Zeea

As a kid, I only had D!Zone compilations to try out. One of my favorite levels was The Big Open (Doom2, 1995, Mark Riel), which tried to make really enormous outside areas. It didn't exactly work amazingly because Doom monsters aren't Serious Sam monsters, but it was neat. Are there any more modern attempts at making levels with huge spaces and vistas? I know there's some big levels out there, but they're mostly composed of corridors and tight spaces because that's where Doom shines. I'm talking more about levels with 5120-pixel-wide fields and such.

It's a cool site because it's been around and going fairly strong since I was in high school or thereabouts. Also great for filtering through WADs, introducing me to some modern level design concepts, and helping me figure out how to use ZDoom features more effectively. I'd definitely recommend the Cacowards for examples of how far Doom has come (and if you want a more old-school feel, one of the recent Cacowards includes No End In SIght, which is a great old-school Ultimate Doom level pack.)

They were great back in the day when I didn't have internet access, but not so useful now. My wife's collected a bunch of ISOs (since I lost my actual physical disks), but that's because she likes to collect things, not because there's much worthwhile on them. Mostly they're just levels you can find elsewhere and some outdated versions of old Doom editors. Unless you want to feel better about your own level design skills by playing some of the truly awful ones on the CDs, I wouldn't bother. About the only useful thing I remember unique to the CDs was that one of the D!Zones had a utility that would autoload levels for you (useful in those days) and could randomize Thing placement. But you can find better options for that now. H!Zone is a bit of an exception because it has a twelve episode campaign included, in edition to the shovelware stuff. But that's about it. And H!Zone requires some conversion work to make it practical to use with modern source ports.

Okay, implemented that with a lot of typing and got it working. Thanks again.

So, I've discovered a weird and annoying issue in Doom Builder 2. Anyone got any solutions, or seen this happen? This is a bit more advanced than the usual "my monsters don't work, help!" thing and I know what's causing it, just not why it happens. Situation: --I'm using a pk3 file with custom sprites and a decorate file. --Everything works fine in game; summoning the monsters/weapons works. --Everything works fine when I place the monsters in Doom Builder 2 and then test the monsters/weapons. --There are no conflict DoomEd numbers or error messages. --(Random) I'm not going to upload this, it's just for personal use, so no need to tell me not to put a bunch of IWAD content together in a custom WAD. The problem: --Doom Builder 2 only displays sprites for things if the sprite graphic has been used inside a states{} somewhere in the DECORATE. --Otherwise, it shows a blank placeholder thing display. It still works in the game, but it makes it harder to see what the level will look like in 3d mode. --This happens even if there's a default sprite for the thing in question. (For example, I'm putting the Heretic weapons in this and have the Heretic sprites in the pk3, so there was no reason to go through and define all the states{} again since ZDoom already knows what Heretic weapons use as sprites.) Examples of the Weirdness (sample code below this): --x1Gauntlets and x1Elvenwand are just inheriting from Gauntlets and GoldWand. But Gauntlets displays a sprite in DoomBuilder2, and GoldWand doesn't. --That's because the gauntlet sprite is reused (with a Translation recolor) later in the code, in the states{} forx2FighterFists. --Sorcerer1 doesn't display a graphic, but Sorcerer2 does. Because I didn't reference the Sorcerer1 sprites anywhere in the decorate, but Sorcerer2 has a states{} that references them and thus it applies. So, basically, unless I explicitly put every single sprite I have into a states{} somewhere in my decorate file, Doom Builder 2 won't show them. It's bizarre. Any way around it? (My current idea is just making a dummy ACTOR that uses every single sprite in its states{} so that DB2 loads them all.) ------------------------------- ACTOR x1Gauntlets : Gauntlets 17002 {Weapon.SlotNumber 1} ACTOR x1ElvenWand : GoldWand 17003 {Weapon.SlotNumber 2} ACTOR x2FighterFists : FWeapFist 17101 { Weapon.SlotNumber 1 Inventory.PickupMessage "Fighter Gauntlets" Translation "0:255=%[0,0,0]:[1,0,0]" States { Spawn: WGNT A -1 Stop } } ACTOR x1Sorcerer1 : Sorcerer1 16015 {} ACTOR x1Sorcerer2 : Sorcerer2 replaces Sorcerer2 16016 { States { Spawn: SOR2 MN 10 A_Look Loop See: SOR2 MNOP 4 A_Chase Loop Rise: SOR2 AB 4 SOR2 C 4 A_PlaySound("dsparil/rise", CHAN_BODY, 1, FALSE, ATTN_NONE) SOR2 DEF 4 SOR2 G 12 A_PlaySound("dsparil/sight", CHAN_BODY, 1, FALSE, ATTN_NONE) Goto See Pain: SOR2 Q 3 SOR2 Q 6 A_Pain Goto See Missile: SOR2 R 9 A_Srcr2Decide SOR2 S 9 A_FaceTarget SOR2 T 20 A_Srcr2Attack Goto See Teleport: SOR2 LKJIHG 6 Goto See Death: SDTH A 8 SDTH B 8 SDTH C 8 A_PlaySound("dsparil/scream", CHAN_BODY, 1, FALSE, ATTN_NONE) DeathLoop: SDTH DE 7 SDTH F 7 A_Sor2DthLoop SDTH G 6 A_PlaySound("dsparil/explode", CHAN_BODY, 1, FALSE, ATTN_NONE) SDTH H 6 SDTH I 18 SDTH J 6 A_NoBlocking SDTH K 6 A_PlaySound("dsparil/bones", CHAN_BODY, 1, FALSE, ATTN_NONE) SDTH LMN 6 SDTH O -1 A_BossDeath Stop } } ---------------------

Oh, thanks so much! I'd forgotten about $Category and didn't know about $Sprite at all. That should help tremendously.

