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Steve D

Any Mac Doomers Left? Anyone Still Use Hellmaker?

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I'm a lapsed MacDoomer, and I wonder if anyone still maps on the Mac and still uses Hellmaker?

Ages ago, I was on The Macintosh Team designing levels for Realm of Chaos (rlmchaos at idgames, Doom2 Megawads). I also designed Elfstomp! for UDoom, and Disraeli for Doom 2. I came to these forums after a long absence to see if there'd been any reaction to these levels, and was overjoyed to learn that all my levels, except Disraeli, had been speedrun by the likes of Heretic, Hitherto, Donatis Tamonis and SAV88, most of them since 2008, a big surprise. And what a blast it was to watch players way better than I am completely demolish those levels. If I could play like those guys, people would run away crying from my maps. ;D

I also began looking for people who gave evidence of being MacDoomers and Hellmaker designers. I discovered esselfortium, and played his Test Facility level. Very beautiful work, great lighting and design, but surprisingly easy. I have seen some other people, such as MacWadMaker (dead giveaway) who haven't been active since '05. If anyone is still active, or still using Hellmaker or Demon, please let me know.

I tried Hellmaker again about a year ago, after I bought a G4 Mac Mini mainly for running MorphOS (a very nice Amiga clone), but also downgraded MacOS to 10.4.8 so I could run 9.2.2 for Hellmaker Enhanced. As might be expected, it fell far short of the amazing Doom Builder 2. Back in the day, what I loved most about Hellmaker was its fill colors for sectors. It was easier for me to visualize the level taking shape than in DOS/Windows editors that just had lines on a black background. I still found it to be a nice editor, and did a little work on it, but partly because Mac OS ran like a dog on that machine (so slow next to my beloved Mac Pro), I used it for MorphOS only until the HD died.

Doom Builder 2, with its flats view, removed the last advantage of Hellmaker with superior visuals.

As many have mentioned, Hellmaker was not the most stable app in history. Over time I learned to save constantly, never doing more than about 10 sectors at a time so as to minimize any work lost from a crash. It became such hardcoded behavior that I still work this way in Doom Builder.

Sorry for the lengthy mapping geekery, but I figure I might as well get it out in one shot. I'm not trying to throw Hellmaker under the bus. It's really a nice editor if you learn its quirks, but with the onward march of MacOS it seems unlikely that many people still use it.

Anyway, among other things, I'd like to see the levels any Mac mappers have made, especially those made on the Mac. I have a large number of levels which I designed in the '97-'99 time frame that I never released, that I'm now polishing/finishing in Doom Builder, and I'd like to find some playtesters. Not sure if this is the right forum for that.

Further, I have maps made by MacDoomers that have never been released at idgames. This includes the 3-level Wrath mapset made by Matthew Phillips, which is startling. I think I still have the Circa map by Beau Mullis, plus a couple by Shane Borrowman that are interesting. Over time I plan to upload these. I'm doing some alterations to Wrath, agreed upon years ago by the author, to make it playable (at least to me) so I'll want to upload an archive with the original plus the altered maps.

That's enough for now. Here's hoping I hear from MacDoomers, lapsed or otherwise, plus anyone else who might be interested.

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I still map on my Mac, but I boot into Windows using Boot Camp and use Doom Builder 2 and other tools to do it.

I used to use Hellmaker, but with neither of my computers able to run Classic environment anymore, it's no longer even an option. Regardless, Doom Builder 2 (and Slade 2.0, previously) took care of basically anything I used to prefer Hellmaker for, and I came to like most of their other behavior.

My first release, "Testing Facility" from 2006, was built mostly in Hellmaker and finished in Doom Builder 1.

edit: Oh, heh, I missed that part in your post. It's an alright map I guess; there's a lot of design flaws. Thanks, though. :>

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Ah god that editor was so buggy, if it was re-fiddled with I think it could become a pretty awesome editor though, except Doom Builder 2 is THE ULTIMATE editor and pretty much has nearly all features.

