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Jimmy

Ceiling detail

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I suck at ceiling detail. I find myself defaulting to bland and simple TLITE fixtures more than I feel comfortable with, and elaborate ceiling detail can really add a third (two-and-a-halfth?) dimension to the inside of a room if done well. Unfortunately I do tend to clutter up my rooms with lots of floor detail, leaving very little leeway for eye-candy on the ceiling.

Are there any tips for a mapper like myself who has yet to perfect the art of good detail?

...

While I'm here, can I just pull into question the weirdly-placed computer terminals/security monitors I see embedded in ceilings quite a lot nowadays? They look nifty, but... what purpose do they serve being there? Where's the practicality in having them at impossibly high elevations? How could they be operated at all by the base technicians without the aid of magic space bikes or something equally implausible?

...That's just something that slightly bugs me. :P

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Jimmy91 said:

How could they be operated at all by the base technicians without the aid of magic space bikes or something equally implausible?

...That's just something that slightly bugs me. :P

Ladders.

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You mean computer screens hanging from the ceiling like in E1M1's computer room?

1. It looks cool.
2. It doesn't affect normal movement, contrarily to floor detail.
3. It can perfectly well be read with glasses.
4. Real world examples of such things include every airport and train station ever. Stock exchanges, too. And basically any place where many people need to be able to read the same screen at once while other people are moving about.

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darkreaver said:

Those ceiling computers are for the cacodemons, DOH!!!

No, they're for the hanging bodies actually.

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printz said:

No, they're for the hanging bodies actually.


That does beg the question of how the upside-down guys and the apparently limbless twitching guys use the computers, though.

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Encryptic said:

That does beg the question of how the upside-down guys and the apparently limbless twitching guys use the computers, though.


Because demons mutilated them and stuck them up there...?

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I think one trick that helps with ceiling detail is dividing the room up into smaller compartments. For example, this picture from a map I finished yesterday:

http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z148/pgdebruyne/Screenshot_Doom_20110117_211606.jpg

To detail this room, I first built the support pillars and then connected them to each other with the black bars on the ceiling. I then divided those compartments in half with some smaller black bars perpendicular to the large ones. Then I added the tan marble skylights and divided them in half. Unfortunately, all this didn't leave much chance for me to do anything to the floor, so I just threw some rugs down. Whatever.

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Have none of the modern crop of map editors yet gained the ability to merge and compile together two copies of a room with floor and ceiling detail constructed separately, adding sectors and linedefs as appropriate?

I thought Doom Builder had that functionality years ago, given how, after it became popular, such intricate constructions of overlapping floor and ceiling detail became more and more common. But then I used to believe Doom Builder had an automatic "add border to sector" feature too, until I was informed by a reliable source that it did not.

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RjY said:

Have none of the modern crop of map editors yet gained the ability to merge and compile together two copies of a room with floor and ceiling detail constructed separately, adding sectors and linedefs as appropriate?


I was wondering that too, if any editors could take the ceiling height, textures, and details of one space and combine it with a similar-shaped floor space. Maybe just 2 whole maps, with one designated as ceiling and one as floor.

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RjY said:

Have none of the modern crop of map editors yet gained the ability to merge and compile together two copies of a room with floor and ceiling detail constructed separately, adding sectors and linedefs as appropriate?

I thought Doom Builder had that functionality years ago, given how, after it became popular, such intricate constructions of overlapping floor and ceiling detail became more and more common. But then I used to believe Doom Builder had an automatic "add border to sector" feature too, until I was informed by a reliable source that it did not.

Nope. In Doom Builder 2 you can draw lines overlapping existing lines and it'll automatically split the sectors and linedefs for you, but you can't paste an entire structure over another like you're thinking.

Using portals, though, lets you do pretty much this without the need to paste anything ;)

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RjY said:

Have none of the modern crop of map editors yet gained the ability to merge and compile together two copies of a room with floor and ceiling detail constructed separately, adding sectors and linedefs as appropriate?

I thought Doom Builder had that functionality years ago, given how, after it became popular, such intricate constructions of overlapping floor and ceiling detail became more and more common. But then I used to believe Doom Builder had an automatic "add border to sector" feature too, until I was informed by a reliable source that it did not.



That would never have worked with the binary map formats due to lack of vertex precision. Only with UDMF it has become feasible but it's still not an easy task and if ever done it sure would make the result very hard to edit.

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Ceiling Detail is the best detail. (well, second best if you count lighting as detail) To elaborate on what Gez said, it looks cool. Why? Because things that make us look up are impressive. Think about Seqouia redwood trees, The Cleveland Arch, the Eiffel Tower,all of which are huge tourist attractions. The human interest in flying before the airplane was invented. Flying kites and balloons and chandeliers are all cool too.

In addition to that, it doesn't effect movement. You can have any number of sectors jammed up in the ceiling that at least provide 56 untis of height to walk under and it doesn't affect any more of your movement than if the ceilling was completely flat (unless of course there are high ledges you an jump off from.)

Floor details are always obstructions of movement some way or another and wall details, while they can be sealed with impassible lines, are also at risk of interrupting the players movement. Ceiling detail will not.

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Ceiling detail is actually a feature if you want to map something like an inside of a dome. But that's not all. You can do detail of timbering or even a whole roof of beams (one of my favourite ceiling detailings is in Alien Vendetta MAP10).
Also, if you're mapping something that is actually infested, you can do even huge holes opening to the free sky (1Monster MAP05). The hi-tech ceiling detail (1Monster MAP13 or any map from KDiZD) is something that has to do with TLITE6_* textures and the suitable usage of them.

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skillsaw said:

For example, this picture from a map I finished yesterday:


Looks about the same as repeating TLITE fixtures to me, instead it's open sky.

Now, I think it looks quite beautiful :P

However I'm not sure that is what Jimmy91 is asking for. I'm also not sure how exactly to answer your question. It seems like you are referring mostly to techbase areas or other structures (like wooden ones). Similarly to floors, it often helps to create large pieces that are either protruding or set inward. This can be somewhat mindless and they really don't have to serve a purpose besides providing contrast.

Here's a super fast example:



A bland hallway with some TLITEs thrown in. This can be spruced up just a tad by making a cute little border thing:



That is one tactic that I often use, and it is nice because on both the floor and the ceiling you are free to "color in" areas without affecting movement. You can also make it any nonsensical shape just to have it look cool.

Another thing I would suggest is simply to play with the ceiling height and geometry of architecture. There's no reason all your ceilings have to be the same height, and there's also no reason you should refrain from having large blocks of material that might not be super realistic. For example, instead of just small TLITE fixtures you can raise the ceiling and then make the fixtures hang down more than 8 or 16 units. In the same way that height variation on the floor can make an area much more interesting to explore, ceiling height variation can provide a better sense of space and it is aesthetically pleasing to see contrast rather than endless flat areas.

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Of course, I was only talking about "man-made" structures. In the case of things like rocky caves or whatever, I just draw a bunch of curvy shapes and make them all different heights :P

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