Favourite map editing tricks?

[Katamori]

Do you have any favourite mapping tricks? If yes, what's that?

[Obsidian]

Instant sectors: they're used in 3D bridges, faux sliding doors, breakable walls, heaps of stuff! They're just extremely versatile and only really limited to your imagination.

[mrthejoshmon]

Mixing light variations with height variations (typically higher = darker):

Clashing textured pillars to highlight important exits/entrances:

Overlapping rock textures in corridors to say "This shit collapsed":

Waterfalls made of more than just 1 sector (To make it look all rocky ans shit underneath):

Sudden dark areas to hide enemies:



EDIT: MOAR TECHNIQUES:

Thin door sized lifts instead of doors.

Hide enemies in computer terminals that are indented into the side of the wall so you can't see them from the side and then have them open later in the map so when you backtrack you get ambushed (Best is lost souls so you don't hear them).

Holding SHIFT when making natural geometry (as long as you hold it, the grid id no longer your boundaries).

The curve tool for corners.

The curve tool for pillars.

Rips in the wall revealing SP_FACE textures (Or similar Flesh textures) in hell maps.

Chaingunners up high to piss people off :3

Revenants in "W1 Door Open Stay (Fast)" traps to also piss people off.

Mancubuses in areas where they cannot move to far to avoid them shooting the floor/ceiling (And to stop them locking people).

Hell Knight "Squads" (3 or 4 of them) led by a Baron of Hell.

Imp "Squads" (5 or 6) led by a Hell Knight.

Zombies flooding corridors, it is fun to mow them down.

Archvile traps that teleport an Archvile into the piles of dead demons (See my SUBBSE.wad for the DMP2013).

As the levels/megawad progress, replace Imps with Hell Knights as main enemies.

As the Levels/megawad progress, replace Zombiemen with Shotgunners and Shotgunners with Chaingunners as main enemies.

Have 1 or 2 Specters in Demon hordes (They blend right in and you will sometimes miss them for a surprise amount of damage).

Flat is better than crap, square is better than all kinds of fucked up and no lighting is better than fucked up lighting.

Don't auto align odd angles, split the linedef and shift the texture until it looks like just 1 or 2 textures.

Trees go outdoors or in Incubators, not in houses without some weird ass 90's style myhouse.wad feel.

Pillars are great side decorations, green ones with the occasional beating heart pillar between them also adds either a great secret or some visual variety (Same with red pillars and red skull pillars).

Taller pillars on the outside of pillar rows, smaller pillars on inside.

LAVA or FIRE textures make great furnace/fireplace textures when used right.

I use MARBFACE either in 8 Wide and 128 long or a 128 wide cube.

GSTGARG is a great little addition to any marble room if you lower and upper unpeg the texture and only use the actual face block.

48 is the length of the first COMPSTA terminal, remember that.

Invisibility pickups can do more harm than good against Projectile enemies however it is great against hitscan enemies.

[40oz]

I don't use it often but I love when self referencing sectors are used to make invisible floors or stairs. I'm also a big fan of sinking the floor or ceiling so that the light change is only on the ceiling or only on the floor, to simulate light coming from a direct source. Also changing the light levels on both sides of a middle texture to keep it from bleeding through the floor.

[plums]

40oz said:

Also changing the light levels on both sides of a middle texture to keep it from bleeding through the floor.

Oh nice, I didn't know about this. Thanks!

[Obsidian]

plums said:

Oh nice, I didn't know about this. Thanks!

Neither: I'd just use a similar looking texture. This is much simpler!

[Katamori]

40oz said:

I don't use it often but I love when self referencing sectors are used to make invisible floors or stairs.

I could never understand: how these self-referencing sectors work? How to do them and why they work as they work?

Also changing the light levels on both sides of a middle texture to keep it from bleeding through the floor.

That's a kind of expectation for me; I mean, since I work a lot (~almost always) with either Boom or Vanilla compatibility, I have to use it all the time.

[scifista42]

40oz said:

Also changing the light levels on both sides of a middle texture to keep it from bleeding through the floor.

The downside is, when a player picks up Light Amplification Goggles, the effect (temporarily) stops working.

I don't use it often but I love when self referencing sectors are used to make invisible floors or stairs.

Same for me, that must be my favourite trick. I like to use self-referencing sectors for invisible blocking structures, to raise decorations in the air and such.

How to make self-referencing sector? Create a sector inside another sector. Completely inside - it shouldn't share any linedefs with other sectors. Select linedefs making this inner sector, and look at their Sidedefs tab. You can see that they have assigned front and back sector index. Manually change the index numbers so both of them refer to the inner sector. Now you have a self-referencing sector, which will appear as invisible ingame, but collision with it will behave normally. Rough explanation why does it work so: The front/back sector index of the linedefs is used by Doom engine's rendering code. If you change them, you confuse the code. It will never detect that the sector should be rendered. But the sector is still there, and collision code doesn't rely on these indexes, therefore it normally blocks things.

