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DoomUK

The Doom Confessional Booth

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40oz said:

In many cases simply finding the secret is the reward in itself. Extending the gameplay can sometimes be enough, but if you've already depleted all the powerup options like Partial Invisibility, Berserk, Supercharge, Megasphere, Computer Area Map, Light Amplification Visors, a new weapon, Health, Armor, and Ammo, you could also use the secret as a shortcut to the exit, or to a special key, or an important objective. The secret can be an area that the player can see from a window or from a ledge that the player might have been enticed to explore. A secret can also be a lift or stairs, or teleport that you can take to get access to the chainguns, and shotguns left behind by sniping zombies on a distant platform, or to mitigate the effectiveness of a trap, by being able to say, attack a monster closet from behind so that when the player gets to activate the trap, the monsters will already be dead.

Hey, I completely missed this post until just now, thanks for typing this up! I think the map has most of this covered already (since posting, I made a thread for it in WADs & Mods here), although stuffing extra health/ammo into secrets is definitely an idea. I should throw a computer map in somewhere too; I think I already know where to put it.

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40oz said:

If you're having a map playtested and they say there's too much ammo or health, just create a secret area to move them in instead, so in a normal playthrough the player wont have those items without vigiliantly searching for secrets. That's usually how I get my way in my maps. At least I'll know where the secrets are. :P

Lately, I've been in love with how versatile secrets can be.


I confess to really liking the way you see Doom. You have such a unique perspective on things.

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schwerpunk said:

Near the end of making a map, what I'll usually do is play through from start to finish, with the caveat that I will quit and go back to (GZ)DB if I see anything that needs fixing. Invariably, this leads to me playing the first five minutes of the map about two-dozen times, and each following five minutes also, but at least I'm unlikely to miss anything glaring.


When I do this, I do it with a notepad by my side (an 'actual' one, not the Windows one), and I write down every thing to be fixed as I find them.

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Fernito said:

When I do this, I do it with a notepad by my side (an 'actual' one, not the Windows one), and I write down every thing to be fixed as I find them.


I've taken up doing this myself recently after some mammoth co-op testing session resulted in a load of small bugs and visual errors being noticed... and then I immediately forgot what they were after the session finished.

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Avoozl said:

I just can't stand Plutonia for some odd reason, also I find the new textures in it particularly the rusty cement brick and orange brick textures to be very bland looking.

I actually got the feeling by many textures from Plutonia, especially from the ones that are overly purist.

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Nice track. Sets an atmosphere of, I don't know, moodyness? alertness? I can imagine it to be used in eg. a base-themed map perhaps, one that's not too intense but with lots of things to explore.

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Kotzugi said:

Nice track. Sets an atmosphere of, I don't know, moodyness? alertness? I can imagine it to be used in eg. a base-themed map perhaps, one that's not too intense but with lots of things to explore.

Thanks! :) It is intent to be for a semi-jungle themed map, with some base-esque stuff at the end.

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I have often wondered what the result would be if I opened Heretic in PrBoom+, activated god mode, and gave it to someone under the influence of hallucinogenics...

I prefer TNT to Plutonia
I prefer Hexen over Heretic
I've never played Wolfenstein 3D (only Wolfendoom)

And despite playing PSX Final Doom to death since 2001, I never played any PC doom until 2011

...I think thats the worse stuff out of the way

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Little Ishida said:

I have often wondered what the result would be if I opened Heretic in PrBoom+


If I get it right, PrBoom+ doesn't accept Hexen textures.

Little Ishida said:

I prefer TNT to Plutonia
I prefer Hexen over Heretic


This is correct.

I've never played Wolfenstein 3D


Not good.

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I've never played Wolfenstein 3D

This is going to boil the blood of the purists, but my reply is that you haven't missed much.

OK here is my confession: I've played Doom 2 first and original Doom (Ultimate) only a number of years afterwards. I still don't get why people would make WADs for Ultimate Doom, I would always miss the super shotgun and all the cool monsters that are specific to Doom 2. I get the argument about the organisations of episodes, but personally I really don't care about that. In any case, you can actually duplicate that in a Doom 2 mega WAD by introducing a death exit every 8 levels followed by a new theme, right?

