Shaviro

So happy to see RTC-3057 up there. Julian really did an amazing job with the soundtrack :)

Yeah Caff here wanted to try something different with this level. It turned out really well :)

This was absolutely amazing. Someone pointed me towards this wad without really saying anything about it other than I had never seen anything like it before. So I did a plain run through the "first map" and was sent back to Underhalls. At that point I was a bit perplexed at what all the hubbub was about, so I gave it another run and noticed the soulsphere through the window there. From then on I was hooked. What an experience. Easily one of the best times I've had with a wad/mod ever. I've always been fascinated with this kind of content and I've often dabbled a bit with it in my own works, but I've never had the "budget" to go all in on something like this and it's just amazing to see what they came up with. A few great great hours. Thank you!

The chorus music is The stuff during the narrator's part could be Trent Reznor. It sounds somewhat similar in style to the ID_LOGO_BED from the alpha. I do believe I asked someone at id about this back in the day and the answer was that anything with a beat was NOT Reznor/from the game....but I may be confusing that with some public Q&A at this point :D

The 1:24 music is The 2:20 music is The latter was also featured on the danish equivalent of "Survivor".

As in 2020? ;) It's so difficult to say. Back in 2019 there wasn't a single doubt in our minds that Episode 2 would come out that very year, but we ended up releasing it late 2020. Episode 3 is pretty far along on most counts, but I don't want to say a 2021 release is a sure thing. We're aiming for it and it seems to be realistic, but you never know with these projects. We also don't have any shareholders or publishers, so if something doesn't work quite right we will spend the time it takes to fix it :)

That is such an arrogant hand wavey response to a sincere piece af advice coming from experience. You also skip all of the details in my post and assume there is no plan for anything. Things are not always super simple and depending on what you're building, "fun" isn't an easily defined concept. Sometimes you have to let the visual design come in and be part of that iterative process and feedback "loop". Reducing it to be "set dressing" has its own host of problems that will work in some games, not in others. It's an extremely simplistic way to view the creation process. But I'm glad you've found the one true way for every single person to build every single type of game with 3D environments. That must be awesome! :)

Just to elaborate on this iterative process. We actually used to use more placeholders and make less detailed versions of the levels with a lot of caulk (texture) brushes and low detail rooms. We did this with the intention of adding in the "awesome" later on. The positive side of this is that you get some instant gratification and you make a lot of progress fast. Another win is that you're able to quickly prototype some of the macro-level parts of your game or levels. The gotcha is that you don't really get a good sense of the style you're building for and you don't get a realistic picture of how much work is required. Another problem is that it quickly turns into an "and then" fest where you keep on adding stuff to your map because it's just so darn fast. I need this AND THEN that AND THEN this AND THEN that. We had some humonguous levels that would never work in reality, but we didn't figure this stuff out before we started trying to make it good in all relevant aspects. For us this was very much equivalent to "fix it in post" or the star wars prequel approach to cinema where you quickly cover the scenes and then figure out how to make it look great later. Internal talks in the team had this stuff labeled as "postponing homework" and staying in the wonderous concept phase for as long as possible. The thing is that when you finally do get into the nitty gritty, the early version you made quickly becomes incompatible with your newfound experiences. We could call this process breadth first as you're kinda trying to represent as much of the level or the game as quick as possible. I think we started opting for a depth first approach somewhere in the middle of the process and that's where we really started to gain traction and speed. From the get go you don't really know what style to build. For me, the easiest way to do this is to find some specific detail, area or whatever and then build it. From start to finish. This helps me figure out the level of detail I should aim for and I can extrapolate the larger scale features from this piece. In Phobos, we struggled with the style for the intro house areas for a long time. When we one day built a complete skybox with houses, bridges, a light house etc. everything started to come together and we built the rest of the scene around this. It just seemed natural. We knew that we wanted to show off some specific things in the skybox, so that lead to creating windows that allowed for this. The room itself was then created around the windows. I'm not saying that the other way to do it does not work. Obviously it does work for many people and amazing games are created like this, but for us trying to get to that vertical slice of a level, a style and a concept as soon as possible made it much easier for us to plan, schedule and actually complete this thing. I'm just trying to provide an alternative approach to it that helped us a lot :)

I'll do the 180 and recommend building these things inside the editor. Practically everything in Phobos is being made with the original DOOMEdit. We sometimes do models, but they're almost always pieces of geometry made inside the editor that are turned into models so we can tweak things or cut down on the number of clip models. All of this certainly feels like a daunting task at first, but I think once you get a hang of it it will be worthwhile. Of course, once you're doing organic things like caves or whatever it's extremely difficult to do with brushes and patches. We also use models for those, built for that exact purpose. I've been craving a spline + extrude method like you suggest many times, but all in all I'm not sure it would save us that much time. It would be faster, no doubt about it, but more often than not you can get to the same result with a few copy/pastes. At this point I wouldn't really say that building stuff is slowing us down. Building good stuff slows us down and the bottleneck here isn't the tools but creativity, vision and persistence. We also don't really make caulked box maps first and then add in detail later. For us it's an iterative process where idea leads to detail/specific implementation which in turn leads to a better idea and so forth. Not that there is a "right way" to do this, but this one has been the most successful for us.

i9-9900ks, RTX 2080 TI with 32 GB ram running at 3440x1440 at Ultra Nightmare settings. Framerate is usually in the 150-200fps range. Loving the short load times!

