jerrysheppy

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.

So far I've been having trouble actually getting a proper map completed per day, since I get dragged down into detailing and using special effects (which I ironically am not skilled enough to use properly, thus making it completely pointless).

Wow, you must be way ahead of me time wise. Are you doing them all in a single map file?

Sign me up. Worst that can happen is I'll have to bail out.

I mean yeah this comes across as a subtweet of the Infernew drama, but really, isn't a relatively high-profile incident of questionable project management a good time to talk about good project managers (and why they're good and what that says about good project management)? But anyway I really agree with @Phobus on this. Especially TGH, not necessarily because the actual project was better than any other (it was certainly excellent but I'd put the two released BTSX episodes a little higher, for instance), but rather because of what a good salvage job it was. As far as project managers I've personally worked under, well, there's only been one successful project that I've tried to contribute to, namely the pcorf community project. And pcorf managed to put everything together in a reasonable amount of time, with decent quality controls, and without ruffling any feathers as far as I could see. I'd definitely "work for" him again.

In... well, not really in defense of bonnie, but in the interest of fairness, the critiques that bonnie made of my map were decent and in some cases improved it. They were presented in a way that was, let's say, sometimes unnecessarily lacking in pleasantry; but, in my case, they weren't completely wrongheaded. That said, I also looked at the way bonnie was treating some of the other folks. In particular, I think it was @sarge945-- whoever had the Hell Keep inspired map that was one of the earliest maps to be rudely booted from the project despite myself and other folks not seeing what the hell (heh) was wrong with it-- that made me lose confidence that it was likely to be a pleasant experience or that I would be able to revise my map in a way that would ultimately be up to bonnie's (seemingly idiosyncratic) standards for what qualified as an Inferno-inspired map. In hindsight this seems to have been part of the same trend as NaZa's second map, though unlike Sarge's, I haven't played NaZa's. So that was when I bailed. Weird as it seems to say it, the coming out into the light of this remaining drama has actually been a bit of a relief for me, since it confirms for me that I wasn't actually being overly sensitive and was in fact seeing the writing on the wall of what would become a problem for others as well.

Well, the good news in that regard would be that there's an ample supply of e3-inspired maps that are now left without a home. Someone who could get those mappers onboard would have a head start on releasing something!

Tried this. Looks good and played decently well. Couple of thoughts-- 1) Killing the player if they try jumping down down the second tier of the lavafalls in the red key room (after they've already dropped down one fall with no harm) is a bit of a dick move. Just make an invisible wall there if you want to stop them from going further, or a teleport back up. 2) The animations in the last room, where the lava is trickling down the cracks on the walls, seemed like they were running too fast-- almost like strobing on and off. Come to think of it, the lavafall animations may have been running faster than they ought to, also, but it was less obvious there since freely falling vertical lava can reasonably move faster than lava oozing along horizontal cracks and stuff. Anyway, if I were you, I'd go into your animdefs and increase the time between frames by double or more. But that would just be my preference.