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MasterofJKD

Timeframe to make a level?

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How long does it take to make a good level in general. Like from start to finish how long does it take the average person to make a good level. For me it takes me about 1-2 months.
Keep in mind I don't really work on the level every day or even once a week. But I would like to be able to map faster.

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The speed at which a map can be completed depends on a number of factors (some of which you've already identified):

    1. Availability of reasonable blocks of time to map (e.g., after work/school, weekends, etc.)
    2. Size of map
    3. Amount of resource work required (e.g., new textures, enemies, etc.)
    4. Amount of detail that's put into the map
    5. Amount of testing that the map undergoes
    6. Native talent of the mapper
    7. Degree of experience of the mapper
    8. Absence of mapper's block (and, vice-versa, degree of inspiration)
One to two months for a "good level" sounds reasonable for a mapper with an average amount of native talent & experience, and who has a full-time job or is a full-time student.

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I made an entire megawad in that time. Not sure if it was any good though as I still haven't really played it.

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If one simply throws down sector upon sector, a level can be done in minutes. If one wants to create a level
which does not look like 1000s already published, that takes some degree of imagination and artistry.

To flesh out the architecture, the gameplay, the geometry of a map takes time and is an ever changing process.
As it is with anything involving ones creativity, there is no end in sight.

Yet, to decide that a map has reached a point at which one is somewhat satisfied with the result, is a highly
personal constraint, and varies from person to person.

After all, the phrase 'It will be done when it's done' carries some meaning.

There is no point in rushing the mapping process.
So, take as long as you want and still have fun doing it.

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Kappes Buur said:

'It will be done when it's done'

This is also a common train of thought used by artists/creators who are just lazy and only work when they're in the mood. ;)

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Fucking eternity. I make first few rooms in one sitting and then can't add anything new for months.

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Khorus said:

I made an entire megawad in that time. Not sure if it was any good though as I still haven't really played it.

Heh, I like that reply. :)

I can spend two hours doing a single room. God only knows how long it would take me to finish a megawad. If I am really motivated and have the time, I can do quite a lot of work, but I tend to obsess over texture alignment etc too much.

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I found that the more time I was willing to give to a map, the more likely I wasn't ever going to finish it. All the maps I've completed were intentionally done over a short period of time. I guess it's a mental thing, by convincing myself I didn't have a lot of time I forced myself to be motivated.

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It really depends on how I feel, as ReX said with the main reasons, it depends on what you're creating.

For most of the Doom mappers here (original Doom/2/final), it's relatively a few days to a week for 1 map or in 8 hours if 40oz.
If you like playing other peoples maps but into Doom 64 editing, it's one hell of a process. ETA of map varies 5days to 1 week and a half or longer due to complexity*. >_<

Complexity = the Macro/Scripting.. The mechanics of the level.

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Depends on the mapper. I, for one, generally take long enough on a map that the time counter wraps around into the negatives, which usually results in me having finished the map before ever starting it.

Time is weird.

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I try not to take more than 4 days with mine. I can speedmap reasonably quickly, but if I take longer with it, the quality usually suffers more, oddly.

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As most everyone has said already, mapping speed really depends on a multitude of factors; the skill involved, the type of map your making, etc. It's hard to really pin down an average time frame. For example, I've spent anywhere from a couple of hours to half a year on a singular map :P

If you want to get faster at mapping (without needlessly sacrificing quality), then I suggest you try out some speedmapping. Set yourself a time goal and try to make a map within that limit. The speed map doesn't even have to be good. Personally, after doing a bunch of 32in24 sessions, I found that my overall mapping speed (and quality) improved quite a bit.

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I feel one of the reasons I don't map quickly is because I map as I go along, trying to make each room unique or put some thought into each room, like "what would make this room special" or "why would this room be here in terms of the real world". I recently just finished a space station level, where one can actually walk out in space but other than that one section of the level everything else was created on the spot. Maybe I just need to write some ideas out on paper first before I start. But I'll be trying out that speed mapping technique Mechadon mentioned soon.

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I've been working on the same map for close to six months. There hasn't been much progress. I built the foundation in a normal time frame, but the progress since has been slow. I'm desperate for SIZZLING INSPIRATION, but it doesn't come, and I want to make it as perfect as I can. I make new rooms, and then decide that the location doesn't make sense, so I try something else instead. I work out a layout, and then I question if it's the best possible layout.

I just hope the result isn't mediocre.

