meapineapple

I'm almost finished with a small first map made for the mod! Couple of things: Shotgun weapons, especially the regular shotgun, have so little kickback. It looks kind of weird. I got this error when trying to run the mod with Zandronum v2.1.2. The wad does start with Zandronum v3.0.0, but the same error and a few others appear in the log:

Holy crap this is incredible. Very very nice work. I think I'm going to make a map or a few for this mod.

I also recorded a playthrough of this map. I really enjoyed it, actually. It's small and sweet. Maybe the best first map I've played - you already seem to have a grasp of monster and item placement, and I think that's the hardest part of mapping to get right.

I recorded my playthrough of your speedmap. I didn't like it very much. Other than one outstanding cave ceiling the map is visually pretty nice, especially for a speedmap, but this kind of gameplay is not my thing. And regardless of my own preference I think you could have done better with your item placement and some of the design in general. Why does the player not see the weapons before picking them up? Why is there a red key and no door? Why is there no clear indication that you're waiting for a teleporter to come down in the second area, as opposed to searching for a red door? It's just confusing, and unfriendly to the player in a really crappy way.

I played through your map @WolfBlue and recorded a video. Seems like you understand there's a lot of room for improvement, though I didn't think it was bad enough to be called a sh!tstain. It was a lot like many of the first maps I've played, making the same kinds of mistakes, but not the worst of them. The map isn't particularly visually detailed, the monster placement is kind of patternless and doesn't feel like much planning went into it, there's a softlock due to the lift in the big room by spawn only ever going up and down once, and I couldn't find the red key anywhere I looked. But I liked the room with the lifts and switches, I think the overall layout of the map was decent, I think some of the encounters were only a little bit more attention away from being quite enjoyable.

...Can I vote for my own megawad? I would love to see what everybody thinks of this one. Thank you Capellan and galileo for your interest! +++ Nanopineapple

Thank you much for playing! I've made some improvements to the map based on what I saw in your playthrough. Are the two fights you found particularly exciting the ruins fight with the two cybers, and the arena at the end?

Check out @HAK3180's awesome playthrough of this wad! I've added another version to the topic post improving a couple of things which I noticed in the playthrough.

Horse's Cradle is a large single-map WAD with much thematic variety. It has difficulty settings, but it's made with UV in mind. This map is not merciful. It uses some graphics resources from Deus Doom. You should probably play with freelook on, on account of all the verticality. Format: Boom. IWAD: Doom 2. Music: Yes. Graphics: Yes. Difficult: Yes. Compatibility: Tested in Zandronum v2.1.2 and PrBoom+ 2.5.1.4. Off-the-cuff playtime estimate: 60 to 90 minutes. Download the WAD here: hscradle.19.09.10.zip or via idgames Download an older version: • hscradle.19.08.28.zip • hscradle.19.08.27b.zip • hscradle.19.08.27.zip • bileconf.19.08.26.zip • bileconf.19.08.25.zip Screenshots: Changelog:

My bad, link should be fixed now.

It's a short map and not very visually detailed - the four-hour time shows - but the gameplay is very tight and nice. I recorded my playthrough of your map -

Thank you for playing @FrancisT18 and for your feedback! I'm not sure how those softlocks and inexplicable red key got past me. I just posted a new version of the wad with those issues definitely fixed and the cyberdemon issue hopefully fixed too.

Another update. This time the biggest change is to the name. Formerly called Bile Confluence, the WAD is now called Horse's Cradle. Download the new version in the topic post!

Yep, you're coming right up on the pictured changes. It's directly adjacent to the red key area.

@HAK3180 The bigger change is limited to a pretty small part of the map, just one arena. (Other than that, it's just some rather minor tweaks.) I made the change because I'm concerned the fight in that arena could be frustrating without the change. Otherwise there's not really any room to move around, you just get overwhelmed so easily and getting through it the encounter be more luck-based than I'd like. Either way I would for sure like to see your FDA progress so far - but whether you start over on the newer map is really up to you and whether or not you'd like to play through those first two-thirds over again, just for a better experience in one of the later encounters. The more gameplay I can see the happier I am, so I'm certainly not against a replay if that's what you choose. Illustrative before and after screenshots below. Note how the sheer gray rock face into inaccessible scenery changed into stairs made of brown rock making the whole upper area newly accessible. Before the change, there's only one narrow way in and out of that lower-elevation grassy area, it's very easy to become cornered and trapped. After the change, there's a lot more movement options.

