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invictius

90's wads that were ambitious for their time?

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I honestly can't think of a single released map from the era that's made me go "this is a pretty huge/well designed area for the time" - sure, there are a lot of people that have made good single levels but most of them I've heard of are well known (as in going on to make wads like AV, HR etc).

Who are some mappers who have made really large standalone levels, who we either don't hear about or have fallen through the cracks of history?

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Not really fallen through the cracks per se, but hoover.wad was pretty ambitious for it's time. Can't forget about uac_dead. I think that opened up a lot of creative doors for early mappers.

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I think one of the most ambitious wads of the 90s were Eternal and anything by Jim Flynn, Sverre Kvernmo, Paul Schmitz, and Bob Evans.

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INVADE1 and 2 sprang immediately to mind - big spaceshippy mission levels where there's a definite action plan for you to follow. Not beautiful but actually fairly good at representing where you are in terms of the ship's blueprint, too.

also Aliens the TC

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Memento Mori II looks very slick for a 1996 wad, and plays quite good as well. It has a lot of variety in the ways it challenges a player, yet it also has a fairly cohesive feel from start to end. Of course everyone knows about it, but most people don't play it. They usually either play MM1 or Requiem, which in my opinion aren't nearly as good.

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Aliens TC and Doomsday of the UAC were very ambitious.

Also I liked STRAIN and HacX was essentially a dehacked doom TC. Both very ambitious.

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Roger Ritenour made some pretty impressive stuff

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The Artifact, which the author had to split into three maps because it broke his map editor or something. Would've loved to see it as one huge map but sadly even the Boom tune-up versions are still in three pieces. Edit, three, not four, sorry.

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TRUCK.WAD and it's short film that displayed in a wall :P

I still don't know how they did it, I want to do it too!

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Gustavo6046 said:

TRUCK.WAD and it's short film that displayed in a wall :P

I still don't know how they did it, I want to do it too!

It's baffling, I remember having it explained to me and I still didn't really understand.

Another one I wanted to add to that list is Dropdead, an old DM map: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ojznmvywq0w/dropdead.zip

Being a youngster and seeing the marine caught in the massive spider web while fighting the mastermind was a really memorable experience. The 3 legged dog interpic also creeped me out back then. The map may not seem like much now, but all those custom graphics actually being used somewhat effectively was amazing back in the vanilla days.

Danfun64 said:

Was said short film done the same way as the short films in chex quest 2's e1m2?

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/deathmatch/s-u/truck

Definitely worth checking out, very innovative stuff.

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"a pretty huge/well designed area for the time"

This suggests you haven't had much exposure to early mapping tools. Making any map at all in early 1994 was pretty ambitious, even if the end result was crap :)

"The 90s" is also way too wide a period. What people could and were doing in mid-1996 was vastly different to what was being done 24 months before that, and things were very different again by the time 1998 rolled around.

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Gustavo6046 said:

TRUCK.WAD and it's short film that displayed in a wall :P

I still don't know how they did it, I want to do it too!

Doomkid said:

It's baffling, I remember having it explained to me and I still didn't really understand.

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/deathmatch/s-u/truck

Nice exploit of the scrolling texture effect. I didn't examine it in a map editor, but I believe it depends on 1-pixel-long scrolling linedefs, each of them with a different middle texture, and each of the textures containing all pixel columns belonging to a single particular column on the screen, forming the pictures only when these multiple textures are combined together. Making these textures in the first place must have been tedious or required some automated tool.

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Gustavo6046 said:

TRUCK.WAD and it's short film that displayed in a wall :P

I still don't know how they did it, I want to do it too!


I looked all over the map in gzdoom (no addons) and couldn't find it...

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invictius said:

I looked all over the map in gzdoom (no addons) and couldn't find it...

there's a room with a creepy glowing face and a tiny (16 x 16 maybe) square 'holovid' playing a little odd looking film clip. Looking at the texture shows the author has done something like what scifista mentioned or something else equally complicated, but it's still interesting. I don't think it plays properly with uncapped FPS.

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scifista42 said:

Nice exploit of the scrolling texture effect. I didn't examine it in a map editor, but I believe it depends on 1-pixel-long scrolling linedefs, each of them with a different middle texture, and each of the textures containing all pixel columns belonging to a single particular column on the screen, forming the pictures only when these multiple textures are combined together. Making these textures in the first place must have been tedious or required some automated tool.


I just looked at it in a map editor and in SLADE and this is correct.
They replaced the face textures on the Icon of Sin so they were able to store the sequence of pixels for more than one column in one image and access the required one with a vertical offset.
I don't know much about modern editing features, but I think this could be done in Boom (?) and compatible ports with animated textures without having to resort to whatever tedium was needed to make the textures.

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