Jan

I do! https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/53924-no-sleep-for-the-dead-v1-0-released

Don't think I've ever encountered that. What does annoy me sometimes is when people give faint praise to older classic wads, saying things like "it's pretty good for a 90s wad" or "it has aged relatively well", as if mappers were totally clueless in the earlier days of Doom.

In what sense do they not give respect to it?

Another thing I dislike is a level that's full of obvious doors (i.e. bigdoor texture or something) that can't be activated directly but have to be opened by a switch or trigger somewhere halfway across the level. Nothing more frustrating than going *umph* *umph* against door after door when you are trying to explore a level.

* Choose a theme and stick to it * Maintain a varied but consistent texture scheme throughout the level * Vary floor and ceiling heights often * Pay attention to the proportions of my rooms * Pay attention to which room height works best with the texture I'm using. For instance, the STARX textures work best on 72 or 144 high rooms. * Try to use interesting shapes, not just rectangles and octagons * Use light level, objects and/or texture choice to create interesting contrasts * Never change floor or ceiling texture without changing the corresponding height * Never use corners with angles sharper than 90 degrees * Never change texture without a proper transition * Almost never use 128 high BIGDOORs in 128 high rooms * If wall thickness is apparent when going from one room to the other, make sure the wall appears *thick*, at least 32 units * Let the level loop onto itself and avoid large gaps of void in between the different parts of the level. This makes it easier for the player to get a feel for the 3D space of the level, and it makes it easier to create interconnectivity in the layout * Don't go overboard on detail. Not every wall has to be plastered with decorations, sometimes you have to let the wall texture speak for itself. These may be a bit more controversial: * I avoid using lifts as a crutch to bridge height differences. It feels a bit cheap. If possible, I will use stairs. I definitely try to avoid lifts on the main path through the level because they slow down the flow. Nobody likes to wait 4 seconds for a lift. * I avoid using teleporters to bridge parts of a level together. It's often used when an author has painted himself into a corner, and then uses the teleporter as a cheap way to get himself out of that corner. * I avoid making rooms that are unusually tall. If a texture tiles more than 3 times vertically, it looks really shitty in the Doom engine IMO.

There can also be a small 1 unit wide sector in front of the actual switch, with the action "S1 raise to nearest ceiling" that, with the help of a control sector, causes it to insta pop down the 1 unit wide sector when pressed, revealing the actual switch, giving you the illusion that you just pulled a switch and nothing happened. If the switch is on a pillar or something, the 1 unit wide sector is almost impossible to notice. I used that effect in dodead E1M3 to reveal the teleporter that took you to the BFG secret. Quick demo wad: https://www.dropbox.com/s/icyuwfvyldsemeu/swdemo2.wad?dl=0

You get that if there's a linedef right in front of it that has an S1 action. Example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5lf8mi4p311d74r/swdemo1.wad?dl=0 The linedef in front of the switch opens the right door. The switch itself opens the left door.

More like preferring pre Black Album Metallica over post Black Album Metallica.

Just a theory, but perhaps his design process wasn't that well suited for Quake (or Quake was messing with his design process). I recall him saying that he used a very iterative process when building a level, as in create-playtest-create-playtest-... in very short chunks. Now for Quake, compiling your level is a lot more CPU and memory intensive than for Doom. IIRC you had to run qbsp, light and vis and for anything moderately complex, it could chug on for hours on the hardware of that time. So you had to build a large part of your world, and make sure that it's alright in the editor, before you committed to compiling it. Then it was fingers crossed, and hope that everything came out alright in the game. I tried my hand at making some Quake levels too at the time, and that always frustrated me immensely. It just sucked the fun right out of the whole process.

This. Don't bite off more than you can chew. You can always expand the scope later.

I'm using gzdoom. No, refering to the switch behind the yellow key door in map02. The one that lowers the lift to the exit. Edit: I just checked with prboom-plus, and it also happens there. Also, music doesn't work in prboom-plus, I get the default Doom2 music.

Cool episode. I think I ran into a bug though. A switch on MAP03 can't be triggered because there's a linedef in front blocking it. I had to idclip into the wall a bit to pull the switch, otherwise I'd been stuck there. I'm talking about this switch: Same thing almost happened with the switch behind the yellow key door too, but I could squeeze into the sector behind the door just enough to pull the switch.

Can't believe I never noticed that... Of course, it's MAP25, and I rarely get that deep into DOOM2.WAD because of aforementioned reasons.

How about NUKAGE as a ceiling texture in E1M8 then?

