Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
Blastfrog

I hate it when people credit Petersen for Hall's maps...

Recommended Posts

Why do people often refer to all of Tom's maps as Sandy's? I mean, I know he "revamped" them, but to be honest, he barely did anything to them. All he did was retexture the levels (actually making them look worse, his horrid texturing is infamous) and make some minor gameplay tweaks here and there. He didn't do nearly enough for everybody to credit him for the entire maps. Tom deserves full credit for the maps, not Sandy. Sandy only gets credit for the minor changes he did.

I've become quite familiar with the alpha levels, and here's a rough list of changes he made, aside from texturing.

E1M8:
All he did was remove the mines an redid the boss area. Texturing isn't even different.

E2M1:
I know Tom made this map, but I've never seen his version, so I can't really judge what Sandy did here.

E2M2:
Changed start from west side of hub to north side of crate maze. He did not add the crushers, they were already there in the 0.5 version (they were horizontal and non-functional, though), all he did was make them work. He replaced the exit on the east side of the hub with a red key, just to lengthen the level by a few seconds by forcing the player to backtrack. He made the crate maze a little less flat by removing several top-crates.

E2M3:
Another level that Sandy barely touched. Just some retexturing here and there, and not much else.

E2M4:
This one he barely did shit with. Texturing and architecture is almost identical to the 0.5 version. All he did was add an extra little bit to the end.

E2M7:
This one I will admit he actually did make some major changes (mostly in the flow of the level). Not too much was done with the architecture, but several areas were added, like the exit (the original one on the ground floor was removed) The original level back when it was E1M1 didn't even have keys.

E3M3:
He mostly just retextured it, no major gameplay changes. It looked so much better when it was the original Tei Tenga Lab level. :(

E3M7:
Not sure how much work was done on this one by Tom after the 0.5 version, so I can't really judge what Petersen did here.

Share this post


Link to post

I was pretty surprised to learn how Tom Hall actually made a lot of my favorite DOOM maps, instead of Sandy. However, I still think Sandy made E2M6 all by himself, and I still love that level. Sure, it's ugly, but it's just so devious and very distinct.

Share this post


Link to post

I hate it when publishing a novel and the editor gets writing credits.... then gets part of your cut.

Share this post


Link to post

Any map done by Petersen that feels remotely playable was most likely made by Tom.

EDIT: OK, I'm being unfair in my statement, but really, all Petersen's maps feel genuinely unpolished.

Share this post


Link to post

American's maps are the best. I think they are better than Romero's. In fact, I used to assume that the ones he made were made by Romero until I read the level design credits.

Share this post


Link to post

Sandy's E2 maps are better than Tom's in my opinion. E2M5 has a few questionable design decisions but probably has more interesting scenes with legitimate height variation than the rest of E2's maps combined.

Flat, square rooms do not make interesting levels.

Share this post


Link to post

Most of my favourite id maps are ones by Petersen.

geo said:

I hate it when publishing a novel and the editor gets writing credits.... then gets part of your cut.

Actually, if you talk to many people in the publishing industry, you'll be quite surprised to learn that an awful lot of books are rescued by being totally rewritten by editors. This happens much more often than the editor being properly credited for their work.

Share this post


Link to post
Grazza said:

Most of my favourite id maps are ones by Petersen.
Actually, if you talk to many people in the publishing industry, you'll be quite surprised to learn that an awful lot of books are rescued by being totally rewritten by editors. This happens much more often than the editor being properly credited for their work.


Indeed. :-)

Share this post


Link to post

Yeah. I don't know why people say Pandemonium is a techbase misplaced in hell. To me it just looks eclectic, like Tenements in hell, but the texturing on the outside top passages make it look like Inferno alright to me...

Share this post


Link to post
Sigvatr said:

American's maps are the best. I think they are better than Romero's. In fact, I used to assume that the ones he made were made by Romero until I read the level design credits.

I wouldn't say better than Romero, but they're damn close.

Share this post


Link to post

Is there a way to play the alpha version with a modern port, instead of the bundled doom.exe?

I tried with chocolate-doom (-iwad, -merge, and -file options) and prboom. Alas, no luck.

Yadex seems to be able to handle it, when invoked like this:
yadex -iwad8 ./doom.wad -g doom05

I was able to walk around the map in 3D mode (with textures & sprites toggled on), but it'd be much more fun to check it out in a modern port. :)

DOSBox is possible, but much slower. Only as last resort...

Share this post


Link to post
hex11 said:

Is there a way to play the alpha version with a modern port, instead of the bundled doom.exe?

No.

