My first wad!

[MajorRawne]

Hi everyone! I've finally started to build my first ever Doom 2 wad which I call Slow Rot.

The theme is heavy detail to create a realistic environment. The map is more like a survival horror than an out and out shooter. As you move through the level each room tells a new part of the overall story.

Basically your shuttle crash lands on a remote planet where you hope to repair and resupply. However, the small UAC installation is silent, and once you beam into their teleporter bay from your shuttle, you realise something has gone terribly wrong.

Secret worship room


Maintenance hallway


Computer Room


Computer Room showing behind the security desk


Light and shadow test area (not in the map)


Entryway - facing towards where a set of stairs will be built connecting the research complex to the teleporter room


One of many security checkpoints built into the map (currently 2 are finished)


I've got more pictures to come. This map is taking ages due to the uber-detail. I was planning another 2 or 3 maps to follow it and those would be less detailed and more action-oriented.

The maps are all in Zdoom->Hexen format so I can play with special effects such as fog and coloured sectors. I always thought the coloured sectors in PSX Doom added huge atmosphere so this would sort of be a tribute to that. And fog is always good for adding a mood!

As soon as the wad is halfway playable I will upload it if anyone would like to stroll round it and admire the architecture? (Or berate it if it's crap)

EDIT: I just noticed half a million texture alignment fails -- aligning this lot has been a nightmare cos I keep going back and adding stuff, which knocks it all out again!

[Hellbent]

MajorRawne said:

I just noticed half a million texture alignment fails -- aligning this lot has been a nightmare cos I keep going back and adding stuff, which knocks it all out again!

Might want to ignore texture alignments until you're sure you're done editing. Looks cool. I'd like to dl it when it's up.

[MajorRawne]

Thank you! Yeah I will take your advice and forget the texture alignment stuff until the map's finished -- it's the perfectionist in me -- I need to know exactly how it will look when it's finished, and it holds me up!

Some more screenies:

Uh-oh:


Security station #2, looks like they redecorated and got rid of their computer monitors in favour of something tasty:


This was originally a copy and paste of the light & shadow test area (in my first post). Now it will lead into a main lobby, which in turn branches off to an office area, a server room and a scary demon place.



Battle damage?


Server room - brand new, needs some heavy work.


Starting area - crashed spaceship has carved a trail across the landscape.


Starting area - your ship has crashed into the mountain and is all on fire and stuff:



Exterior area with my first attempt at a skybox. What a miserable experience that was, lol!

[MajorRawne]

Dummy sector to allow coloured areas in the map:

(Ooo! Pretty!)

[Malinku]

looks really good for your first map.

[Hellbent]

I hope you keep to smaller areas. Too many maps for my feeling have large areas. I just don't think they are fitting to doom. :-/ I really like the first screenies you post. The expansive outdoor areas are less interesting to me--just my opinion of course. I really like the indoor areas you made, minus the big hall with the lights on the ceiling ;-).

[DeathevokatioN]

Looks great for a first map. Good luck with this. And hopefully you finish it so I can play it! :)

[MajorRawne]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

When it comes to large areas, I am planning a map called Rat Run (working title). Basically this is a station with very tall and very wide corridors, and a few big open rooms, which are patrolled by Cyberdemons.

There is not enough ammo to fight the Cybers since the point of the level is to avoid them. (Having read a lot of threads here over the last 48 hours, I now realise people don't like maps where you can't get 100% kills. Maybe there could be an armaments cache at the end of the map and you can go back and slay some Cybers?)

The actual action involves fighting through a series of structures which are made up of cramped corridors and small, tight rooms, creating a claustrophobic and unforgiving alternative to the breathless and scary corridors. You'd be able to hear the Cybers clanking and roaring outside and you'd have to keep braving the open corridors to reach the next bit of the map.

Ah well, I'll get on with it and see what people think when they playtest the beta!

[Jodwin]

Hellbent said:

Might want to ignore texture alignments until you're sure you're done editing. Looks cool. I'd like to dl it when it's up.

IMO, leaving texture alignment last is a really bad idea and only creates more problems than necessary. First, often the textures you choose to use affect the room shapes and sizes greatly. Sure you can split texture panels into parts and stretch them as shown here, but you should avoid it when it's not necessary. For example, in the last screenshot of the first post, just moving the wall with the window 16 units (or moving the window) would probably be better than aligning the wall textures around the window properly. An other example, if you're using a texture that has irregular tiles (such as the green bricks, which are vertically irregular) setting sector heights to suit it would be better than trying to align the texture itself.

This kind of issues, where your room shapes and sizes simply do not work well without painful texture alignment, can be easily fixed while you're still in early parts of mapping, but it becomes much harder once you've got all the detail and gameplay put in place.

Second, if you leave the texture alignment last, that part is going to be a really boring and arduous task. Comparing to creating new layouts or planning gameplay, texture alignment is most of the time a boring, low-reward (for the mapper) task. Just for yourself it's probably better to spread it over the whole mapping process in smaller bite-size chunks than trying to tackle aligning the whole map's textures all at once. You'll just burn yourself out on that and end up releasing an unfinished, badly aligned map.

[MajorRawne]

I was thinking of doing pretty much what you suggest Jodwin, doing some basic texture alignments as I move along and then coming back much later on to see what I've missed. It is a pain sometimes but I have invested so much of myself in the map I don't mind taking ages over it; I'll just be careful about the amount of detail I put in later maps, I'm not a fast enough mapper to go overboard yet :)

I've been building Slow Rot for a month on and off, mostly off, so let's say a week in real time. That includes farting about with lighting and special ZDoom effects. I've learned so much in that time; thanks to JaundiceJaun's online tutorials, the Doomworld Community for its advice and support, and Tormentor667's texture and monster sets!