You know that thing about sarcasm over the internet? Fair point, but counterpoint: there is enough content in both iwads that is well above Sandy's quality (Romero's E1 is an obvious example), so it is possible. OP was asking what people disliked in Doom II, and Sandy's solo levels are a big factor in that for me, so I singled that out. I may not have pointed it out in the most PC way, but well, I generally don't do PC.

Wait what, are we feeling butthurt because I dislike something that you like? Sorry for having an opinion I guess, it's not like the topic starter asked for that or anything right? Also, I don't map to gain your or anyone else's respect. I map because I enjoy the creative process of building my own little world. Hopefully some other people can enjoy the fruits of that process too, but that's up to them. I have no interest at all in building pure Sandy style maps, because I'd have to emulate all the flaws too (like godawful texturing) and they would not get through my quality filter. I could find these examples in all of 2 minutes of walking through E2M6 and E2M7, and I wish I could say they were an exception, but they're not. They're the norm for Sandy maps. This doesn't mean that I dislike everything in Sandy's levels. Most of the time the gameplay and atmosphere are okay, and I even use Sandy-ish elements in my own maps. I also respect the time constraint he was under when making the Doom I maps. That said, as for my general opinion on his style, I refuse to call it out any other way than I see it and that is severely flawed. If that offends your fanboy sensibilities, that problem lies only with you, "bub".

And those giants just wouldn't go down. You fire your shotgun at them, once, twice, three times and they just don't budge. You take your chaingun, and it doesn't even stun them! So you take your most powerful weapon up until that point, the rocket launcher (that you carried over from previous maps), thinking that should do the trick, and even then they don't go down immediately! Of course, nowadays we know it just takes 5 or 6 rockets or about 15 shotgun blasts while we circle strafe around them, but when the most powerful enemy you've encountered up until then was the demon, two barons was a bit of a shock.

Yeah I must suck, that's the only possible explanation. It's impossible to accept that I just have different preferences than you.

This is correct. The first years I was playing Doom, I didn't even know about circlestrafing, and I didn't have dedicated strafe buttons in my setup. Arrow left and arrow right were just for turning left and right (the default in vanilla Doom IIRC) I did use the right mouse button + a flick of the mouse for quick strafe dodges.

It's not so much about level of detail, but attention to detail and caring about esthetics. I don't think it's a big stretch to think that someone who thinks it's perfectly ok to wear white socks and sandals would also think that it's perfectly ok to put a startan texture right next to a skin texture on the same wall. I personally do care about such things. I wouldn't be caught dead wearing sandals, and I would be embarassed to release a level as badly textured as some of Sandy's. Actually, you're more or less illustrating one of my other arguments. In D2 it feels more like you are battling the game dynamics than that you are a space marine on a lost moon base. For me this is important, for you, apparently less so. Oh, as for those baron fights: you realize that you have a plasma gun and rocket launcher too, right? ;)

As in they're just not fun to fight. Hard to kill with anything but the SSG. Comprehensive reading is not your forte, is it? The frequency of plasma bullets is much higher than Baron fireballs, so you're likely to get hit by 2-3-4 bullets at a time. If you got your head out of your ass, you'd realize I'm not talking about difficulty but about balance. They are related, but different things.

Because it pertains to his sense of esthetics or lack thereof? Maybe your standards are just lower, but personally, I don't just want my levels to play nice, I want them to look and feel nice too. There really are some jarring texture and architecture choices in Sandy's maps. I'm not talking about the hell/tech juxtaposition here, because I'm okay with that, but things like rooms that are taller than the open sky courtyard next to it (E2M7), FWATER as a ceiling texture, SW1DIRT on a BROWNGRN wall, generally using a coloring book of all kinds of mismatching textures without proper transitions.

But his wife has https://twitter.com/br/status/713337499716886529

The Chasm is actually where I "quit" Doom 2 when I first played it. I didn't know the cheat codes yet (this was back in the day before I had internet), so in utter frustration with that level I just gave up. I do like Doom E3M5 and The Citadel is kinda cool too. Oh we're talking about deathmatch now? Sorry, I don't care much about deathmatch. The last time I played deathmatch was in the Quake 2 days, and I don't think I've played Doom deathmatch more than twice.

You're defending a man whose sense of style is wearing white socks in sandals, and yellow/orange suspenders over a blue shirt. Slough of Despair? Nirvana? Dead Simple? Entryway? All levels I could easily do without. Hell, they're levels I could shit out myself if you gave me a couple of days and if I could somehow block out my entire sense of esthetics.