Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
Catpho

What did it felt like when you guys started mapping?

Recommended Posts

I think im getting into the mapping scene soon, so i wanna know how it felt like for some of you veterans :P

Share this post


Link to post

Fun! Trying to overcome hurdles and you're not sure how at the beginning is not fun. But once you've learned enough to have a little bag of tricks at your disposal, it's one of the most enjoyable things you can do (in my opinion)

Share this post


Link to post

It was super fun. Being able to move the player start in Doom 2 Map19 and turn it into a castle escape scenario seemed like the best thing ever. I spammed my IRC friends with awful one minute levels and acted all excited about them. Total crap seemed like gold, there wasn't any doubt in what I was doing. Just PLAYING with the editor and enjoying myself. What happened?

Share this post


Link to post
5 minutes ago, Memfis said:

It was super fun. Being able to move the player start in Doom 2 Map19 and turn it into a castle escape scenario seemed like the best thing ever. I spammed my IRC friends with awful one minute levels and acted all excited about them. Total crap seemed like gold, there wasn't any doubt in what I was doing. Just PLAYING with the editor and enjoying myself. What happened?

I dunno, what did happen :P

Share this post


Link to post
2 minutes ago, Catpho said:

I dunno, what did happen :P

Times have changed, I suppose. I don't know what mapping was like back then, I have not been around at the time, but something I have seen is that people are quite quick to have certain expectations as to what is a good map and what isn't. And I'm guilty of this myself, I suppose we all are in a sense. By the same token, there seem to be certain "standards" people expect nowadays, visuals, gameplay, layouts, yadda yadda... Stuff you "can" do in a map, stuff you "can't" do in a map and so on. Maybe people were more "open minded" back when memfis started out... Obviously I can't speak for him, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was on the right kinda track here.

Share this post


Link to post

Overwhelming. All the tools available in Deepsea (as well as [GZ]Doom Builder) were too much for me! :P

 

Maybe one day... if I wasn't so fucking damned lazy XD

Share this post


Link to post
4 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Times have changed, I suppose. I don't know what mapping was like back then, I have not been around at the time, but something I have seen is that people are quite quick to have certain expectations as to what is a good map and what isn't. And I'm guilty of this myself, I suppose we all are in a sense. By the same token, there seem to be certain "standards" people expect nowadays, visuals, gameplay, layouts, yadda yadda... Stuff you "can" do in a map, stuff you "can't" do in a map and so on. Maybe people were more "open minded" back when memfis started out... Obviously I can't speak for him, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was on the right kinda track here.

I think it was maybe kinda the same, considering the "worst wad" award going to "1994 levels"( im glad its gone, heh :P).

Share this post


Link to post

Oh man I remember when I first started mapping, it was feelings of pure excitement and endless possibilities, and that was with a very limited understanding of the game and mapping at the time.

 

I don't know why I view it as such a dreadful chore now......

Share this post


Link to post

There's something about newbie maps that's a lot of fun to play, IMO. It probably has a lot to do with the excitement and ambition that you feel when you first start out. I was actually thinking the other day that would make a cool community project, you ask people to submit their first maps and then compile them all into a megawad. I would play something like that. 

 

Personally, I just started mapping last year, I've already made 3 big maps and I'm still excited at the prospect of mapping more... guess I'll see how I feel in a year or so, lol. 

Share this post


Link to post

I'm no veteran but I remember how I felt when I loaded up Doom Builder 2 for the first time ever.

 

Warning! Obnoxious text wall ahead:
 

Spoiler


"THIS IS AWESOME! I'm going to make a megawad now and title it Hell Invasion. The first map will be a huge city with demons and zombies and imps and gunz and... Why does the sky look like wall paper? Never mind! STARTAN, <Default Flat (I forgot what it was called> and <Default Ceiling (Forgot its name too)> are just the best! Clearly everyone thinks these are awesome otherwise they won't be the default textures. And wait, I put the door texture on this wall. Why doesn't it open? SCREW THAT! An awesome map like this totally awesome city (with a ceiling so high, you can't tell what texture it has) doesn't need doors! Who needs to enter buildings amirite? OH! I'll use redkey texture on this building and a blue building and yellow one. Can't forget skull keys. I know! I'll have this sludge do 10 damage to the player. And it'll drain into this hole. You die in real life when you fall down a manhole so I'll make it damaging AND inescapable. I'll put the exit right here. But I don't want the player to skip this super awesome map by running for the exit. I'll put this large building in front of it. No one will find it unless they're super sharp or finish the level the proper way. Brightness? Put that all they way up, baby! My maps will be well-lit so everyone can see how awesome they are. Put player start and a shotgunner in front of it. DONE! THIS IS THE BEST MAP EVAR!!!"

