Jan

The thing is, a lot of the Doom levels that are attributed to Sandy Petersen were at their core decent levels, because, as we all know, they were actually made by Tom Hall and only later retextured and made fit to play by Sandy. Specifically E2M1, E2M2, E2M3, E2M4, E2M7 and E3M3 define the second part of Doom for me. Yes, the texturing is often whacky, but despite that they still ooze atmosphere and they are great fun to play. I feel that with the attention of a more skillful hand, at least E2 of Doom could have been awesome and Deimos would have been remembered as Phobos' evil, more twisted twin, as it was originally envisioned. As for the "true" Sandy levels, like E2M6, E2M9, E3M1, E3M2 or E3M6, I have the same feelings about them as I have about his Doom 2 work. Forgettable. Hm no not really. I think his plans were interesting, but way too ambitious and they would have made Doom too complicated at the expense of fun. The brilliance of Doom is its simplicity.

Much more reliably than a Chaingunner. Avg number of shots needed to kill imp: 1.06 Avg number of shots needed to kill heavy weapon dude: 1.32 http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Shotgun

At the time, like almost everyone else, I thought Doom II was the best thing since sliced bread and even cooler than Doom I. In hindsight though, it really hasn't aged as gracefully as Doom I, and a lot of the new features it introduced are problematic. So let's talk about the things I dislike about it. 1. The level design is lackluster Most levels look rather bland and uninspired. There's no overarching theme binding them together like in Doom I. Despite the attempts to mimic real world places, the levels never convey a sense of location. There's no sense of wonder, and I never feel like I want to explore more of this place. It just becomes about "beating the level", "finding all the secrets", "killing all the monsters". You're battling the game logic instead of trying to survive on a lost moon base. People sometimes attribute this to Sandy Petersen, but I think Romero's levels are just as bad in Doom II. Only some of American McGee's levels are somewhat memorable in my opinion. It's not just the level design either, but the general art and texturing as well. If you look at the unique Doom II resources, they feel a bit second rate to the Doom I ones. There's nothing as iconic as BROWN1 or STARTANX/STARGX. I also feel like they started to go past the limits of what the Doom engine is capable of, and I don't mean technical limits but the limit of what still looks good. Doom looks at its best with levels that are medium sized, indoor and with limited access to the outside. Let's face it, large outdoor levels look like ass. Natural areas look poor because you can inevitably see the tiling of the various sp_rockx textures, and canyons and caves shouldn't have only perfectly vertical walls. Seeing large outdoor city levels may have been neat in 1994, but they just looks ridiculous to me now. 2. The super shotgun screws up the balance It used to be that a pack of imps or shotgun sergeants was a challenge, and you had to carefully pick them off one by one, making sure to aim your shot properly especially with imps because they can easily survive a badly aimed shot. With a SSG though, you can just blap through hordes of lower tier monsters with impunity. It's even more ammo efficient because a SSG shot delivers more damage than two regular shotgun shots. Don't even get me started on demons and spectres, they get rendered completely useless by the SSG. To even things out again, they introduced more higher hitpoint monsters, but again, the SSG screws up things here because you hardly ever need to switch away from it in favor of the "heavy" weapons. In Doom I, if you were fighting a baron, what would you use? Depending on the situation you would alternate between shotgun, rocket launcher, plasma gun or even the BFG if you want a quick kill. In Doom II, 99% of the time you'd just use the SSG. Oh, and you get the SSG already in MAP02, not even in a secret. 3. Some new enemies are annoying Case #1: Pain elementals. Does anyone even like them? I wonder what the thought process was when they created it. So we have the Lost Soul, easily the most annoying Doom I enemy, let's create a big blob that's hard to kill that spawns an infinite number of them? Case #2: Chaingunners. They are just unfair. They deliver way too much damage for a hitscan enemy and are too hard to kill. A single shotgun blast, even perfectly placed at close range doesn't reliably kill them, so again, you have to resort to the SSG. And then you have those incredibly annoying chaingunner traps where a closet opens up behind you and before you even have time to react, chaingunners start to tear you apart. I guess id thought we weren't using the savegame function enough. Equally annoying is the "chaingunner on a far away ledge picking you apart" trick (I'm looking at you, MAP15). Bleh! If you're a level designer and you use one of those tricks, rest assured that I'm not going to reload a savegame. I'm going to quit, delete your wad and then overwrite the disk sector where it was ten times with a random combination of zeroes and ones. Case #3: Arachnotrons. Their continuous plasma stream moves too quick to dodge and is too punishing. I think the issue here is that with regards to threat they are too "binary". They are either completely unfair, or, if you can dodge behind cover, no threat at all. I think that an enemy should be threatening, but taking some damage doesn't have to be the end of the world, requiring a load from savegame. If you get hit by a baron, it hurts, but it doesn't grind you up like the arachnotron. You can take it like a man and soldier on. Case #4: The Mancubus. This enemy just doesn't work for me. It's ugly, slow, and once you learn to do the little Mancubus dance, you can easily dodge their fireballs. Hell, you can even stun it with a chaingun. That leaves the Revenant, which I do like gameplay wise, but it's a bit of an ugly tall mf. The Archvile is a pretty neat trick too, if used correctly (and sparingly!). It's very threatening, but it's not completely unfair. The Hell Knight works too, but again, too easy to kill with the SSG. tl;dr I think the overall lesson here is that taking a good thing and cranking it up to 11 doesn't always produce a better result.

