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Jon

The Cursed Hangar (former Freedoom E1M1) Released

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My old Freedoom E1M1, which relied heavily on Boom special effects, has finally been removed from Freedoom (which is targetting Vanilla in the near future). I decided to clean it up and release it standalone as a "director's cut".

du5veak.jpg

RC1: https://jmtd.net/tmp/hangar_rc1.zip

RC2: https://jmtd.net/tmp/hangar_rc2.zip
RC3: https://jmtd.net/tmp/hangar_rc3.zip

final: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/Ports/g-i/hangar

 

now on /idgames

Edited by Jon

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Awesome! I loved that map and I thought it was perfect for a first level.

How do I play it, though? I tried adding hangar.wad to my Freedoom shortcut's target field, but Outpost Outbreak still begins with Outer Prison.

EDIT: After some experimentation, it seems I can only get it working with Doom II. I tried renaming the map marker to "E1M1", but then, I get a plain black sky.

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Judging purely from the screenshot:
The sky texture shown is the first sky in Doom 2, so I'm guessing this is now a Doom 2 map. And I see Freedoom's broken glass textures is present, so I'm guessing you imported those textures from Freedoom. Not to mention the animated acid there is nothing like Freedoom's.

Q: new music present?
Q: the extra non-accessible areas (which I believe are leftovers) are removed too?

You really should've given more more details on how to load it up :)

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/attachment.php?postid=1725873

Edit: so those leftover areas weren't removed :/ not sure what the point is in keeping them.
I understand you want to give the feeling that the map is collapsing apart. You should make more parts of the map "break down" to make it truly feel like the whole place is being destroyed.

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I intended to release this as a PWAD containing E1M1 and MAP01, so you could play it with either doom or doom2, but at the moment it's only MAP01. I wonder if I should make it E1M1 only, maybe there's no point trying to make it dual-purpose.

The GLASS* textures, and MFADEMAP, are from Freedoom; I originally created them for this level and added them to Freedoom at the same time. A couple of other Freedoom textures are in here too (things from Doom that are not in Doom 2, one of the TEKWALLS, PLANET2, etc.) - but if I go E1M1 only they can go (but I will need to plug some Doom2 textures/flats in for the same reason)

There's one inaccessible area in single player, a room you can see from the "viewing platform" at the north of the map. I originally put it in to make the view more interesting, then developed it into a room for Death Match purposes. There's a DM start and a teleport inside that gets you into the main level. All the other areas of the map are reachable in SP (although there's a hidden corridor that isn't much use except to make the map more connected for death match).

There are a lot of control sectors in the void that are necessary for the smog effect under the slime area. Perhaps you think these are inaccessible areas / unfinished stuff?

The "collapsing ceiling" in the first room: yep, I wanted something a little like the beginning of Quake 2. It was deleted in Freedoom but I brought it back for here, and tried to make it work a little better. It's actually possible in ZDoom ports to have the zombies gibbed by the explosions but not in closer to vanilla. I don't feel like making huge changes to the level so I don't plan to add any more effects like this.

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Really cool if teasingly short. The slime-raising device for progression is pretty in the way it plays out (as is the tight staircase in that area leading down). I have a personal peeve against most H-marked helipads, but that is kind of a personal issue. I think they look out of place.

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In the void, there is a small room with a switch in it that raises the the acid floor, revealing HOMs in that area (the room with the destroyed ceiling that is). How is that switch necessary, when players can't even get there?
And another, which looks to be replica of the staircase that leads to the foggy room. But this replica leads to nowhere. What's this for?

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Voros said:

In the void, there is a small room with a switch in it that raises the the acid floor, revealing HOMs in that area (the room with the destroyed ceiling that is). How is that switch necessary, when players can't even get there?
And another, which looks to be replica of the staircase that leads to the foggy room. But this replica leads to nowhere. What's this for?


Every sector in the map which has the fog effect needs to have another sector paired with it, within which one linedef is type 242, texture MFADEMAP and tagged with the same tag as the original sector. These are called "control sectors".

