PSX Doom: The Lost Levels - New Pre-Beta Available courtesy of Salahmander2

[Tristan]

BaronOfStuff said:

Here's some early WIP nonsense of what I'm cutting up and hacking the shit out of for the 'IOS' map:
You can probably guess what I have in mind at this point for this section.

Surely that should be the 'GOH' map?

[BaronOfStuff]

Eris Falling said:

Surely that should be the 'GOH' map?

Nope. It's a compilation of all three MAP30 slots from Doom II and Final Doom, ending with the original IOS section. This is the mid-point too; I started with Last Call.

EDIT:

Everything's in one map and the original triggers have been sorted out and reworked, as has all the retexturing. Now it's all that coloured light stuff along with various other tweaks and reductions...

[Dragonsbrethren]

Updated versions of all my maps:

Bloodsea Keep (MAP01)
Power Control (MAP74)
Well of Souls (MAP85)

Playing through Final Doom again, I can't help but wonder if I went overboard with simplifying these. (Then again, Final Doom ran horribly, so it'd probably be for the better if we could target the original engine.)

I also claimed Caged (Plutonia MAP04) for myself.

[Gez]

BaronOfStuff said:

Everything's in one map and the original triggers have been sorted out and reworked, as has all the retexturing. Now it's all that coloured light stuff along with various other tweaks and reductions...

I see the TNT teleport puzzle has been greatly simplified. :D

[Nuxius]

Added a section to my initial post, titled "Simplifying 2 sided linedefs", for those who are interested.

BaronOfStuff said:

Another map that might be worthy of consideration for 'conversion' is the PC version of House Of Pain (E3M4); several bits and pieces of it are missing in the PSX map, and the endings to each version are completely different too. I know it's somewhat redundant to bother with, but for shits and giggles it might be worth a look.

On that note...
(to self: holy smokes, it was 2008 when I made that post... o_O)


Levels made so far:
I have Power Control, Baron's Den, The Castle and Well of Souls downloaded (your Bloodsea Keep link returns a 404, Dragonsbrethren). Looking forward to giving them a run through.

Dragonsbrethren, since Power Control is a relatively small map, I'll run through it here in a bit and try to get back to you sometime later tonight with my thoughts about the map.

[BaronOfStuff]

Gez said:

I see the TNT teleport puzzle has been greatly simplified. :D

Oh, that bastard had to go!

I was toying with the idea of reducing it to a 9x9 grid needing a specific path across all tiles (with all teleports throwing players to the start of the map as opposed to killing them -- can you imagine how many hours could possibly be spent seeing [LOADING] on the PSX if they were telefrags?), but scrapped it after having to run across it with every test run started getting tedious.

I may put it back though once everything else is finalised, as it wasn't really that bad as a tweaked map feature.

[Gez]

There is a precedent for teleport puzzles in PSX with The Mansion.

[Devalaous]

I hope the IOS part is getting a masssive retexturing. The original was horrible and would be pure cheese no matter what atmosphere the PSX version gives, ESPECIALLY coming out of the Plutonia finale I even edited the map myself one time just to make it more hellish. The ONE time I could actually use an editor :D

Maybe you could put the deathmatch-only part of Gateway of Hell into the level, edited of course, to add more substance to that bit?

[BaronOfStuff]

Ragnor said:

I hope the IOS part is getting a masssive retexturing. The original was horrible and would be pure cheese no matter what atmosphere the PSX version gives

It's being massively retextured to look a lot less like a pile of randomly-textured unmatching shit, yes. It's even having the central column gimmick reworked into something I'm attempting to make fun as opposed to tedious -- the default 'raise by 512' and resulting Elevator Action finale just isn't workable with the new sector height changes anyway, and let's be honest, it's bit of a crap way to end a map, and with it the game.

Ragnor said:
Maybe you could put the deathmatch-only part of Gateway of Hell into the level, edited of course, to add more substance to that bit? [/B]

I did think about using this somewhere, but came to the conclusion that it wouldn't really add much to the level. I can take another look at finding a way to place it, but shoe-horning that section in for the sake of padding out what's already a considerably large map seems a bit unnecessary.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Nuxius said:

(your Bloodsea Keep link returns a 404, Dragonsbrethren).

Sorry about that, fixed.

Nuxius said:

Dragonsbrethren, since Power Control is a relatively small map, I'll run through it here in a bit and try to get back to you sometime later tonight with my thoughts about the map.

Cool, thanks. After reading your latest addition, I might have to update these again to add some of the vertices I removed, heh.

[BaronOfStuff]

A couple of lazy screenshots of the retexturing/redesigning currently going on in the IOS chamber:

http://imageshack.us/a/img89/9016/iosai.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img818/1917/iosb.png

Ignore that stack of platformy shit in the middle, that's me fucking around with ideas.

[BlueFireZ88]

Romero would be proud.

[neubejiita]

I am using gzdoom 1.6.0 to play this mod and the status bar will not show. I have the psx final doom hud pk3 file and I am running the PSXDOOM.BAT file to run this and I just get HOM where the status bar should be. Is there a fix for this? I am using ATI drivers and I have a Radeon HD6670 on Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

[Dragonsbrethren]

No idea. We're targeting 1.6.0, it should work fine. You're not loading an outdated copy of psxdoom.pk3, are you? Like, really old, before the Final Doom content was added? If not, does it work fine without the Final Doom hud elements loaded?