(It's not)

 

 

Fun times. Fun times.

Share this post


Link to post

i had deu5.21 off a cover disc and i was already really absorbed by the first room I drew and then everything else would just be corridors or squares

eventually i would get a critical linedef back to front or create a shape where every line belonged to a different sector and the renderer would go nuts and turn all three hundred of my badly-placed lines into a bizarre cobweb

and then i would start again

 

the way doom builder keeps track of sector integrity was a pretty huge revelation to me lol

believe it or not i made sheer poison in windeu5.24 by dragging vertices off the first square i placed because the Add shape... tool used to crash my 486 and the trauma from all those years ago never quite relaxed its grip

 

i remember thinking it was cool to set doors to have f_sky1 as their texture

still kinda do

 

it has taken me a really long time to become even half good at mapping to be honest

Share this post


Link to post

It has always been a wonderful experience for me. When first started out, I used to map out places such as the blueprint of my house and surrounding areas. Had a lot of fun with DB in the past years; made various crazy projects but never released more than a few decent one's. Now however, I don't spend that much time creating maps... There are some partially done levels for a survival wad that I'm working on, but I find myself neglecting the project nowadays. Need some motivation, followed by ideas, to go into the maps. I've probably lost that enthusiasm, or got fed up of Doom Builder with the passage of time.

Share this post


Link to post

I remember making a small hangar and how it took me ages to make it work in an outside area with sky. I didn't bother to read about the logic of how sectors are made exactly, I just wanted to try it myself, words would have just made it more complicated for me. I do remember being very happy when I got it working. Started imagining the whole map, made a small sketch even.

Share this post


Link to post

It was probably one of the most exciting times in my life. I've never been so eager to learn anything else in my life, seeing as the Doom Builder website already had about six or so tutorial videos which I gladly watched after installing Doom Builder 2 in 2009. I basically only watched those videos and went from there making levels, which began with me trying to recreate my grandparent's house in Long Beach (which ended up with a major overhaul years later as MAP01 of Eternally Yours). I also learned that you couldn't place floors over each other just by raising the floor/ceiling height and placing them over other sectors, lol.

 

Starting out mapping, it was the first time I could actually exercise the ideas I had for any video games, and at times when I wanted to learn how to do certain things, I'd look at the IWAD maps and see what the Id authors did, and I just recreated certain parts of it in my own way - can't think of a direct example of this, but I'm sure there was some odd issue I was encountering with a mid-texture or something. I was staying in Lake Tahoe at some point in later 2009, and I remember working on some fun concepts which were some of Doom Core's earlier maps (maps 4, 5, 6 & 8) and I would take a break from mapping to play the drums, and after a while I'd take a break from playing the drums to go work on some more Doom maps. Those were good times.

 

Nowadays, I don't feel I've changed much - I've improved in a lot of places obviously but I still have a lot of ideas for Doom maps. Even in my post-activity years ago I never did stop getting ideas for Doom maps, I was just burned out after playing legions of Doom maps and felt like playing something else for a while.

Share this post


Link to post

Back then, I was using DoomCad, which was super user unfriendly, but it had 3d view feature long time before other editors had it.

So it was like:

  1. Let's create few sectors.
  2. Start 3d mode.
  3. Wait 15 minutes to load the view.
  4. Wooow! I am the best architect ever!
     

Share this post


Link to post

I really enjoyed the experience while making some of the worst maps ever. I'm really fond of those memories, even if the maps it produced weren't good at all. It was this new period where I could make new doom levels and put whatever the crap I want in them.

Share this post


Link to post

My ten year old self was amazed and frustrated because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I could make things.

Share this post


Link to post

It was an odd experience since it went from "hey guys! look! im making a level for a videogame" when i used to make deepsea maps were i just made maps for the sake of just making them to "hey.... you know? this is actually fun" when i switched to doom builder were i finally started to get some enjoyment of making an actual map and started to notice small details that made a map fun, it was also equally frustrating since i would show my maps to some friends and when they would send me their own maps i would be amazed by how complex and amazing their levels were and how simple and crappy mine were. But it was never discouraging to stop mapping. 

Share this post


Link to post

It was a real joy being able to create Doom environments that I visualized in my mind. Once the map was constructed, populating it with monsters to blast and goodies to collect was pretty fun too. Although I would say the first few maps I made were rather cramped, but once I got the hang of it the maps were more open and easier to transverse.

Share this post


Link to post

Overwhelmed, to be honest, in no small part due to my hubris. But I guess it turned out well in the end.

