NOVA II: New Dawn - First status report in November | Still open for mappers!

[jerrysheppy]

Thanks for the reply! I already decided a short while ago to go ahead and build my map entirely with cc4-tex (and doom2.wad, of course). Many of the Plutonia textures I was using appear to have been in cc4 already. If there somehow turns out to be a texture in the other wad that I can't live without, I'll ask when that time comes.

[Stygian]

Wow. This has really been generating a lot of enthusiasm from brand new mappers. I think I will give up my slot for the project. If there's a Nova III or a special wad for just the Nova alumni, I will try to submit something to one, or both, of these.

No matter the case, I will play-test for the other mappers.

[NuMetalManiak]

heh, I found a texture called SHITWALL in the pack. never seen it before but probably won't use it.

[plums]

SHITWALL is from the Doom beta. Patch name was WALL75_1, it's not used in any texture though. It's pretty ugly but I decided to include it, with a more descriptive name ;)

[Ashstrodamus]

Alright, I'm using the Doom 2 engine and there is no planes option under properties. Is there any way I can import some plane options or is it done another way in the Doom 2 engine? I can't get the damn slopes on there.

[kildeth]

Marnetmar said:

Is there room for me to apply as an inexperienced mapper?

Sure. I'll sign you up.

@Ashstrodamus - You can't use slopes, this project is being made for a limit-removing port.

@plums - I'm fine with CC4tex. To be honest I'm fine with whatever textures everyone else wants to use at this point as I don't want to stifle creativity and don't really know a lot about custom textures anyway. I just want people to provide due credit (and have permission) if they use other people's work.

[dobu gabu maru]

Ashstrodamus said:

Alright, I'm using the Doom 2 engine and there is no planes option under properties. Is there any way I can import some plane options or is it done another way in the Doom 2 engine? I can't get the damn slopes on there.

NOVA 2 is a limit-removing megawad meaning that Zdoom features like slopes and scripting aren't allowed/won't work.

[Ashstrodamus]

Thanks guys. I thought I was going crazy. I'm guessing those options are available in say GZ Doombuilder. I'm still working on getting used to the program, but I'm getting there.

[Superluigieth1]

UPDATE: Changing setting for MAP01.

[Superluigieth1]

kildeth said:

CC4tex

Fuck no.
I DO NOT want this to ruin it. It's overrated, and why EXACTLY? We've got all our stuff geared up.

[cannonball]

Personally I think just using the combination of textures from all the IWads would be enough. As the previous NOVA showed, you can make some stunning visuals, even with just the stock textures.
Also I would be far more interested to see what kinds of new textures that newbies could think of/design from scratch as this would add another dimension to this project.

Just my 2 cents (or 2 pennies as I'm from England :P)

[Ashstrodamus]

I had a major breakthrough in the past couple of hours. I even added a secret to the mix and some nice lighting. While playtesting, the damn ceiling kept dropping down on me but I finally found a cure for it. I'm liking this.

Anyone know a projected finish time for this? I learn something new every day and my maps just keep getting better.

[kildeth]

Ok, CC4tex won't be a part of the NOVA II texture pack then. If anyone still wants to use that or any external texture pack, they are free on their own accord to pull textures from it, but it won't be a part of the main pack.

Is this fair?

@Ashstrodamus - No project completion date yet as we've only just started but we might have a status report for everyone and an alpha put together in November, which gives everyone five months to get something prepared for the first compilation.

[Superluigieth1]

I have started to make a plot:

TNT Corp. Is at it again. Another experiment on Mars. They let Hell brake loose again. It now has been long abandoned with the bases full of hellspawn, but sent a team to go and search for alive people. They never heard of them since. They sent you through the teleporter to kill all these bastards.

That's what I've done so far.

[SFoZ911]

brake loose?

[kildeth]

For the NOVA alumi and other experienced mappers, Silverdeth has began a map in UDMF format that needs to be polished up and converted into standard limit-removing format. Silverdeth said they're fine with someone else taking this in and finishing it so here it is:

Base Hell by Silverdeth.
http://speedy.sh/YSD9j/BaseHell.wad

[jerrysheppy]

kildeth said:

Ok, CC4tex won't be a part of the NOVA II texture pack then. If anyone still wants to use that or any external texture pack, they are free on their own accord to pull textures from it, but it won't be a part of the main pack.

Is this fair?

So people are free to use it but the textures won't be in the NOVA texture pack? I don't see how this changes anything. It's not like cc4 is hard to get ahold of if you want to use it, so anybody who likes the CC textures is going to use them, and anyone who doesn't, isn't.

Actually, I never thought cc4-tex was going to be distributed as part of the NOVA II texture pack proper in the first place, so I really am confused as to what, if anything, you've actually changed here about the policy.

(If you were to go further and actually ban/discourage cc4 textures from use, I'd have to withdraw or make a completely different map, since I've more or less gone all-in on a certain look since making my previous posts.)

[kildeth]

@jerrysheppy - Don't worry about it. I was confused about what was being discussed. I thought there were suggestions to put CC4tex textures in the actual pack for downloading. If you're just going to use it as an external source, that's fine. We'll just give the CC4tex creators credit in the readme file for using their resource.

Does that clear things up?

[jerrysheppy]

Sure does, thanks :) For the record, I thought what plums was suggesting was making a version of the main texture pack that was fully compatible with cc4-tex, such that people could use them both together without any problems. But I might still misunderstand how that would work.

