What do you hate the most about mapping?

[Breezeep]

Here's a shitty little thread where people can vent about what they don't like about mapping.

I'll start this thread off with what I don't like about mapping:

 

Whenever I have some cool idea for a map, but I try to start on it and not get anywhere because I don't have a solid idea of what the map's layout would pan out. Even if I start on a map and make some decent progress on it, I would end up getting stuck on some areas, unable to figure out what to put next. Therefore, I end up losing interest in the map and abandoning it. 'Tis a shame, really.

[AD_79]

thing placement is the worst

[Fonze]

Layout and detailing are my least favorite parts; thing placement and mechanics are the best :)

[Arctangent]

Making a finale. Or anything after the first room or two.

[⇛Marnetmar⇛]

Texturing is the bane of my existence.

[Doomkid]

I enjoy pretty much all of the process, I just hate how long it takes to get anything done!

[HyperLuke]

Repeating mundane tasks over and over, texture alignment, and detailing.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Play testing once everything is done, which is the stage I'm in now with my current project.  I hate it 'cause I'm ready to move on, but I'm instead stuck testing and fixing little paper cuts here and there.  So it ends up feeling tedious.  But, I just can't bring myself to release things when they feel incomplete, either.

 

Also aligning a large amount of rock textures, and getting textures aligned on anthing but basic sloped areas.

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 minutes ago, YukiRaven said:

Also aligning a large amount of rock textures, and getting textures aligned on anthing but basic sloped areas.

Those were the days LOL! ;-)

[Zanieon]

The lack of ideas also hit me hard but i gave up the development of only 2 maps since i begun mapping, i get inspiration and ideas mostly from musics and movies or places where i go in real life so for me it is all a matter of time to i resume the progress in a certain map to look nice.

After that i think my most problem with mapping is secret making, man, i'm the worst person to ever think in where to place secrets in a map, on that part, i assume i am dumb.

[Spectre01]

I'll second texture alignment, especially when you align one texture and it screws up a bunch of others attached to it. Thing placement is the best part and what actually brings your map to life. I do dislike tuning hard UV encounters though since a lot of the time I can't tell if a fight's too hard or I'm just sucking at the moment or using the wrong approach.

[SaladBadger]

I'll join the thing placement crowd. Something inside of me wishes editors had a thing where you can define the properties and type of a thing before putting them down in a UI that was part of the editor instead of a separate dialog (like maybe within the bottom panel area in db2 and its forks), since constantly jumping in and out of the dialog gets a little annoying to me. (Slade 3's property dialog is kinda nice but its always after the fact still). Templating objects like that would probably speed things up a little for me.

 

also while I don't find texturing overall to be too bad, I have one pet peeve: floors and ceilings. Especially ceilings. there's so few flats that feel like they make a good ceiling, and letting a single texture tile tends to look silly in many cases.

[Gerardo194]

Not having ideas :'(

[Teivman]

Thing placement.

[leodoom85]

Having a lot of ideas just to disappear most of the time, same goes for inspiration.

[BigDickBzzrak]

1. When an area looks so much better in your head than in 320x200. Including when you are too dumb to decompose that mental image into actual sectors that you would draw in DB2.

2. When you remove a patch from your PNAMES and it completely messes up the TEXTUREx and you have to redefine every single goddamn texture. SLADE folks, are you reading this? Pleaseeeee... do something...

3. Lack of generalized linedefs in vanilla. That's the only Boom feature I genuinely miss.

4. Running into obscure vanilla bugs, such as "stuck things --> stuck sectors". Good thing we've got @scifista42, though! Thanks for everything pal, we love you!

[Decay]

To be honest, I hate mapping, all parts of it. The only enjoyment I get out of it is POSSIBLY the fulfillment of a vision I had, but that's not a guarantee. Thankfully I'm on my way out of mapping, I don't know why I tortured myself for this long though.