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esselfortium said:

I still map on my Mac, but I boot into Windows using Boot Camp and use Doom Builder 2 and other tools to do it.


Understandable. I did the same thing on my Mac Pro, which was, among other things, the best XP PC I've ever owned. ;D

esselfortium said:

I used to use Hellmaker, but with neither of my computers able to run Classic environment anymore, it's no longer even an option. Regardless, Doom Builder 2 (and Slade 2.0, previously) took care of basically anything I used to prefer Hellmaker for, and I came to like most of their other behavior.


Agreed. Doom Builder is the best editor I've used, by a significant margin. It's so awesome that I approached an Amiga/MorphOS programmer to see if he could make a MorphOS port, but he said that it's written in Visual Basic and is essentially unportable. I'm really more an Amigan than a MacHead (yes, one of those people), and was hoping I could edit on the Amiga given that PrBoom is available for the platform. No luck on that.

esselfortium said:

My first release, "Testing Facility" from 2006, was built mostly in Hellmaker and finished in Doom Builder 1.

edit: Oh, heh, I missed that part in your post. It's an alright map I guess; there's a lot of design flaws. Thanks, though. :>


No major design flaws that the addition of 40 monsters in UV couldn't fix. ;D

I downloaded Claus1024 and am playing through it on UV. Very cool maps up through Map 03. It'll take a little while to reach yours. It seems most of your maps are DM, which I don't play, but there's also the Knee Deep in KDIZD project that looks interesting, if it's still active.

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phobosdeimos1 said:

Ah god that editor was so buggy, if it was re-fiddled with I think it could become a pretty awesome editor though, except Doom Builder 2 is THE ULTIMATE editor and pretty much has nearly all features.


No disagreements there, but being a platform geek, I do hope to upload some of those Hellmaker-made levels I mentioned before.

Natch, some of the Mac mappers are pretty well known, for example Laz Rojas of Wolfendoom fame, probably the most prolific Hellmaker mapper of all time (correct me if I'm wrong). Also, Quingshuo "piXel ReX" Wang, who did massively detailed levels in Hellmaker in the 1998 - 2000 period, and moreover mastered a lot of the tricks, such as over-and-under bridges, at age 13. Thopse tricks weren't easy in Hellmaker, which IIRC posed a real challenge for making invisible stairs. So it seems that the app was buggier on some machines than others. For example, opening piXel's maps on my copy of Hellmaker usually resulted in sort of a grey goo spearing all over the place. ;D

I'll post notices when I release the levels by other mappers, as well as my own. BTW, where do I go to ask for playtesters? I have an E4M1 I could probably release this week, but I'd like to get playtesters first if possible. I'll release it with my own playtesting if necessary, though. The time has come, as they say. ;)

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SteveD said:

I'll post notices when I release the levels by other mappers, as well as my own. BTW, where do I go to ask for playtesters? I have an E4M1 I could probably release this week, but I'd like to get playtesters first if possible. I'll release it with my own playtesting if necessary, though. The time has come, as they say. ;)

You could post a thread in WADs and Mods asking for playtesters. Post some info and maybe some screenshots and if you're lucky some people will take interest.

BTW, design flaws I'm thinking of in Testing Facility are mainly stuff like the yellow key door being waaay out of the way where you could easily miss it entirely, and placed on the opposite end of the map from the key itself. That's a pretty major one that didn't occur to me at all when I was building it. :P

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esselfortium said:

You could post a thread in WADs and Mods asking for playtesters. Post some info and maybe some screenshots and if you're lucky some people will take interest.