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Boss fights with tag 666, secret exits, trying to make something fun with a limited set of enemies. And also, nostalgia.

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I like Revenants...
I put them behind doors and walls, I put them in pillars, I put them in open areas, I put them on pillars, I put them in small rooms...
basically Revenants everywhere.

I also like Arachnotrons... I put them where ever they fit (Which is mostly outdoors).

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plums said:

Boss fights with tag 666, secret exits, trying to make something fun with a limited set of enemies. And also, nostalgia.

I think it's basically the last one. I don't know what tag 666 is, you also have secret exits in Doom 2, and why can't you have the same amount of fun with a more varied set of enemies? In any case, you don't even have to use Doom 2 specific enemies.

Here's another confession, although my guess is that this is true for a lot of people: When I finished Doom 2 for the first time, I used cheats (iddqd and idclip) for the entire time. Also, I was playing on a friend's computer, after high school on Fridays, and I was playing the entire time without giving him a chance to play...(he was just a nice guy and liked to watch, I was just being a selfish bastard)

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Kotzugi said:

I don't know what tag 666 is


Tag 666 appears in MAP07 of Doom II and E1M8 of Ultimate Doom.
In MAP07, it's what causes the walls to lower after the Mancubi are killed (tag 667 makes the exit accessible after the spiders are killed)
In E1M8, it triggers the arena walls to lower on death of the barons.

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Eris Falling said:

Tag 666 appears in MAP07 of Doom II and E1M8 of Ultimate Doom.
In MAP07, it's what causes the walls to lower after the Mancubi are killed (tag 667 makes the exit accessible after the spiders are killed)
In E1M8, it triggers the arena walls to lower on death of the barons.


Also in E4M8 when the Spiderdemon dies, doesn't it?

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So it does, I'd forgotten about that one :P
There's also the Keen doors on MAP32 of Doom II, and I guess something happens on E4M6, but I've only played that map once, and I was too busy celebrating killing the Cyberdemon to notice anything had happened (this is pretty much when I first got Doom on PC)

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Eris Falling said:

Tag 666 appears in MAP07 of Doom II and E1M8 of Ultimate Doom.
In MAP07, it's what causes the walls to lower after the Mancubi are killed (tag 667 makes the exit accessible after the spiders are killed)
In E1M8, it triggers the arena walls to lower on death of the barons.


OK, I'm lost in here. What's exactly the difference between tags 666 and 667? They seem to perform the same task: "activate" some sectors to access another part of the map.

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Zed said:

OK, I'm lost in here. What's exactly the difference between tags 666 and 667? They seem to perform the same task: "activate" some sectors to access another part of the map.


Tag 666 triggers a specific action in some levels when you kill all specimens of a specific kind of monster (which level and which kind of monster is hardcoded in the Doom executable, AFAIK). Tag 667 is sorta the same thing, but it is used only once in MAP07 of Doom 2, and it triggers when you kill all the arachnotrons in the level.

Eris Falling said:

So it does, I'd forgotten about that one :P
There's also the Keen doors on MAP32 of Doom II, and I guess something happens on E4M6, but I've only played that map once, and I was too busy celebrating killing the Cyberdemon to notice anything had happened (this is pretty much when I first got Doom on PC)


Yeah, right! Forgot about the E4M6 one :P It triggers when you kill the cyberdemon.

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I guess E2M8 and E3M8 don't really count as tag 666 fights but it's the same idea, force a fight with a boss. It's a shame they were all hard-coded, so many wads have weird setups for forcing you into killing that cyberdemon without exiting.

It took me a few playthroughs to notice that E4M6 had a tag 666 effect, just because why would that level have one? Doesn't follow the format of the previous episodes at all. But then a lot in E4 doesn't.

Kotzugi said:

you also have secret exits in Doom 2


Yeah, but at quite limited points. Having one per episode works much nicer IMHO. Maybe that's not enough to warrant using Doom over Doom 2. But sometimes it's nice just to do things a little differently.

