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Tuxlar

Good Practice Conventions (Removed)

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I agree.
I have been writing another doc, "Design Concepts", and it says just about the same thing. I do not expect everyone is going to agree.
Been working on it for too long, should get it posted some time soon.

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I like it for the most part. Though id probably modify and include/exclude some things, its a good set of morals to consider by itself while mapping. Nice work

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I agree with most of these, and most of my disagreements are of the "there's an exception to every rule" variety. Though I would also add one more rule on the topic of nukage:

9. No inescapable nukage pits (or similar deathtraps). They only force the player to cheat or reload a saved game, and that's neither fun nor challenging.

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Tuxlar said:

Throwing monsters into the map for repopulation purposes staves off boring backtracking, but throwing monsters right into the player's face in some carefully-structured encounter is like saying the player is too stupid to know how to properly have fun with the game.

This is very deep.

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And Tuxlar descended from the heavens and delivered unto man 8 mapping commandments: Thou shalt not use things I don't like

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Haha Ribbiks, that's kind of what I was thinking too, but the paragraph at the end sort of changed my opinion.

Tuxlar said:

These are not meant to be definitive set of immutable, all-purpose constraints; you'll probably break each one of these during the course of most vanilla mapping projects, even. Consider them instead as conventions to start your design with; if you have no trouble adhering to these, and you can still make good/fun maps, I'd imagine then you're worthy of using or ignoring them at will.


If you don't know what you're doing, and don't even know what you want to do, trying to make a map that follows these guidelines might help you create something better than you otherwise would. A lot of the things Tuxlar suggests doing/not doing are in areas where I can think that newbie mappers would execute ideas quite poorly. Once you have a sense of what's fun and what's not, break all these "rules" as you see fit.

Actually there's a fun challenge, someone make some good maps that either (a) follow all these conventions strictly, or (b) go against them as much as possible.

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Da Werecat said:

This is very deep.


not sure if sarcastic but that was the one I mostly took issue with. Even regular doom used monster closets in your face and I enjoyed it every time. From the "lights out, imps in" blue key room in E1M3, the Nirvana revenant closet in that... area, and all the traps on The Living End, save for the cyberdemon.

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The OP is generally opposed to tightly choreographed fights in favor of free-roaming monsters, it seems. But it's okay. The "it's like saying the player is stupid" argument is what made me smile.

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I only agree with #2 - avoid using monster blocking lines

Foxpup said:

9. No inescapable nukage pits (or similar deathtraps). They only force the player to cheat or reload a saved game, and that's neither fun nor challenging.

I don't agree with this either. Inescapable death pits force the player to avoid falling into them, which adds a challenge to moving around a map's layout. The fact that they're annoying to encounter when playing a map for the first time doesn't change that.

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I Iike that you have a mapping philosophy. It's a useful thing to work with. Mine is quite different to yours though going so far as to contridict some of your points. We should play some of each other's maps and see if our philosophies are really that far apart after they have been translated into sectors and vertices :-)

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Foxpup said:

9. No inescapable nukage pits (or similar deathtraps). They only force the player to cheat or reload a saved game, and that's neither fun nor challenging.

I'm on the fence about this. Like mazes, I guess this could be considered a design risk; if you use them, and they're at least somewhat obvious in advance, they can strategically add to the challenge. Otherwise, they're easy to misuse/abuse, and are often a sign of shitty design. I'll consider adding this as a convention.

plums said:

Actually there's a fun challenge, someone make some good maps that either (a) follow all these conventions strictly, or (b) go against them as much as possible.

Who needs a challenge to make maps that go against these conventions. Just pick from any of a large set of modern games. /s

Da Werecat said:

The OP is generally opposed to tightly choreographed fights in favor of free-roaming monsters, it seems. But it's okay. The "it's like saying the player is stupid" argument is what made me smile.

The idea is if you're fighting against doom's ai/mechanics to make your design work, it's likely a sign of a shitty plan, or shitty execution.

If you're confident in your plan/execution ability, or just can't otherwise be arsed, then by all means, use monster blocking lines and closets/teleports to your heart's content. Just try to understand the difference between doom's limits and yours.

purist said:

I Iike that you have a mapping philosophy. It's a useful thing to work with. Mine is quite different to yours though going so far as to contridict some of your points. We should play some of each other's maps and see if our philosophies are really that far apart after they have been translated into sectors and vertices :-)

This isn't the philosophy I use for making maps, it's more the philosophy I now use to avoid making shit maps, as best I can. If I create something that feels like it isn't shit, I pretty much disregard the conventions completely. Otherwise, they're a good place to start.

I should add some conventions regarding challenge/ammo balance, since this feels like an unaddressed matter, now that I think about it...

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1.Avoiding deaf/ambush monsters.

I like a mix of deaf/non-deaf. Deaf=ambush, they should normally see you before you see them. If not flagged properly, they get too exposed. Also, you'd better not place 95% of the monsters in monster closets (<5% is preferable), otherwise you'll have maps like sunder maps conquered by Ribbiks without harming any monsters.