Heads up to all, I just released a newer version! Check out the topic post for a download link. This newer version has lots of tweaks, and most notably an improvement to the layout and movement flow of what was probably one of the clunkier monster encounters in the map, throwing a lot of monsters at the player at once while limiting movement options a bit too much. I'm considering renaming the WAD to "Horse's Cradle" after somebody very rightly pointed out to me how part of the automap resembles a seahorse. Seems like a much less forgettable name than "Bile Confluence". Thoughts?

I have a kind of arena where I'd like a lot of monsters to appear in the perimeter as though they're an audience, and I don't want them to wake up until a walk-over linedef is hit. But currently, even though they don't hear the player, they do see the player and wake up. I could turn the monsters backwards, but then they wouldn't be much of an audience. How can I achieve this with Boom - player can see the enemies, enemies can't see them, until an action takes place?

That wasn't intentional but wow you're right, that extremely looks like a seahorse. It's got the body and tail and everything.

Hi again @HAK3180, I finally got back into some Doom mapping after exhausting all my mapping energies making Nanopineapple last year. Your playtesting help on that rocked, by the way. Thank you much! Would you consider a playthrough of the new map? It's on the harder side, but I'm sure that you can get through it.

Yes and now you can play it here

I was able to accomplish what I needed a lot more simply than any of that, on account of this being an outdoor area where I wanted this to happen. I brought a part of the sky ceiling down to block the monsters off, and didn't assign any upper textures - this way there is an invisible barrier - and then I assigned an action raise the ceiling when I want the monsters to start fighting the player.

More -

I recorded my playthrough of map 1 and part of map 2. Partway through map 2 I ended up fighting a bunch of cacodemons shortly after picking up the red key, and when I died after almost exhausting my ammo I lost my patience with the wad and quit. The maps are gorgeous and there is fantastic attention to detail. This is seriously one of the best-looking wads I've played. But... The gameplay is atrocious, at least in the first two maps. It's pretty to look at but, for me, it was no fun at all to play. The monster placement wasn't fun, the health and ammo balance wasn't fun, the cramped layout wasn't fun. It's very easy to get lost, especially in the indoor environments, because there's so little distinction from one area to the next. The interiors are horribly cramped and it's a headache trying not to get hit by enemies when there's hardly anywhere to dodge to. And the dodging difficulty might have been less of an issue if there was more health, but the map seemed awfully stingy on the health pickups for how much seemingly unavoidable hitscan damage there was. Also, the lighting really got on my nerves. Who uses the glow or blink from zero lighting settings on entire rooms? It hurt my eyes and made it very difficult to navigate those rooms.

So first I tried making an MD3 format model for a simple 3D thing I want to use in my map. MODELDEF looked like this: Model Fence2 { Path "models/" Model 0 "fence2.md3" Skin 0 "fence.png" Scale 1.0 1.0 1.2 FrameIndex FNC2 A 0 0 } DECORATE looked like this: actor Fence2 10242 { Height 48 Radius 32 +SOLID States { Spawn: FNC2 A 0 Loop } } When I tried to run a map with the thing in Zandronum or GZDoom, it sort of froze. The map would seem to load fine and music would play, but the screen was black and the game didn't accept any inputs. On clicking the "x" to exit, Windows said the program wasn't responsive. Well, then I tried voxels. I got me a KVX file of pretty much the same thing. SLAB6 seems convinced that the file is valid, I can see the thing I made in Magicavoxel just fine. VOXELDEF looked like this: FNC2 = "voxels/fence2.kvx" { scale = 1.0 } GZDoom has the same freezing issue. Zandronum just shows those vile red diamonds with exclamation marks in them apparently saying there's something missing. Zandronum's log says "Fence2 at (x, y) has no frames". Somebody please help me to at least get one of these things working