[Kappes Buur]

Where maps usually have a sector, as a window for example, with a large brightness value,
I don't see many which have a bright patch on the wall itself.

[plums]

scifista42 said:

The downside is, when a player picks up Light Amplification Goggles, the effect (temporarily) stops working.

Actually, it doesn't. The display of the light levels doesn't seem to matter, just that having two different light levels keeps the engine from making textures show through the ceiling or floor, for whatever reason. Even two different values > 255 works, though both light levels look exactly the same.

Anyone have a technical explanation?

[scifista42]

^Oh, you're right! I was sure I've seen it not working, but after a quick test I just did it seems I was wrong. Thanks.

A technical explanation would be really neat.

[Jayextee]

Katamori said:

Do you have any favourite mapping tricks?

Dummy sectors to control the effect of floor movements. Can't get enough of them.

[40oz]

If you can call it a trick, merging two disconnected sectors so that the sound properties in one take place in another, so you don't have to use little sound tunnels for a teleport ambush like in e1m9.

[wesleyjohnson]

Technical explanation of why different light levels work:
There is an explicit test to determine if two adjacent sectors can be merged into a common flat draw. What is tested in that statement has been expanded a few times, including adding checks for the light levels.
Any difference, like texture, height, will prevent the merge.

When two sectors get merged into a common draw, there is no wall edge to clip the middle texture, so it gets drawn badly over the floor.

[Katamori]

40oz said:

If you can call it a trick, merging two disconnected sectors so that the sound properties in one take place in another, so you don't have to use little sound tunnels for a teleport ambush like in e1m9.

That's also a kind of expectation for me. When I created Katamori 1024, I couldn't do sound tunnels because of the lack of places, so I uesd joined sectors.

I kept this habid, IMO works way better than the silly sound tunnels.

[Memfis]

Sound tunnels can be cool too sometimes, like you notice a little hole in the wall so you know that sooner or later there will be a monster ambush but when? Fun for suspense maybe.

[purist]

I sometimes still use sound tunnels for this reason. Plus I like that the place the monster warp from as actually attached to the map for some reason.

[Fellowzdoomer]

Make the main path first then add side paths and secrets later.

[mrthejoshmon]

I create the entire map first, then add monsters.

[FireFish]

-> manually balancing brightness levels.
using a small amount of sectors to
make sure that light somewhat looks like light. The problem is
keeping it vanilla limit compatible with larger maps.

-> play testing after every medium or big update.
i want the levels to have enough ammo and health but
not to much to keep some tension.

-> add a trap door triggered by an linedef just far enough
that you do not hear it, and get shot in the back. ;)

[Xegethra]

scifista42 said:

How to make self-referencing sector? Create a sector inside another sector. Completely inside - it shouldn't share any linedefs with other sectors. Select linedefs making this inner sector, and look at their Sidedefs tab. You can see that they have assigned front and back sector index. Manually change the index numbers so both of them refer to the inner sector. Now you have a self-referencing sector, which will appear as invisible ingame, but collision with it will behave normally. Rough explanation why does it work so: The front/back sector index of the linedefs is used by Doom engine's rendering code. If you change them, you confuse the code. It will never detect that the sector should be rendered. But the sector is still there, and collision code doesn't rely on these indexes, therefore it normally blocks things.

I think....I think I accidentally created one of these in my map. Not knowing what a self referencing sector really is. In my furnace I have in level 3 it had this bit at the back which looked normal...until the floor lowered when you are on it....you would see bleed through of the floor in the self referencing sector as you went under it. Also if you walked to it you would get blocked and couldn't get into that part of the room. It was meant to be a big open room but I didn't know how to fix it properly and luckily this sector was on the edge of the furnace so I just deleted it and changed the furnace shape.

The whole thing was helped along by the fact that there were a few sectors in this room so I could pop in a lot of texture variety to make it looks like a futuristic furnace...whatever that would look like. And one of them became self referencing.

Old versions of my map up for download still have it, I didn't know I had accidentally created a sector using a technique....If I load up an old version, perhaps I could look at what how it was made and maybe start using it deliberately.

I'm not very technique savvy but thanks to these forums I have managed to pull of some moves, like that Shadowcasting one for example.

[Phobus]

I quite enjoy using extra vertices on lines to alter the appearance of a texture (stretching parts, for example) although the drawback is that you get some repetition in the patterns depending on what you're doing.

Another one I commonly use is rather than having a pillar or wall be hollow, make it a 0-height sector with every line hidden, except for the wall one, which is flagged secret. This appears normal on the automap, but lets you stack two textures (or three, if you make it taller than 0 and make sure it's impassible - shots will go through still, though), which can be handy for tall areas that don't want vertical repetition. Doesn't work too well if you're playing around will offsets though.

[peach freak]

I'm a big fan of the "insta-drop" trick, which is used to make a sector lower (or raise) immediately rather than gradually. For example, using "Floor Lower to Highest Floor" to make the sector immediately move upwards instead of downwards.