Plenty of engine-side differences. You can read them up on the Doom wiki, but in short: map format is completely different, texture definition format is completely different, image format is completely different, sounds and music are missing, palette is incomplete, status bar is completely different, several line specials are different. The only thing you can load successfully are the flats.

For fun, I once added the code to read the old graphics formats to a custom build of ZDoom. Could load the beta levels this way (since the beta levels are in the same format as the final game, except for missing the REJECTS lump and ZDoom will accept to load them); though it'd have required more work to be actually faithful; notably modified actor definitions and a custom xlat file to handle the changes in line specials.

It was fun for about half a minute and then boring; but it illustrated some less obvious differences. For example, the POL5A0 graphics does not correspond to crushed gibs, so in my modified ZDoom it looked odd when the monsters got crushed. It turns out that in the beta, corpses are not crushed by moving sectors. In fact you can get stuck in E2M2 this way, in the hidden (though not secret) area where in the final version you see an imp, a trooper, a shell box and a window overlooking the room with the chainsaw pillar. Kill the trooper at just the right (or rather, wrong) place on the lift and it'll make a solid corpse that will prevent the lift from ever moving back up, trapping you down forever. In the final version, the corpse would get crushed into an intangible gib and the lift would remain functional.

Plenty of little things like that.

Share this post


Link to post

Ah, that explains why deutex was barfing so badly. And yeah, I know deutex is "outdated crap", yada-yada. :P

But since yadex could actually load the maps correctly and display the flats, textures (and even some weird sprites I never saw before), I figured it could also save them in a more useful (modern) format.

Saving E1M1 worked, but then chocodoom barfed from a missing flat:

$ doom -file e1m1.wad -warp 1 1
R_FlatNumForName: FLOOR3_6 not found

So in yadex, I did this:

yadex: s FLOOR3_6 flats.wad
Saving directory entry data to "flats.wad".

And chocodoom was happy with that flat, but barfed on the next one it couldn't find:

$ doom -file e1m1.wad flats.wad -warp 1 1
R_TextureNumForName: TH_192G1- not found

So I'm thinking it's possible in this manner to at least re-create a PWAD with the alpha maps/flats/textures/sprites that can be played in modern ports. A more "programmatic" approach would be better, though instead of saving each and every resource by hand. ;)

Maybe also some fine-tunning would be necessary for special linedefs or things, but that might be addressable via a dehacked patch. Not sure about the status bar, but that's not too critical. The end result wouldn't be a perfect emulation, but something that's at least playable in a modern port.

Edit: Heh, I guess you weren't kidding about the flats. yadex is able to save textures okay to PPM format (and the resulting image looks correct), but not to a PWAD:

yadex: s TH_192G1 tex.wad
Saving directory entry data to "tex.wad".
Entry not in master directory.

Share this post


Link to post
hex11 said:

Maybe also some fine-tunning would be necessary for special linedefs


I don't know the full extent of what is possible with dehacked, but I really don't think so. Can you really change the speed at which lifts are moving?

Share this post


Link to post

Tom is a talented guy and it shows in the levels he made for vintage Doom. Petersen's touch on the final product seemed to add a bit of chaos, though in a cool way. Seems he was the one who could make something out of thin air and was pushed to the max... key point for shipping.

As already mentioned American's maps were killer(Map02-07,14, 22) - minimalistic, to the point and memorable... must have given Romero a reality check that there's more than one wunderkind.

P.s.: Heck, I always assumed Map05 was made by Romero.

Share this post


Link to post
Sigvatr said:

American's maps are the best. I think they are better than Romero's. In fact, I used to assume that the ones he made were made by Romero until I read the level design credits.


Not that this noticeable or a bad thing whilst actually playing within the excellence of his levels, but have a look in your editor at ALL the maps credited to him and see if you can notice something about his mapping that i'm referring to :P

Share this post


Link to post

Sodaholic said:
Why do people often refer to all of Tom's maps as Sandy's?

Because they get their data from old lists that didn't incorporate Hall due to copyright reasons. From users, it's innocent ignorance because Tom's input became available only later, not an attempt to avoid crediting Tom.

I mean, I know he "revamped" them, but to be honest, he barely did anything to them. All he did was retexture the levels (actually making them look worse, his horrid texturing is infamous) and make some minor gameplay tweaks here and there. [...] Tom deserves full credit for the maps, not Sandy. Sandy only gets credit for the minor changes he did.

Not true, because the playing experience is affected heavily by item placement and even relatively minor changes to the structure. Credit is not merely "artistic", and both need to be credited. There aren't any "design percentage" tables like the one Ty provided for TNT, but that's something people can glean from looking at the alphas as you are doing now and many have done previously.

