Megamur

Does anyone know what the oldest, single-player megaWAD is? And I mean a megaWAD that was actually designed to be a megaWAD, not one of these "collection" WADs where some guy stole a bunch of maps and crammed them all together into one huge WAD. With a timestamp of March 21st, 1996, nothing on /idgames seems older than Icarus: Alien Vanguard. Can anyone recall any earlier examples? I find it a bit surprising that no one ever attempted to make a whole new, game-replacing set of SP maps before Icarus, but I guess it's not impossible.

I almost wish Id didn't have such reverence for the cyberdemon. I'd actually like if the cyberdemon in Doom `16 would finally be "dethroned," and a new, even deadlier demon would be introduced. Something more complex and cunning that would make the cyberdemon's simplistic, brutish stomping and shooting patterns seem antiquated. I think the cyberdemon works best not as a boss, not a commander or "Hell's greatest warrior," but like a demonic tank; Hell's heavy artillery and a great piece of military hardware. So they roll one out to get you quaking in your boots and you trade rockets with each other, and after a pulse-pounding fight, it eventually falls. But then another might come stomping over the hillside soon after. So let's forget about the "legend" of the cyberdemon. Let's forget about that first time you saw it and how it turned you into a quivering puddle of fear. Let's stop making it such a huge event like its disappointing appearance in Doom 3. And let's just have it be one brutally tough hombre that could show up at any time to ruin your day.

Turning the Brightness setting up to maximum in the original Doom 64 produced exactly the same effect as picking up light-amp goggles, therefore making it a pointless power-up. Also, you may be surprised to realize that people other than men can withstand being in dark places, too. Anyway, I'm not sure if these issues have been noted already, but here's a few weird things I noticed from playing a few levels in Doom 64: Retribution. (Note that I'm using the 2016-2-21 SVN build of GZDoom. 2.2.something. I need to update this thing...but apparently not to version 3.0.0): -Equipping the chainsaw actually seems to wake up monsters for some reason. You don't even have to fire it, just select it and bring it up on-screen, and nearby, non-deaf enemies will become alert. As far as I'm aware, this is abnormal behavior for any Doom game, let alone Doom 64. -DSPDIEHI (the louder player death scream) sometimes plays when the player is killed. This sound effect was not in Doom 64. -DSPOSIT3 (zombie sight sound) and DSPODTH3 (zombie death sound) never actually play in Doom 64. (These mystery sound effects also show up in the PSX Doom TC's despite never playing in the real PSX Doom games either, and I don't know where they came from. DSPOSIT3 in particular doesn't even sound finished, so I'm not sure why modders use it.) -Using the classic weapon animations (I haven't tried the updated animations), the punch seems to inflict damage on a later frame than it should. There's a greater delay between when you press the fire button and when the punch actually connects than there should be. I have to "lead" my punches more than I would in the real game. -The weapon switching is way too fast. It might seem like a minor thing, but when a spectre is biting your face off, being able to quickly switch to a new weapon gives you a greater advantage than you're supposed to have. -In Map04, the first hell knight you encounter (near the soul sphere that triggers the red, flashing lights in the primary junction) shouldn't spawn until you grab the blue key, but it seems to appear immediately when the level starts. -Some buttons can be pressed from height levels they shouldn't be accessible from. (For instance, the button on the super shotgun platform near the beginning of Outpost Omega can be pressed while standing on the floor below the platform. You can't do that in the real Doom 64, as you actually have to be on the SSG platform to press the button.) I know this was a bug in classic Doom, but isn't there a Hexen feature that forces the player to be at a certain Z-axis in order to activate a line trigger? I assume ZDoom would support that, too. I really hope this mod won't succumb to feature bloat, and that the designer will focus on polish rather than adding lots of extra features. If players want extra things, they'll add them, themselves.

True, and I often think that was a typo, as well. Regardless, this is obviously meant as a remake of the original Doom, and in that game, the first level is spelled "Hangar." Calling it "Hanger 2" is incongruous, and makes it seem like an error.

