Forevermore

[Demonologist]

...Is a single map for limit-removing ports with heavy usage of Eternal Doom resources. And since it's a map by me - expect ED's ideals to be shattered, crippled and spit upon because... because. It draws general inspiration from Eternal's works but isn't really about mimicking his style (though there are some small hints on his usual moves in terms of monster placement and such, I guess you know them when you see them).

Screenshot album (I sort of dislike how colorful and cheesy this map looks in glboom+, but oh... visuals are shit anyway, so who cares)

Download link
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/Ports/d-f/frvrmore.zip

Included the standard readme for convenience purposes.

Huge thanks goes to Ribbiks, Phml and dannebubinga for playtesting and lots of really valuable and reasonable feedback, their involvement helped a lot in tweaking various stuff. You guys are awesome, just as always.

Happy suffering. If you're up to it.

[tourniquet]

A pretty decent, sort of medieval themed map. Hard but defnitly managable. The farthest i've made it was the long hallway with the HK's and Arachnotrons.
The variation between crowded fights and rather small groups in certain locations works very well.

Here's an FDA

[Merry Widow]

I think this looks beautiful. Will try it tonight.

[Demonologist]

@ tourniquet: Thanks for the demo, you're quite persistent I must say.
And yes, I like doing pace variations, with some breather encounters taking place between big fights. Brings some variation into otherwise neverending spamming spree which, in itself, isn't a very good thing in my eyes. Well, it actually depends, but still.

@ grouchbag: Good luck!

[mouldy]

I died a lot playing this map, mostly in the first room it felt like, thanks to the chaingunners. In fact I don't think any other part of it gave me as much trouble as that first room. Maybe the arachnotron alley and the final archvile/cyber battle, but with those the deaths felt more like my own fault than from the sweeping curtain of invisible death those chaingunners put out (probably because there was more room to move in those other fights, and moving actually helped). I think my favourite bit was the corridor of spiders and hellknights, very epic scale to that fight with the fireballs and rockets coming in from the distance. Good stuff.

[gggmork]

Nice looking map. Some of the nice looking stuff juts out making it harder to maneuver which is often the case w/ visuals vs gameplay. My fda sucked like usual, especially with some surprise parts that are easier w/ pre-knowledge so recorded over it (everything after central blue/red arena is fda, everything before is uvmax ish). Maybe in a couple places the 'traps you because something takes awhile to lower' could trigger at the same time as the monsters appear, otherwise you might kill all the monsters and only then hit the switch and have to wait w/ no monsters, but doesn't really matter.. you would just have to remember to switch it as soon as it appeared to be fast for uvmax.
http://speedy.sh/uxQCF/frvrmore-fail-ggg.lmp

Spoiler

invisibilities are practically always an anti-powerup making the difficulty harder not easier, as was probably the case w/ the arachnotron hallway (only sometimes good for hitscanners)

[Cupboard]

My FDA, SDA, and TDA were all horrible and not worth posting. Then I turned it down to skill 2 and I made some significant progress. I think by far the make or break moments are the byproduct of nastily-placed chaingunners and shotgun sergeants. They throw in the most random make-or-break moments in the map, considering they are placed up on pillars and spawn when you are never quite ready for them. >:)

IMHO I think this map could use a much longer midi. :P Taking into consideration how much you will die and how long the map is of course.

My only nitpick with this is the degree of architectural symmetry. I realize the rooms themselves have a lot of space to cover and there is a lot of originality in this map, yet I can't help noticing that most rooms seem to be symmetrical; specifically, as you enter a new room and draw an imaginary coordinate plain from the player's POV (in each room), there is symmetry along the y axis.

I feel echoes of dv.wad map03. Mixed with Eternal Doom. Good combination.

[Demon of the Well]

Here are a couple of demos for you. The FDA is named as such, that one comes to an abrupt end in one of those slapstick 'he only hit me because he wasn't trying to' sort of scenarios. I took a rest after it and tried again a bit later, was able to get a first exit (the other demo) after a couple of attempts. My anti-cyber BFGing in that one is beyond pissweak, I warn you....played it safe because I wanted to, well, survive.

