Shai'tan's Luck - Uploaded to /incoming

[ArmouredBlood]

Hmm. I usually kill everything in stage 1 before going outside, so I'll have to recreate it somehow. I think I'll try adding a horde of cacodemons or two to the ring forts and see what happens; nothing too complex, just like 2 groups of 40 in the lava.

[Super Mighty G]

ArmouredBlood said:

you did try HMP at least, I hope?

I always play on HMP unless I'm playing a super hard wad or something.

[ArmouredBlood]

Yea then I need to lower the monster counts -.- I mostly halved the imps and left out a few mancubi but I guess that's still too many.

[ArmouredBlood]

I tried it on HMP and it is easier than UV but I guess not enough since I couldn't make it through the last tower set reliably on the south route. The north route is easier so I probably don't need to check that but I probably should ...

@ UOD; if you'd like, can you populate a version you're comfortable with? For HMP all I do is tone down the fights really, not make them completely different, so having another person's views could really help. If anyone else would like to do so it'd be great too. Also I never put in the SSG for HMP, sorry >.<

[Super Mighty G]

ArmouredBlood said:

@ UOD; if you'd like, can you populate a version you're comfortable with? For HMP all I do is tone down the fights really, not make them completely different, so having another person's views could really help. If anyone else would like to do so it'd be great too. Also I never put in the SSG for HMP, sorry >.<

Wow, really? Well I guess I could if you're okay with it. I'll mess with the monster count and get back to you. You still want it to be hard right? Also what format did you use?

[ArmouredBlood]

Yea it's fine with me, I posted this thread to get feedback not to show off ;P Yea I still want it to be hard but not slaughter-map; 200-monsters-in-your-face-and-100-behind kind of hard, for HMP I mean. I'm probably going to strip everything down to barebones on skill 1/2. That might still be medium though .. idk, I'd have to make it and see.

I used boom format for this ep.

[Super Mighty G]

Okay, so here's what I threw together. Upon further examination of the map I was able to understand it better.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ddjhmme12ci

I discovered that the monster overload was because of the monsters clustering together and messing up the flow. This was fixable with some blocking lines. I took the liberty of putting some in. Now various monster groups patrol an area of a castle and don't cluster together with other groups. This is also to prevent monsters with large models from getting stuck. This wasn't entirely successful though. The Spidermastermind in the South-west castle gets stuck in place if Revenants gather around it. :/ Funny story actually. At one point during testing the Cyberdemon in the Eastern castle was pinned down by a group of Demons and killed. lol

Aside from the monster clog, the second most prominent problem was the Revenant placement. Because a lot of them were on high ground they could shoot at you from the nearest castle. So if you're not always looking behind you you can get blind sided by a half dozen or so missiles. This is still kind of a problem depending on which route you take.

I noticed a lack of Demons so I thought putting some hoards in to greet the player when he teleports would be a good idea. Also each castle has 1 Cyberdemon. The exit gate has 2. Other than that the monster count was generally reduced. Another thing, having hordes of Chaingunners together is not effective IMO. They're just going to kill each other if there's too many of them grouped so closely together. If you want to do the Arch-vile constant revive thing, Imps would be a better choice.

Most of the monsters on Stage 2 have had their difficulty settings reset (all monsters appear on all skill levels). Sorry about that but it was easier to gauge the monster count working from Ultra-Violence. I had a quick run through both routes and they should be completable without Godmode now. Also there should be less holding down the fire button with the BFG now. :)

[gggmork]

I didn't try that one yet, but one likely problem is that editing a line to be blocking etc. affects ALL difficulties, not just that difficulty. I'm pretty sure just the things (monsters/health etc) are what can vary from difficulty to difficulty.

[Super Mighty G]

I'm aware of that. I don't really see the problem though.

[ArmouredBlood]

Thanks for that U.O.D., it was kinda hard but not overwhelmingly so, like I wanted. Unfortunately you messed with the teleport lines somehow on the southern fort with the big brick pillar in the middle that has the 2 mancubi, so now you can't get back to the previous fort =/ not a problem since I'll probably copy/paste the thing layout with a few modifications ;) I'll tinker with it tomorrow.

On revenants, that was an unforeseen hurdle that worked out nicely for UV, but I guess doesn't work too well on HMP. I tried to minimize the revenant count but it didn't work out I guess.

