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Encryptic

Few questions from a mapping newbie

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So I finally got off my ass and started learning how to use Doombuilder to make my own Doom maps (woot!). I'm really comfortable with DB after working on a test map most of yesterday and today - I know all the fundamentals and made a pretty decent little map that implements them as well as some other things like a little bit of detailing, remote switches to open doors/turn on lights, etc.

I have run across a few things that I'm not totally sure about, though. I checked through several pages of the Editing forum already just to see if there was a thread that might address what I'm looking for. I did find one thread that links to a page on Doomworld with some editing guides, but a lot of those links are now defunct, unfortunately.

So here's the questions I have - if they can be answered by a good guide available elsewhere, that'd be great as I might need a good reference in the future to help me troubleshoot other common editing issues. Otherwise, any help would be appreciated.

1. How do linedefs block sound? I seem to have had inconsistent success with checking off the appropriate box in DB for a given linedef - it doesn't always seem to work correctly. For instance, I started off the test map with a couple monster closets opening on either side of the player in a passageway. There are two linedefs further into the level just after the passageway that should in theory be blocking an Imp (in a different sector from the passageway) and a pair of Lost Souls (also in a different sector) from hearing me. However, as soon as I shoot, the Imp immediately wakes up.

I resolved the problem temporarily by setting all monsters to be deaf, but of course that's bound to add more work in the future if I have a lot of monsters and possibly screw up some traps that rely on the monsters hearing me first.


2. I was able to build a working lift successfully. However, I can't seem to figure out how you make the walls surrounding the lift on 3 sides to be impassable above (the lift is open on all 3 sides in the room below), so if you walk onto the lift, you can just walk through the walls around you before the lift drops down. I tried making the linedefs surrounding the lift sector impassable, but of course I then can't get into the room below after the lift lowers.


3. Is there a "minimum" thickness that a wall needs to be in Doom? In the room I mentioned above, there's a chaingunner I inserted as a test. In theory, he should only see you as you're coming down on the lift, but I noticed that he's able to see and shoot at me through an upper wall that is shared with the room below - I hear him wake up and start shooting before I even get on the lift. I can shoot through the wall from above and kill him, as well as shooting through the wall from below.

I was able to solve the problem by moving the room out and adding another linedef for the upper wall of the passageway leading to the lift, so I'm just wondering if I inadvertently created a "shoot-through" wall by using a single linedef for the shared wall.


4. Finally - Doombuilder keeps reporting that one of the sectors in my test map is not closed. As far as I can tell there aren't any missing linedefs - it's a pretty basic L-shaped sector.

I don't see any apparent issues when viewing in 3D mode or when playtesting the map in ZDoom. Are there any problems that could be caused by a sector not being closed - hall of mirrors, etc.?

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First of all, welcome to Doom mapping! I hope you enjoy it.

Before getting to any of the other issues I'll go to this one, as it has the potential to make all sorts of weird shit happen:

Encryptic said:

4. Finally - Doombuilder keeps reporting that one of the sectors in my test map is not closed. As far as I can tell there aren't any missing linedefs - it's a pretty basic L-shaped sector.

I don't see any apparent issues when viewing in 3D mode or when playtesting the map in ZDoom. Are there any problems that could be caused by a sector not being closed - hall of mirrors, etc.?

Did you disable "Merge Geometry" at any point? (It's the icon at the top next to snap to grid). If so, turn it back on and don't disable it again. Doombuilder is usually very good at not letting you build unclosed sectors, but I find it stops working correctly with this option turned off, letting you stack sectors on top of each other and all sorts of crazy stuff.

It sounds to me like you have a linedef placed directly on top of another linedef, and one of those linedefs has an invalid sector reference causing Doombuilder to get confused. You should never ever have linedefs stacked on top of each other, nor should they ever cross (there should always be a vertex at each intersection between linedefs). Either of these is a serious mapping error, and in such cases your level is likely to compile incorrectly, at worst leading to horrible crashes.