I'm currently playing the "Super Gore Nest" map and that's probably the most Doom level yet. It's really good.

I'm not really disappointed. The countless videos and pre-release material made it pretty clear what kind of game it is. I'm not gonna lie, once you get a hang of the controls including platforming, the resource management etc. it's not bad. I think they call it the fun zone and sure it's all right. I fail to see how that one narrow approach to shooting is objectively better than any other approach, but it is what it is and it's all right to be "forced" into a different playstyle than what comes naturally to you. Gives a new perspective on things. That said, what bothers me most about this game is that this is all it's going to provide. It's a one-trick pony and I don't see myself ever playing it again once finished. That's no big deal really as it's more or less the standard fare for me with modern shooters. I know there are a loooot of collectibles, secret areas and whatever to find, but I don't really care to drag myself through the levels to collect arbitrary stuff that has zero grounding in the game environment and no real influence on the game past soft or hard cheat codes. I love the rendering. They did an awesome job here. Glass has never looked as good as it does in this game. Geometry detail is through the roof here and there. It's great. The areas show a great sense of scale and imagination. It's just a shame that they never really use these locations for anything past combat. You never form a "relationship" with the areas, even earth is just a static movie-set. It's just on to the next dimension and area. Earth is being invaded? Who cares, look it's that tank guy from Doom3, but with horns and demon like. Want to know what's going on in the story? Read these 300 books you pick up. Everybody has their own subjective stance on what Doom is, but I see Doom as a game comprised of three main aspects; Combat, suspense (or horror) and gravity. Combat is of course what immediately pops into most peoples minds when they think of Doom and that aspect definitely has to be nailed down, but when I think back I recall wandering the dark hallways, low on health, desperately trying to find some medkits. I think of the suspense, the play between light and shadows. Not knowing whether what comes around the next corner is compatible with whatever health and ammo you have. I loved that. Then there's gravity. It's arguably the weakest of the three, but I did feel like a random joe, fighting against all odds to stay alive and maybe even save whatever was left of humanity. It felt like I was placed into this nightmarish world and I would have to navigate through it. In Doom Eternal all of this is gone. There is no longer any kind of play between light and shadows. Everything is practically lit the same. I never really fear going around a corner because the health and ammo doesn't really matter. I can always chainsaw some dude and glory kill some demons. Done. It doesn't matter. And for gravity? It has none. The entire world is centered around you and moves with you. I don't think it's a bad game at all. It's fun, but it's kinda empty and the whole game feels like "surface area". I'm glad that people enjoy it. Not every game, movie or whatever has to cater to everyone's taste. Some times a game wasn't made for you and that's perfectly fine.

So I've only completed the first level and am currently on the second, but I'm already kinda fatigued on the whole thing. There comes a time in almost any shooter for me when I feel like I've experienced everything there is to experience in the game and the rest is just getting to see the end etc. I don't know if it's because of all the pre-launch material but I kinda feel like I'm already there. It seems to be an expertly crafted game for a very specific and extremely narrow focus, so I'm not trying to knock it. It may just not be for me. Aside from the combat that doesn't really feel like a shooter at all I think what bothers me the most is that the whole setup and presentation is all over the place. Now you're on a barely recognizable earth. Now you're on a weirdass spacestation. Now you're some place weird. The environments seem to be crafted 100% for the combat and then a "location theme" is painted on top. It doesn't really matter if you're in hell, on earth or in...weirdplace...A broken down metro train, weird tunnels or a temple of sorts. It's all the same in the end and so, so inconsequential. Nothing is ever grounded in any sort of context. It just goes from fight to fight in a really predictable way. I do like all the nods to the original games in terms of soundtrack and visuals. I also like what little of the weapons I've tried. I just wish I could have the freedom to play the game in a more traditional way and not constantly be forced to play Star Craft 2, the fps. Again, to each their own. For me it just seems like they took Doom 2016 and doubled down on all the features I found questionable and then ignored the things I enjoyed. Nothing wrong about that as so many people seem to enjoy it. More power to you! I'm of course still going to give it another chance, but so far I'm really struggling to see where the fun lies, so to speak.

I'm sure the game will pick up, but I had to quit after encountering the 10th popup info screen in like 2 minutes.

Moving the textures panel from the inspectors window to the XY view is a really nice idea!