Thanks, essel, I'll do that, and try to have everything rerady tomorrow. I hope I get lucky, and especially maybe get some help on why the level has a bug in Doomsday. It works fine in Risen3D and GZDoom. But with or without testers, it goes online in two weeks.

esselfortium said:

BTW, design flaws I'm thinking of in Testing Facility are mainly stuff like the yellow key door being waaay out of the way where you could easily miss it entirely, and placed on the opposite end of the map from the key itself. That's a pretty major one that didn't occur to me at all when I was building it. :P


There's room for debate on the Yellow Key issue. If you intend to have the player backtrack through a new set of released monsters, I'd say it's not a design flaw, so long as you don't annoy the player by going overboard on backtracking. I just looked at your map in Doom Builder, and thank Heavens for Find & Replace Mode, and yes, in this case, it's extreme. I do remember wandering around confused, because the map is big and very heavily worked -- 1,874 sectors! That even beats Simple Evil by piXel reX, with a mere 1,251. ;) I'll probably do another run through your level soon just to look at it, though.

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SteveD said:

Agreed. Doom Builder is the best editor I've used, by a significant margin. It's so awesome that I approached an Amiga/MorphOS programmer to see if he could make a MorphOS port, but he said that it's written in Visual Basic and is essentially unportable. I'm really more an Amigan than a MacHead (yes, one of those people), and was hoping I could edit on the Amiga given that PrBoom is available for the platform. No luck on that.


It would probably be a lot easier to port Yadex. It's in C++ and uses straight Xlib for display, so it would definitely help if you can get an X11 server running (I'm guessing there probably are some for that OS). But if not, it should be possible to change all the graphics functions to use something else instead, like for example SDL. The current code does different things based on whether X11 or BGI is defined, and I'm guessing the BGI stuff is inherited directly from the DEU 5.21 code. So this might actually make it easier for someone to add a third graphics library option.

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hex11 said:

It would probably be a lot easier to port Yadex. It's in C++ and uses straight Xlib for display, so it would definitely help if you can get an X11 server running (I'm guessing there probably are some for that OS). But if not, it should be possible to change all the graphics functions to use something else instead, like for example SDL. The current code does different things based on whether X11 or BGI is defined, and I'm guessing the BGI stuff is inherited directly from the DEU 5.21 code. So this might actually make it easier for someone to add a third graphics library option.


Thanks for the tip, hex. Those are good points. I looked into Yadex and I'll contact the Amiga programmer about it. I did a little digging, and it turns out that, years ago ('98), someone ported DEU to the Amiga, from the UNIX version, so that verifies the practicality of using Amiga graphics libraries for Yadex. Alas, that version of DEU was released as an Alpha, and was never further worked on. I'll take a look at it just the same, and maybe ADeusf, too, to see if I can run a proper version of Osiris.

I fired up ADoom tonight on my Amiga emulator, Amikit. Back in the day, I managed to get a 1600x1200 display from ADoom on a 57Mhz Amiga. It made for a visually impressive slideshow at about 1fps. ;D I did a lot better tonight at 1280x1024. There's another good Amiga version of Doom called DoomAttack, that managed to include some source port type features, look up/down and jumping, but appears to have been limited to a 640x512 display. It was a nice version, though. Lastly, I thought I saw mention of using MacDoom on an Amiga, but not on a Mac emulator. I'll look into that, too, and see if it's anything more than just grabbing the WAD files from a MacDoom CD.

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Hey can either of you guys post a screenshot of the hellmaker grid as I remember how nice it looked and i'm gonna make my doom builder look like it :P

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phobosdeimos1 said:

Hey can either of you guys post a screenshot of the hellmaker grid as I remember how nice it looked and i'm gonna make my doom builder look like it :P


I wish I could. IIRC, I did a review of Hellmaker for The MacDoom Review, which was in Docmaker format. I'm guessing I'd need a Classic OS to even open it, or does it work on OS X? I'll file your request in my long-term drawer, since someday I'll probably get my 9500 working again.

Here's hoping someone else has screenshots laying around.

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esselfortium said:

phobosdeimos1:
http://essel.spork-chan.net/screens/index.php?dir=hellmaker

Some pictures I took a few years ago.