Encryptic said:

1. How do linedefs block sound? I seem to have had inconsistent success with checking off the appropriate box in DB for a given linedef - it doesn't always seem to work correctly. For instance, I started off the test map with a couple monster closets opening on either side of the player in a passageway. There are two linedefs further into the level just after the passageway that should in theory be blocking an Imp (in a different sector from the passageway) and a pair of Lost Souls (also in a different sector) from hearing me. However, as soon as I shoot, the Imp immediately wakes up.


You actually need two block sound linedefs in order to stop sound. I have no idea why it's not one, but sound won't stop travelling until it hits a second block sound linedef. Sectors of 0 height (e.g. closed doors) will also not let sound into or through them.

For reference, as it's a similar issue (it sounds like you know this but I'm going to double check just in case), a common issue is that sometimes after making a hallway then placing a door in it, the player shoots and the monsters wake up on the other side of the door despite it being closed, this happens because DoomBuilder probably kept both sides of the door as the same sector after you built a door through the middle of it, the solution is to use Make Sectors Mode to stop them being the same sector.

If in make sectors mode both sides of the door highlight when you hover the mouse over one of them, then they're the same sector (despite being physically unconnected shapes) and you should click on one of them to separate them into different sectors. This whole "sound travels to unconnected shapes when the same sector" is actually a very useful feature, except in cases like this.

Encryptic said:

2. I was able to build a working lift successfully. However, I can't seem to figure out how you make the walls surrounding the lift on 3 sides to be impassable above (the lift is open on all 3 sides in the room below), so if you walk onto the lift, you can just walk through the walls around you before the lift drops down. I tried making the linedefs surrounding the lift sector impassable, but of course I then can't get into the room below after the lift lowers.

Are you saying Doomguy will run through an upper sidedef? Somethings gone horribly horribly wrong if I'm reading this correctly because that shouldn't be possible.

Encryptic said:

3. Is there a "minimum" thickness that a wall needs to be in Doom? In the room I mentioned above, there's a chaingunner I inserted as a test. In theory, he should only see you as you're coming down on the lift, but I noticed that he's able to see and shoot at me through an upper wall that is shared with the room below - I hear him wake up and start shooting before I even get to the lift leading to the lift. I can shoot through the wall from above and kill him, as well as shooting through the wall from below.

I was able to solve the problem by moving the room out and adding another linedef for the upper wall of the passageway leading to the lift, so I'm just wondering if I inadvertently created a "shoot-through" wall by using a single linedef for the shared wall.

See previous response. What? You're not using a midtexture attached to the ceiling as your "upper wall" by any chance are you? Upper sidedefs should be totally solid. It sounds like more unclosed sector wierdness to me.

Alternatively, upload your wad to somewhere like Mediafire and let us take a look. Then we might be able to tell you exactly what's wrong.

P.S. If you're looking for a general purpose mapbuilding guide I'm writing one for UDMF format over on the Something Awful forums (found here if you're interested, currently unfinished and still in progress). I'm pretty much making it up as I write it, so apologies for the sloppiness in places, and SA occasionally stops those without an account from reading threads, so sorry if this is one of those times and you can't see it. (When it's finished, I intend to clean it up and mirror it at its own site to make it more accessible).

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Melon - thanks so much for the help. I'm actually on SA (as Encryptic, same as on here - small world, eh?) and your posts in that thread were what got the Doom mapping bug eating at me again. :-)

I definitely didn't turn off Merge Geometry, so that's not a problem, thankfully.

Thanks for the info on the soundblocking lines - I'll have to try that out.

Looks like I figured out the "clipping through the lift walls" and the "chaingunner sees me from the lower room" problem - that appears to be caused by the fact that I didn't lower the ceiling of the room. Once I lowered the ceiling, I can't clip through the walls nor can the chaingunner see me until I actually enter the room via the lift. I totally missed the "lower the ceiling" part in the directions for creating a lift - go me!