On block monster lines, I'll look at where you put them, mostly they'll probably be fine but speedrunners will probably do what ggg does for the first stage and then there'll be some flying monsters around, so a few might change.

On chaingunners, I was kinda messing around putting large groups of them there. I might add a few spidermasterminds or chaingunner nests on the hills (wall edge) for UV instead.

[Super Mighty G]

ArmouredBlood said:

Unfortunately you messed with the teleport lines somehow on the southern fort with the big brick pillar in the middle that has the 2 mancubi, so now you can't get back to the previous fort =/

Yeah I'm not sure how that happened. I tried to leave the linedefs alone but I must have changed it by accident. Anyway, looking forward to the next version.

[ArmouredBlood]

Newest version with some tweaks and new area. Finished it in prboom with saves on UV in 44 minutes.

http://wadhost.fathax.com/files/AB.Area42-10-22.zip

[gggmork]

Looks like it'd be quite fun to do a uv max demo on, but I'm just iddqding now because a version change would desync a demo.

linedef 6454 (lift) has 'exit' written on it if not intentional (opposite island lift too).

[ArmouredBlood]

Heh, at first I thought you meant it was an exit linedef, but now I get what you're saying. I used that texture because I had just started using the gothic textures and thought to keep it as an easter egg later, but it's kinda pointless so I'll change it.

If you'd like to hold off demoing until stage 3 is done it's fine, I seem to have a habit of uploading something every two days for some reason.

[ArmouredBlood]

Stage 3 of MAP29 is mostly done, maybe add some detailing here and there but I like doing it in passes. This is more for gameplay testing anyway. Also I'm not sure if I should cut it here or go onto stage4, I'm fine with cutting it out if time and limits won't let me map it (200+ tags and over 20k lines, but I think I've heard of more lines somewhere. What is boom's limit on tags though?). If you've looked at the map it already has a circle in another, guess what stage 4 will do ;) Also the map names are only auto mapped right now, need to work on a graphic for them, and yea I'm renaming the ep, Area42 sounds a bit meh, plus it's gone a bit farther afield.

So to work on, I'll fiddle with this stage for a bit, maybe do difficulty levels, although right now I'm thinking just cut out everything for skills1/2 (includes stage 1/2) and put some invulnerabilities for skill3 for this bit.

And fun fact, halfway through working on this stage I got to about 19.5k lines then had to switch to zdbsp. So I'm no longer a virgin to zdbsp ;)

Well here it is, have fun.
http://wadhost.fathax.com/files/AB.Area42-10-29.zip

[gggmork]

I don't know much about nodebuilding, but afaik sidedef count is pretty important and maybe 25-30,000 sidedefs start to produce problems for me at least, and this map has 45,000. Might be better to just copy/paste the 2nd halfish of the map onto a new map to avoid that. Or I only briefly read that nodes can be built for large maps using the command line (outside of doombuilder), but don't know for sure. Insane gazebo's maps started having problems like splash damage not working when too much memory/segs/etc are used or something. Not sure if he figured that out (or the guy who made deus vult might know some tip on building nodes for large maps too). Hard maps tend to be more fun when not too long anyway, imo, since you have to play safe to expect to get all the way to the end.

As is, 29 no longer works in prboomplus as far as I can tell (and wasn't able to rebuild nodes through doombuilder to make it work in prboomplus). Did work in zdoom but had just a couple brief instances of major lag where there was none before for me at least; making the level even larger would probably have further effects.

I only see one obvious thing to reduce some segs but wouldn't help much: changing imp warps from squares to triangles (on the bridge). Alternately (if you don't mind that there would no longer be green teleport flashes, the imps could simply be put in a single big sector/deaf and like a thousandish units below ground (with no textured side lines so you wouldn't see the hole). Then a line could 'lower floor to highest floor (= instant)). Which would save 1500ish sidedefs (because you wouldn't need the outer dummy imp sectors either) and also almost 100 warp location things.

Don't know what the tag # limit is but suspect you can go into the thousands (other numbered stuff does at least).

