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Mechadon

[WIP] Vela Pax (on hiatus)

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I would probably like it less if you start using custom textures alongside the stock textures. Not saying that you should follow my taste in mapping :p But imo it would lose that bit extra doom-ish feeling you get if you are using custom textures. Now its probably more obvious that you are a talented mapper that can make 4/5 star material without using custom resources.

Huge architecture btw, I normally don't attempt anything that big. It scares me :p

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Yea no worries guys, I wasn't planning on deviating from my stock texture choice :). That was a main goal of the project from the get-go. Plus working new textures into the finished portions of the maps at this point would require a pretty huge amount of time and work. I'm saving new textures for Supplice.

dutch devil said:

Huge architecture btw, I normally don't attempt anything that big. It scares me :p

Heh, there are some outside upper walls that are kind of bare because the sky ceiling is so high. I try not to pay any attention to them because they keep telling me to decorate them. I really have no good ideas to break them up very well (not at the moment anyways) so I try my best to ignore it. I'd image that most people won't even pay that much attention to them anyways.

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I'm hovering around 75000 sidedefs right now and I'm not as close to being finished as I would like (in relation to my sidedef count anyways). I was hoping 80K would peg the layout but it's looking like it's going to be a little higher than that; maybe 90K. Even with the sidedef compression, I'm worried that I'll be bumping up against the ceiling pretty soon. Is there any way for me to see the compressed sidedef count? I'd like some sort of concrete number to look at if possible. XWE reports [exactly] 47000 entries, although the map preview is a jumbled mess of lines. Is that an accurate and reliable number?

If my previous stress test was reliable in any way, I'm hopefully still in the clear. Of course I guess it still depends on a lot of variables and the style of mapping I use for the remainder too.

I'm getting to the point where I'm sorta sick of looking at this thing in Doom Builder, which is surprising because I usually get that feeling way sooner than now. Although I'm still happy with the quality of the structures I'm making so the map isn't suffering because of that...yet. I'm going to make a hard push to finish the layout and maybe even the lighting this coming week. If I get the lighting finished, expect some new screenshots.

Also I'm never ever ever making a map this ridiculously huge ever again. Ever. Well, probably not anyways :P

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Mechadon said:

Is there any way for me to see the compressed sidedef count? I'd like some sort of concrete number to look at if possible. XWE reports [exactly] 47000 entries, although the map preview is a jumped mess of lines. Is that an accurate and reliable number?

If it were me I would save the map and use something that tells me the raw size of the SIDEDEFS lump in bytes, and I would divide that number by 30. I have no idea if that's what XWE is actually doing to get 47000, but it sounds reasonable.

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Yup, that seems to be right. XWE reports the sidedef lump to be 1,440,210 bytes in size, which gives 48,007 after being divided by 30. And that's the same number of entries that's being reported. As long as that's a correct number as far as the compressed number of sidedefs, I don't think I'll have a problem finishing this map.

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I think I'm going to end up eating my words here. I just hit 100,000 sidedefs tonight, and compressed that turns into 62482. Taking a wild guess, I'd say I'm right over 90% done with the layout soooo...this might be a really close shave. Or I may have to start nuking some bits here and there. I thought about splitting the map up, but I really can't see how that would be feasible because pretty much everything is dependent on everything else, structure-wise. Here's a DB shot:


Grid is 256x256 by the way.

Pretty much all of the large chunks are done, so thank god those are out of the way. What's left:

- The northern edge wrapped all the way around to the western edge. In the original map, there's a path which wraps the map starting from the north and circling around to the west. You can see some of the old map layout there. This is probably the biggest thing left to do.
- The southern-most space that's just open field right now is supposed to have some rocky structures and a rocky "mountain" to close it off into a sort of arena. The main layout is dependent on this area so I can't exactly do with it, but I can probably get away with making it somewhat simple.
- The western-most area with the squiggly lines is supposed to be some sort of cave area, though I wasn't planning on it being anything major.
- The exit room is going to be directly north and just above that walkway I described in my first point. It'll likely be pretty simple, I guess :P
- There's also some misc. areas that need finishing and that will connect to areas that don't exist yet.