2.Avoiding monster blocking lines.

Yeah, this gives the player unfair advantage and looks so weird sometimes.

6.Balance between 'theoretically skippable' and 'practically unskippable' monster use. If you can literally run from start to exit without taking notable damage, you might be doing it wrong. If you can't get to the exit without 100% kills, you might be doing it wrong.

I like this point. An immersive medium/big map should also be insanely hard/impossible Tyson style. (Contrary to Erik Alm-style all-speedrunning-category-short-level in which it is cool). Original levels, especially Sandy's, had it wrong, and I'm being serious here.

7.Inescapable or 'point-of-no-return' areas, like mazes, are a design risk. If you're not confident in the rest of your design, best avoid them.

Not necessarily. What if I want the player not to escape and collect the ammo saved before? But I see the point.

9.Damage should not be mandatory.

Oh no. Take that -20% damage corridor in end2, e3m2. The design is awesome, you have to kill monsters quickly to survive and get your reward. Also, what about AV jumps?

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I almost want to consider 'mandatory damage' as a matter of taking a risk (as opposed to being outright 'not recommended'), but there is a legitimate concern involved: In a (usually very rare) set of (usually bad luck-only) situations, players can genuinely be screwed out of progress at any points that require them to receive damage.

Of course, they can still get screwed at low health against difficult obstacles, as usual, but that's the player's problem; not the map's (except as a matter of difficulty balance in general, which is a separate matter). Like any convention, you can disregard it, if you think you know what you're doing, but I feel it needs to remain a 'not recommended'-type convention, nonetheless.

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Can't say I agree with a lot of these, but in most cases it comes down to how these tools are used, the best advice being to not use them in a bad way. Which is pretty vague I guess. I've seen nearly all of these things used well in good maps, and probably couldn't think of a map that didn't break one of them.

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I disagree with most of these as well.

Before I say anything else, I'll say that mapping within a set of limitations can be a fun and very rewarding challenge, whether they be the limits of vanilla or a source port, or stylistic limitations like a TWID project, or a required theme for a speedmapping session, or whatever else. I don't think there's anything wrong with seeking to build an interesting level within a set of arbitrary constraints.

I think there are some disadvantages in trying to hold all of one's work to the same set of limitations, though. I've been having a lot more fun mapping since I let myself stop worrying so much about arbitrary things like whether I had "overused" archviles by putting more than a couple of them in a long level, or whether using teleports to connect areas was "cheating".

With regard to your first four points:
Doom's monster AI is simple and dumb enough that it can be manipulated effectively for a wider variety of encounters than you can get from letting all your enemies wander around. Monsters in sniping posts, teleport loops, closets, and other "blunt" methods of implementing them allow for more interesting choreographed encounters that can be contrasted effectively with the unpredictability of wandering enemies. I think by seeking to completely avoid gameplay scenarios that can only be created by expressly manipulating monster behavior, you're unnecessarily limiting your options for making a fun map.

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I don't agree with most of these either...

TimeOfDeath said:

I only agree with #2 - avoid using monster blocking lines..


I think it depends on how it's used and I don't think it's something anybody with any experience is going to use much anyway. I recently used a short monster blocking line so a couple zombies get funneled up a sloped ramp towards the player. Works well and no monsters are available on the opposite side to get caught in it.

I agree with what esselfortium said.

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I have spent far too long trying to explain these same issues in "Design Concepts" and do not want to repeat it all here. But I cannot totally silence my need to refute.

I too have lost interest in the repeated use of some of Id's design elements, like monster closets and teleporting monsters into the players face. It is more than just seen that, it is that those were not good for my style of play. So I agree with the original post in that repeating those is a mistake and it is not limiting the wad design. Instead it is not limiting the play to that one challenge style, which is actually opening up the wad design to better alternatives. This lets other players with other styles of play find their own best way to play the level. Like what was said, avoid forcing the player to play it only one way like they were too dumb to figure out how to find the monsters themselves.

I really think this comes down to a different distinction. Some designers get caught up in throwing traps and tests at the player and mistake their own pleasure at doing that for what is actually our main concern. I do not find any pleasure in being a victim of another trap or having monsters thrown at me. My pleasure is in exploring and finding a new and very individual way to defeat the monsters (usually by running back and forth and taking advantage of their position like it was a chess game). That this is not like the way many others play a level is the whole point here. The proposed level design rules allow my style of play as a possibility.

Here is a classic example:
The designer decides that they are going to force the player to experience nukage to get to one of the keys. Some health is provided later to make up for the damage. This is the designer playing with the player. My style of player is not going to go into the nukage.
At some point we realize that a key is missing and that it must be somewhere, where we will invent a way to find it. Some may finally go into the nukage (relutantly and with distaste for begin forced to do that). Others may noclip and/or make their own door. I consider it a flawed level design and anything I have to do to avoid the nukage is fair since the designer was not being fair.