Looks to me like your style seems to be shifting a bit. I've played a few of your other maps, most of them in 'Realm of Demonology', and I'm seeing a move away from the giant, flat and very angry boxes with monsters in them (although 'Irreligious' was an interesting and quite challenging subversion of the way maps in that style tend to be played, I'll give you that--those fucking pews!) that characterized much of that WAD to the more structured, conceptualized encounters found here--I quite like the blue key viles/demons fight and the long causeway covered in arachs and hell knights. Still rather flat in the sense that the vertical axis is really only relevant in a small number of the fights here, but I don't think the symmetry hurts this particular map much at all, on the other hand. I've always liked the Eternal texture set, myself, or at least the medieval portion of it, so thematically it suited me just fine. Several of the bigger areas probably could've been sharpened up/lent more visual depth with more big glowering shadows or the like, which might've helped to mitigate a bit of that 'saturated color spam' effect you touched on re: GLBoom.

Main complaint is that I don't much savor plinking away at the cybers on high at a couple of points--just sort of bogs down the pace, and to no small degree. The guy on the plinth at the end of the arach bridge is there for a very good reason, I understand, but....just let me telefrag him or something (or I could've just IGNORED him, I know, I know). The cluster up near the final switch, by contrast, seemed barely relevant at all, and I'm wondering if a big knot of revenants or some more viles might've been a better/more pressuring choice. Oh, and I'm not so sure about the pain elementals on the way to the red key, either...knock one of them out over the pool and he's a royal pain in the ass to deal with, and not the good kind of royal pain in the ass, either.

Anyway, was a solidly entertaining map. I haven't seen your 'Imago Mortis' (named after the Italian black metal band by any chance, or just for the ominous way the phrase rolls off the tongue?) from the current iteration of MAYhem yet, but it's surely in the offing.

[Demonologist]

@ mouldy: Thanks for the feedback! Well, the first battle offers obvious camping opportunities if you want it safer but slower way, but if you choose to fight in the open - be prepared to eat some bullets. Still, this provokes more infighting and helps clearing the place much faster if you're up to taking risks. Bridge is the most adorable part for sure, heh, glad you like it.

@ gggmork: Thanks! Fair points in your post, but I actually don't mind these issues much since slight environmental challenge (i.e. being slowed down by some obstacle if you're not paying attention) is nice, but it's important not to go overboard with it. Hopefully not the case here. About lowering stuff - I tried to make sure it lowers faster, so hopefully it's not very annoying (hello, Sunder). Sorry for that, in any case. Nice demo, but yeah, that last fight is quite a troublemaker without knowing the deal (or with bad luck).
And invisibility... I admit that I've put it in there just for laughs since I see no real use in it other than to make yourself additional Touhou-like challenge or something. This secret can be triggered without picking it up. Still, it's amazing to see that you were able to handle this fight with it. Some mind-boggling evasion skills with keyboard only, you're the man.

@ TheCupboard: Thanks for your input! Did switching to skill 2 make any difference? There are no skill settings actually. But heh, seeing that it helped...
Midi is my favorite in ED and also suits the mood and feel I was aiming for in this map just perfectly, so while it's a bit too short indeed - I see no worthy replacement for it.
Symmetry... I guess you're right, it plagues all of my stuff objectively, but I personally am not concerned about symmetry much as long as the map I'm playing is fun. Hopefully this one can be fun.
Comparing it to DV is probably a bit too much, but thanks anyway.

@ Demon of the Well: I quite like reading your comments, thanks. And gratitude for the demos, too, I've never seen any of your demos before, but judging from these - you're one hell of a player. Why don't we have you in Slaughterfest thread? It definitely needs more attention from great players since it lacks proper testing and reasonable feedback even still.
ROD maps were in fact my first 'serious' ones (I'm not taking my childish gibberish from many-many years ago into account, they're long lost to oblivion, anyway, thankfully) and I was mostly trying various stuff to get the hang of Doom mapping, so no surprise it looks and plays like shit most of the time. I think in hindsight I like map04 the most. Map05 turned out to be pretty good, too (at least gameplay-wise, I'm quite satisfied with the result, but I think I went a bit overboard with abstract insanity in there in terms of visuals). M03 is sort of entertaining mess, but that's all about it. So all in all - the more I look back at it, the less serious it becomes to me.