Share this post


Link to post
phobosdeimos1 said:

Not that this noticeable or a bad thing whilst actually playing within the excellence of his levels, but have a look in your editor at ALL the maps credited to him and see if you can notice something about his mapping that i'm referring to :P

Orthogonal layout? Some rather dinky maps(MAP22)? Mechanical bugs (E4M4) or anomalies (E4M1, MAP14)?

Share this post


Link to post

printz: yeah i was mostly referring to the orthogonal structure but i'll look out for those other things,

And yeah thinking about it you're right about dinky maps, he has the earliest examples of cramped areas because of detailing

Share this post


Link to post

There are a lot more differences in the pre-beta game engine than you'd think just by playing it. Some parts of the internals are so foreign to the final code as released that they're unrecognizable.

The entire mobj system is different; there is no single mobj type, instead objects are "Monsters", "Projectiles", or "Statics" and each has a different T_ thinker callback function.

Some parts of the renderer are still extremely immature - especially 2S line rendering, which is basically non-functional due to Carmack having essentially fallen asleep half-way through writing the code apparently when Romero up and said "I am compiling the press release version!". You can literally see where he left off half-way through what would eventually become the drawsegs system.

The visplane system is completely different - the drawing of floors is handled in a vastly different way that I cannot even describe and involves a data structure that no longer exists as of the 0.99 release version.

Weapon thinking is unfinished and functions differently in many respects.

Player sounds (when the sound engine is enabled, as we managed to do for the 0.8 hacking project) emanate not from the player mobj, but from the status bar ticker routine. Mobjs can't even properly play sounds yet; the sound engine has no means of tracking positional information.

Monsters don't drop ammo yet. This causes you to run out very easily.

Well over half of the linedef action types are just completely unimplemented, and out of the remaining, a large number had their functioning changed completely, and a large number that are present in the pre-beta are grotesquely broken and malfunction in the most bizarre ways, sometimes causing the game to crash or hang up in an infinite loop.

As in the 0.99 release version, player motion is handled in a completely different manner.

Demo recording is not finished.

There is NO trace of code to save or load the game.

And all of this isn't even scratching the surface.

Share this post


Link to post

I've been thinking about picking my Doom Bible TC back up, but with clear direction this time: Finish the alphas in the direction it appeared to be going in, and only use the Doom bible as a general guide, not the end-all-be-all of design (like I was doing, and figured that was a bad idea, since even Tom himself didn't follow it as closely as I was trying to).

One thing I would definitely do differently is a custom engine, I was originally using ZDoom, but I wanted a vanilla-like experience. I think that making a custom Chocolate Doom engine is the best way to go. Mostly use the final engine, but implement elements of the alpha and beta engine (such as the old bobbing, the flatter lighting, etc.)

Keep in mind, I'm not nearly as ambitious as I used to be for project goals, that was the original version's downfall. The main thing I want to do is modify engine features, and that's really about it.

I was wondering, though; is there anyone willing to help me out with this? I'm not very experienced with C, but I can learn quickly. I already have a copy of Chocolate Doom's source, along with the stuff to build it with (except the compiler, I'll ask how to set that up in a different thread).

Share this post


Link to post

Tom Halls maps always were the best maps. Someone should contact him and try to convince him to make some more Doom maps. Hell, this is the case with pretty much every original Doom mapper, I'd love to see them return after so many years, team-up and make a completely new Doom megawad, maybe with the source ports of today too.

Share this post


Link to post
hex11 said:


That really is an interesting find, although I do wish the distributor had at least somewhat stayed true to Doom and not put in Pain Elementals, Chaingunners, and SSGs. However, still interesting to play through.
It seemed to me like they took what was on Map08 and made it into half of E2.

Share this post


Link to post
TrueDude said:

Tom Halls maps always were the best maps. Someone should contact him and try to convince him to make some more Doom maps. Hell, this is the case with pretty much every original Doom mapper, I'd love to see them return after so many years, team-up and make a completely new Doom megawad, maybe with the source ports of today too.


I agree. E2M2 and E2M7 were fascinating levels before Sandy got his hands on them.

Don't get me wrong, even now they're still pretty damn good...But they don't have the same charm the original alpha maps had.

Share this post


Link to post
TrueDude said:

Tom Halls maps always were the best maps. Someone should contact him and try to convince him to make some more Doom maps. Hell, this is the case with pretty much every original Doom mapper, I'd love to see them return after so many years, team-up and make a completely new Doom megawad, maybe with the source ports of today too.


Tom and John Romero are busy making Facebook games, last I heard. I have no idea where Sandy Petersen even is anymore.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×