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

[BaronOfStuff]

If progress on Tombstone has completely halted, I'll take over.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I'm waiting for replies to the PMs I sent out, if I don't hear anything in a few days, I'll mark you down for it.

[Impboy4]

Dragonsbrethren said:

Did you get permission to take over for this map?

Probably not, but then again; the project is 95% done and I haven't seen Nuxius around much anyway.

Among other things, is Dead Zone and Baron's Den going to be finalized anytime soon? They're not bolded.

[RichardDS90]

Impboy4 said:

Among other things, is Dead Zone and Baron's Den going to be finalized anytime soon? They're not bolded.

Ah, Dead Zone has been finalised a while back, I uploaded an unfinished version at the time.

[Avoozl]

I do know I have to fix the level info text in Baron's Den.

[RichardDS90]

Avoozl said:

I do know I have to fix the level info text in Baron's Den.

I think there were some PC textures if I remember right, not sure.

[Dexiaz]

Dragonsbrethren said:

Did you get permission to take over for this map?

No, I didn't. It's rude of me, but "Seven people don't wait one" (russian proverb; possibly not good translation, because I didn't found english equivalent).

I'm sorry that didn't asked him (I have should think about it).

We all have real life, but if you have no time for this, just send a message here and don't make mistakes for other people in team.

[Megamur]

DeXiaZ said:

No, I didn't. It's rude of me, but "Seven people don't wait one" (russian proverb; possibly not good translation, because I didn't found english equivalent).

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Vulcan proverb, but I think that's close to what you were saying. :)

[BaronOfStuff]

Couple of updates in an attempt to get these two maps closer to the 'points limit' pseudo-requirement:
Cyberden V2
Update uses the MAP05 slot, will require FIRESK00 as the sky when compiled with the rest. Track of choice is (obviously) PSXMUS05; secondary would be PSXMUS13.

Go 2 It V2
Now on the MAP04 slot, will also require FIRESK00 for the sky. PSXMUS04 fits this map, if it's overused then go with PSXMUS17.

Bullshit:
Go 2 It still oversteps the limit (by 2.5 points), with the inclusion of Imps as replacements for many smaller fodder-types (Demons, Chaingunners). Without these though, the fighting would be little more than a boring slog through 150 Meatshields. A lot of stuff had to go in order to even come close to an acceptable score here (down from a colossal 72!), and not everything could be substituted well either. For extra fun (and in an attempt to scale difficulty accordingly), much of the Cell Pack items have also been erased. You really won't need most of the ammo provided at all.

Cyberden on the other hand fits in nicely now with a comfortable 24.5 points, at the expense of Demons and Revenants which are now replaced with Imps and Hellknights respectively. The monster variety used here is almost identical to that of Tricks And Traps.

Megamur said:

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Vulcan proverb, but I think that's close to what you were saying. :)

Suitably logical; typically Vulcan.

[Dragonsbrethren]

DeXiaZ said:

No, I didn't. It's rude of me, but "Seven people don't wait one" (russian proverb; possibly not good translation, because I didn't found english equivalent).

I'm sorry that didn't asked him (I have should think about it).

We all have real life, but if you have no time for this, just send a message here and don't make mistakes for other people in team.

I know you're anxious to get this done, but I just think Nuxius deserves a little more respect than that. He was pretty much the one that established the actual hard limits for this project and brought up all the technical information about the PSX renderer that none of us knew about. He also said he'd upload his maps, so his conversion and yours might be different. You should've tried to get in touch with him is all I'm saying. I'll add your conversion to the OP since he hasn't gotten back in touch with me yet and the forum doesn't say when he was last on (but his last post was only 5 days ago). If he does post his version, I'd suggest taking a look at it and incorporating his changes.

That said, Cryo or MajorRawne also haven't replied. Since Cryo hasn't been on since September, I'm going to remove him from the OP. Feel free to take over for Storage Facility. Rawne was on yesterday and might've missed the PM, so I'll give him a chance to see this message here and reply.

[RichardDS90]

Open Season is up should be on this page or the one before.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Added it, meant to earlier and forgot.

[Devalaous]

Nuxius was also apparently putting in that secret exit to Sewers I suggested, so theres that too. But yeah, if thers one person that we can wait on, its him

[Tristan]

Personally, I would've cut the Cyber from E4M6, like it was cut from E4M2

[Gez]

Contrarily to the E4M2, though, the E4M6 cyber is a core part of the level. (I mean, it's a hardcoded boss slot. You have to kill it to make the exit accessible.)

[Tristan]

I can't argue with that :P My lesser familiarity with the PC maps comes round once again

[Dexiaz]

Dragonsbrethren said:

I know you're anxious to get this done, but I just think Nuxius deserves a little more respect than that. He was pretty much the one that established the actual hard limits for this project and brought up all the technical information about the PSX renderer that none of us knew about. He also said he'd upload his maps, so his conversion and yours might be different. You should've tried to get in touch with him is all I'm saying. I'll add your conversion to the OP since he hasn't gotten back in touch with me yet and the forum doesn't say when he was last on (but his last post was only 5 days ago). If he does post his version, I'd suggest taking a look at it and incorporating his changes.

You're right. Well, I think his version would be better if he post this.