Yes! Netflix has been pretty solid, and they're the best chance of it being something that actually resembles the games. Like, some people didn't like Netflix Castlevania and that's reasonable, but I don't think anyone would complain that it was too cautious and mainstream.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

The retromod mod. You know how people have made modernized versions of the Doom and Doom 2 levels with added Boom/ZDoom features? The retromodmod would recreate all the classic styles of ancient TCs and partial conversions with ZDoom features. Get ready for ZDoomized versions of classics like "some Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon sprites and voice clips from the shows recorded in the late 1990s" and "some kid replacing the sounds of monsters dying with clips of him trash talking them." Also, the plasma gun would share a weapon slot with over ten thousand different homebrew flamethrowers.

Thanks for the screenshots. It helps me figure out that the behavior I'm seeing in my builder isn't normal. That's exactly what I've been doing, except the "Available Textures" keeps displaying all of the Doom 2 textures alongside the PWAD textures. Maybe I messed up something in the game configuration file. Anyway, much appreciated!

Hi, everyone. Extremely long time lurker, first time poster. My usual approach with Doom level creation is starting a new map, loading up several texture pack PWADs, and browsing until I get inspiration. Then I'll make the level, make note of the textures I actually used, and package them in the WAD with SLADE 3. Doom Builder 2 has a bunch of default categories for IWAD textures, and then lists each texture PWAD below that. So I can click on, say, SuperMarioBros.wad or whatever, and I'll see some awesome 8-bit walls. Except for some reason, it'll also display all of the IWAD textures there as well, even though the IWAD textures aren't in the PWAD. It means that I often have to scroll down past the Ashwalls and everything before I actually find the new textures. If I'm using someone else's PWAD where all the new textures don't start with the same letter, it'll scatter them throughout the IWAD textures. Is there any way to prevent this? I can already see the IWAD textures in their own categories, and don't see why they also need to display in every single PWAD listing. But I can't find any way to filter them out (except by name, and that usually doesn't work).

And it would have been a lot easier to set up as far as pacing. My wife's my complaint about the movie was that it starts off tense but then it takes forever to go anywhere. The tension gets lessened after, like, forty minutes straight of some dudes shining flashlights around dark tunnels and not really seeing anything interesting. The "slow mutation into monsters" thing meant that most of the movie was just everyone killing time while waiting for credible threats to appear. It seemed like they were borrowing from Alien but couldn't stick the landing, and "zombies that turn into vague gray things that turn into bigger vague gray things" isn't exactly "facehuggers that become xenomorphs."

I've heard the original Doom movie was sabotaged by executive meddling. Someone had a religious objection (or maybe PR objection) to the demon theme and turned everyone into mutants (because apparently they didn't have a religious or PR objection to the notion of evil being a genetic trait.) I can't really imagine anyone being dumb enough to mess it up that way again, but I can imagine lots of other ways they could mess it up. Especially if they just go with the most absolute formulaic ultra-reserved stuff where it's just an action movie with zombies and maybe one villain who turns into an imp at the end. If they actually make a real Doom movie with cacodemons, mancubi, arch-viles, and stuff? I'd watch it even if the special effects were all terrible CGI and the acting was SyFy Channel Original Movie quality. Whereas I'm not going to watch some generic action movie with a random reference to a BFG or something. Still, I have no problems with another Doom movie coming out, even if it's terrible. It's not like it actually impacts the games like superhero movies impact the comics. (Also, wow. If the original Doom movie actually resulted in new people signing up here, maybe getting into the 2d games, that's pretty awesome. No Rest For The Living was amazingly good, so if the occasional bad movie keeps the older games alive and gets us more anniversary episodes, I'm all for that.)

The short answer is that you can do this, but it'd take too long to explain it all in one post and you'll kinda have to do some learning and experimenting on your own. I can point you to where to start, though. Do you have SLADE 3? If not, you should probably download it. It's the easiest way to mess with graphics and game mechanics in Doom, and it'd help with all of these. Also, I'm assuming you'd be using ZDoom, since most people do and it's really easy to use with mods. If Rebel Moon is a sprite-based game, probably the easiest thing would be to find hero sprites somewhere online, reformat them to the right sizes and other specs for a Doom marine skin (you can probably find that on the Zdoom wiki), and then pretty much plug them into a player skin template. I've never actually messed with player skins so I don't know exactly how it works, but I imagine it can't be much harder than making new enemies or weapons. There's probably an easy guide somewhere online. For enemies and weapons, you can grab the sprites for them somewhere (a quick search actually turned up a Zdoom forums thread that had some of the weapon sprites, apparently). Then, you can either do it the old school way or the new school way. The old school way is just replacing the weapon graphics and sounds with the new weapons; they'll still work like the Doom weapons but will look different. The new way is to create entirely new weapons and enemies for ZDoom, using the Rebel Moon sprites, and try to make them as close to the originals as possible. It's more work, but there's some tutorials on the Zdoom wiki for doing it. You're mostly going to be looking at articles related to the DECORATE lump, which is basically just a text file you write and then (usually) insert into a WAD file with SLADE 3. It helps to understand some basic programming concepts like object inheritence before you start, but you don't absolutely need to. You can just sorta look at someone else's WAD with new monsters or weapons and see how they did it.