Wagi

It also doesn't make sense for demons to leave medkits, keys, and weapons all over the place that allow you to make it through the level, but in Doom the prevailing philosophy is (usually) gameplay and visual clarity > realism. Simply name the map "Flint, Michigan" and it will make sense.

The Icon of Sin fight is creative but it isn't fun.

Food for thought: Given the opinion most players have on this map, the fact that you can skip straight to the exit may have been a feature, rather than a bug.

Do bear in mind that there are textures in the game with the sole purpose of warning the player that a liquid is poisonous. If you want to make blood damaging, by all means do so, but it might be a good idea to use those signs.

Few comments about the Heretic screenshots: * I don't recognize the level from the first screenshot at all * The gargoyles look absolutely jacked up. Glad they updated the art before they released the game. * Kind of interesting that they had blue fire braziers, I wonder why those were removed. * The Citadel was noticably different. The yellow key was in a different spot And the weird room with the invisible teleporter that the waterfalls take you to looks like it is connected to the starting area. I wonder why they changed it. * The Cathedral looks like it underwent a lot of changes. The blue door is in a completely different spot. * Looks like the COLORMAP is different. You can tell that the light blue color fades to gray rather than dark blue like it does in the final game. They probably used the same formula for generating the COLORMAP that Doom did and then tweaked it later in development. * The automap shows the player as a red arrow. In the final game we have the title screen artwork, status bar gem, and powered hellstaff rain all suggesting the player is red, despite being green. And in the beta (alpha?) we can apparently add the automap to that list.

Hard disagree. The deep vivid blues are downright iconic. Can you imagine the start of E1M1 if the carpet was that drab, faded blue that a lot of PWADs like to have? Yuck. I think the biggest problems with the Doom color palette is that the red doesn't roll off to black quickly enough, meaning that the COLORMAP has to fade red to brown when it gets dark (same with the pink range). Heretic did a much better job of preventing color artifacts with their palette, seemingly by restricting what colors a particular range is allowed to fade to. I'd be really curious how the tool that generated their COLORMAP worked compared to Doom's.

I use a homemade port that is based on Chocolate Doom but adds uncapped framerate, truecolor rendering, supersampled column/span rendering, removes a few static limits, and adds a colored fuzz effect. I like having a vanilla experience that is easier on the eyes but was annoyed with some of the changes that Crispy Doom made.

I'll chime in and play devil's advocate here and say that one thing Heretic did a lot better than Doom is interesting enemy attack patterns for bosses. The bosses in Doom simply wander around and fire the same mint ice cream ball/rockets/bullet at you over and over again. The Iron Lich fires a tornado around that chases you and disrupts your movement, an ice ball that splits out when it hits a wall, or a column of fire. The maulotar can charge at you and stun you, smack you with a hammer, create a wide column of fire or a snake of fire that will instakill you if you touch it. D'sparil can teleport around the map and summon minions. One thing that is really disappointing though, almost every single enemy projectile makes no sound when it hits a wall, making them all seem inconsequential. It almost makes it seem like the game was unfinished.

I got stuck on Seven Portals because I did not understand the purpose of the switches up the stairs of Guardian of Steel. I basically figured out how to do the Seven Portals skip before I found out how to complete it normally.

IMO, SpaceDM9's Tokyo level takes the cake for cool vibes.

I totally agree, the texturing still sucks but the lighting looks significantly better in software mode.

The level doesn't have the best texturing but the complete lack of fake contrast and any sort of light distance fading is making it look way worse than it is supposed to.

I created a deathmatch level that was thematically based on the most hated TNT map of all time. Yes, that one.

The problem with inescapable death pits is that the punishment is too far out of proportion with the mistake. Main idea is that if you screw up, you should lose a little bit of health (or if it's the Cyberdemon, a lot of it), but everything is survivable if you stay healthy. That goes out the window with death pits because the moment you fall in, no matter what your health total, every single item you've collected up to that point is totally worthless.

Judging how the muzzle flash is correct, I'm going to assume that the light tables used for column drawing got jacked up somewhere. Probably related to the colored lighting effects.