Bear in mind, this is just my opinion, not map design gospel: -Try to avoid instant-kill traps that aren't at least somewhat telegraphed to the player beforehand. Pressing a random switch that crushes the player or drops them into an inescapable pit is just going to make the player frustrated. There's no challenge in this sort of design and the player feels no reward for overcoming it. They just get angry that they had to redo a part because there was no way they could predict they'd be killed by doing a completely innocuous thing. Something as simple as putting crushed piles of gibs on the floor of a sector where the player can trigger a crushing ceiling would help, for example. Then the player gets the hint that they need to be extra-alert and react quickly to what's ahead. (Of course, that's not to say you can't have unpredictable traps. It's just better when the player has a chance of actually surviving them if triggered.) -Doom was one of the first FPS games (or maybe the very first) to allow non-orthogonal walls. You should probably make the most of that in your levels. In other words, don't be afraid to draw walls that aren't straight north-to-south/east-to-west lines. While I'm not saying you need to draw zigzags everywhere, some slants and curves make architecture less sterile and homogeneous. -Similar to the above, some asymmetry is appreciated, too. One of my biggest issues with one of the more popular megaWADs, Ultimate Simplicity, was how utterly symmetrical everything was: whatever was on one side of a room would be perfectly mirrored on the other side. It not only made ambushes more predictable (if a shotgunner is waiting to the left side, inevitably, I can expect another in the same position to the right), it also makes the design feel more artificial and redundant. These are zombies and demons--bloodthirsty creatures of chaos--and it just feels bizarre having them standing on their marks at perfectly-aligned, equal distances from each other like they're part of some elaborate choreographed dance. -Blocking off areas with locked doors is all well and good, but it's also pretty cliche and a little dull. Consider mixing up the ways players access new areas, like having to climb over structures or jump through a window or find a hole in the ground that goes under an obstruction, or even something simpler like a switch that builds some stairs up to a previously-inaccessible area. A little bit of variety helps. -On that note, a puzzle or two every once in a while wouldn't hurt. Not many people do puzzles in Doom anymore, and that always disappoints me. Think of Level 19: The Citadel from Doom II. First, you've got to find out how to get to that red building across the moat that surrounds the main building. Then, once aside, there's a room of multiple teleporters that lead you all over the map, with only some of them guiding you toward the keys you need. I find pleasure in having to stop and think and retrace my steps and experiment with switches and jumps that might lead to the next area. It gives the gameplay a little more depth. However, I know this style of design isn't very popular with the modern Doom community, so tread carefully. -As mentioned by another poster, nonlinearity is nice. Think of E1M4 from the original Doom, which has various, significant alternate areas for the player to explore if they decide to, but also a more direct path for speedrunning types. There's no need to feel afraid about making some of the areas you create completely optional (as long as they can quickly get back to the main path from there). It enhances the sense of adventure of the player can wander off the beaten path and find some goodies that aren't essential to the level's progression. -Try to avoid making it that picking up a key always triggers an immediate ambush. It's the oldest trick in the book. Even delaying it can help, like making it that picking up the key opens up a monster closet close to the door the player needs to backtrack to. They think they're just retreading an old area they've already cleared, they turn a corner, and WHAM, monsters out of nowhere. Of course, don't do that all the time either, or it, too, will become predictable. Basically what I'm trying to say is, mix up your ambushes! I hope you'll consider some of these things when designing your levels. Good luck! :) I don't really agree with this. Sometimes it's more engaging and mysterious to make things less obvious. I think it's more important to showcase that there are key locations that you need to access, but absolutely can't reach right now: a door that's too far off the ground to walk through; a barrier with a switch visible behind it; a key above a moat that you can't cross. Then when the player hits a switch with no immediate effect, then they'll think, "I should probably check that place/those places I couldn't get to before." It's when you get into the "this switch opens a random, innocuous wall that houses another switch that does something else" craziness that things get frustrating. A few more pet peeves of mine in Doom level design: -Try to keep items out of the way of the action and the primary route. It's always annoying when you're fighting something or are just trying to reach the next area and accidentally step onto an item you don't want yet. Got a narrow doorway with a medikit right in front of it? Move it somewhere else: I've got 98% health and I don't want to waste the whole health kit because I can't get around it. -Clearly define your exit. Sometimes I want to go back for items I hadn't collected yet or look for more secrets, but I hit a seemingly normal switch or walk into a typical teleporter and the level abruptly ends. It can look corny, but that EXIT sign is useful for navigation. -Similar to the above, I can't stand secrets that you can only access one time. Sometimes I want to save stuff for later and so I leave items in secret areas, and then I try to go back and get frustrated when I realize I only had the one chance to get them. Same thing with one-way paths in levels, where you're eventually cut off from returning to earlier parts of the map. It's fine if you want to bar the player from retreating, but consider making it temporary: perhaps after the enemies are all killed and the exit is available, you open a new pathway or offer a teleporter that grants return access to earlier parts of the level so the player can make sure they got everything. Okay, I think I'm done now.

