Nick Perrin

So I wasn't the only one who found those maps surprisingly evocative? I think it must be due in part to the fact that, given it's BRUTAL DOOM, we're expecting over-the-top silly action from start to finish, but it does get pretty dark. The radio thing was very effective. The whole atmosphere just made me want to get out of that place (those maps) as quickly as possible.

This is a really broad and probably very inaccurate statement. Theory doesn't make interesting music, it gives you tools to lead the ear in ways it's been trained to listen. Theory can't help you with broad emotional arcs, innovative or original ideas, or good melodic gestures... and it doesn't take audio production into account either. Nevermind the amount of "rule breaking" required to do a whole lot of interesting things (theory itself being reductive, so all of these rule breaks eventually ended up as codified theory on some level of critical analysis). However I agree that learning not to rely on 'inspiration' is a skill that can be learned (and MUST be in order to produce high quality consistently). rdwpa, I think one thing that's really worked for me (and composers on a higher level than me) is planning out your work in advance. The details of how you approach this can vary wildly but questions like: What feeling do I want to communicate? Or more specifically: What atmosphere do I want this to have? What sonic palette or texture(s)? Maybe you have a melodic idea that you want to develop over an emotional arc - plan the arc and try to make it work through that over the course of several minutes (or whatever it takes). I think just jumping in and making it up as you go is great, BUT if you have a more or less fully formed idea of what your track is going to be, it's like the script to your movie or the design document to your game. The rest is filling out the details and bringing your creativity to life to bring that plan to fruition. Bits and pieces will change, be dropped or added, and there will still be making-it-up-as-you-go, but you will find less "what the fuck do I do now?" moments. It will also help make your music more dynamic and flow better - thinking of music just as 8-bar chunks can over time make things sound very "sectional." Often to your advantage, often not. This kind of planning is more important when you have deadlines for your music, but it still makes a big difference for the cohesiveness, coherence and vision of your work regardless. IMO.

Except for the intro ambush where I nearly choked, crushed it on UV. Very cool to be back in a zone created by the man himself. A kind of videogame historical revisionism. Otherwise, not exactly some kind of masterpiece, but if this means he's going to be active in making new maps from now, that would be very very cool. I was listening to a late 00's interview with John and it really made me wonder what it must be like for so much of your life to be defined by one game, and for that community to still be going so strong and keep you in the loop (this goes for anyone of course who had one single great, marked, massively popular/influential accomplishment and has been a part of that legacy ever since, and perhaps nothing else ever living up to it afterwards). I wonder if he's acknowledging that Doom is kind of his virtual home by coming back to creating inside of it. It's cool that this is bringing some oldies back to the forum too (I haven't been here myself in ages).

People are all giving valid advice here, but please realize that making decent music is a skill that takes years to develop. If you don't know anything about music yet, you may or may not have a few good moments in your material early on but composition is an endlessly deep craft that demands respect. Don't mean this to discourage, if anything, start going at it and if you simply enjoy making music you will make quick improvements! Keep in mind that working with MIDI also limits the sonic quality of what you do, but the advantage is, if you're just starting to write music, it will also set a baseline level of sound quality than is higher than what you'd get if you tried to start recording real instruments with no prior recording/mixing/production experience. So MIDI is a good starting point for experimentation, and could be a gateway to more advanced audio tools in future. And of course for DOOM it's the obvious choice for easy compatibility.

When I first played ROTT as a kid I had a blast with how wild and crazy and gimmicky much of it was, but to play it all the way through would have been too much of a chore. It really does get repetitive and boring. It's amazing how much monster variation and HEIGHT variation in maps makes a difference, ROTT has neither. But shrooms mode has to be one of the highlight features of early 90s gaming.

This functionality exists in existing audio software. For example, Celemony's Melodyne plugin is built as a pitch correction tool, BUT because it analyzes the pitch and duration of recorded notes to allow for effective manipulation, it is also able to export MIDI from the data collected. Therefore, hum a tune into a mic and record it, run it through melodyne, save as MIDI, use MIDI as a guide to remember your tune when sequencing it properly later on. The simpler way is of course to learn an instrument, and over time you can easily remember the tunes you think of, play them out and record the audio (or MIDI data if using any number of existing MIDI controllers modelled after pianos, drumkits, guitars, wind instruments, guitar hero controllers, etc) directly, as well as harmonize/improvise on the fly.