The approach I used for the underground area was to first try and complete it before I added any of the control sectors. So when it came to setting up the control sectors, I figured the easiest way to make sure I didn't miss any was to copy and paste the entire region off to the side of the map, and use the copies as control sectors for the originals. So when I copied the sectors I copied the slime switch too, although it isn't needed. Half of the stairs leading to this area are tagged 242: the other half are not (the transition is achieved at a high brightness level to try to make it seamless).

Since then I tweaked the area and so had to add or remove some more control sectors and that's why there are some square ones around that area. Most people would just have used square ones from the start but at the time I made this map people hadn't really tried to do very complicated regions using Boom type 242.

All of the linedefs in the control sectors *should* be marked invisible... but I might have missed some.

(As a side-note: I wrote some cool stuff to make it easy to use 242 in WadC maps, generating all the control sectors etc. for you. this unfinished test wadc map has 7365 vertices, 7997 lines, and 1359 sectors, of which 680 are control sectors. The source is about 5K, the generated WAD ends up 100x larger, and if you build nodes another 3x again.)

There are a bunch of other control sectors floating around: two conveyors with voodoo dolls: one for the collapsing roof in the beginning and another for the lift exit at the end; the collapsing roof also has some extra sectors to achieve that effect (It's using this vanilla trick)

Aquanet said:

Really cool if teasingly short. The slime-raising device for progression is pretty in the way it plays out (as is the tight staircase in that area leading down). I have a personal peeve against most H-marked helipads, but that is kind of a personal issue. I think they look out of place.


Thanks. There's something about that staircase I really like, I think it's the fact it's aligned diagonally wrt the rest of the map. It seems to help the illusion of room-over-room a bit. If I make any more maps I might try doing more of this.

Heh, the H-marked helipad is a total cliche :)

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Recording of two bugs

-skipsec 70: brief disappearance of fog on exit from multiplayer passage. May be hard to fix, not worth the effort (I had attempted without success a few years ago, when it was still a Freedoom map).

-skipsec 120: can glide and fall into gap between stairs and wall. Simple fix, sides of stairs need impassible flag (as was done in other parts of the map).

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Voros said:

Q: new music present?


No.

Voros said:

Q: the extra non-accessible areas (which I believe are leftovers) are removed too?


I realise now you aren't talking about the "hut" visible at the north of the map, or at least not just that, but I'd like to talk about that a second. It's hard for me to see this with fresh eyes, but at least wesleyjohnson tried to make that area reachable.

Does it scream out to people as a region the should be able to reach? If so, I should probably change it. I have an idea for something to put there instead...

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When I first played C1M1 in Freedoom, I saw that "hut" and thought maybe it was a secret area, because it didn't look like scenery to me. I looked for a way to get there, but no luck. Then I IDCLIPed to the hut, thinking it was nothing more than a solid sector. Surprised to find decent texturing, a working teleporter and usable windows.

I thought it was strange to add a functional room that can't be accessed.

So yeah, it seems like an area I should be able to reach.

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Well, this is certainly very strange for me. See, how I first discovered the joy of Doom was via a distribution of FreeDOS, which I was curious enough to experiment with back in high school. Said FreeDOS came prepackaged with some software, including a copy of FreeDoom. That makes The Cursed Hangar my very first exposure to Doom ever! So yeah, this is strange.

I played the level on UV, having been through it a few times over the years. It does a decent job of replacing the original Hangar. Many of the motifs of the original are there with a little twist. The main difference seems to be the fact that you have to hit a switch to reach the exit. It seems like it would have benefited from more resistance in the basement, especially on the harder difficulty. The map looks surprisingly good using the original textures. Makes me want to play FreeDoom's maps with the Doom textures. I do miss the Cobra Imps, though.

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This is an awesome comment for me to read. That was the intention I had when I first sat down to make this map all those years ago.

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OK nearly got rc2 done. I've got slightly carried away with the replacement for the little hut. Looking forward to finishing.