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esselfortium said:

With regard to your first four points:
Doom's monster AI is simple and dumb enough that it can be manipulated effectively for a wider variety of encounters than you can get from letting all your enemies wander around. Monsters in sniping posts, teleport loops, closets, and other "blunt" methods of implementing them allow for more interesting choreographed encounters that can be contrasted effectively with the unpredictability of wandering enemies. I think by seeking to completely avoid gameplay scenarios that can only be created by expressly manipulating monster behavior, you're unnecessarily limiting your options for making a fun map.

Oh, certainly. You'll definitely want to be able to use all available options for map making. Unless it involves port/system limits, there's no legitimate reason not to.

Again, the idea of practice conventions is, as the name suggests, to practice to develop a good style. If you're using things like choreographed encounters to compensate for other gameplay problems, well, in coding terms we call things like this a code smell; a sign of other, more general problems, in other words.

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I love monster block lines. Stop flying enemies in big outdoor areas from being pushed back miles away into inaccessible scenery the second the doomguy fires his SSG, prevent "turret" foes from falling down into pits you can't see without mouselook, funnel monsters as previously mentioned, create new fight dynamics with appropriate changes in sector flat/lightning (think demon stuck in pentagram), block enemies from heading towards and hinting at a secret place... So many uses. If I did a second pass through my old maps most of them would probably end up with extra monster block lines.

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Well, those sound like good uses for it, without being obvious or letting the player abuse them by standing behind them.

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Added a new convention:

Build your layout to no less than a 16x16 grid, and avoid <96 wide, <72 high (accessible) passages. Barring certain visual effects, almost nothing that affects the gameplay of your map should break these constraints. For example, 64-wide tunnels mess with monster ai and virtually eliminate player tactical movement options; unfun, to say the least.


I'm a tad on the fence about this one, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense.

Edit: Also, considering a map duration convention, but I'm not sure how to define it...

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I've found a good rule of thumb is that the minimum size of a corridor should be 3 times the radius of the monsters that will move through it. Thus, 64 units is (just barely) wide enough for imps and former humans, but larger monsters will have problems.

On the other hand, corridors <= 64 units wide have the additional issue that two players cannot step past each other, which can be huge problem in multiplayer (especially if there's no other way around).

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Added the following:

  • Design as if the player has no back-peddle key. Think of being forced to hard-reverse movement as like bullying in map-design form; you're directly challenging the player's forward progression decisions. Like other conventions, if you don't understand how to use this to add to the experience (keeping the player on their toes, teaching them a strategic lesson in humility, etc.), it's best to avoid it.
  • Design as if the player takes damage from standing in any one 96x96 area for 5 seconds. Except for certain combat situations, they should always be moving.
  • Design as if monsters should have the same chance to survive as the player. Obviously they won't, but if they can't even get to attack, or else their attacks have no chance of being effectual against a non-drunken player (for the respective skill setting, mind you), that monster should be seriously rethinking its life choices.

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esselfortium said:

I think there are some disadvantages in trying to hold all of one's work to the same set of limitations, though. I've been having a lot more fun mapping since I let myself stop worrying so much about arbitrary things like whether I had "overused" archviles by putting more than a couple of them in a long level, or whether using teleports to connect areas was "cheating".

With regard to your first four points:
Doom's monster AI is simple and dumb enough that it can be manipulated effectively for a wider variety of encounters than you can get from letting all your enemies wander around. Monsters in sniping posts, teleport loops, closets, and other "blunt" methods of implementing them allow for more interesting choreographed encounters that can be contrasted effectively with the unpredictability of wandering enemies. I think by seeking to completely avoid gameplay scenarios that can only be created by expressly manipulating monster behavior, you're unnecessarily limiting your options for making a fun map.

I've been thinking about this a bit.

You're right that simply being able to make maps fun in a very boring way (which is partly the point of these conventions, I might add) is not all there is to practicing at getting a reliably-good mapping style. This is surely what you'd want to start with, but I think there could be a separate "102" course of practices to graduate to, once this set ought be considered mastered.

Phml said:

I love monster block lines. Stop flying enemies in big outdoor areas from being pushed back miles away into inaccessible scenery the second the doomguy fires his SSG, prevent "turret" foes from falling down into pits you can't see without mouselook, funnel monsters as previously mentioned, create new fight dynamics with appropriate changes in sector flat/lightning (think demon stuck in pentagram), block enemies from heading towards and hinting at a secret place... So many uses. If I did a second pass through my old maps most of them would probably end up with extra monster block lines.

I've clarified point #2 for distinguishing between monster blocking use for 'cheating' versus creating specific encounters.

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Da Werecat said:

Sounds a little like "using monster-blocking lines is wrong, unless it's right".

Hmm, you're right. Creating specific effects for monster blockers (preventing large-area runaways, holding monsters in sniping positions, keeping them from interfering with triggers, etc.) seems like things you could still be accommodating with the map design itself, as a good practice. Not going to water that down.

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