Also, one of my maps has a pool, in which you walk in, the pool "drains" (Floor Lower to Lowest Floor (Changes Texture)). Using dummy sectors, the water is drained into a staircase that goes into a hidden room. Has to be my favorite thing I've ever made in any of my maps.

[Obsidian]

Exploding walls.

This one I discovered while making my speedmaps.

-Set the linedef you're using to Floor Raise to 8 below Lowest Ceiling(Crushes).

-Raise the bit of wall you want blown up to the ceiling.

-Link it to a dummy sector that has a ceiling height 8 above the floor height you want the wall to drop to.

-Create a sector with a low ceiling, tag it and put a barrel inside it. Feel free to have several of these for a louder noise.

When you activate the linedef, the wall will instantly lower to the ground and the barrels will be crushed, creating a loud bang. You could possibly have barrels teleporting in, but some source ports don't get it quite right.

EDIT: Plums found a strange bug: if the barrel-crushing sectors aren't at least 42 units high, undefined behavior appears in random sections of the map. One of the weirder bugs I've seen.

[mouldy]

I've become addicted to monster triggered linedef actions. Having a wandering monster outside the map whose path is controlled by which route the player took or which order they did things so that it triggers different events depending on how you played the map. I also like using this for random and timed events.

Also recently discovered boom actions 213 and 261 for lighting floors and ceilings independently from the walls and each other.

[Obsidian]

mouldy said:

I've become addicted to monster triggered linedef actions. Having a wandering monster outside the map whose path is controlled by which route the player took or which order they did things so that it triggers different events depending on how you played the map. I also like using this for random and timed events.

Something I like to do is have a lift that you need all 3 keys to activate: just have a Lost Soul floating around in a separate sector with WR Lift Lower Wait Raise and 3 doors cutting it off. I used it in MAP04 and MAP06 of Into the Code.

[mouldy]

Obsidian said:

Something I like to do is have a lift that you need all 3 keys to activate: just have a Lost Soul floating around in a separate sector with WR Lift Lower Wait Raise and 3 doors cutting it off. I used it in MAP04 and MAP06 of Into the Code.

Of course the downside is that you can't test the map with nomonsters...

[Obsidian]

mouldy said:

Of course the downside is that you can't test the map with nomonsters...

Yeah, that is rather unfortunate. It works in vanilla though, which is always cool. :)

[scifista42]

Obsidian said:

It works in vanilla though, which is always cool. :)

That reminds me of a trick I've discovered years ago and used in MAP19 of Doom 2 In Name Only. The trick allows to have a door that automatically open and stay opened after a certain monster (or group of monsters) is killed. In vanilla. I think it's relevant for this discussion, so I'm crossposting the trick from the D2INO thread.

1. Have a monster in a sector.
2. The sector has an inside sector.
3. The inside sector has as low ceiling as is the monster's height.
4. Because the ceiling has SKY1 texture, nobody will notice.
5. Have the inside sector joined with a dummy sector.
6. The dummy sector has another floor two units above the sector's floor (one unit didn't seem to be enough).
7. Player [somewhere] triggers a W1 Floor Raise to Next Higher Floor, attached to our inside+dummy sector.
8. The monster (with its height) blocks the floor movement, but the action will continue trying to raise the floor.
9. Later (whenever), player eventually kills the monster.
10. The floor below it raises 2 units.
11. The joined dummy sector floor raises with it.
12. The dummy sector contains a dummy monster.
13. As the floor raised a little, dummy monster can now step in a teleporter prepared by the dummy sector.
14. Dummy monster teleports to another dummy sector.
15. The other dummy sector contains a dummy door.
16. The dummy door sector is joined with a real door somewhere in the map.
17. Monster opens the dummy door (DR action).
18. The door opens as much as is the dummy monster's height.
19. Then the monster walks or gets teleported under the dummy door and block it with its body, so the dummy door doesn't close.
20. The joined real door open along with the dummy door, and stay open as well.
21. Later (whenever), the player enters the real door and does what he needs to.
22. He unknowingly triggers a (W1) Floor Lower line action on his way.
23. In a sector next to the dummy door sector, a floor will lower, path will be opened and the dummy monster leaves its position.
24. The dummy monster teleports to the map and fights the player.
25. Several seconds later, the dummy door (and the real door) closes. Thankfully, the player won't need to re-enter the area anymore, or he can open it from inside.

The trick also works only thanks to the monsters involved. Apologizes if my explanation is hard to follow, I'm afraid I can't do better.

[MathsDevil]

One favourite of mine is that when the player drops down into a particular pit or lower room you may want a certain W1 or WR linedef to activate. However, if you make the edge of the pit the linedef, the player can 'lean over' the edge and activate the line without dropping down into the pit.
So, you put the linedef with the action exactly 16 units past the edge. Then the action can never be activated by 'leaning over' but will activate when the player drops into the pit, even if they do so very gently.

If anyone would like I could use this thread to describe how some of my more elaborate mechanisms work, such as that in my first upload, 'SuicIIde.wad'

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/s-u/suiciide.zip