Jayextee

Until OP clarifies, I'm taking vanilla to mean vanilla. Words and phrases mean things.

Zeppelin Armada is, as you say, limit-removing. Not vanilla.

Hell 2 Pay's a good shout because it uses some trickery to get those launching rockets in the background of one of the early maps.

It's vanilla whether you regard it as such or not.

You shouldn't really be editing the IWAD. There's nothing to achieve there that you couldn't do using a patch WAD, or PWAD.

I actually always wondered why, if numeric values such as enemy health and ammo pickup values could be changed, why the pointers for the secret exits (and, presumably, the map number after which the ending is called) couldn't be found and supported in the old DeHackEd standard. There's probably some technical reason that'll go right over my head, mind you.

I mean, it can be disheartening to make a full 3-episode DOOM replacement and then some rat bastard decides to label your work "painfully unfun" because you dared do something unusual like untag the secret areas (mainly because, ironically, I didn't want the discourse to be about them primarily; I'll accept the 'L' on that decision). Personal bitterness aside, I think the prestige of making a megaWAD all by oneself is definitely an attracting factor; whether it pans out that way or not. I do love how UMAPINFO means that episodes and megaWADs can be any bespoke size, even if my personal penchant for vanilla mapping is at odds with that; although things like 'thank you' ending maps a la BtSX that disallow progress past what the WAD offers as content, they're a good compromise IMO.

Did you close the WAD in SLADE?

It's worth also noting that, when starting up the original DOS executables the initially-highlighted difficulty setting upon starting a new game is Hurt-Me-Plenty. It's almost as if that's the *developer-intended* default or something.

Thinking about it, I'd like to see an adaptive difficulty in a source port somehow; when finishing a map the difficulty can lower or increase based on some performance metric or other, similar to how shmups sometimes do this with a hidden 'rank'. This might not be a simple implementation though; if, say, it were based on no. of player deaths during any given map, there'd have to be a way to record that - possibly meaning some small-scale rewriting of the savegame code? I'm not incredibly tech-minded, so I could be wrong here. It'd be neat to me, at least, even if most players (and definitely the UVbros) wouldn't care for it.

I design for HMP, get people playing my maps on UV then complaining about health/ammo starvation when, yeah, I designed it that way on UV. Hard difficulty's supposed to be hard. You want a normal experience, play on normal. I play on HMP personally. Everyone should do as I do, I'm correct and anybody who isn't doing what I do is therefore incorrect. ;)

Make sure the sectors either side of the midtexture have different light levels, even if it's by 1 and makes no visible difference.

Ever since I saw Crash in Quake III Arena I've wanted a game with her as the protagonist. With her build, I'd imagine something with way more acrobatics and movement options. But otherwise, in general I'm down with the idea of more gender-neutral protagonists. Yes. Please.

Isn't caps lock in and of itself a toggle? I don't think it 'scans' like a normal keypress; same with num lock and scroll lock.

This is exactly why I haven't joined.