netnomad312

Thought I would swing by and wish Doom a happy 12th. Holy crap, I've missed some good megawads... I'm gonna have an interesting January. That is, if I ever get off my ass and release my own crappy old megawad. Heh.

I don't hang around here enough to really lie about anything... well, except I said that I wanted to release my megawad by new year's... and THAT sure went well. Of course, that wasn't a lie so much as a failed plan (if you beta-testers are out there, answer me this: wtf??). ¬_¬

Yeah, except the point of most programs (unless you're deliberately making one to confuse people) is to be user-friendly in that regard. I'll only admit one thing: that I can't remember what the tutorial said. Maybe I had an old version without an interactive tutorial; I don't remember if it was interactive or not. But I know I'm not the only one who got confused by it. I picked up WadAuthor and made my first map without any errors at all (that I couldn't fix) in about half an hour. No tutorials, no nothing. I lost the map long ago, I wish I could upload it somewhere to prove this little point, but it's not that important. I don't have any reason to go get DeePsea now, and frankly I'd not like to waste the HD space (even if it's a small program, which I can't remember either) for something I have no reason to use. That's not laziness, that's just choosing not to do something that in your case would be pointless.

Oh, I could probably do it NOW, that I know more about mapping and how lines/sectors work. I don't even remember what that tutorial said, (it's been over two years since I had DeePsea on any of my computers) but I know I wasn't the first to be confused by it... coincidence? Well, now I can make a sector hook up in Doom Builder if I wanted to, so if I really wanted to map with DeePsea I guess I could. But at this point it's more a matter of laziness and no real reason to re-download DeePsea; I lost that program in a HD crash at least two years ago, and never found a reason to get it back.

How about an example then? I mean, yes, anyone who sticks to the prefabs will come out with a pretty basic map. But the method is different: you create one, split a line, move the new vertex, repeat. In DeePsea I couldn't figure out how to make a sector hook up at all, and even when I did a prefab sector I couldn't move the vertices. Heh. Nothing against Doom Builder, it's just not my style now that I've spent a year+ using WadAuthor before DB came out. And DB's 3D mode is undeniably useful; I'll use that for tweaking offsets and such, but not much else. As for supporting source ports: nothing a new config file can't fix.

For the millionth time: it's just a different mapping method, not style. Using Doom Builder doesn't let you make better maps any more than using WadAuthor tends to produce bad ones. WadAuthor IS better for beginners. Granted, I started out before the release of DB, and the only major alternative was DeePsea, which I really disliked ([/understatement]). It's all a question of line-draw versus sector-based mapping.

I don't really run it in 32bit, but then I'm not sure what running it in GL entails color-wise. That's true, I think the monitor was another thing that 2k tried to replace...

Thanks for that suggestion, turns out the card driver was among the many that 2k attempted to replace with its own generic driver. Bleh. Well, I just got around to installing this today, also (re) installed DirectX 9.0c. GL seems to work fine... except for this one try I just did. I've launched Legacy GL about five or six times for wad testing since I reinstalled the driver, and this last time it... well, it screwed up the picture, to put it simply. Not sure how else to explain it, but it seems when Legacy tried to change the resolution (or something else) back to normal (which is 800*600, 32-bit color as compared to the 640*480 I use in Doom ports), it screwed up. I got about the top 40% of my screen showing nothing, another 40% of random BS pixels, at the the bottom of the screen was the TOP of what it was supposed to show (and even this was shifted to the right about 10%). I managed to restart the computer and this fixed it. Any idea what could have caused this? I'm not looking forward to having to restart the computer every fifth time I test. :-/

Normally I'm not a fan of any GL port, ever... but today I decided to revisit a Legacy map I was making for a group megawad. Now, a couple of months ago I upgraded my OS from Win98 to Win2000 Pro. Before this switch, GL mode worked fine. Now when I try to play any level in GL mode, the "loading" message takes forever to finish loading... then in-game I may be lucky to get one frame per second. What's more, the monitor seems incapable of showing red at this point; the screen is only made up of green and blue colors, and things that are all-red like text and numbers are displayed in black. I get the feeling this is more of a problem with my switch to 2000 Pro, or GL itself. I'm not sure where the problem comes from. Has anyone else has this problem, and what did you do?

GL Nodes? Heh... that's why I never bother with GL, because building GL nodes adds onto the wad usually. He's probably using WadAuthor's node builder. Yeah, yeah, [instertbooatwadauthornodebuilderhere], but I just don't use a GL port.

I could think of a few people who could use one of those back here at home... :-/ ...nah. I don't think I could be that cruel. :P

Yeah, heh. You know, now that I think of it, the "folly of DRE" was a three-parter: Step 1: sucky mapping/ripped MP3s/etc. Step 2: failing to get beta-testers from anyone who wasn't close to the project Step 3: his response to the criticism of step 1 I still think the second part was most important, though. Although if you can't take criticism, you don't deserve to really be considered IMO. You know what? The first map I ever released, back when I'd never used a source port and barely knew what Doomworld WAS, was a little library-esque vanilla map (it can be found at my site in my sig). Ling reviewed it, and the bulk of his review was pointing out errors like HOMs and such (he didn't even finish the map). I didn't know wtf he was talking about, but I didn't say anything at the time... I think what happened was that he played it in a GL port (and I never built GL nodes; I never do, unless I'm building a Legacy map). But... these are the things we laugh about some two years later. Heh...

Well, see, I could PLAY it, but it wasn't fast enough that I could, say, dodge attacks. So I was forced to use the cheats. My problem with Grove is that there's not enough actual mapping involved. I mean, statistically there are almost as many things as there are linedefs (in the original version, anyway)... and half the linedefs seem to be creating the "path" on the "map." Take out the trees and what are you left with? Not too much. I'm not saying Grove isn't an interesting concept, nor that it doesn't have its good points (the "treasure map" was actually an interesting idea). But my point is that an award called single map of the year should be awarded to a level with more... I dunno, mapping? (IMO)

Okay, I would first off like to say that ten million tree sprites and some textures does not create a good map. I still can't play Grove properly even after getting the "alternate" version... and even if I could, I'd probably get frustrated rather quickly (I'm not one for switch puzzles that only the author can easily identify). Sorry FooFoo, but I'm not convinced. Maybe I missed the others, but what are FooFoo's other works? Now as for DRE... I've said it before and I'll say it again: the folly of DRE was that Rampage only asked for testers that were close to the project (thus the claim that "everyone else liked it"). It was an error in judgement on Rampage's part... and although some still have hard feelings about it, it's a good lesson to learn from. Thus, I brought my megawad here as well (now if only my beta-testers would actually REPLY! >_< ). Can't really say much about the other maps... except I agree that there should be a CTF category and that more vanilla wads should be included, indeed.

Sorry to double-post, but there's a different problem now. I figured something out: the ST editing package had extracted to the wrong folder. So I put it in the right folder and tried again, and no errors are detected anymore in the script. However... in-game, the scripts still do not work. The open script that controls the lighting doesn't execute (I could see this from where I put the P1 start), and when I cross a team-select hallway, I get P_Startscript: Unknown script 8. In WadAuthor, those lines still generate errors (bad script number), even though the scripts compiled correctly. What could be wrong now?