Demon of the Well said:

Several of the bigger areas probably could've been sharpened up/lent more visual depth with more big glowering shadows or the like, which might've helped to mitigate a bit of that 'saturated color spam' effect you touched on re: GLBoom.

Maybe you're right, but I have to confess: it's hard for me to do the lighting properly in LR stuff, and darkening could also fuck up the looks completely in software mode since it tends to turn darker areas into homogeneous grey mass. So I tried to hit some middle ground in here. Probably I wasn't really successful in that regard, but at least I tried.

Demon of the Well said:

Main complaint is that I don't much savor plinking away at the cybers on high at a couple of points--just sort of bogs down the pace, and to no small degree. The guy on the plinth at the end of the arach bridge is there for a very good reason, I understand, but....just let me telefrag him or something (or I could've just IGNORED him, I know, I know). The cluster up near the final switch, by contrast, seemed barely relevant at all, and I'm wondering if a big knot of revenants or some more viles might've been a better/more pressuring choice. Oh, and I'm not so sure about the pain elementals on the way to the red key, either...knock one of them out over the pool and he's a royal pain in the ass to deal with, and not the good kind of royal pain in the ass, either.

No, you kill that cyber yourself! He deserves prolonged pain for his horrible deeds, telefrag would relieve him from his misery too fast.
That cluster acts as an obvious obstacle of course, to force you to fight as long as it lives at least.
About PEs - well, yes, but at least he can't fly out of the arena itself, if that could be enough of an excuse for me not putting the block monster line in that room.

Demon of the Well said:

I haven't seen your 'Imago Mortis' (named after the Italian black metal band by any chance, or just for the ominous way the phrase rolls off the tongue?) from the current iteration of MAYhem yet, but it's surely in the offing.

Heh. I guess I can be pretty predictable at times.
I'd be very interested in your thoughts, though it's nothing special, really. Just a little exercise in cramped fighting and holding your ground. Oh, and one more cyb/rev clusterfuck (the move I've apparently became associated with after my Doomworld Mega Project submission) is there as well. This map has one, too, as you might've noticed.

[Darch]

I've played this like 50 times. And died 50 times. My best runs were done by skipping the fights. By best run, I mean grabbing the red key:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/jleavsdw8j7z6jn/frvmoredarch.lmp

This is my first demo, by the way. I was trying to record an FDA. Silly me. This must be my 46th run or something.

I liked the epic proportions of architecture and fights. I still want to beat this, probably with save scumming :P Great map.

[Demonologist]

Thank you, and welcome to the masochist club! I like watching all the demos I can get. Not the best map to start demoing activities with I suppose, but in any case I greatly appreciate your interest in it, as it clearly seems to be very far from your comfort zone. Hopefully it won't be too frustrating for you in the end, hehe.

[Darch]

Heh, I'm fine with hard maps, as long as I can save. When I learn to record multiple runs in one demo, like gggmork did, maybe I can deliver some start to finish demos :P

By the way, finished it already, it wasn't frustrating, actually the first room is one of the hardest! Epic is a good word to describe this map. Great stuff!!

* I don't know if it's intentional, but the candelabra sprites are shaking a bit, I think they're unaligned.

[Demonologist]

And once again - thank you for your kind words!

Darch said:

I don't know if it's intentional, but the candelabra sprites are shaking a bit, I think they're unaligned.

Oh yes, this is an awkward sprite from Eternal Doom as well. It replaces twitching hanged body and... well, twitches. I don't know, maybe guys behind ED wanted it to look like it's shaking because of air currents or something. And it's also misplaced from the center. Anyhow - I didn't feel like editing any of the content provided and am cool with that weird thing.