jerrysheppy

You go into a place with lots of blood and pentagrams everywhere. It looks really awesome and you'd love to just soak it in, but the current inhabitants have absolutely no chill so you need to shoot them before you can sightsee

All other things being equal there's probably few states I'd rather live in than California; trouble is the part where "all else being equal" includes stuff like being able to afford to live in a nice neighborhood (or live there at all). I'm also not a fan of their gun laws if I'm being honest. I tell people that the United States is weird because all but the very worst states have a lot of decent places to live and a fair chunk of good people, and conversely the "good states" might still have 30+% shitters in their population, spread out across the rural areas. In terms of states where I definitely wouldn't want to live even if I were well set up in a nice suburban neighborhood or safe city neighborhood, it's probably like... West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida? I think most of the others I'd at least consider for a minute.

Has anyone who's pointed out the bad things about the port been doing so with the thesis that Rebecca Heineman was a shitty programmer? Of all the mockery I've seen of the 3DO port, I've never seen that argument being made, so it seems weirdly strawman-ish to frame things that way.

I tend to do a balanced, back-and-forth approach. As @Asbadagba mentioned above, going too hard in detailing before a region is properly laid out has its drawbacks, but by the same token I have a hard time really envisioning or being able to move on from an area before I've composed at least a representative amount of its aesthetics. So I'll block something out, do a rough draft of the detailing, then perhaps move on. Additionally, I often have different days when I want to do different things on a level. So, for as long as possible, it helps to have some detail left to add to the map somewhere and other areas left to be blocked out somewhere, so that I can shift from one sort of task to the other as needed to keep me feeling engaged.

Make a second one of those rooms, maybe? And then a third? I ain't gonna say that a map that's just combat arenas strung together is the best thing but it will at least break through the rust and get the nut turning.

I'm having a hard time parsing out exactly what it is you're talking about. Stealth monsters are a thing in (Z)Doom of course, and what you're describing sounds like that, but stealth status has nothing to do with sprite data per se-- there isn't a "stealth version of the sprite". As far as I'm aware (and creating monsters isn't my forte so it's possible I'm wrong) the only way a monster becomes a stealth monster is by having the stealth flag set in its definition.

The proliferation of nice starry skies in PWAD resources pretty well puts the lie to any idea that you couldn't have a good-looking sky that conveyed the impression you were on the surface of a Martian moon. Or at least did a more credible and immersive job of it, notwithstanding the question of whether it's actually photorealistic to what you would see from Phobos's surface. The gravity and atmosphere thing is easier to handwave away. Artificial gravity is nearly ubiquitous in sci-fi even where it's physically unrealistic (and where you have artificial gravity you can have an atmosphere). Terraforming the surface of an asteroid-like moon until it resembles a particularly picturesque set of heavily vegetated mountains from China is, uh, not a common sci-fi trope. The real take-to-heart message is that, at this point, there's probably absolutely nothing to be gained from having an extended discussion about it. Everyone ought to realize that the E1 sky breaks immersion if you think about it for a nanosecond. Everyone ought to be able to come up with some (relatively) convincing arguments for how to handwave parts of it away, and everyone ought to be aware of the limitations of those arguments and not defend it past the point where it becomes unambiguously dumb. And everyone ought to realize that you can't actually travel back in time 30 years and tell Adrian Carmack "yo, people are actually going to notice stuff in three decades, so make sure your i's are dotted and t's crossed", so it's probably not worth spending any more of your life thinking about it.

Your first obligation is to take care of yourself and/or your loved ones. Your obligation to regale us with blog posts about Doom level development comes immediately after those.

It would be supremely ironic if a new generation comes to associate the concept of a "MyHouse map" with an elaborate, creative and detailed project. Basically the complete opposite of what the term meant for 30 years.

Very much this. Things are going to be a lot worse than we'd like, but they'll still be much better than we fear—as long as the good people don't take their eyes off the ball. Even if we're going to miss 1.5c, every little fraction of a degree helps when it comes to mitigating the overall negative effects. Keep doing everything you can. That means not giving up; that means organizing; that means voting effectively. Even if you're disenchanted with the political system, there are still better outcomes and worse outcomes. Work for the better ones. It does make a difference. Each incremental improvement makes the next one easier. Apologies for the cliche, but: it's a marathon, not a sprint. The people who are causing all of this would love nothing more than for you to give up and stop fighting against it—or to adopt righteous-feeling, all-or-nothing performative attitudes that don't actually lead to improvements—so that they can keep burning their gas stoves and coal power plants in perpetuity while the opposition bloc fragments. There is nothing virtuous about cynicism or small-d dooming. Anyone who explicitly or implicitly tries to lead you to believe that there is, is not your friend.

Not sure if you mean 4.10 but if so, it working with the most recent version means everything is fine. (It working with actual 4.1 would be quite remarkable.) 4.9 is like at least a year old at this point, and it's entirely routine for maps/mods to break with older versions of GZDoom. edit: saying 4.9 was a year out of date was overselling it a bit but it's still been 9 months

People are saying it would be considered good because of the new monsters, but I'm not sure why they're assuming that id wouldn't already have made the new monsters. The hypothetical, remember, is "id releases TNT instead of Doom 2"-- and TNT, of course, had all the Doom 2 monsters in it. So I'm assuming the question is basically about levels and to a lesser extent textures. And in that case, I think it gets judged at best as being of inconsistent quality and mediocre on average with a number of decent standouts. You know, like Doom 2's levels are. TNT doesn't have uniformly great levels either, but where TNT's levels are bad it's usually because of being overly complex and obtuse rather than just looking amateurish.

Yeah, as I said in my post, the mapper has an obligation to not push out shovelware and ask people to playtest it, and I lose a lot of respect for "mappers" who do that. I wasn't aware of any context involving Dreamskull personally.

So I'm a mapper who feels myself highly conscious of the need to respect the time of my playtesters, but I don't see this as a "terrible take" necessarily. Hopefully this doesn't become too great of a digression, but in (hopefully) brief terms, the biggest place I see mappers disrespecting playtesters' time is by shoveling out maps that have way too much still wrong with them. Playtesters are there to catch stuff that you didn't or aren't able to assess for yourself. Stuff like egregiously widespread texture misalignment, completely broken scripts, or other basic errors are signs that the mapper didn't move through the stage of testing it themselves before coming to the point of getting other sets of eyeballs on it. Expecting a certain length of time commitment, on the other hand, is not ipso facto disrespecting that time. If properly playtesting and giving feedback on a map takes sixty minutes, then it takes sixty minutes. Nobody is entitled to have any other given person agree to playtest their maps, of course, but once that agreement is made, it's reasonable to expect the task to be done properly.

My map in the first iteration of RAMP (2021) was probably the first map I've made where I'm wholly satisfied with the overall player-facing package and wouldn't change much of anything looking back. Under the hood, some of it is still pretty yucky. I've definitely continued to expand my skill level when it comes to scripting, lol.