Things id got wrong

[jazzmaster9]

mason1729 said:

Putting a non-secret SSG in Underhalls.

I disagree.
Doom 2 did not really have a lot of new weapons, in fact it had only one.

So introducing it early is pretty smart.
It shows off new content right from the get go. In game design, all the good "show of" bits should be in the beginning of the game, E1M1 was a great example of showing what the game had to offer.

[VGA]

jazzmaster9 said:

I disagree.
Doom 2 did not really have a lot of new weapons, in fact it had only one.

So introducing it early is pretty smart.
It shows off new content right from the get go. In game design, all the good "show of" bits should be in the beginning of the game, E1M1 was a great example of showing what the game had to offer.

There should be some build-up to it ... or a hard fight right after you get it. Imagine fighting many low tier enemies to get to it and then you get swarmed by demons, which you can now one-shoot!

[yakfak]

drygnfyre said:

Not to mention I feel it violates a rule of map design: don't put a keycard door in a map unless there is also a corresponding key somewhere, even if it's in some secret area.

incidentally, could you explain why you feel this should be a rule of map design? :D

[VGA]

yakfak said:

incidentally, could you explain why you feel this should be a rule of map design? :D

Seems everyone has their own ideas about mapping "rules" 😇
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/71641-doom-mapping-tenets/

[Captain Ventris]

yakfak said:

incidentally, could you explain why you feel this should be a rule of map design? :D

It's a rendition of violating the concept of Chekhov's gun. An unused key, unless an intentional misdirection, is just a superfluous and unused asset which serves no purpose but to muddy the experience/perception of the level.

[yakfak]

Chekhov's gun suits a linear script but not an exploratory scenario where the audience controls what happens next, I think >:) I take your meaning though

imagine a level where everything pertinent is locked behind yellow doors. The player explores the obvious rooms available to them, finds no way to open the doors and then (hopefully) understands that the goal of the level is to bypass those doors through little security tubes, jumping through windows and finding the occasional secret. The yellow key would never be used but would still be on the player's mind!

[drygnfyre]

yakfak said:

incidentally, could you explain why you feel this should be a rule of map design? :D

To me, it's all about setup and payoff. In a game like Doom that has secret areas and thus encourages the player to explore, there should always be a yin to the yang. If I come across a keyed door, I have the expectation that there is a corresponding keycard somewhere in the map, no matter how well hidden it may be. So for Map 12 to not do this and lock the player inside the exit building, and thus preventing them from collecting any items they may have missed outside (like medikits), that's just not a good design idea.

Traps are completely fine. I have no problem with map designs that feature crushing walls, etc, because they are almost always setup in a way that they can be avoided. But simply creating one-way doors for the sole purpose of confining the player isn't very nice. Unless it's done properly. For example, E1M6 will confine you to the upper area if you choose not to collect the yellow key (which can be bypassed by taking the secret sewer route). But this is fair because the choice to skip the key is entirely up to the player. Had Map 12 offered the red keycard optionally, then the exit building potentially being one-way is perfectly acceptable.

[Gez]

I can think of another good reason to have locked doors without keys. Take a city level, put locked doors on all the "dummy" buildings that cannot actually be entered. For good effect, the locked message should be something neutral like "You don't have the key for this door" or just "This door is locked" instead of Doom's standard "You need such-and-such key to open this door".

[drygnfyre]

Gez said:

I can think of another good reason to have locked doors without keys. Take a city level, put locked doors on all the "dummy" buildings that cannot actually be entered. For good effect, the locked message should be something neutral like "You don't have the key for this door" or just "This door is locked" instead of Doom's standard "You need such-and-such key to open this door".

If that's the case, I would at least use a keycard color not normally available within the Doom engine. Like green, or silver, etc. Although Knee-Deep in zDoom actually did create some additional keycards.

[Havoc Crow]

Textures that don't have good-looking corresponding flats. Especially the lack of convenient metal flats.

Want something that would go with the dark-brown metal textures (METAL, SUPPORT3?) Your only choice is the featureless CEIL5_2, because it's about the only flat that fits the coloration.

Want something that goes with the dark gray metal (METAL2 etc?) Well TOO BAD

Same applies to green metal (TEKGREN). At least there are some flats which kinda-sorta fit (RROCK20, the marble of FLOOR7_2) but none of them look metallic.

Other nitpicking:
- the ASHWALL textures are really damn ugly
- too few blue textures
- too few techbase-themed decorations that aren't corpses or lamps/torches
- missing lots of potentially useful linedef actions, such as "G1 Floor Lower"

[VGamingJunkie]

What would be the point of putting in a key locked door without a corresponding key, anyway? Unless you plan to force the player to get creative and find some hidden way to get in there or unless you want to have inaccessible doors for decoration and you want it to be Vanilla compatible or something.