I'm working on my final Doom project where I want to really tap all of the potential that is available with Doom, GZDoom, the incredible amounts of graphical and other resources, both in Doom and on the internet, and make something that totally blows the player away.

The player is always left with some impression after playing a Wad, or a game or seeing a movie or whatever. I really want to make that a surprisingly pleasant and overwhelming impression.

We'll see!

Maybe I will just can the project eventually. lol :) That'd be following the footsteps of countless Doom project in true form :)

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If I don't get a map made in 2-3 days (usually somewhere between 10-18 hours) then it probably isn't getting done. So I'd say about that for me. Does depend on map size, my level of enthusiasm and the amount of free time I have in one block though. Vanilla or limit-removing maps get done quicker than those with advanced features and scripting too, as a general rule of thumb.

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If you're having trouble making maps at a reasonable speed, here are some tips that will help you. (This is assuming you use Doom Builder 2)

1. Learn the Shortcuts! - Doombuilder is loaded with tons of little hotkeys and stuff. Take the time to look under Tools > Preferences and click on the Controls tab to see what all the keys do. Almost every letter on the keyboard does something.

While in Visual Mode:

- Selecting a texture with the middle mouse button will copy a texture, every wall you right click on will paste that texture. If you hold shift and select a wall with middle mouse button, it will paste the texture on that wall, and all adjacent walls that share the same texture, so you can change what the whole room looks like in one click. Think of it like the Paint Bucket tool in MS Paint.

- U and L change the Upper and Lower unpegged properties of a line, which will save you precious time vertically aligning textures yourself. You can also use R to reset a texture's offsets back to 0,0 and A to autoalign all adjacent textures (autoalign isn't bad if you use it correctly!)

- You can change floor heights by pointing your crosshair at the floor and scrolling up and down with the mousewheel. If you hold shift, you can adjust the floor heights by one mp at a time. If you hold ctrl while scrolling, you can change the light level of the sector. This can be handy with practicing light gradients.

While editing:

- The significance of Brightness Mode is that you can quickly adjust the light levels of a sector by right clicking on a sector and dragging your cursor up and down to change the light level. This works especially effectively in conjunction to changing your view to view Brightness Levels.

- You can use the bracket keys ([, and ]) to adjust the size of the grid. You can do this in the middle of drawing a sector too. If you need to, you can also hold shift while drawing a sector to temporarily turn off "Snap to Grid" which lets you place vertices freely without being magnetized to the grid.

- Holding Ctrl while drawing sectors will draw "cut-out" sectors, which delete the region of the sector you're drawing in. This can be used if you wanted to say, create a pillar as a centerpiece of a large room. If at any time you do draw out a cut-out section, you can select the enclosed area using the the "Make Sectors" mode to change it back into a sector, so that you can select it.

- It can also be very beneficial to memorize the numbers of the most common linedef actions. 1 is repeatable doors, 117 is fast repeatable doors, 97 is repeatable walkover teleports, 62 is repeatable lifts, 88, is repeatable walkover lifts.

2. Use Doombuilder's Features! - Doombuilder has a few things that can make mapping super fast and easy, but only if you know what they do and use them right (so it's not blatantly obvious you map entirely with Doom Builder effects)

- It may be beneficial to instead of working on a serious map, just open up Doombuilder and practice with the effects until you can get a feel for what they do and how they are used.

- Autoalign is a super handy tool, but usually only works it's best on jagged areas that use large rock textures (where autoalign abuse is forgiven or hard to notice), or small sectors with 90 degree angles. I usually use it for crates or 32x32 METAL2 pillars. Usually if you have piles of crates and things sitting under changes in ceiling height, your objects will have a lot of vertices on them which will probably muck up the alignments. Usually resetting one of the faces of a crate's offsets to 0,0 (by pressing R on it in Visual Mode) and pressing A will leave the selected texture's offsets unchanged, and all adjacent linedefs adjusted to align to that texture. Since crates usually all have 64 width faces, all the textures should be perfectly aligned on all the crates. Autoaligning an already misaligned texture will make the alignments on all the textures messed up.

- Stair gradients are troublesome to use, because if they aren't used right, you'll get a bunch of stairs with uneven floor heights. However, if you know how to make one good set of stairs, you can use some math to get a good set of stairs with the stair gradient tool every time. My general rule of thumb, is if you have one room where the floor height is at 0, and another where the floor height is at 128, you need 7 sectors worth of stairs drawn between them in order to get a nice set of 16 height steps. Select all nine sectors; the seven steps, the 0 height floor, and the 128 height floor and click on Make Floor Gradient. For every 128 units higher you want the stairs to go, add 8 more sectors of steps in between.