Thanks, essel. I recognized Test Facility right away. Heck, I did a God Mode walk-thru the other night and got a lot of detailing ideas. ;)

This Hellmaker pic shows very clearly why I loved it so much. Those fill colors for the map really make it stand out. I never liked the white grid on black DOS/Windows editors. You could change colors on some of them, but you'd never get fill colors for the map, only highlights for the lines. Please correct me if I'm wrong. It might be a personal weakness, but I really need to see the map stand out from the background.

Doom Builder 1.x started getting me into Windows editors, in spite of the white on black, no-fill color scheme, because it's so good, and because it has 3D Mode. Doom Builder 2 has come through as the best editor ever, natch. But if there was no Doom Builder, I'd get an old PowerMac (they're pretty cheap) and use Hellmaker again. The visuals are that important to me.

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phobosdeimos1 said:

Thanks man, haha, didn't look as I hoped :( kind of hurt the eyes


That's a really dark color scheme. Then again, mine left Group Mode in default blue, but for Sectors, Linedefs and Things I went with a sort of pinkish lavender and yellow. It was a "vivid" scheme. ;D

Which map is this? Can I download it?

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SteveD said:

That's a really dark color scheme. Then again, mine left Group Mode in default blue, but for Sectors, Linedefs and Things I went with a sort of pinkish lavender and yellow. It was a "vivid" scheme. ;D

It might be a personal weakness, but I really need to see the map stand out from the background.


It's Db2 when I tried to make it look like Hellmaker, but because it doesn't fill sectors with a colour in Wireframe view it didn't work like I wanted it to, as you can see it looks painfully contrasting with the white background, which like you said is alot nicer than a sort of DOS-like black background

SteveD said:

It might be a personal weakness, but I really need to see the map stand out from the background.


Yeah i completely agree man, i guess with the flats view in DB2 now though it's not as bad

SteveD said:

Which map is this? Can I download it?


It's in progress atm, it's the last level of the spire complex WAD that's on wadsinprogress so it'll be released tomorrow dude.

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I think DB2's settings dialog has a slider to control how bright the flats overlay is, so you could probably brighten it up a bunch to look better against the bright background.

Personally I found Hellmaker's color scheme to get somewhat hard on the eyes after a while, and eventually started using a light-on-dark scheme in it like most other editors have.

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phobosdeimos1 said:

It's Db2 when I tried to make it look like Hellmaker, but because it doesn't fill sectors with a colour in Wireframe view it didn't work like I wanted it to, as you can see it looks painfully contrasting with the white background, which like you said is alot nicer than a sort of DOS-like black background


I don't mind black backgrounds. I went with the black background in DB2. The main thing is I don't want a wireframe-only view. So far as I know, that leaves Hellmaker and DB2 as the only options for me.

phobosdeimos1 said:

Yeah i completely agree man, i guess with the flats view in DB2 now though it's not as bad


For me, it's perfection. :)

phobosdeimos1 said:

It's in progress atm, it's the last level of the spire complex WAD that's on wadsinprogress so it'll be released tomorrow dude.


Coolness. I'll be on it. Already found it at WIP. :)

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Well I don't know if you'll like Yadex then because it just uses lines to display sectors (no solid color filled areas). But maybe your coder friend can fix that for you...

Btw, if you decide to use that editor, make sure to get the "all-in-one" patch from here:
http://glbsp.sourceforge.net/yadex/

The 3D preview function patch is amazingly helpful. But make sure to read the diff for usage instructions, because by default pressing the "R" key only renders the map with a solid shading algorigthm, and no sprites.

I think there might also be some other patches not show on that page. Browsing the mailing list archives brought this up:
http://www.freelists.org/post/yadex/Patches-to-patch-page

But I don't know what the deal is with that. I just started getting back into mapping and picked Yadex because there's basically nothing else out there that runs on Unix. Back in the day, I avoided DEU and went with EdMap and DCK instead. ;)

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esselfortium said:

Personally I found Hellmaker's color scheme to get somewhat hard on the eyes after a while, and eventually started using a light-on-dark scheme in it like most other editors have.