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OK here is RC2 - https://jmtd.net/tmp/hangar_rc2.zip

 

The old hut is sort-of gone now. There's a simple, optional DEHACKED lump / .deh patch now too.

 

One last thing I know of to fix: I've broken DSCLAW by trying to reduce it's amplitude. Not sure what's wrong with the lump anymore. SLADE refuses to convert it to Doom format. I'm going to try Deutex (but not tonight).


I haven't fixed the gap that RjY discovered: I don't want to make the step sides impassible and I don't want to move the far wall. I decided it's so unlikely someone will fall in by accident, and if they do, they'll simply die in the nukage, and it's DM only area, so I was happy to leave it.

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11 hours ago, Jon said:

I haven't fixed the gap that RjY discovered

Fair enough. It's true I have this condition where I am compelled to try to break maps instead of just playing them normally and falling into that gap did take some effort.

 

First attempt at rc2, 2:00. No new bugs I could see.

 

Spoiler

I kind of missed the special effect at the top of the tower because I'm conscious that there's guys with shotguns up there to whom I've died before, so they took priority. However, I think this might be the first use of A_Mushroom I've seen in the wild (i.e. outside of MBFEDIT!.wad).

 

I assume the middle textures on either side of the multiplayer door (linedefs 1988/1992) are intentional? Okay after sleeping I realise what you did here (and that I miswrote the linedef numbers) - as I had discovered when it was still a Freedoom map, the two end doors of the passage, which have the same tag so the same switch opens both, in fact need to have different tags, so only the lower one has fog in it. In rc2, adding fog to the lower one has also put fog into the higher one, so you've added middle textures to paper over it. My attempt to fix had involved a second S1 line, with PASSUSE set (so you'd press both of them together and open both doors simultaneously) in front of the switch, but it must have had some problem which made me give up on it (or I'd just reached critical Yadex-is-getting-on-my-nerves levels).

Edited by RjY

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I noticed that the barrels dont seem to have a functional blast radius (whatever that means). The multiplayer door mentioned above has midtextures even when open. Are both of those things intentional?

 

Good job with the hut, now it really feels like scenery and the map feels more like its crumpling apart.

 

The slime fall textures in the broken ceiling room are slightly misaligned though.

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42 minutes ago, Voros said:

I noticed that the barrels dont seem to have a functional blast radius (whatever that means). The multiplayer door mentioned above has midtextures even when open. Are both of those things intentional?

 

The barrel thing is a side-effect of changing the code pointer from explode to mushroom cloud. I'm not sure whether I'll try to fix it. I could put the explode (or mushroom) code pointer on the next frame instead. I might try that, I'm going to fiddle a little bit to try and get it working in ZDoom anyway.

 

I don't know what you guys mean about the MP door. I'll try another runthrough and see if I can see it.

Edit: just saw RjY's edit. AAAH I get it now. Yes I need separate tags for the two MP doors. This is a bug to fix. Thanks!
 

42 minutes ago, Voros said:

Good job with the hut, now it really feels like scenery and the map feels more like its crumpling apart

 

Thanks!

 

42 minutes ago, Voros said:

The slime fall textures in the broken ceiling room are slightly misaligned though.

 

Yeah that's really tough to fix. There are a bunch of different ways you can scroll things in Boom: the method used here is one of the simpler ones, which uses the x/y texture offset to control scrolling. So I can't fix the x offset without introducing horizontal scrolling as well. I could try to use one of the more complex scroller, but I think I would need to have a control sector with linedefs arranged parallel to a normal from the relevant lines.

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i have a suggestion for the initial crumpling wall. Instead of adding the trigger line where the player will instantly see the wall change, instead add it near the switch, beyond the wall. That way, players wont see the sudden change, and will be surprised to see it after turning around. 

 

Isnt there someway to add some floor/ceiling variation here too? That would make it a lot more recognisible as a broken wall.

