jerrysheppy

I'm going to try and do this, with a personal twist: I'm not gonna worry about texturing, detail sectors, or thing placement. Rather, I'm just going to get each level to the point where the automap is complete and one can follow the major path(s) throughout the level. This is because this is precisely where I usually get bogged down in my attempts at any sort of mapping project: I'll go one room (or one small area) at a time, trying to fully realize my goal for the visuals of each room, and then move on to the next area. Inevitably, I start approaching burnout before I get too much done in the way of complete levels. So instead, I'm going to try and crank out some full-length rough drafts, if you will, of maps. Then I'll have a stock of rough maps that I can perhaps, someday, go back and work on fleshing out.

Well... it's absolutely relevant insofar as the thesis of this thread is that Doom Eternal was the biblical apocalypse. It's right there in the title. It's certainly true that Doom Eternal (and Doom in general) draws a lot on the modern conceptions of Hell that have arisen from later sources, primarily Dante's and Milton's "Bible fanfiction". However, that's (a) again not what this thread was trying to argue, and (b) kind of not worth pointing out since it's so trivially obvious. Honestly, if there's a good argument to be made for Doom Eternal drawing directly on the Book of Revelations or other biblical sources (as opposed to just the broad lines of pop-culture understanding of Christian hell/eschatology, which again, is trivially obvious and has been for 25 years), this thread wouldn't be it. The OP's posting is way too rambling and disorganized-thinking-esque, and lacking proper references. It's also reaching a lot based on broad tropes. HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS SOMEONE SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT JUDGING IN THE TRAILER, AND THE BIBLE MENTIONS JUDGMENT TOO, ISN'T THAT A WILD COINCIDENCE???

At least the thread title is honest.

Just to reiterate what everyone else is already saying: Obviously, the visuals are utterly fantastic. This is right up there with the very best romps through Hell I've ever experienced in the (GZ)Doom engine, and the fact that it was done with vanilla texturing makes the achievement all the more incredible. Obviously, the engine features are used to their best advantage to do some heavy lifting here; the colored lighting, complex architecture, and added freedom in applying/manipulating textures all combine to make things look much better than the exact same textures/concepts could possibly have looked in a strictly limit-removing source port. The metaphor that kept coming to my mind as I played through was that the vanilla-texture restriction felt almost like Inigo Montoya fighting with his off hand in The Princess Bride. It's impressive to see what can be done even with the "handicap", but what it leaves me wanting is to see the author go: and really blow our minds with something that makes full use of an expanded texture set. Since other people have mentioned performance issues, I just thought I'd chime in on that as well. My computer is solidly mediocre relative to the current state of the art: the CPU is something like 9 years old at this point and wasn't bleeding edge even then, and the graphics card is a GTX970 that I got three years ago. Some poorly optimized and/or overly bells-and-whistles-y GZDoom maps have brought it to its knees; I'm thinking in particular of one Eviternity winter-episode map that had a huge outdoor area near the end filled (in GZDoom) with weather effects. But here, even in the grand finale, I didn't have much trouble. There was a noticeable framerate drop but it still stayed very playable. Maybe my standards for what constitutes playability are lower than others', but it didn't become a slide show. *shrug* (I would've been happy with a grand finale that was slightly less grand, but that's because my gameplay tastes don't run to the slaughter-y, not because of performance issues.)

clearly he's telling you to bring up the berserk fist so you can punch the shit out of the demons

It wasn't really harsh, just direct and to the point. And given that you appeared to have blithely disregarded the well-known conditions for using the resource in question, I don't blame the creator for being a bit curt with you. You'd already appeared to ignore their wishes once so why wouldn't they escalate to something firmer?

It's me, I did this

Had to put this down for a couple of days because of lots of other shit, but I started playing again last night and got a few maps through the snow episode. I just wanted to say that the little detail of snow fading out around heat sources/under trees blew me away, out of all proportion to how simple it actually is. Just a really neat touch that seems so obvious but that I'd never seen before. It's like the first time I saw sector-based faux lightmapping two decades ago in Darkening 1 or whatever it was. And of course everything else about the maps continues to be amazing. I wasn't really into the aesthetic of the second episode (just how I feel about base maps; no slight against the texturing or mapping skills) but the snow episode has reeled me right back in.

Ironically, after waiting so long I think I'm going to wait a few more days before actually downloading the texture set and looking at it in the editor. The main reason is that I'm still playing through Eviternity, and I want the textures to be fresh and new when I see them 'in the wild', as it were. :V

One of the things I really like about the textures in the first episode is how a lot of them seem like callbacks to vanilla textures, but done over in cool new ways.

Indeed, I picked up on that detail and did assume it was intentional.

I had to go to sleep just as it would've been posted :( But now I'm awake, here, and downloading Update: I played through the first three maps, really nice so far. Maps are obviously impressive (not sure how some of these effects were done) and the textures are creative and well done. Don't think I've ever seen the Enneagram in a Doom map before, heh, which is surprising given that every other quasi-mystical geometric design has probably appeared at some time or other. Fun stuff.

Basically this, except instead of "planning what maps I could make" it will be more like opening it in SLADE to stare at it in wonder, since I suck at actually making anything.

Well, as you might have been able to guess, I fell off the wagon hard after the first several days. I really underestimated how nuts November would become, but even before that my efforts were mediocre and incomplete. I learned a lot about where I tend to get stuck when it comes to mapping, though, and I have hopes for being able to turn that experience into better work down the road.

So far I've dutifully started a new map each day. None of them has yet to include an exit trigger, let alone silly things like "monsters" or "ammo", so my chances for finishing Nanowadmo according to the letter of the rules isn't looking good. That said, I'm making a lot of interesting layouts if nothing else. I could see this becoming a handful of actual maps at some point.