All these flat, 90-degree-angled walls are dull to look at, sorry to say. It's okay--and appreciated--when you have some curves here and there. Even some insets would be nice: computer panels or light fixtures mounted into the walls. Just something to break up the monotony of the single-textured, flat walls everywhere. John Carmack didn't upgrade Doom's mapping capabilities from Wolfenstein 3D's angular, homogeneous designs for nothing. Make the most of it. Also, it's spelled "hangar," with two A's. That's a structure aircraft go inside. A hanger is what you use to hang up clothing.

Right. Rocket explosion sound effects are cut off at the end because the sound effect only plays for as long as the explosion graphics are visible. Once the animation is completed and the sprite disappears from the game, so does the sound. By comparison, ZDoom plays the explosion sound and all other projectile "death" sounds in their entirety, even after the graphic disappears.

So it's impossible to make a new, more-accurate translation table that wouldn't make the green blood so bright? I thought PrBoom-plus did this, but I was mistaken. Doomsday does it, though.

Hopefully not. E-Sports are an embarrassment to gaming. A guy sitting at a computer is not an athlete. You do not deserve a cash prize for being able to click your mouse or twiddle your analog sticks better than other people. Plus, it ironically turns nerds into the egocentric jocks they probably grew up hating in school, except they don't even get any of the physical fitness benefits or respect from anyone outside of the gaming culture that an actual jock would receive.

Isn't that kind of what the new zombies in this game look like? They look way more deformed than they did in the old games, and seem to be partly fused with their armor.

Which is exactly the problem with the "the demons are aliens from a dimension called Hell" thing. Demons and Hell should remain as a nebulous, indefinable "other," not as something that can be classified with tangible logic and technical terms.

The GBA Doom was terrible. My least-favorite Doom port of all time. This hack is still pretty cool, though. Makes me wish all the maps would be redone so they'd be more authentic to the PC originals instead of just recycling the crappy JagDoom mapset.

I'd like to see a melee-focused enemy that's actually really dangerous, since classic pinkydemons, maggots and wraiths are almost embarrassingly bad at their jobs. "Oh no, it's coming right for me! It's winding up for its attack! Whoops, I took two steps back. I'm fine. Eat buckshot." I want something more like the fiends from Quake, that launch at you suddenly and do horrific amounts of damage in a short time. Happily, if that recent multiplayer footage is any indication, I might get my wish with that one new monster that smashes people into walls. I just hope they're similarly threatening in single-player.

It annoys me, too. Are we still doing this? I've been hearing this crap since Doom 3 came out. What's wrong with it literally being Hell? What's wrong with Hell and demons existing for real in Doom's story universe? For me, saying "the 'Hell' in Doom is actually an alien planet/dimension" is basically like saying the Force comes from midichlorians. Quit with all the sci-fi explanations. Can't we leave just a few things completely fantastical?