I wonder how hard it would be to get stats on wads made for Doom 2 vs wads made for Doom, since Doom 2 was released. I bet it's < 10% for Doom, but maybe I'm wrong. I guess you could get a very rough estimate just looking at the size of the idgames archives.

Anyhow I don't want to sound like I don't like wads made for Doom 2, because that isn't true at all. But, my related confession: in terms of "stand-alone games" and not "resource sets for mappers/modders," I think Doom is a much better game than Doom 2.

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Zed said:

OK, I'm lost in here. What's exactly the difference between tags 666 and 667? They seem to perform the same task: "activate" some sectors to access another part of the map.

The thing they do is hardcoded.

	if (gamemap == 7)
	{
	    if (mo->type == MT_FATSO)
	    {
		junk.tag = 666;
		EV_DoFloor(&junk,lowerFloorToLowest);
		return;
	    }
	    
	    if (mo->type == MT_BABY)
	    {
		junk.tag = 667;
		EV_DoFloor(&junk,raiseToTexture);
		return;
	    }
	}

plums said:

It took me a few playthroughs to notice that E4M6 had a tag 666 effect, just because why would that level have one? Doesn't follow the format of the previous episodes at all. But then a lot in E4 doesn't.

E4M6 is a Romero map. He wanted you to have to kill that cyberdemon, so added that map to the ones affected by boss death. Being one of the programmers has its advantages.

---

I can't stand playing vanilla Heretic. I want to play it, I'm a purist after all, but the controls are just way too dated. The inventory, flight, and looking stuff is all just too out of the way or clunky with a WASD control scheme. I bind inventory to the mouse wheel and use mouse look in ZDoom, and the game's really fun. Vanilla controls are just frustrating, since you can only bind keys. Also, fuck that incredibly obnoxious shift + inventory use = inventory left shit in vanilla.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

E4M6 is a Romero map. He wanted you to have to kill that cyberdemon, so added that map to the ones affected by boss death. Being one of the programmers has its advantages.


It sure does. Actually now that I think of it I'm a bit surprised Boom didn't come up with any weird sector tag extensions.

I can't stand playing vanilla Heretic. I want to play it, I'm a purist after all, but the controls are just way too dated. The inventory, flight, and looking stuff is all just too out of the way or clunky with a WASD control scheme. I bind inventory to the mouse wheel and use mouse look in ZDoom, and the game's really fun. Vanilla controls are just frustrating, since you can only bind keys.


I know what you mean. The default vanilla controls are exceptionally bad. I feel like this is part of the reason Heretic and Hexen seem easier these days: their difficulty was balanced against out-of-the-way controls. (Although Hexen is still quite easy.) To be fair, mouse wheels didn't really exist when those games were made.

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Personally I use ZXC for inventory; Z is left, X is right, C is use.

I used to use the default of [ for left, ] for right and Enter for use, until I decided it'd be nicer if I could select my inventory while dodging enemy fire at the same time.

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Was there any way to bind inventory shortcuts? Because it's the only convinient way of using repulsion, flechettes, and chaos device.

I think there wasn't, but I don't remember.

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Da Werecat said:

Was there any way to bind inventory shortcuts? Because it's the only convinient way of using repulsion, flechettes, and chaos device.

I think there wasn't, but I don't remember.


As far as I recall, there were default bindings for flechette (0), icon of defender (5), banishment device (7?), disc of repulsion (9). Probably keys 6 and 8 were bound too, but I can't remember to which inventory items.

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Straight out of README.TXT:

Key             What
---             -----------------------------------------------
5               Icon of the Defender
6               Porkalator
7               Teleport Other
8               Chaos Device
9               Disc of Repulsion
0               Flechette
\               Quartz Flask
BACKSPACE       Panic button: USE one of everything you have!
Heretic had a few too, the only one I remember is backspace for Tome of Power. Also I think in both games you could activate the wings of wrath by pressing MOVEUP.

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