[Not Jabba]

I love deciding how to place monsters, weapons, and special items, but then having to place health and ammo at the end feels like such a chore. Can't you guys just Tyson everything and not get hurt?

 

Layout and details can be interesting, but textures are a pain in the ass. Especially since approximately 93.6% of all Heretic textures are different kinds of stone walls. And then you have to align that shit.

 

Also, monster sprite rotations.

[dobu gabu maru]

Dealing with vanilla limits, bar none. Thing placement is engaging, texturing can be relaxing, and even playtesting is fun albeit time consuming—I was inclined to agree with @Doomkid and say that how long it takes to make/balance/tweak/fix maps is, holistically speaking, the most worst part about mapping (assuming you seek to make more than speedmaps), but nothing has made me want to quit mapping altogether more than trying to fix visplanes on a map I thought was already finished. It's one of those things that makes you greatly appreciate mappers that stick to that limitation, but working under it is like wearing a cilice simply for the sake of "well they used to do it in the old days!" It's torture for me, especially because I'm stubborn and don't like to trash the detail I make.

[axdoomer]

I'm a perfectionist and I find none of the maps that I have made perfect, so I prefer not to map. 

[torekk]

55 minutes ago, InsanityBringer said:

Something inside of me wishes editors had a thing where you can define the properties and type of a thing before putting them down in a UI that was part of the editor instead of a separate dialog

Eureka Doom Editor kinda has this: http://eureka-editor.sourceforge.net/shots/shot2.png

 

Basically you select a thing and the panel on the right shows it's flags and such. If you select e.g. an already placed imp and then press the spacebar somewhere else, it'll basically copy&paste that imp, so you can easily give a group of enemies the same flags, just by doing it once and then copying them.

 

 

For me it's propably playtesting, which has mainly to do with how I design my levels. I basically start with a few basic rooms, place some things down and then playtest, so basically by the "end" of making a map, I played through it's beginnings over a hundred times. One one side it's frustrating, since you get bored so easily, on the other hand it's a good way to see if what you created is actually fun to play.

[DoctorGenesis]

Sometimes I'd say making doors can be a pain in the ass. But what really gets me is making "elevators".

[Grain of Salt]

I don't hate anything except starting something new.

 

How are things like texturing and thing placement unpleasant??

[printz]

Like the original poster, I dislike starting a map and seeing the empty grid in Doom Builder. Then I draw some room with STARTAN walls and generic floor and ceiling (hexagon tile floor and rectangular tile ceiling), place a few Doom 1 lamps, and everything looks so boring. Usually that means I started nothing, so I scrap that beginning of the map. The good thing with this is that it prevents me from starting too many new maps. And if I get past a point in a map, the map idea is no longer in risk of being abandoned.

 

Making directional lights in Doom is really unfitting for this engine, as it involves creating detail sectors, and the nearly-2D engine doesn't make it always possible to be realistic either.

[Koko Ricky]

I just hate when shit gets complicated and you have to do some major reworking, tweaking or hacky effects such as bridges. Or just going through every texture and making sure they're all aligned. Basically the really tedious and repetitive stuff.

[DooM_RO]

When I get stuck, when I lose confidence in my skills and most of all when few people play my maps.

[AnonimVio]

Everything.

Spoiler

Besides everything, difficulty settings.

 

[Albertoni]

"Man, this would look awesome."

5 days fine tuning the effect later:

"Okay, I can live with that one line of pixels showing if you look from this weird angle."

15 days later:

"Whew, finally fixed that, just had to write some scripts and define a pair of new actors so the sprites would overlap just right."

[Bauul]

I really struggle with secrets.

 

They're basically cupboards whose only purpose is to unbalance the map. Map balance is hard enough without having to worry about whether a player does or doesn't find a secret.

 

So screw secrets. I only put them in because I'm meant to have them. If it was up to me, I'd never include another secret again.

[joepallai]

adding new textures into the file/wad; every time I have to relearn the process.  It's just not intuitive to me.