[kildeth]

I guess that's up to Plums. I don't know if anyone else is using CC4tex at this point though. It might be worthwhile if there are several interested in using CC4tex along with the Nova II texture pack as then there would be demand for such a compilation to be produced.

[plums]

To try to clear things up:

The current issue is that you can't use both alldoomtex and cc4-tex at the same time, without some work, because of the TEXTUREx/PNAMES problems I discussed above.

I was proposing to make a separate version of alldoomtex that includes TEXTUREx/PNAMES entries for cc4-tex, so that people who wanted to use both could do so easily.

Any custom textures are allowed as per the current NOVA II rules, so anyone can use cc4-tex anyhow. However by providing direct support for it in alldoomtex, it would probably encourage more people to use it, especially people who are new to texture management and don't want to fuss around with SLADE.

The same could be done for any other popular texture pack, in theory. gothictx, retres, q1tex, etc. etc. It doesn't directly change what people are allowed to use, but it does probably steer them in a direction.

FWIW I'm not overly fond of cc4-tex, I think it's got a few nice textures and a lot of ugly ones. But that shouldn't stop me from helping other people. Besides the same could be said about alldoomtx anyhow, given the look of some of those TNT and Alpha textures.

Finally, a rant: I'm kind of surprised this is still an issue in 2014. I wonder if either the GZDoom or SLADE3 coders could be talked into implementing dynamic texture management in their level editors...

[tourniquet]

Do we really need more textures? CC4 is a decent texture pack but IMO we've allready a nice variety included and if thats not enough you can still rely on stock textures, that's what i do.

[plums]

Small update to the texture pack:
https://www.mediafire.com/?haljthx37tc476h

* fixes a few duplicate texture names and misnamed patches
* adds a few new textures and flats
* lavafall can now use LAVFALL texture names, in addition to DBRAIN (they're the same graphics)
* changed filename to alldmtx#

Because of the duplicate texture name issue (sorry!), I recommend everyone download this version. I believe the only major texture name issue was BRNPOIS2.

[kildeth]

I think I get it now. Sorry, this is all new to me. =)

Hmm. Since everyone has different opinions on the issue, maybe we can implement a rule, where if at least three mappers agree that they want to use an additional texture pack like CC4tex alongside the NOVA II pack, they can get a combined pack made for them as then several people would want the same thing and a new pack wouldn't be a waste of time to create. How does that sound?

[NuMetalManiak]

kildeth said:

For the NOVA alumi and other experienced mappers, Silverdeth has began a map in UDMF format that needs to be polished up and converted into standard limit-removing format. Silverdeth said they're fine with someone else taking this in and finishing it so here it is:

Base Hell by Silverdeth

i'll do it, but yeesh, why does he have a random picture stored in his wad?

I also noticed several extra starts and stealth monsters which i'll hopefully fix.

[MFG38]

I kinda feel like contributing a map as "other experienced mapper". I'll think about it over my holiday trip, you can expect my decision by Thursday next week. I've always been interested in contributing to a community project.

[Steve D]

@plums - I sent you a PM.

@kildeth - Although I consider myself a back-bencher ATM, I downloaded the new texture pack and I think it rocks. It brings into Doom 2 my Ultimate Doom faves -- Redwall1, Skintek, Skullwall and Stonegarg, plus the Doom 1 skies and a bunch of other killer skies to replace those dodgy Doom 2 sky textures. For me, that would be enough. But there's also Lavafall and Wfall, plus that cool alpha animated floor and some more stuff. I may diddle around with a map just to play with the textures and have something ready, just in case.

But here's a question, are we going to have defined sky textures for each episode, and if so, are they going to be the Doom 2 skies or some other skies, or will mappers be allowed to use the sky transfer function so they could put in whatever they want, even though it won't work in Boom?

As for cc4, yeah, great, I think it's wonderful and not average at all. Too bad it doesn't have those killer lupinx-kassman textures from Community Chest 4. I guess he didn't want to publicly release them? But I think I'll stick to the Nova resource pack. Save some work for plums. ;)

[tourniquet]

Well i was asking myself the same thing. There really a lot of different sky textures in the Resource Wad.
Since the maps gonna be limit removing a sky transfer won't work, so why so many? Are we gonna pick 3 of them later, one for the every espisode?

[plums]

I only put all the skies in for posterity. (They can be used as normal wall textures, you know. The Plutonia ones in particular could be useful.) They're actually all just split apart into patches - if people want to use this as a resource wad for other (cl9) maps, I guess I should assemble them into full textures.

I wouldn't count on requiring a sky transfer for your map, since cl2 doesn't support it, but if you do put one in it won't break anything. It will just only display on certain ports or complevels. I don't think this is a great idea myself but there's no technical reason why you couldn't.

As for what skies will be used - EvilNed made some great ones last time, I'd be happy to see what he might come up with again. The other idea I had was to take some lesser used skies from the iwads; TNT's mountain sky doesn't get much appreciation IMHO. I could also assemble something from the beta skies, which are a bit ugly on their own, but might look OK with a bit of work.

[Phobus]

I'm not in this anymore, but for what it's worth, cc4-tex is a bit overwhelming with the sheer amount of variety it has, even for experienced mappers. It's also remarkably lacking in some of the themes it has, which makes working with it surprisingly difficult if you're keen on getting texture/flat combos right. For a newbie project like this one, keeping it simple should be key. I've not checked the latest draft of plums' texture set, but that sounds like a sufficient range of additional textures, particularly with the Plutonia set.