I guess it's supposed to be a "point of no return" kind of thing but what's the point of doing that? All it does is screw over players who want to be completionists because, if they want to get a secret they might have missed, they'll have to use IDCLIP.

[scifista42]

Drygnfyre also mentioned the fact that such a door will be openable in deathmatch (only), which the mapper can potentially take advantage of.

[yakfak]

JudgeDeadd said:

Textures that don't have good-looking corresponding flats. Especially the lack of convenient metal flats.

Want something that would go with the dark-brown metal textures (METAL, SUPPORT3?) Your only choice is the featureless CEIL5_2, because it's about the only flat that fits the coloration.

Want something that goes with the dark gray metal (METAL2 etc?) Well TOO BAD

Same applies to green metal (TEKGREN). At least there are some flats which kinda-sorta fit (RROCK20, the marble of FLOOR7_2) but none of them look metallic.

Other nitpicking:
- the ASHWALL textures are really damn ugly
- too few blue textures
- too few techbase-themed decorations that aren't corpses or lamps/torches
- missing lots of potentially useful linedef actions, such as "G1 Floor Lower"

for certain desirable colour schemes it might be worth innovating a style where the floor texture does not necessarily continue the wall texture :3 not everything is chiselled out of big blocks of *material* - floors are often decorated, carpetted, lined with wood and so forth!

[scifista42]

^Agreed. However, some maps (often the highly detailed ones and/or with a specific theme) have ambitions to look particularly good. A single unfitting texture clash (even between walls and flats) can potentially spoil their good appearance, and so the mapper will appreciate higher selection of colors/materials to use to prevent this.

[Chewyninja69]

Grain of Salt said:

• Melee attacks don't work very well
  
• Wasted space in the status bar
  
• Using a tint for the berserk pack that implies the effect is temporary
  
• Not having a map screen for E4 (or doom 2 I guess)
  
• Making the BFG use the same ammo as the plasma gun (or not at least balancing its ammo usage so having the BFG doesn't make the PG redundant)
  
• Giving lost souls about twice as much health as they should have
  
• Too many similar monsters in doom 1
  
• That one E4 map no one likes
  
• Not enough types of flying monster, even in doom 2
  
• No slow melee monster

Hmmm...

Agree with all this.
What E4 map are you speaking of?

[Chewyninja69]

Inkie said:

The Chasm

^^^THIS.....SO much this

[FireFish]

Doom and Doom 2 ;

- The Giant status bar.
- Maze-like level design (d1).
- Hectic badly proportioned levels (d2).
- No mouse-look.
- Some of the music

I would never be able to complain about the digitized weapons and textures. Their art assets always had a very balanced, moody look and feel while many other games always had this plastic, overbright, wrong gamma settings look to them.

[drygnfyre]

I know id was involved in other projects at the time, but I would have liked Episode 4 to feature some original music, and intermission screen. There were a whole bunch of unused Doom tracks (most not very good), maybe some of those could have been used?

After the fourth time hearing "Demons on the Prey," I kind of got sick of it.

[ABRACADABRA]

FireFish said:

- The Giant status bar.

it was all about framerate, thank johns, we didn't have alpha hud

[VGamingJunkie]

Could be worse, many of the older console ports had to shrink the screen size to keep it steady.


http://199.101.98.242/media/shots/90865-Doom_(32X)-2.jpg

[Jon]

Doom 2 relies too much on monsters facing away from you. The weird "jig" they do when not activated just looks pretty stupid, on MAP01, MAP02, MAP29, MAP20 (I think) and a whole bunch of other ones. They should have implemented a static 'standing' animation (or lack thereof) for monsters if they were going to do that.

ABRACADABRA said:

it was all about framerate, thank johns, we didn't have alpha hud

Not sure that's just it. How to make it smaller but keep the same amount of info and keep the numbers legible?

[Gez]

FireFish said:

- No mouse-look.

Do you mean looking up and down? Because you can already look left and right with the mouse. Just use novert so as not to move forward and backward involuntarily.

[VGamingJunkie]

Only a shame the original MSDOS Doom (to my knowledge) wasn't very key map friendly, would have been nice to map movements to WADS back then. XD

[Da Werecat]

Setup point exe.

[ABRACADABRA]

Jon said:

How to make it smaller but keep the same amount of info and keep the numbers legible?

remove hud background like they finally did in q2