Share this post


Link to post

Making huge open-world (city-like) maps with lots of buildings and stuff, setting the gamemode to Nightmare, placing a number of monsters on top of them, and letting them infight used to be a fun activity for me in childhood lol. Just hiding in a corner and watching all those hundreds of projectiles in the air, moving from one building to another :P

Share this post


Link to post

I've only just started (still published only one map, have two or three discarded attempts and two or three more WIP's).

 

To me, figuring stuff out isn't that hard. Granted, I'm using DB2, whereas most of the veterans around here started with DEU and other tools which were far less intuitive and polished. But I also have the advantage of friends here and on Discord that I can ask questions to, lots of tutorials available (written and video), a decent understanding of the game engine, etc.

 

I suppose my biggest difficulty is that I don't consider myself to be all that creative or artistic. I feel like I spent most of my good ideas (and a couple of bad ideas) on my first map, and don't really know what else to do now, lol. None of the maps I make is "pretty" or intended to be so... I just want them to be fun to play, and I lack patience for detailing and decorating after the gameplay is accomplished. They are sets of square rooms with square obstacles. That probably will never change.

 

I also have trouble with scaling fights. I enjoy macro-slaughter, and my initial go at making a fight always always turns out to be flat-out impossible. :-P

 

One thing that I do find very thrilling and deeply satisfying though, is watching others play my maps. Especially when they die. >:-) (So long as they are enjoying themselves, of course... that loses its appeal if the person is just getting frustrated.)

Share this post


Link to post

denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance that I'll never be anything but a musician to this community

Share this post


Link to post

When I first started to use SLADE 3, I had no idea what to do in forms of map design. Should I make an outdoors level? Should I make a usual UAC lab of some sorts? How about five Barons of Hell while using your fists around a Colosseum that's poorly designed? Hence why I think before I create.

 

I've seen so many DOOM maps up to this point of making some myself that would end up HORRIBLY put together. I don't know how to make doors open properly, I don't know how to make something in the lines of "Collect Weapons, RATA-BATA-BANG BANG Hidden Doors that Open once collected, then BAM, cYBERDEMONS--"

...actually, that Idea seems a bit sucky, imo.

 

Anyways. Map making was just a pain up the wazoo, though making a basic room with adjustments to look pretty seems a bit time consuming, but cool. However, when I try to make details, it'll go in one in of two outcomes:

 

1. Everything goes perfect as usual.

 

or 2. Some vertices get buggy and screwed up and I have to restart the whole thing unless I have a backup file of that said map I am making.

 

That's all I have to say, either way, Doom Map Making has a huge learning curve that I have to follow in order to be part of the "Majority of DOOM Map Making".

 

...I'm going to guess that there are modern crap maps out there, don't wanna be part of them.

Share this post


Link to post

Already plenty of lengthy replies so I'll try to keep it brief: I was a little kid who absolutely loved Doom and Doom wads. The ability to just move stuff around on Entryway blew my mind. One of my first maps was a blocky 1994-esque recreation of New York with the twin towers still in tact (9/11 had literally just happened). There were little texturing bugs all over and I didn't even understand how tags worked, but I kept pumping maps out and learning more and just never stopped to this day.

 

The pre-Doom Builder days were like the stone age. WadAuthor was one of the easiest and best back in it's heyday and it was my first proper mapping tool, but in 2005-2006 switching to the (then quite new) Doom Builder was the best choice I ever made as a mapper.

 

The "fun and mystery" of being new to mapping is a feeling I do miss a bit, but the knowledge of how to make a fun Doom map was certainly a worthy tradeoff.

Share this post


Link to post

That short period of time when I knew how to make doors and stuff, yet were still novice enough to experiment with things like teleports was great! Even if maps of that era turned out cramped (partly due to DB2's visual mode not being 1:1 with ingame). I love the abstract, everything goes style of my old maps, even though the visuals were extremely unrefined for me back then (well, even more than nowdays). I did though make a point in not playing any pwads or watching footage of them in order to create as virgin of maps as possible, free from any modernisms of Doom today (I just aren't sure if it was a good idea, as now I have hard time trying to play pwads)

Share this post


Link to post

The first time, it was interesting. I put some Keens into cage to nearby room, added slime pit, a lift to outdoor area with trees and imps. But my very first map is unfinished, and deleted from HDD, because it even have no exit. It was about 10 years ago, but I clearly remember it.

Share this post


Link to post

@94's the best style That does sound interesting, it's similar to what I went through when I began mapping since I went in only having previously played The Ultimate Doom and Doom II. As I began mapping that was when I started playing Final Doom for the first time, so I was occasionally inspired from Plutonia, TNT and otherwise as I went on from there in my mapping process. I'd be curious to see more maps from people who have only been familiar with the Id Software experience.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×