Somehow, I gotta do all of that with right at 3000 [compressed] sidedefs. And then also have enough left over for monster conveyors, control sectors, and misc. crap that you have to put in for gameplay. Thankfully I did all of my lighting sectors ahead of time. So if I get this done under the limit, lighting shouldn't be too much trouble. I guess if worse comes to worse I could convert it to UDMF, though I'd really hate to have to do that since I'd lose my PRBoom+ compatibility. Unless it gets support for UDMF at some point, heh.

Well anyways, enough of my lamenting. Guess I'll just keep grinding away on this the best I can. It'll likely be a while before I get more shots up because I wanted to wait until the lighting is done.

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Too much :P

I think I'm going to just end up cutting out some parts of my planned layout. It'll lose some of the original's layout bits, but at this point I could really care less. I mean, it's such a huge departure from the original map, it's not like it would matter anyways. I'm staring at Doom Builder afraid to start on another area, so I gotta do something.

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For some reason I feel compelled to make a make grander than yours in some sort of a competitive fashion.

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What do you estimate the frame rate for playability will be on computers with 1 GB RAM, 2.60 GHz and 96MB graphics card? On 640x480 resolution in OGL. I ask this because for example, map05 of Eternal's 32 Inch Nails was entirely unplayable on my computer.

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Oh wow, that's a good question. Eternal's map has a bazillion monsters in it, so that's probably one of the reasons why it slowed you down so much. For the most part I don't think I'll have nearly as many monsters and things on the screen at once in most areas, so in that respect it shouldn't be a bad. However this map is also over 3x as large as far as structures are concerned. In that respect, you will probably get a good chunk of slowdown from that alone, especially when viewing some areas from outside. Given you want to run it in OpenGL...well, with your specs, I'd advise against it. I can only guess but I'd say that with the size of the map and with things added, it'll be borderline unplayable. But that's only a guess; I'd suggest giving it a try at the least.

I tried running MAP03 on my 12 year old machine about two months ago and it was barely playable (the hardware is much, much older than what your running). MAP03 is finished and it's about half the size of this map. However, if I killed all the monsters and ran around with just structures, it ran perfectly fine. However, this was in software mode. So if OpenGL gives you trouble, try software.

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BurningCadavre said:

2.60 GHz



What kind of CPU are you talking about? There's a vast difference in performance between a Pentium and a more modern processor with the same rate.

Also what graphics card? 96MB sounds like something like a Geforce FX5xxx at best.

From the other values you give I assume that your system is already a bit old so my guess would be that such a large map would be borderline unplayable, especially with such old graphics hardware.

Maps of this size will already cause slowdowns on much more modern system so be prepared for a slideshow.

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It brings me great pleasure to type the following - I finished the layout tonight.

:D

I hit the sidedef limit four or five times before finishing up and I had to downsize and simplify some of the remaining areas. Overall though, I'm happy. I think I have about 400 sidedefs remaining to work with for gameplay structures (teleporters, control sectors, etc) and I've already picked out a few places that I can nuke without feeling too terrible about it.

Anyways, I know no one wants to read this stuff or look at a super-blotchy DB overview shots. I'm just really happy about finishing the layout so I had to post about it. I'll be doing lighting next and then I promise I'll post some new shots up. I don't know how long lighting will take me though...but the shots will come when they are ready.

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BurningCadavre said:

Sorry about that, Pentium IV, an "Extreme Graphics 2" on an Intel 82865G Graphics Controller.


Prepare for a slideshow then. These Intel integrated chips are way too weak to handle such monsters of maps.

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Thanks dutch :). Two days ago it looked like I had a whole lot more work to do than I really did. But most of that is because I cut out half of what I had planned to build, like those mountains/caves to the west. I'd say I cut out a good 10% of the layout and just improvised new areas to finish up. The entire exit of the map was moved/changed because of that, and now it's completely different from the original map (as is the other 95% of the map :P). But it was sorta nice to be forced to have to finish this thing because, honestly, it was starting to drive me nuts :P

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Graf Zahl said:

Prepare for a slideshow then. These Intel integrated chips are way too weak to handle such monsters of maps.


Well I could always try software if that will mean anything. If not oh well, someone should do an LP once it's out.

And yeah, that kind of mapping is inhuman. He might as well of hit a record on how many side/linedefs you can have in a level without it looking like shit.