[ArmouredBlood]

Well that doesn't sound good =/ That's weird that prboom+ doesn't work, I actually used prboom 2.5.0.3 (not plus) to test it with (fixed some little changes but they didn't really add much. Be kinda weird if I juuuuust missed the cap and went over there.). So it's sidedefs that are the problem, hmm. I think for the sake of making the thing work right I'd split it into 4 maps, which would be good cause they're in 10-20 minute parts each (except maybe stage 3, I was getting a little tired of it so it's fairly non-linear besides the 2 keys; only takes 5-10 minutes without the big corridor). Well at least I can use 3 more pieces of music :)

[gggmork]

I might not even know what I'm talking about. If you used prboomplus to test it, maybe I'm just not doing something right. But the last update before this (where the exit was after the long corridor of hell knights w/ 4 cybers at the end) worked fine for me. You can successfully play this current version in prboomplus?

[ArmouredBlood]

not plus, 2.5.0.3. It might be .4, but it's not + for sure. I'm not sure why I use it over +, I just do -.-

Slicing and dicing the maps, just put stage2 into MAP27, I think that's where most of my problems are since it spans like 40-50k units wide.

EDIT: just did another test run in with iddqd, it looked fine to me. Are you using GL?

[ArmouredBlood]

Done slicing and dicing. MAP29 is still partially there (no stage 1 plus player start is voodoo doll ...) if anyone has an interest. I'm going to have to clean it all up before I get everything set, but here's a raw version of each stage separated;
Stage 1 - MAP26
Stage 2 - MAP27
Stage 3 - MAP28
http://wadhost.fathax.com/files/AB.Area42-MAP29sliced-10-30.zip
^^^ Stage 3 is not max friendly with the large piped monster teleporters. (nor is stage2 for that matter but more cause of its size ...).

[gggmork]

Specifically, what happens to me (with the version before your 'sliced' version) is I drag/drop the wad into prboom-plus.exe. It plays and I can idclev to any map. BUT when I idclev to 29, I get a 'I_SignalHandler: Exiting on signal: signal 11' popup (then prboom crashes/quits). Same thing for glboom-plus.exe.
This often happened with insane gazebo's maps too (which were also big/lots of sidedefs).
Or, I can open 29 in doombuilder, but no matter which nodebuilder I choose, it takes forever to load then eventually has a popup about memory or signal 11 or something.

But I don't know what I'm doing or how to handle large maps, so hopefully I didn't make you dice up your map if it didn't need to be.
(still havn't tried that diced version, will do later).

[gggmork]

Tried the sliced version.

But as far as I know it probably doesn't need that many slices. One of the previous versions where there was the entire inner part + all the islands + the end line of hell knights with 4 cybers after them (and cacos on sides) all worked fine for me as one single map. Maybe the next slice could start after there.

But again, maybe someone else knows how to make huge maps work/nodebuild correctly without needing to slice. I don't know how.

Also 29 has the player start as one of the dummy players (just delete intended player start then repaste a new player start there to make that the real one).

[Super Mighty G]

Played through Stages 1-2.

There's something on Stage 1 that I never mentioned. The Chaingunner closet that opens when you open the building with the blue key. I just found it rather troublesome to have roaming Arch-Viles in front of me and hitscan monsters behind me. I cleared it all right, but I had to turn my attention to the Chaingunners and by the time they were dead the Arch-Viles had raised a shield of demons.

On to stage 2. Seems like you saw fit to delete most of the blocking lines. No worries, it's the author's choice really. Something new that I wasn't expecting was several waves of seemingly endless Cacodemons. They came at me at the first castle from all sides. I managed to kill them but it was pretty close. I hope there isn't even more on UV. That'd be nuts. The other wave came later. I forget when but it was a little easier to deal with.

Aside from that there's one crucial thing I wanted to mention. While walking around the top of the final castle I was blind-sided by a Cyberdemon's missile. Miraculously I survived. Barely. The Cyberdemon was shooting at me from the next castle over. The south-west one I think. Something should be done about this IMO.

Lastly the exit for Stage 2 can't be triggered.

Aside from that I don't think there were any major problems. Ran it in PrBoom and it seemed stable. It might have problems on less powerful machines though. I didn't play Stage 3 for lack of difficulty settings and wrong player starts. I idclip'd through some of 3 and I noticed that I could see all of Stage 2 from behind the Stage 3 start. Why weren't those areas deleted? Having giant areas that the player doesn't go through wastes space. (I'm not an expert on how wads work but that seems like the logical conclusion.)

[ArmouredBlood]

I looked up signal 11 for prboom and all I found was something about an error regarding not starting smoothly - I'm not sure if that meant starting the map smoothly or getting the nodes read or whatever. I have a feeling it might have to do with your OS limiting memory for apps though, since dooombuilder gave the same error.