[neubejiita]

Dragonsbrethren said:

No idea. We're targeting 1.6.0, it should work fine. You're not loading an outdated copy of psxdoom.pk3, are you? Like, really old, before the Final Doom content was added? If not, does it work fine without the Final Doom hud elements loaded?

I got it to work; I installed it into a clean empty folder and everything works. It must have been something else in the folder confusing it.

One thing I have noticed is that in the Master Levels map "Attack" you can not drop down on top of the exit switch and activate it from the back of the switch linedef like you could in the PSX engine. Apparently switch textures could be activated from both sides of the linedef. But that would require a re-write of Gzdoom to duplicate.

[Gez]

neubejiita said:

But that would require a re-write of Gzdoom to duplicate.

Not at all.

[neubejiita]

Gez said:

Not at all.

Well, then it would be a good thing to implement into the TC; then it would have one more feature that the PSX engine has. This is very useful in Barons Lair; you can activate switches early and get bonuses in the starting room.

Btw; how do you implement this in Gzdoom?

[BaronOfStuff]

Ehhh, I'm not sure it should be an option. It's a bug with the PSX engine, not an actual feature of the game.

[Gez]

neubejiita said:

Btw; how do you implement this in Gzdoom?

Set "firstsideonly" to false.
http://zdoom.org/wiki/Linedef

[Nuxius]

Alright, finally found some time to run through both Well of Souls and Power Control.

Well of Souls looks great, honestly can't see anything I would change about it. (well, except for adding some of those linedefs back, of course. ;) Sorry I forgot about that in my original post, would have saved you the time.)

Moving onto Power Control, I have a couple of suggestions for this one. I think the windows in the central courtyard could exist, they would just need to be shrunk down.



Shrinking them like this keeps the gameplay mostly the same while blocking view of all the teleporters in the central room.

I'd also pull back on the transparent windows a bit; for the ones in the central courtyard, leave the ones on the outside linedef alone and delete the ones on the inside linedef. For the blue key area, keep the set closest to the diamond shaped hallway and delete the ones in the central room. See the imp pens in the crusher room in "The Crusher" for reference.

Some lighting suggestions (do whatever you want with these):
I'd get rid of the blue lighting strips in the central courtyard and just make them yellow like everything else is.



For the yellow key area here, I'd cut back on the yellow lighting to just a 64*64 square around the yellow key itself (like the yellow and blue keys in "Computer Station", for reference). You'll probably have to either move the lightcasts around or move the yellow key to the back corner to do this. IMO, the monster cage that opens up here is screaming for a rapid flashing light.

For the blue key area, I'd make the whole diamond shaped hallway blue.

I think that covers everything.

Now that Christmas is over with, hopefully I'll have some time to go through some of the other maps before I start work again.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely consider some of that. On transparent windows specifically, I only really looked at MAP03 as an example, which uses the window texture on both sides.

Edit: I kind of slacked on Caged this week on account of the holiday, but it's nearly done. I did want to get your opinion on what I did with the starting area. I put in some walls to block line of site between each of the four sections. I was actually getting VPO warnings and drawseg HOMs in Chocorenderlimits after adjusting the sector heights in this area, so I figured reducing the amount of geometry visible would be a good idea.

Original
Edit

[Avoozl]

When I was doing the conversion to Baron's Den I remembered that the map that comes after and before it in the original TNT were included in psx final doom, the one before was using the E3 sky and the one after was using the flame sky so I decided to use the E3 sky as I thought it would be best for it, I don't know if that was a good decision though.

Also for Caribbean I'm not so sure which sky would be apropriate for it as the original red cloud sky isn't in psxfindoom, I didn't think the E3 sky would be best for it because of the mountains so I decided maybe to use the E4 or psxfindoom night sky, perhaps the night sky would be best.

Also regarding the updates to the previous maps I have done, I won't be able to upload any any time soon as my sim card for the phone I tethered for internet failed to register, I had to get a new sim but it won't give free net via tethering like the last one so I can only use it directly, I hope to get a better net sometime soon so I can continue to upload any updates to the maps. I'm sorry about this.

[Devalaous]

For what its worth, I vote night sky for Carribean. Change its atmosphere to a peaceful night on vacation gone horribly wrong..

[BlueFireZ88]

I think this was brought up before, but never given a definite answer:

Were the levels from "No Rest For the Living" going to be considered for this Lost Level set, or are we just sticking to the levels already listed?

[Avoozl]

Well this was meant mainly for the levels left out of the psx versions of Doom & Doom 2 and Final Doom, NRFTL was not in the orignal Doom 2, however I guess they could be considered if everybody really wants to do them.

[BlueFireZ88]

It's up to you guys if you want to do it. I'd figure it just be interesting to see them in PSX style.

[fenderc01]

I don't have a problem with it, although I think it should be kept separate.

EDIT:
I didn't realize it was released so recently. I'm going to agree with Dragonsbrethren on this one.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I personally have no interest in porting No Rest for the Living over. Both because it's relatively new and because the levels are way too detailed to do believable conversions of them without completely stripping them down.

[Brewtal_Legend]

Probably not likely, but it would be pretty awesome to see some/all levels from No Rest for the Living remade in this psx style.

Or even Doom 64 levels. Just the levels not all the new enemy, weapon, and enemy sprites.

[Death Egg]

Sorry about this but I'm going to have to give up my slot. Shouldn't of taken it in the first place, but basically I have no time to do anything on it because I'm fairly busy nowadays. No work was done so I have nothing to upload for someone else to take over.