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Those are great suggestions, but I'm kinda tired of working on this, I just want to try and squash the remaining serious issues, and I think that's now done with RC3 (updated the initial post). Got rid of the separate .deh as the DEHACKED lump seems fine. Fixed DSCLAW. Fixed the weird midtex on the DM only door. A few more tex alignment changes I noticed. Hoping this is the one :)

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3 hours ago, Voros said:

I noticed that the barrels dont seem to have a functional blast radius (whatever that means)

 

2 hours ago, Jon said:

The barrel thing is a side-effect of changing the code pointer from explode to mushroom cloud.

A_Mushroom calls A_Explode itself, so you should get both effects.

 

I suspect what happened here is that Voros ran the map in -complevel 9 in PrBoom+, which as I have just discovered, disables using codepointers which were new to MBF. This also explains why my hangar_rc3 test demo broke in PrBoom+ unless I added a mouthful of a command line option "-apply_mbf_codepointers_to_any_complevel". I must have neglected to test the demo I posted for rc2, it most likely also desyncs in PrBoom+.

 

I expect this means in order for A_Mushroom to work your map needs to recommend to be run in MBF complevel, like Valiant, Mayan Mishap, etc. Now I wonder if my earlier remark about its first use in the wild was wrong.

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15 hours ago, Jon said:

One last thing I know of to fix: I've broken DSCLAW by trying to reduce it's amplitude. Not sure what's wrong with the lump anymore. SLADE refuses to convert it to Doom format.

SLADE should log a message in the console when it fails to convert a sound file. It'll only accept to convert to DMX format sounds that are 8-bit PCM mono.

 

I've got code that displays information about wav files (channels, bit rate, sample rate, any sort of metadata). I need to commit it.

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37 minutes ago, Gez said:

SLADE should log a message in the console when it fails to convert a sound file. It'll only accept to convert to DMX format sounds that are 8-bit PCM mono.

 

I've got code that displays information about wav files (channels, bit rate, sample rate, any sort of metadata). I need to commit it.

 

It's a metadata issue. Slade did indeed log a complaint about converting the file, but simply said "cannot convert file". I had generated the file using ffmpeg to convert a larger-bitrate WAV down to pcm_u8. Looking at the file in a hex editor, it would appear ffmpeg injected more metadata into the WAV header than SLADE likes. I fixed it by exporting from Audacity in the correct format straight away. For reference

 

0:tharsis$ hexdump -C broken.wav | head
00000000  52 49 46 46 46 23 00 00  57 41 56 45 66 6d 74 20  |RIFFF#..WAVEfmt |
00000010  10 00 00 00 01 00 01 00  11 2b 00 00 11 2b 00 00  |.........+...+..|
00000020  01 00 08 00 4c 49 53 54  1a 00 00 00 49 4e 46 4f  |....LIST....INFO|
00000030  49 53 46 54 0e 00 00 00  4c 61 76 66 35 37 2e 32  |ISFT....Lavf57.2|
00000040  35 2e 31 30 30 00 64 61  74 61 00 23 00 00 80 80  |5.100.data.#....|
0:tharsis$ hexdump -C dsclaw.wav | head
00000000  52 49 46 46 24 23 00 00  57 41 56 45 66 6d 74 20  |RIFF$#..WAVEfmt |
00000010  10 00 00 00 01 00 01 00  11 2b 00 00 11 2b 00 00  |.........+...+..|
00000020  01 00 08 00 64 61 74 61  00 23 00 00 80 80 80 7f  |....data.#......|

I don't know what's actually in the header, but I can see the the data is offset much further in the broken file.

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53 minutes ago, RjY said:

I expect this means in order for A_Mushroom to work your map needs to recommend to be run in MBF complevel, like Valiant, Mayan Mishap, etc. Now I wonder if my earlier remark about its first use in the wild was wrong.

 

Argh. I might document the complevel stuff in an update then (I've made an /idgames upload already). It's a shame the failure mode is to strip the old code pointer, rather than ignore the lump... Thanks for the diagnosis!

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Yeah I definitely need to dig up and commit my improved wav support code, if it's chocking on metadata.

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