For slicing I think pairing stages 1 and 2, 3 and 4, together would work. Depends on how I make stage 4 though. And yea the hell knight corridor probably works better as part of 2, it's just an interesting challenge to get through (kinda bad if I needed those invulnerabilities though).

U.O.D. said stuff about :
Chaingunner closet on Stage 1.

Cacos and block lines on Stage 2.

Blind-siding rockets from adjacent castles.

Lastly the exit for Stage 2 can't be triggered.

Stage 3.

Usually I clear out the arch-viles first, then I can snipe the chaingunners behind that random (but not so random cause I placed it! x) pillar. Going for the chaingunners with any arch-viles alive doesn't make sense to me since then you let the archs res stuff I never gave ammo to kill, plus that area isn't conducive to blocking arch LoS.

Yea I had problems looking for the blocking lines ... (as in too lazy). The cacos were an idea of ggg saying he liked the aerial attackers that came out when running through stage 1. There might be a bit too many though (and yea there's about 9 more from each side on UV ... ~30 released on each side).

The blind-siding rockets on castle-tops is intentional, don't get too comfortable up there ;P

Damn I need to check that, I didn't really test Stage2's slice very well.

Are you sure you were on MAP28? Sounds like you were on MAP29, I specifically worked on making Stage 3's beginning work (since it was impossible without the invulns and obviously needed weapons placed).

[ArmouredBlood]

Sorry no maps this post. Instead I need opinions on how sucky/acceptable this building looks.

Near
Far
Extreme high angle (aka tower shot)

WARNING! WILL BE PREFABBED! along with 5-10 or so more variants + warehouses + shops + inns + ... other stuff. The whole high fantasy city if you will. I'm intending to only make 3-4 plazas worth or as many as I can make with the other stuff and still run skulltag at a playable fps (using a decent 2yr.old laptop).

I've got a few more window textures to make, so if that one doesn't cut it I can post some and whoever reads this can post about them, but I'm only one mapper who grew an interest in texture making that goes back about a month. Otherwise I'm counting on piecing the gothic textures together to a mediocre look (so that the whole city looks pretty decent).

Meh, enough midnight rambling, have a look at it and critique.

[aaglo]

That building looks like a small warhammer40k ecclesiarch (spllng?) chappel. Which is nice. Definitely somethign different. But I think the window texture (if you want to go realistic) might go a bit too high close to the roof.

[ArmouredBlood]

Hmm. Looking at it now it doesn't look too bad in the pic, but it was pretty easy to tell the window had no depth when I was playing in skulltag. They are a bit high, it's too bad I resized them to 64x128, should've gone for 96 instead.

Now to make more ...

[aaglo]

Are those windows in linedefs in front of the building? if so, you could just pull the image down a bit.

BTW, what's inside?

[ArmouredBlood]

aaglo said:

BTW, what's inside?

Unfortunately nothing. I'd LIKE to make it uber detailed and stuff ... but it's boom compat so no room over room, plus I've had to downsize my plans to something closer to the 45k sidedefs limit. However on top of that building though ... let's just say that on a slaughter map, when you've got multiple megaspheres and cell charge packs in a safe-ish spot, there's only 1 item that can be used as a secret and make finding it worthwhile ...

If you're looking for pics I posted a bit of the map when playing around in the shrunken doom mod, which is in the doom mutator results thread. Otherwise not much to add, I'm a bit dissatisfied with how the city is turning out and decided to take a break and make an unrelated map.

[ArmouredBlood]

Been a while. So yea, I'm getting close-ish to done with MAP28 (will be moved to MAP29 eventually don't worry.), and would like some opinions on whether I should stick with this theme or scrap the city. Contrasting with the dark and brooding castle, the city is kinda bright and meh. I'll finish the block around the mini hell castle (heh, castle vs. castle ... yay), and work on the sea and mountain limits, but the monster placement is basically done.

In addition, please tell me if the map lags and what port/type of computer you're using, it's getting close to 20k lines (probably will be over since each one of those buildings takes ~400-800 lines each -.-), and most of those are now in one gigantic area. I find it kinda funny that it takes like 30 seconds to run all the way down a main street ... anyway, play, comment, and I'll quickly add a bunch of invulns for skills 1/2/3 just before posting.

http://wadhost.fathax.com/files/AB.A42DiCe-11-14.zip