Paar

Made some progress today, here's a sneek peek.

The actual hight from the bottom of the chasm (the main HUB of the level) to the top is around 700 pixels (or units). It's not designed to be super high rather to be about climbing. But all other places in the level are about verticality too. Thanks!

Thanks for your input, appreciate it. The verticality aspect was challenging but I think I made it work. I always start with a crude prototype to know that my idea is achievable, which, in this case, it was. I'm pretty sure it's gonna be a nice experience for any Doom fan. By the way, those two GIFs only portray the beginning area of the level which was designed to warm up the player. The main vertical area that serves as a HUB is yet to be finished (you can see it in some screenshots in the original post). And yes, Albion is not very known, which is a shame. It's a great RPG, one of the best.

Made nice progress yesterday but it is pretty time consuming. It will take a while to finish the level. Nevertheless, I though it would be nice to share the level with you through short GIF animations. I would be glad if you could tell me if you like this format more than screenshots.

I have always thought that it was due technological limitations back in the day, to save memory... The sprite is pretty big and is animated. It's pretty weird if it's only an oversight.

Nitpicker...

I heard that DB family editors run fine through Wine. It's probably a hassle to set up though.

I was talking about SLADE, not about Eureka. That's misunderstanding.

Unfortunately is seems that it's author doesn't care very much about improving the map editor (apart from some bugfixes). I can't blame him though since majority of the community uses DB2/DBX/GZDB, it's hard to justify the development time.

I wonder why he didn't do that while losing the fight with Corvus :D.

That explains it. Thanks.

Well SLADE3 is cross-platform too. The old hardware can be an argument but knowing how laggy Eureka feels (and I have quite competent machine) I wonder if this problem isn't pronounced on older hardware even more?

I have tried Eureka briefly and my impression is that the editor looks like something from Windows 95. It doesn't help that it feels slugish, either in 2D or 3D mode. I'm happy that there is an alternative mainly for people who prefer it that way. But even then I wonder why should I use Eureka instead of Slade3? What is it's selling point?

Maybe they tried to make a contrast to final area of Doom? You know, hell and fire and so on. I'm glad they did because water levels are my favorite in the game, especially E3M9: The Aquifer.

I know that Heretic support is still WIP even though it looks pretty solid already. I have very high hopes for this support because this is the first time Heretic is getting something that could be considered as a Boom alternative but with the bonus of being highly modable. At least I think so. So what level of accuracy do you aim for? Do you want it to be demo compatible as Doom support is? Will Heretic support all modding features of the engine?

It looks nice, don't get me wrong. It just loses the essence of the original game, at least visually. For me there is always a limit for what I consider a Doom mod before it gets lost in it's own thing and PBR materials certainly help push it in that direction.

Hey, that's some heated up discussion. Graf has a difficult position and a lot of responsibility on his shoulders and I think he's doing a grest job. He may not be always right but who is? If he finds the project interesting only if he's able to add modern features to the engine, it's fine. After all, it's his project. I agree some of them are a little too much (PBR materials in Doom?) and for me I would love him to address inconsistencies in different renderers as they are a mess right now. But the modding options of the port don't have a match. There are alternatives after all if you don't like GZDoom.

I really like Heretic (surprise), so much so that I enjoy mapping for it more than for Doom, even though I consider Doom to be a better game. My dream project that I would like to achieve in my lifetime is to take Heretic and do some kind of remaster that would solve some balancing issues, change a weapon or two, add some variety to textures in all of the episodes to separate them thematicaly, make new decorations and maybe create a bonus episode. I aim for it to be as vanilla as possible so accuracy of the Eternity means a lot to me. Same for Hexen eventually. To me, Heresiarch is the true Serpent Rider 😇.

It was a joke obviously. But it's true that I like to play some WADs in the original Boom source port in Dosbox from time to time. It's fun.

Nah, nothing beats chaingun from Quake 2. They nailed it.

You know, they could make Chocolate Boom 😃.

It was meant as a problem for people who would try to launch a GZDoom mod in now deprecated ZDoom and assume it would work. But I doubt there is confusion in the community on this topic as every mod should have a proper description with source port and it's version required. Other than that, GZDoom is mostly compatible with Boom, there are just few inconsistencies. Look at Eviternity, a recent Boom megawad. It works in GZDoom as expected but that could be because it's author designed the pack with GZDoom in mind. But I agree that every source port should fully support Boom as it became standard in the Doom community. But hey, it's democracy, they can do with the port what they want.

More and more mods make use of ZScript which ZDoom 2.8.1 doesn't support as far as I know. That alone should be a problem.

There's not much competition regarding Heretic support in other source ports (with modding capabilities) so I will be probably happy with "faithfully playing Heretic", even though I would be interested in changes made in comparison to the original source code.

I like Quake even though I think that it isn't as fun as Doom is. Weapons are a big factor in this. Ultimately they feel underwhelming and uninspired to me. The axe is ok-ish but I have never used it to this day, maybe just for opening secrets. Then there is a single barreled shotgun and double barreled shotgun. I wouldn't have problem with them if they didn't occupy separate weapon slots (unlike Doom where both occupy slot number 3). Nailgun and super nailgun have similar problem - they are in their core the same weapons, just with different damage output and ammo consumption. They could easily make one nailgun with an alternative mode. Once you have SNG, you don't need to use the original NG. I would understand if SNG did a little higher damage output with double the ammo consumption (that way you would need to consider if it is worth it you) but it's exactly 2 nails for single double damage shot. Even the accuracy is the same. The only advantage is it's higher DPS. And than there are grenade and rocket launchers... Both good weapons but again, you could have just rocket launcher with alternative mode that behaves like grenade launcher. There are 8 weapons in total and most of them feel like duplicates of another. That isn't a case of Doom for the most part. The only problem I see is a gun vs chaingun since when you obtain the latter you don't have to use the former anymore.