- Light gradients are done the same way, but less noticeable by the player if the light levels aren't a steady even 16 units apart. Usually it's best to start with a tiny circular sector drawn under a light source, such as a torch. Set the tiny sector's brightness as high as you want and continue drawing larger circles surrounding it. Then select all the circles and the sector that outlines the room it's in and press the light gradient tool. Remember that lighting effects are much more noticeable to the player on walls than on the floors.

- Prefabs are highly underated. Instead of using them for highly detailed things that would be annoying to draw on your own, use prefabs for basic shapes! I usually use prefabs for general rooms, such as squares, rectangles, T's, L's, X,s, diamonds, octagons, etc. I usually select the vertices and drag them around so that it's not too noticeable that all the rooms are repeating shapes.

- Curve Linedefs are a handy feature for creating rounded spiral staircases and rounded corners. I'm still getting used to this so it's hard give any useful tips yet, but don't ever be afraid to use this. You might want to stick to a lower vertice count though so it's not embarrassingly obvious that you didn't draw it yourself.

3. Try different map making methods! - You may be playing Doom one day, see a room that gives you inspiration to map, open up Doombuilder, get started on something that ends up looking unlike what you expected and get discouraged from continuing the map. Maybe these tips will help you out.

- Get inspiration from layouts -- not rooms. It's easy to see a room you really like and try to recreate it in your map editor. Once it's done... now what? You're much better off wanting to create an entire map as a whole instead of a single room.

- Save EVERYTHING you make! Sometimes it's fun to attach two unfinished maps together to make one big map. Go through your old stuff regularly to see if you can make anything of it. I have unfinished maps in my folders from years ago, and just today I picked one up and decided to polish it off. Nothing is completely unsalvagable.

- Try mapping in reverse. Start with an exit room, create the final battle, then some locked doors, then the key rooms for the locked doors, the room where you get the first shotgun, and then the starting room. You get to do all the fun parts first and then move on to the easy parts.

- Lay out your map first. This is my preferred method. I start by creating a starting room, an exit room, and a bunch of scattered "main rooms" as basic general shapes. It usually helps even further to put a single thing object in it to help indicate what it's for, such as a key, a weapon, a player start or a cyberdemon. This kinda sets up a virtual to-do list, so that it's easy to see at any point in time, what is supposed to happen throughout the entire map. Then you can take the time to figure out how to connect everything together, and finish the map by detailing it on area at a time until the map is finished.

- Can't make any interesting rooms? Try creating big open square rooms, then draw more basic shapes within it, or intersecting it and delete them. So this, becomes this, becomes this. Okay it's not that great of an example but it did create something kinda id-like and looks much better than what I started with.

Hopefully this stuff helps :)

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Very interesting 40oz I didnt know the middle mouse button in visual mode thing, and I've recently started on creating a section of the level from the end (which connects to the room I began in) and then slowly I'm filling in the gaps...seems to be good for this part, and also it switches things up. I feel like I stop mapping sometimes just because I've gotten bored with the method.

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A long time - unless I do it for someone else... approx. 5-7 days.

Good tips 40oz.

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Couple of things I didn't know there 40oz, thanks. "shift" + "A" will auto-align things vertically too, which is very helpful in maps with plenty of ceiling height variation.

Doubt any of those tips will speed me up much, as my actual mapping technique tends to be pretty quick anyway. It's just maintaining motivation that slows me down :P

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Memfis said:

Fucking eternity. I make first few rooms in one sitting and then can't add anything new for months.

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Another useful tip in DB2 visual mode is that you can select several lines to then contain an autoalign or floodfill operation to only the selected lines. Surrounding lines will be completely unaffected. This is useful when you want to correct the alignment easily on a small section of wall without worrying about accidentally breaking alignments you set up elsewhere.

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It depends a lot. When I'm able to map for let's say 7-8 hours a day, like in the weekends or holidays (I'm a teacher, so I've got plenty of them), I would finish an average-sized map - of 10-15 minutes of gameplay - in about a week, but that's ONLY when I have inspiration or when I'm in the mood. Sometimes I just don't map for a month and then pick it up again and never stop for several months. But I've also made maps that last over 30 minutes of gameplay and those took me over a month to complete.

I'm currently working on a megaWAD which I started in March 2011 and I've only finished about 12 maps...

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