[Megamur]

Crap.

Crap, crap, crap.

I wish I'd thought of this sooner, but I've come up with a fairly effective way of deciding if maps are too detailed for PSX Doom. If you have DOSBox and the original games, open up the configuration file for DOSBox. If you scroll down, you'll see a [cpu] section, and a bit below that, a setting for cycles. I decreased the number of cycles to 25,000, like so:

cycles=fixed 25000

This gives Doom less CPU speed to work with. I compared the sluggish opening room of PSX Doom's Perfect Hatred (Level 25) with PC Doom's (E4M2), and 25,000 cycles seems to emulate the choppiness of the PSX version fairly well.

Now, obviously, the best route would have been to actually edit the levels in vanilla, simplifying the architecture and then loading them up with the CPU-choked DOSBox until it runs at an acceptable framerate, and then converting to Hexen/UDMF for additional editing. Since we're so far into the development, that's probably not very feasible anymore. Still, mappers/testers should consider running through the PC maps with these DOSBox settings to get an idea of where framerate instability was most likely to have occured on the PSX, and then apply alterations to the maps in those sections if they haven't already.

Furthermore, regarding the No Rest for the Living maps, mappers/testers should consider running those levels through ChocoRenderLimits first, as I'm pretty sure those levels would cause visplane overflows in vanilla. After the architecture is simplified to vanilla standards, they can then be stripped down further until they reach PSX standards. In their current state, the NRftL maps are simply far too complex to have ever come close to working on the PlayStation.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I did all my simplifications in ChocoRenderLimits before converting to UDMF. It's why Caged has walls everywhere now; lowering/raising the ceilings/floors actually caused a few VPOs. VPOs shouldn't directly matter on the PSX since it has a completely different renderer, but I figured they were a good enough guideline for when too much was in view at once.

Still, that's an interesting idea on the cycles. It definitely gives another guideline to go by. I still have my unconverted maps that I can test.

Still no response to those PMs, by the way. I'll probably call it tomorrow and remove them from the OP.

Edit: Heh, it's fun playing with this low cycle count and seeing what a difference low detail mode actually makes. I should test my "vanilla compatible" stuff with an appropriate cycle count for a machine of the day from now on.

[Megamur]

The first time I played Doom was on a 386. Low detail mode was utterly essential for Final Doom, and even then, some Plutonia maps were nearly unplayable. That's what gave me the idea about lowering the cycles: remembering how horribly the beginning of Abattoire used to run on my old computer.

[BaronOfStuff]

Megamur said:

The first time I played Doom was on a 386. Low detail mode was utterly essential for Final Doom, and even then, some Plutonia maps were nearly unplayable. That's what gave me the idea about lowering the cycles: remembering how horribly the beginning of Abattoire used to run on my old computer.

It's horror stories like this that made me realise just why some of my friends were so jealous of my 66MHz 486DX2.

[Dexiaz]

Offtop: Yesterday I've seen a another (from many) dream that I'm playing Doom (PSX). Well, the map is like TNT's "Central Processing" (outdoors) and Covert Operations' "Jungle mission".

First I thought that I'm playing BaronOfStuff converted map, but in next moment I understand that I'm playing on PSX emulator, lol.

Don't know, it wasn't really PSX'nish, just outdoor map with colored sectors with PSX music.

I remember all my dreams, but I'm too lazy to do them in Doom Builder (but I was done 2 dream-maps, because they are "easy" to build).

[Deleted_Account]

I had a dream that I was playing PSX Doom: The Lost Levels before the end of 2013!

[Dragonsbrethren]

You can play them now! All but three are in the OP: don't fear the -file parameter! Beta will be soon, if you absolutely must play them continuously, but feedback is always appreciated, so I'd rather people waiting on the project download the maps they want and test them out for us. It's easier to update when everything is stand alone. (Updates to the beta maps will likely be distributed as stand-alone anyway, rather than reupping the entire thing every time something changes.)

I'll say right now that none of my maps are really finalized yet. Megamur gave me some excellent feedback, luckily it won't take too long to get it all implemented.

[Megamur]

Really happy I could help. :)

Also, you might want to amend the Lighting section of the OP with a little reminder for those who're making maps with fire skies: Most of the Ultimate Doom E3 maps in PSX Doom featured 255 max brightness in sectors that had fire skies visible overhead. I've been playing too many maps with fire skies (or that are intended to have fire skies) with oddly dim outdoor sections, so crank up the brightness!

[Avoozl]

I've noticed someone has made maps with th brown sky and brownish-gold lighting in the outdoor areas, none of the original psx doom maps with that sky actually used coloured lighting outdoors like that it was mostly just greyish lighting.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Added the fire sky note to the OP.

And it's been a week with no reply to my PMs, so I guess consider those level slots open. If you guys come across this and do have anything significant done on the maps, post them! I don't care if we already have them covered by that point, you might've done something differently and it's always interesting to see different takes on a map.

[Tristan]

Megamur said:

I've been playing too many maps with fire skies

[BaronOfStuff]

Alright, put me down for Tombstone then. If I have the time after this, I'll give Storage Facility a go.

[Dexiaz]

Ok, I'll take other 2 maps