Which is why I changed mine, too, though I went with psychedelic colors. Aside from the lavender fill, I think I went with a pale blue background. I did up to 10 hours at a stretch in front of that Hellmaker screen, with no probs. I tried black, but it didn't seem good in Hellmaker for me. Main thing is you had the option, even the option to go with what amounts to pure wireframe, IIRC. I count myself lucky to have started editing on Hellmaker, and even luckier that CodeImp came along with DB2.

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hex11 said:

Well I don't know if you'll like Yadex then because it just uses lines to display sectors (no solid color filled areas). But maybe your coder friend can fix that for you...


Good point, though this isn't so much for me as for other Amigans who'd like to edit Doom on their miggies. And in this case, the programmer is really a MorphOS developer. The only "Amigas" I have now are emulators running OS 3.x on my PC. No one is developing much of anything for OS 3.x these days, even though it probably has by far the largest user base. To run MorphOS I would need a G4 PowerMac, Mac Mini or laptop, which aren't that expensive, really. The license for the OS would cost more than the PowerMac that runs it. Sometimes MorphOS apps will run on AmigaOS 4.x, which only runs on Sam 440/460 machines costing about $1,000, or on the upcoming Amiga One X1000 dual-core machine which will cost north of $2,000.

My only Amiga option ATM is running the ADeu alpha on my emulators. I think I hear DB2 calling . . . :D

[snip]

Thanks for all that info, BTW.

hex11 said:
But I don't know what the deal is with that. I just started getting back into mapping and picked Yadex because there's basically nothing else out there that runs on Unix. Back in the day, I avoided DEU and went with EdMap and DCK instead. ;) [/B]


I gotta ask, how are you liking Yadex so far?

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SteveD:

I know what you mean by perfection, it is isn't it :P

As i used to be a exclusive mac user, i used to hate the lack of good quality Macdoom tools for Doom, so i started mapping for a game called Marathon Infinity, as it had an awesome editor bundled with it that had 3D mode and a physics editor similar to WhackEd,

back then I would pray for an editor like that to be made for doom, and then wham! Doombuilder came along, i would say the best damn editor for any game there's ever been.. And it's free! Codeimp are the most awesome guys ever for that, If i had any money I would donate to them in a flash!

Essel: How does your DB2 run on an emulator on your mac? Is it smooth? + what Mac do you have/run it on?

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I dualboot into Windows Vista to run Doom Builder and other utilities and source ports directly without emulation, on my 2.0ghz Core Duo iMac from 2006. It used to run a lot smoother than it does now; lack of ram is part of the problem but not all of it. Been driving me kind of crazy lately. Probably going to be upgrading soon, though.

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Wow, that's some expensive stuff! I'd probably go with something like this instead (I think you can get them for about $300, including RAM, etc.):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig

Used to have an A500 back in the day. Then got an A2000. And later on an A1200. Also had a Sega Genesis/CD... Those were good times (I was in the military, and most of my pay went towards fun stuff). My favorite Amiga game was Hired Guns... it was a blast playing with a group of friends all huddled around the same screen. :) Now I just have an old laptop running OpenBSD and a Nintendo DS running AKAIO with a bunch of homebrew games and emulators.

Yadex is actually pretty cool, once you start to play around with it. It's still basically DEU, so you have to have a good understanding of low-level Doom constructs, but it also has functions to speed things up (like for making a door out of a sector, etc.) For some reason, the F8 key doesn't work right (it's supposed to bring up a Misc. Operations menu) but I can still access that from the top menubar. And my window manager (twm) "eats" the Control-leftclick sequence, but it's not that big of a deal (and I can reconfigure twm anyway). I haven't done any heavy editing yet, just modified some existing maps to learn the editor. And I'm probably doing some things manually (the hard, slow way) instead of using the editor's helper functions (there seems to be many!) to their fullest. But that'll come in time...

Oh, almost forgot: Yadex could really use an "undo" function. If there is one, I haven't found it yet? So I end up saving a lot, sometimes changing the filename (to avoid overwriting backup), etc.