This port is virtually perfect. It does almost everything I want it to do (aside from being able to play the OGG sound effects I imported from Doom 3 and, oddly, the WAV sound effects from the PSX Doom TC's sound library. Those are minor things, however). Only other things I can suggest at the moment: -Consider darkening the blood color of hell nobles. Compare their crushed gibs (when blood color correction is on) to the blood pooling under their normal dead body sprite, and the crushed sprite has a much brighter blood color, too similar to the crazy neon green blood in the GBA Doom games. I'm not sure how this engine calculates color values, but at least when doing custom blood colors in ZDoom, a value of 10 50 10 seems almost perfect for hell noble blood. -Consider doing like the other limit-removing source ports and have it that death sound effects don't cut out when the actor they're associated with disappears. This would mean explosion sounds would continue to play in full even after a projectile's explosion animation is complete, instead of the sound suddenly stopping once the last frame of animation is over. I have a hard time imagining this would break compatibility with anything, and it seems like a genuine fix instead of something that would significantly alter the intent of the original game's audio/visual experience, but I won't pretend I'd know for sure. -Do you think hanging/impaled corpses should be affected by corpse mirroring? Or is that overstepping bounds too much? I suppose that could present problems if you're playing a DeHackEd patch that uses the frames of those decorations for other things. However, a DEH patch might also use potentially-mirrored enemy/player corpse frames for other things anyway, so it might just be a bad idea to use mirroring at all with DEH patches, which means it might be fine to mirror hanging/impaled corpses. I'm really not sure, but I'll throw the idea out there. Those things aside (and very trivial issues they are), this is an amazing port and pretty much my preferred way to play vanilla these days.

The Plutonia music pack was pretty awesome, but was anything like this ever done for the Master Levels? Obviously this would be kind of tricky since most of the Master Levels occupy the Map01 slot, meaning players would have to manually insert the MIDIs into each level (or just make a music WAD with 21 new tracks and have people IDMUS/CHANGEMUS to each appropriate track), but I still think it would be pretty cool if ML had its own music set. The levels themselves are pretty distinct, and maps like Bad Dream, Titan Manor and Black Tower could really lend themselves to some interesting aural moods. Just something for our talented Doomworld composers to consider. :)

I despise the PC Quake II's music with a passion, so I'll always prefer the N64 tracks, even if they're not particularly memorable. Nothing in Quake II is exciting enough to merit the constantly wailing guitars. When I'm trying to navigate a complex level or unravel a secret, the blaring soundtrack makes my head ache. It drowns out the cool environmental sound effects, too. Hard-rocking garbage noise from top to bottom. It's one of the only games I play where I disable the soundtrack and load something else into a music player. Anyway.... I agree that the GBA Doom's soundtrack is very hard to love. The tracks are generally butchered, with (obviously) poor instrument samples and often bizarrely sped-up tempos. By contrast, Doom II GBA's music is a vast improvement over the first GBA incarnation. I won't lie: I actually think The Demon's Dead sounds better in the GBA version than the PC original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FprnC95FEY Those drums are sweet, and I enjoy the more pronounced bassline.