I love it when that happens on the finale of any boss map. Best ending.

Beat Vanguard on UV with Brutal Doom. Damn that was intense! Then did a run-through of UAC Ultra again (since I love it so much), this time on Nightmare w/ Brutal Doom again. You really have to use cover a lot more when playing this way, especially since most of the environments in the mapset are fairly closed off. BD already makes the enemies faster, so add a little extra speed on Nightmare and they fire literally the instant they see you. So many projectiles moving so quickly, it almost turns Doom into COD with all the cover I was taking. Almost.

So basically it's just that god mode is more fun for you than using saves? (At first you mentioned having to restart a map with no weapons, which is remedied by saves on both points)

What I meant was if you're going to play a map "normally" and you don't usually play hard maps, playing Sunder "normally" is a bad choice when there are other maps far more suited to your skill level. That's all :) Oh yeah, like I said, I have downloaded maps just to sightsee plenty of times. This becomes especially interesting when you make your own maps/mods. But it's not my primary way of playing maps, more of a secondary novelty. I just found it weird to make that the primary play style. Truth is I don't technically play doom maps "normally" anymore either, as I feel Brutal Doom really balances well with the vast majority of pwads and actually makes the core gameplay a lot more FUN. Faster, harder, more intense, sonically & visually more interesting (better feedback and feel, more dynamic gameplay overall). Anyway, what you say makes perfect sense, and I understand liking the aesthetic of Doom. It's hard to describe, but I think at least one part of it is because of its age - a good-looking map is far more impressive when made on older tech, or with certain familiar limitations, and you can make out the clever tricks or design techniques used to achieve new and creative map styles/effects. There's just something cool about it. So that's settled, but my question to Arjak still remains - "why not save your game?" I fear this might go forever unanswered, haha... At this point I think I can live without the answer

I've done this several times as well. It's just not my main method of play. But I can really relate to loving the atmosphere and ability to just OBSERVE in a virtual world. Obviously my post was really asking Arjak what his reasoning was, so it's not targeting you. But if your goal is atmosphere and visuals, why not pick up a game like Skyrim? (not saying Skyrim specifically, just any game with great atmosphere and exploration, that boasts stronger visuals and more dynamic aesthetics than Doom). At this point it's 2012, Doom is hella old, and gameplay is all it really has left. And why not just use the -nomonsters flag? Also, Sunder is a bad choice if you're not interested in crazy hard slaughter... but that's a whole 'nother topic. Anyway I completely understand your approach because it's something I love to do as well, but I tend to outlet that desire in other games which do it better than Doom. But when it comes time for balls-to-the-wall action, Brutal Doom + a well-designed and tough mapset = my first choice. (Yes, I confessed this earlier in the thread, once I got used to Brutal Doom I never switched back. MUCH more fun/fast/intense than vanilla play, the extra gore is just a bonus)

Indeed, this makes the issue even more confusing. One would think 100% godmode would render the game boring pretty fast, when exploration, atmosphere or the environment in most doom maps isn't worth seeing on its own compared to many other current titles you could cheat your way through and still really enjoy on that basis alone...

Hahah thank you. My point is that you can enjoy Doom in the most fun way without worrying about that by using the incredible SAVE functionality, which has been there since '93. Why someone would choose godmode 100% of the time over saving here or there is what's confusing to me!

I still want to hear this explained. If it's sarcasm, or if it's real, I want to know. It's so confusing a sentiment that I can't sleep at night anymore.

This is the most confusing thing I've ever read.

- Once I got used to Brutal Doom, its ultimately far more satisfying updated arsenal, its variety in the way monsters get damaged, the speed and intensity and overall new balance that makes the monsters threatening again and speeds the game up to a breathtaking level in the right maps, I pretty much stopped playing vanilla altogether. Yes, I play a ton of pwads now, but mostly with Brutal Doom even overriding custom content that may exist within, and I load up soundtracks from newer games to add that intensity that most crappy user MIDIs just don't have.