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hex11 said:
Yadex is actually pretty cool, once you start to play around with it. It's still basically DEU, so you have to have a good understanding of low-level Doom constructs, but it also has functions to speed things up (like for making a door out of a sector, etc.)
[snip]
[/B]


Thanks for the info on Yadex. It sounds interesting, albeit challenging. I might download a copy of DEU to see how that works, since I don't have Linux ATM. And I'm still itching to try ADeu.

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SteveD said:

Agreed. Doom Builder is the best editor I've used, by a significant margin. It's so awesome that I approached an Amiga/MorphOS programmer to see if he could make a MorphOS port, but he said that it's written in Visual Basic and is essentially unportable.

DB is in Visual Basic, DB2 is in C# and relies on .NET. So both are pretty much Windoww-only.

Hopefully SLADE 3 should work on macs, but it doesn't have a map editor yet. (And I don't know how good the AmigaOS port of wxWidgets is. But if anybody wanted to try porting SLADE 3 to AmigaOS/MorphOS, then it'd help us finding all the places that need endianness checks.)

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Gez said:

DB is in Visual Basic, DB2 is in C# and relies on .NET. So both are pretty much Windoww-only.

Hopefully SLADE 3 should work on macs, but it doesn't have a map editor yet. (And I don't know how good the AmigaOS port of wxWidgets is. But if anybody wanted to try porting SLADE 3 to AmigaOS/MorphOS, then it'd help us finding all the places that need endianness checks.)


This is a very interesting option. I downloaded Slade 2 and 3 and tried to chimp my way through Slade 2's interface. The 3D Mode was really cool, though I couldn't figure out how to create a line or vertice, and no Help file was included. I assume editing is possible since I gather someone from the Bioshock team did a level in Slade.

This is one to keep an eye on. As soon as a map editor is ready I will consider this the #1 candidate. Or maybe a port of Slade 2 is possible.

I personally don't know if wxWidgets is available for MorphOS 2.x or AmigaOS 4.x. That's another bridge to cross. ;)

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SteveD said:

This is a very interesting option. I downloaded Slade 2 and 3 and tried to chimp my way through Slade 2's interface. The 3D Mode was really cool, though I couldn't figure out how to create a line or vertice, and no Help file was included. I assume editing is possible since I gather someone from the Bioshock team did a level in Slade.

This is one to keep an eye on. As soon as a map editor is ready I will consider this the #1 candidate. Or maybe a port of Slade 2 is possible.

I personally don't know if wxWidgets is available for MorphOS 2.x or AmigaOS 4.x. That's another bridge to cross. ;)

It has line drawing similar to Doom Builder, to start it press space (in any editing mode). Insert should also work like in DEU etc.

SLADE3 should also work in OSX now for the most part, as long as you compile it with the latest svn version of wxwidgets (cocoa version, not carbon).

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SlayeR said:

It has line drawing similar to Doom Builder, to start it press space (in any editing mode). Insert should also work like in DEU etc.

SLADE3 should also work in OSX now for the most part, as long as you compile it with the latest svn version of wxwidgets (cocoa version, not carbon).


Thanks a ton, SlayeR. With that help, I started a level and I'm chimping my way through the rest; grid spacing, zoom in/out, Thing insertion, etc. I also selected all lines and tried out the Align X function, which worked very well.

I'm guessing you are the SlayeR who's programming Slade. I'll be taking a long look at Slade 2 & 3 and SlumpEd over the next week. This seems like the best possible package for porting to MorphOS/AmigaOS.

If I was to make feature requests . . . ;) they would go something like a DB2 flats view which fills the map, as opposed to the current background texture option which fills the entire background, and 3D Mode texture alignment, if it's not already there. It'll take time for me to figure out more.

Looking cool so far.

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SteveD said:

I personally don't know if wxWidgets is available for MorphOS 2.x or AmigaOS 4.x. That's another bridge to cross. ;)

It is, but rather outdated (v2.6.2 on the CVS).

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