Doom's pros: -Better color variety than Quake. Quake is predominantly brown, with some yellow and red splashed here and there. Doom offers you brown, red, gray, green and blue in the first room of E1M1 alone. -Better theme variety than Quake. Doom had techbases, Hell-infested techbases, and Hell itself. Quake was mostly just an endless series of dungeons. -Better weapons than Quake. Super shotgun and super nailgun basically make their non-super forms obsolete, ultimately reducing the weapon types to just six. Lightning gun is a poor replacement for a BFG. No good melee weapons in Quake, either. -Better-looking actors and objects. I guess not really being able to tell what you're looking at added to the warped creepiness of the Quake bestiary, but it doesn't change the fact that it's...hard to tell what you're looking at. -More memorable soundtrack. -Better sound effects. Gib a monster in Doom and it sounds like a crunchy, bloody, gooey mess. Gib a monster in Quake and I can't even tell what I'm hearing. Doom's weapon effects generally have more impact, too, and DoomGuy's grunts and screams aren't nearly as utterly bizarre and somewhat comical as QuakeGuy's. -Faster-paced gameplay. Not that Quake is slow, but Doom is quicker. -Some items better than Quake's. Quake's Pentagram of Protection doesn't protect your armor, which is totally stupid, but Doom's invulnerability sphere fully protects you from everything except telefrags. Soul spheres and megaspheres are way better than megahealth, the effect of which often disappeared before you actually needed it. Armor and health bonuses are a nice way to keep your power levels boosted. -Easier to mod and with a more prolific modding community, and the wide variety of source ports offers compatibility with a greater range of platforms. Quake's pros: -Better color blending than Doom. While the variety of colors might be lower, the colors that are available have much more levels of shading than in Doom, which allowed for smoother lighting. -Texture sets are more complementary than Doom's. Doom's textures were often a mishmash that didn't go together very well, so you ended up with weird stuff like UAC doors in Hell. Quake's texture set drew a clear distinction between the Earth and extradimensional levels, and just generally had a more unified style than Doom's. -Creepier atmosphere and music. I know a lot of people were upset when Quake came out that Reznor's score wasn't as rocking as hoped, but it makes the game incredibly moody and really sells you on the horrific, otherworldly atmosphere. -Monsters are generally more threatening. Aside from a cyberdemon or maybe a well-placed arch-vile, nothing in Doom puts me on edge as much as a fiend or a spawn coming at my face out of nowhere, and the ogre is quite versatile for basically being a standard foot soldier. -Some items better than Doom's. Ring of Shadows was much more useful than Doom's blur sphere, which was a power-down more often than not. Quad Damage was generally more handy than the berserk pack, and felt extremely satisfying to use. Red armor is pretty rad. -True 3D, free-aiming, swimming, jumping and scripting right out of the box. Doom took a while to get these features, and is still kind of working on the "true 3D" thing. In the end, the better mod support, a better weapon set, and more varied visual themes keep me coming back to Doom more often, but Quake is a nice alternative when I want something Doom-flavored that's a bit moodier and slightly more challenging.

Tell me about it. I love Icarus, too. One of my favorite WADs ever. You just don't see that wonderful, balanced blend of action, atmosphere and thought-provoking gameplay anymore. I don't do pistol starts. I feel it kind of ruins the vaguely-adventure-game-style character progression Doom has, where you gradually get stronger each map (unless some dork gives you all the weapons in the first level). This also means you have to deal with the consequences of your actions in the previous level, which can sometimes leave you even worse off than a pistol start would. And I play in a semi-hardcore style where I only save my game at the start of the map. If I die, I have to do the level all over again. I admit that there's rare occasions where I'll break and reload a mid-level quicksave (especially if I die for a really stupid reason after making a lot of progress), but for the most part, I stick to it and go back to the start. Too many quickloads will make you lazy and soften your skills and reaction time.

@Doomhuntress: MP3's are also a good idea since different sound cards/sound fonts can make MIDIs sound vastly different, so a straight recording like that lets people hear what you originally intended the music to sound like, instead of the sound system's interpretation of it.

I look at it the other way, and see it as a creative way to spice up non-combat areas. Parts of FPS games where you're just talking and not fighting tend to be pretty boring, so it was nice that DNF still gave you some things to investigate and play around with in these sections. Of course, I do have to agree that it would've been nice if such interactions were featured more prominently in the combat areas, too.

Yes. I wouldn't consider Doom+ vanilla, so this isn't vanilla either.

To clarify what I wrote before, I think adding totally new, non-optional features isn't a great idea. However, non-optional bugfixes are fine, as long as they don't mess with the gameplay. (Messing with the gameplay, for example, would be like ZDoom's decision to make lost souls focus on targets, instead of striking once and then forgetting their target like they were originally designed to do.) With that in mind, I'd also like to suggest taking another page from ZDoom and make it that "open wait close" doors that are already opened play their close/open sound effects when activated. In vanilla, if the door is already open, pressing the use key on it again, no matter how many times you do it, won't cause the door to play any sound effects. Only when it automatically closes and is reopened will it play sounds again. I don't believe this would have any significant effect on the gameplay, aside from perhaps making things a little noisier when enemies get stuck on doortracks. And you already fixed the "blazing doors make double-closing sounds" error, so this seems like it would just be an extension of that.