooM/2 have required quite a bit of work too. (As with everything else, the more time you devote to something the better it is likely to become.)

[Super Jamie]

You're right, even making a simple remake of System Shock level 1 took 10-15 hours, and I only did a quarter of the map. And that's not really changing the layout much, just thing placement and vanilla-style detailing. But maybe I am a slow mapper.

I've sat down and thought how to recreate some of the first parts of Doom 3 in the Doom engine but quickly thought it would just be plain too hard. Mr Chris' old valve is one of the more successful ports, but still ends up noticeably sparse. Enjay's njthief springs to mind, I've never played Thief but the map certainly feels like a different game to Doom.

One thing I would really like to see is E1M1 of Classic Doom 3 ported back to Doom (or GZDoom). Something I may have a go at one day myself.

[myk]

andrewj said:
Wolf3d editing is even easier/quicker than DOOM, but there are a lot less people making levels for it than DOOM nowadays.

So I think DOOM is in some kind of the sweet spot between easiness of editing and the quality of visuals the can be achieved.

I think Wolf3d would do okay with its slightly more archaic visuals if it had other benefits DOOM offers, such as:

• Is not hacky and limited to edit
  
• The game is well documented
  
• It has a big community*
  
• Play is more intense and versatile
  
• It has always had multiplayer

* While you can consider this an effect of other pros, it also feeds them back. It has a large community because, being a lot of fun, it was well received (it became a genre-defining game), shareware made it easy to access, and because id encouraged people to dare edit it.