Experienced WadAuthor user question

[40oz]

I've been bouncing back and forth between WadAuthor and Doombuilder 2 in an attempt to expand my horizons. I'm hoping I can learn to use WadAuthor as fast as I use Doombuilder 2 but I don't think it's going to happen. Doombuilder 2 tends to know exactly what you're trying to do even if you don't have much experience in getting your hands dirty with the technical specifics, while WadAuthor needs a little more attention.

A tricky thing I have been trying to work with in WadAuthor is that I tend to design my levels with seperate isolated rooms, and then connect the rooms together with halls and doorways and stuff. Generating basic shapes with WadAuthor is a piece of cake, and works really fast in that respect, which is perfect for the kind of mapping style I have. Faster than Doombuilder 2 even. The tricky part I have with it is that I have a hard time joining these rooms together with halls, doorways, and windows.

I split the linedefs in my rooms and position them where I want, then I generate the rectangle doorway/hall/window and shape it to the size I want so it will fit in between. Then I go to linedefs mode and move the lines to connect them at the vertices. WadAuthor asks me if I want to join the linedefs, then I say yes. Sometimes it works but usually the result is that either one or both of the lines that were joined don't get changed to two-sided and their sector reference changes to -1. I can select these lines and change their sector reference manually by going to line properties, but it only lets me choose the sector reference for the front side of the line, which is annoying because the back doesn't appear to be referred to the sector behind it either. So I need to hit OK, right click on the line and select flip (there's no shortcut key for that by the way) then change the reference again. Checking the sector numbers so I can refer the lines to the right sectors is really time consuming just to join these sectors together. Any clue what I'm doing wrong? So far I've had the best luck by dragging the individual vertices instead of whole lines, but that doesn't always work either.

I have a feeling that WadAuthor is designed for users to map in a very linear fashion even though it appears to be catered to my kind of mapping methods. And I don't expect to come up with any note-worthy speedmaps with this utility if this keeps happening.

[Bloodshedder]

Select the two lines (or vertices) while holding the shift key and press 'J'.