I did have some funky sector issues but I tore out a bunch of stuff and redid them - thankfully I'm just messing with a test map. Doombuilder (or I) did some weird things where linedefs weren't associated with the sector they were supposed to be so I'd have weird gaps in the sector outline. Not sure how that happened, but I'm going to be a lot more vigilant in the future to make sure sectors aren't getting jacked up.

Thanks again for the help. I'll probably hit you up over there or read through your guides if I've got any other questions. I lurk over here quite a bit so I thought I'd try this place first...

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hey, if you don't mind i'm using this thread for a newb question of my own. i'm sure it's a common problem, but for some reason i can't find the answer - only people asking it.

i've started using doom builder and followed the tutorial. everything worked fine until all the stuff placed in "things" mode didn't show up when i tested the map.
on the first map, however, it worked perfectly - all monsters and weapons spawned, everything just like intended.
and on the second one all things just don't appear when i test the map.

tutorial to the first map:
http://www.doombuilder.com/viewtutorial.php?t=2
tutorial to the second map:
http://www.doombuilder.com/viewtutorial.php?t=4

i'm using zdoom.


thanks in advance.

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Check the flags on all the things. That is: "easy", "medium", "hard" etc.

If they are flagged as multiplayer they wont show up in any game on any difficulty unless you load a multiplayer game.

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A couple of shots in the dark:

1) If your level had literally no things, you'd be unable to play it because you wouldn't have a player start, so that thing must be working correctly at least.

2) All of your other things are monsters, and you've started the level in no mosters mode. Click on the drop down next to the test map button in Doombuilder. It lets you choose your difficulty level, but also choose to play with no monsters (the dead caco icon) so you can concentrate on checking out some stuff without them getting in the way.

3) By "testing" you mean "3D mode", and accidentally pressed "t" when in 3D mode to toggle off the display of things. Press it again to toggle them back on.

4) The skill flags mentioned above are off.

I know I'm assuming a lot to come to some of these conclusions, but I'm afraid this is all I can think of.

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Ok im new here, so excuse me if this post is in the wrong place or if its been covered before.. So i just started using Doom Builder 2 (recently stopped using DeePsea) So, I get my first level done on Doom Builder 2 and I tested it polished it up worked out the the problems. When I test the level in DB2 its everything I want it to be, But when i play it with and actual DOOM2.Wad some of my wall textures show up and like white and grey checker and some of my custom things (torches, corpses etc.) they are the little (!) symbol. I've used many resources and got no errors anywhere it all went smooth till playing with an actual iwad. (its doom in hexen format) ive tried playing it with hexen aswell and all the resource wads I used too. How can I fix this problem?

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skaman86 said:

Ok im new here, so excuse me if this post is in the wrong place or if its been covered before.. So i just started using Doom Builder 2 (recently stopped using DeePsea) So, I get my first level done on Doom Builder 2 and I tested it polished it up worked out the the problems. When I test the level in DB2 its everything I want it to be, But when i play it with and actual DOOM2.Wad some of my wall textures show up and like white and grey checker and some of my custom things (torches, corpses etc.) they are the little (!) symbol. I've used many resources and got no errors anywhere it all went smooth till playing with an actual iwad. (its doom in hexen format) ive tried playing it with hexen aswell and all the resource wads I used too. How can I fix this problem?


It sounds like you're editing with multiple wads, which means each of those wads needs to be loaded when you play the game. DB2 should launch the game with the correct parameters, adding all necessary wads to the command line, but when you run your source port externally, you need to run all wads that contain all resources you used. So if you have a bunch of separate resource wads, you will ultimately want to merge them all into the same wad.

And just to clear up confusion, the game always runs with an IWAD because it's required to set up the game (unless you're making some sort of total conversion where you supply all new graphics and maps). Assuming you set up your IWAD paths in DB2, it selects an IWAD for you when you launch your source port from within the editor. You shouldn't have to worry about that when launching externally though, as Doom 2 is the default game mode on most source ports; just run the executable with the PWAD(s) you intend to use.

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