Now if I can only find out how to alter the basic monster's attacks... a Cacodemon with 1000 mass points and a flamethrower breath attack would be scary...

[Foodles]

I dont normally consider downloading first maps, but I'll be sure to give this one a go when its finished. Looks really promising especially the outdoor parts, how long are you planning on making this?

[Ismaele]

I agree with Jodwin!

[MajorRawne]

Evening chaps, Slow Rot is quite a challenge so I'm probably going to release a couple of smaller, more bloodthirsty maps first just to give people an idea of my style and to get some useful feedback. I'm entering tonight's speedmapping contest, or at least I will if I can figure out why this sodding door is invisible. I'd say Slow Rot (the map in this thread) is a couple of weeks away yet.

Thanks for the feedback :)

[magicsofa]

I would say don't listen to hellbent's preference about large areas. Excessively huge or tiny areas do in fact suck, but I like the look of the computer room and think it has potential for a fun battle. If it was the size of nuts or something I would say no, but it doesn't look unfathomably giant...plus doom2 had some really big areas so I don't know what HB is talking about :P

Looks awesome for a first map. Also I like the idea of having to evade rather than fight the cybies, that works in the survival/horror genre.

[Hellbent]

magicsofa said:

I would say don't listen to hellbent's preference about large areas. Excessively huge or tiny areas do in fact suck, but I like the look of the computer room and think it has potential for a fun battle. If it was the size of nuts or something I would say no, but it doesn't look unfathomably giant...plus doom2 had some really big areas so I don't know what HB is talking about :P

Looks awesome for a first map. Also I like the idea of having to evade rather than fight the cybies, that works in the survival/horror genre.

Well, doom 2 isn't quite as good as doom. for my feeling largely because the maps are bigger/more open. SargeBaldy's updated version of Espi's Alleycat is the kind of thing that i like these days. The computer room does look cool, but there is something about big/slaughter areas that just seem to draw attention to the game being a game and not a dynamic, interactive experience. It also basically means a repetitive and tedious fight is inevitable.

[magicsofa]

Yeah, I see what you mean - large fights have a lot of potential for endless circle-strafing (circle-jerking?)

[MajorRawne]

The server room was going to be a maze of server banks where you fought against Imps, Lost Souls and Hell Knights. It wouldn't appear as it looks in that photo -- think of these screenies as a beta of what the finished product will be. I didn't know nearly as much about Doom Builder back then plus I lost a lot of formatting when I copied the map from Zdoom to Zdoom->Hexen. Even simple things like the doors into the server room were giving me hell. So I forgot that area of the map in favour of the other sectors that were returning easier results.

I'll take into account all of the opinions in this thread, after all I'm making the map for you lot as well as for myself :D

[magicsofa]

MajorRawne said:

The server room was going to be a maze of server banks where you fought against Imps, Lost Souls and Hell Knights. It wouldn't appear as it looks in that photo -- think of these screenies as a beta of what the finished product will be. I didn't know nearly as much about Doom Builder back then plus I lost a lot of formatting when I copied the map from Zdoom to Zdoom->Hexen. Even simple things like the doors into the server room were giving me hell. So I forgot that area of the map in favour of the other sectors that were returning easier results.

I'll take into account all of the opinions in this thread, after all I'm making the map for you lot as well as for myself :D

Sounds good to me - grand architecture doesn't have to mean a huge open battle.

So when can we expect a beta?

[Hellbent]

magicsofa said:

Sounds good to me - grand architecture doesn't have to mean a huge open battle.

So when can we expect a beta?

If you were feeling really ambitious, you could have the 'intimate quarters' of the base with a... say, loading platform... looking out onto a cityscape. So you'd have grand architecture outside the base that adds atmosphere but is not part of the gameplay. There aren't really many doom wads where the sky texture matches background architecture. But let's say you had sky scrapers on the edge of the map that you can't get to but only look at from a window or 'loading platform' as an example, and the sky texture was a city-like one that closely matched the textures used the make the actual, physical sky scrapers.

[MajorRawne]

Mate, you read my mind. the outdoors area was supposed to look over an inaccessible cityscape a la map 3 from AV2. I had a large structure quite a distance from the player and the textures looked crap and distorted which I later learned may be a natural fact of the textures in the game and the way they are rendered over distance (?).

Looking back at Av2, the buildings were all very close to the player, which may be one reason they worked and mine didn't.

I tried to compensate by building a sky box. had some major problems, but ended up with a distant monolith and cave structures that looked quite effective. By that point I'd already overcompensated by elaborate cliffs and things around the start area.

I would definitely be up for the challenge of what you said, a high up platform overlooking buildings; hopefully as my skills make the slow climb from n00b to l33t...

I'm working on a map I started yesterday, working title Caverns, which was a speedmapping entry that blew up when doombuilder crashed, and I'm editing a very old map called WOODHAL2 to bring it up to today's standard, so Slow Rot is on the back burner at the moment cos of its massive complexity.

[Hellbent]

kewl, keep plugging away. You'll only get better.

[fatal error]

This looks really promising.

[MajorRawne]

Thanks :)

Now if only I can get my 2 Black Library novels finished (anyone who's interested should check their website, they're appealing for new authors!), my 1994 wad done, plus a number of 40k short stories, then maybe I can spend the dozens of hours needed to make Slow Rot a complete map!!