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BurningCadavre said:

Well I could always try software if that will mean anything. If not oh well, someone should do an LP once it's out.


I think software will suffer more from framerate drop than GL in a map this big. In Sunder software is almost unplayable in the big maps, but GL does just fine.

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Not sure of how this adds up, but I've completed Jaded Earth. An incredibly massive level, and the only problems I had was a slight waiting time when loading the game, although it's a much shorter pause if you save.

It has over 1000+ monsters and the level can take almost two hours to complete. Either way I think I'll be able to play Vela Pax just fine. There's ways to speed up a slow game if needed by setting rendering quality to speed and turning off dynamic lights.

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Icytux said:

I think software will suffer more from framerate drop than GL in a map this big. In Sunder software is almost unplayable in the big maps, but GL does just fine.

Well, map size isn't the only factor to consider. Long lines of sight are what are most likely to cause speed problems with the renderer. The more segs are in view at a time (this being made up of pretty nearly any linedefs at all between the player and the nearest closed door or 1-sided line in a given direction), the more work it has to do per frame. Large, open scenes are what's most likely to cause problems, and Sunder has a lot of those.

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There may be a few areas (mostly outdoor views) that will have similar segs views to some of the maps in Sunder. One [contained] room in particular makes up almost 10,000 sidedefs on it's own, and it also has some view to other, outside areas. So that might be a problem area.

Maybe when the map is finally tested, one of the testers with better knowledge than me about performance and etc. can give a better insight on how the map will run on different hardware and different ports.

By the way, while I'm here, I started lighting today. If it weren't for the bazillion lighting control sectors/tags that I had to make and keep track of, I probably would have gotten a good 1/4 of the lighting done today. But I didn't...because of all the control sector madness :P.

Also something I found amazing was that when I built the REJECT lump for this map, it added on 11 MB of data to the wad. LOL

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Ok welp, I stayed up tonight to finish up the lighting. And it's done! So I took a whole horde of screenshots; some of old areas and some of new. Hopefully I'm not giving away the whole map; there are just so many areas that I wanted to show off. But I guess by the time any of you get to play it, you'll probably have forgotten about the screenshots :P

By the way, I'm having a pretty major issue with the sky transfers that I can't seem to fix (could have something to do with the map being so big but I dunno). So the sky texture is being pulled from MAPINFO right now. I'll post about the problem later; for now, screenshots:






http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061456.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061511.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061516.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061543.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061556.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061735.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061857.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_061921.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_062000.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_062013.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_062039.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_062050.png
http://mekworx.phenomer.net/mekastuff/pics/screenshots/vela%20pax/Screenshot_Doom_20101111_062103.png

Hopefully I executed my original lighting concept well enough. I wanted the map to have a brooding atmosphere with lots of "hot", bright bits that look like they'll burn your arms off if you rub up against them. I also wanted the lava to really stand out and look super hot as well. All in all I think I'm pleased.

So this is pretty much what the map is going to look like. I am going to update or change the sky texture to make the map feel a little darker (actually, I may use this sky for MAP04 as it's current sky looks like vomit). Other than that, WYSIWYG :). These will likely be the last screenshots I'll post of this map, atleast until I start on my next map. Well, I might post a few once monster/gameplay is done.

Oh I almost forgot to mention, I renamed the map "Obsess". I noticed that I've used the name Delirium before and I wasn't too happy with it to begin with. So there ya go.

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Bloody awesome. O___O xP

Not sure about the new name, though, what persuaded you to change it to "Obsess"?

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By the way, I'm having a pretty major issue with the sky transfers that I can't seem to fix (could have something to do with the map being so big but I dunno).

I've seen sky transfer weirdness before, here's some sanity checks

- make sure you have one and only one sky transfer special linedef for each sector tag. I think if you have more than one sky transfer linedef acting on the same tag it's the highest numbered linedef that "wins" (at least in PrBoom)

- make sure each of those linedefs' front sidedef has the sky texture on its *upper* texture, one time I managed to use the middle texture instead, which doesn't work. Confused the hell out of me when I got a sky full of AASHITTY...

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This looks really nice, though I fear the extremely high contrast of the large chunks of bright red in some of the darker areas might cause eye strain or visibility/playability problems.

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