I have played, not just watched, it's only Sunder specifically that I haven't played and only watched. It's also clear that the player who mastered UV-maxing Sunder knew the maps inside out and planned every step... but to me, none of that is really all that fun anyway. It really does come down to personal taste, but my experience with slaughter maps is as written in my post above.

Confusing switch hunts are ridiculous. Rewarding a player for absurd and arbitrary actions is never fun either! Haha no of course not... probably doesn't help watching those UV max videos which are played near perfectly. But regardless, for me, slaughtermaps kind of have that Call of Duty effect - that is to say, 110% intensity for 100% of the time starts to make NO moment feel intense. It really burns things out. It also takes too long with too little variation, and once you get down to a smaller group of monsters (or in some areas right from the start) it really does become the "hold-down-button-strafe-repeatedly" game I mentioned above... Slaughter maps have their place, but put in context work much better, so their intensity is really felt. For example UAC Ultra map10 ("skagway") has a normal lead-in, then you're outside, need rad suits to survive, and are bombarded with monsters. By some slaughtermap standards, the monster count is still low, but compared to the rest of the episode it's a slaughter. The outdoor section is fun, intense and cleverly put together, and makes hordes of monsters scary and a blast to fight. Also, building up to slaughters in a megawad works well too.

Finished Whispers of Satan, killer megawad. To all those playing Sunder, I've been watching youtube videos of it, and there is no attraction to me at all. I realized I have no fun whatsoever playing massive slaughter maps... you just hold down the mouse button and strafe left/right slightly for hours on end. Boo.

Absolutely, and those who claim that the visuals play no part in the immersion/entertainment/any major part of the experience of a game are fooling themselves (after all, most games rely entirely on only two senses at this point, sight and sound). The point you next acknowledged, though, is the crux of this whole thing - aesthetics vs. graphics. Graphics being the technical limitations and "fidelity" that an engine can produce, aesthetics being the art direction, design, etc. Any game that succeeds in its aesthetics regardless of graphics has a chance at timeless visuals, visuals that do not detract from the gameplay in future years and add to it in the present. This is why Wind Waker still feels visually "modern" in a sense, why Starcraft (1) is still visually engaging, etc. Any game that relies on pure spectacle of visuals alone will not deliver a similar experience in the future, which is why masturbatory graphics showcase games tend not to hold up. In many much older cases of course, the graphics are so limited as to prevent anything beyond an abstract and basic visual presentation, like the original pong or early arcade games. No amount of intelligent art direction can make these games feel less "retro." Interestingly the retro game visual style has become its own genre of art design in gaming and now pop culture.

It's funny, the one game that sort of began the trend away from FPS's like Doom - Half-Life - naturally still contains some remnants of the older style, most notably that you run EVERYWHERE and pretty fast too. Of course, come HL2, Gordon Freeman quickly got a sprint mechanic (must have gone out of shape spending all those years in stasis), but it's an indication of the state of the genre when even Duke Nukem and Serious Sam have to tap a limited sprint button in 2012.

But that would have nothing to do with the graphics, presumably. Which means the game mechanics are what deters you, rather than the visuals, which in gaming are likely to always be highly momentary and impermanent factors (which is why any game is stupid to lean on them). Truth be told I still play Crysis (1) once every year or two, underneath all the shiny goodness is a solid FPS which for most of the game gives you a decent amount of quasi-non-linear progression. Funny how a game from 2007 is still holding up today visually.

Ah it's all good, working. Must have done something wrong on my end. Thanks

Hey! Been sifting through the cacowards playing everything I missed. I came across Legacy of Suffering, but on the download page the link for the GZDoom version is dead. Anyone have a mirror or have the latest version of the wad they can send over? THANKS!

That's it. Take it from another composer, pursuing composition for media as a career. It's not just an art, it's a craft, and you CAN learn to put your head down and create music. When you work on commercial projects with deadlines, you build this skill up, and would die without it. With enough practice and study you can compose on demand, in the demanded style. It won't always be the best of your work, but you can constantly improve. EDIT: Added "show signature" to this post so my music is linked. Mostly everything in the demo reel was created for on-demand projects, sitting down and planning out tracks and executing them for hours a day before a deadline.