Well, it's certainly better than the Pentium 100 with 15" CRT screen that I used to make Dawn of the Dead back in the early days :) People sometimes forget that in the 90s we often had to make do with limited computing power and 800x600 and lower resolution screens for creating maps.

Yup, that is more or less what I'm aiming for: Doom/E2 if Tom Hall had been kept on to finish the job (without going all "Doom Bible" of course) and if Sandy had never touched his levels. For this level, I also tried to adopt Tom Hall's methodology as I imagine it was: draw a big rectangle to define/contain the size of the level to start with, and then fill it up leaving little unused space between the areas (like it would be in the real world), add lots of interconnectivity/alternate routes, use other typical Tom Hall-ish style elements such as orderly rooms with repeating geometrical patterns, dramatic lighting, long hallways, ... No, this will be it's own thing. Current working title is Forsaken Shores. I have one level finished for it, and then the one I showed the screenshot of. We'll see how far I get, but I expect it will be a short set, not a full episode replacement. I'm leaving nos4dead as it is, fixes excepted. Correct. The level name should be a hint too.

I have a very short list of wads that I replay, or rather revisit, as I don't always replay them entirely but just pick a level for a quick blast. Currently on the list are: Fava, Memento Mori, BTSX E1, DTWID and Doom64 EX if that counts as a wad.

A few years ago I have tried Doom builder for a bit, but I wasn't really a fan of the DB way of doing things. So I went back to what works best for me (i.e. WinDEU). In any case, it would be a tall order for any tool to replace a tool that I can use with my eyes closed and in which I have all that muscle memory built up over 20 years.

Thanks Paul, I appreciate that :) I had a lot of fun making these levels too, but I am glad that the episode is finally out there and that people are enjoying it. BTW, I hope this feels a bit more like a true "episode" than classic (progression and consistency wise I mean). Most classic levels were originally stand-alone levels in a certain doom theme, but they weren't really meant to go together so playing them in episode form can make them feel a bit disjointed.

You're gonna like the next thing I'm working on then :)

Yeah that's the one. What I'm going to do is collect some feedback about small niggling issues like this, and then release a final updated version with fixes.

I'm guessing after getting the blue key you simply backtracked by taking the long way around instead of making the leap out of the window? I figured nobody would do that :) The closets get activated by leaping out of the window. In earlier versions, they got activated by picking up the blue key, but then you could simply pick off the spectres safely from up in the blue key room. I guess I could rectify it by closing a 30 second timer behind the the player when he picks up the blue key, leaving the only way out through the window.

You just made me remember that in earlier incarnations of E1M3 (in Doom v0.99 and v1.1) that nukage pool didn't have a switch in the middle, and relied on walkover lines to raise. This was buggy in combination with savegames though. It would sometimes lead to the floor raising up into the sky, or worse, the floor suddenly dropping 64 units leaving you trapped. The latter happened to me the first time I played this level and because I didn't know the cheat codes yet, it forced me to restart from a much earlier savegame.

I'm glad you guys are having fun with it! Also, if someone would like to record a run through, that's always helpful and I'd appreciate it. Anyways, the idgames archive link is live now: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/m-o/nos4dead

I wouldn't mind seeing a playthrough of my No Sleep for the Dead episode Download link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xq873nau16reeng/nos4dead_v1_0.zip?dl=0 Source port: it's vanilla compatible, so you can choose. No jumping allowed though. IWAD: Doom 1 Maps: E1M1-E1M9

I just uploaded version 1.0 to /incoming, it should be in /newstuff soon. It's DONE, finally! If you can't wait for it to appear in /newstuff, you can already download it from my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xq873nau16reeng/nos4dead_v1_0.zip?dl=0 Some obligatory screenies to whet your appetite:

My first experience went something like this: C:\>cd doom C:\DOOM>doom DOS/4GW Professional Protected Mode Run-time Version 1.94a Copyright (c) Rational Systems, Inc. 1990-1993 DOS/4GW Professional Fatal Error: Loader failed -- Insufficient memory available :( And then I went back to playing wolf3d and I had to wait almost a year until I could upgrade my lowly 386sx with 2MB of RAM to a whopping Pentium 100 with 8MB so I could actually play doom.

I couldn't reproduce the slime trail in prboom-plus, but nevertheless, I fiddled a bit with the vertices there and hope it went away now. I'm not sure if I want to "fix" that end fight. I know it can be avoided, but if the player is clever enough to do that, perhaps he deserves the reward? I'm okay with the player outsmarting god (the level designer) every now and then :p On the other hand, don't we all want 100% kills when we leave a level? :)

I actually prefer that my demons stay dead :p

Alright, why don't you guys give this a go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z4lxw5s7thme999/nos4dead_201603142044.zip?dl=0 Be aware, this is still a playtest version and I may still tweak it here and there before the final release. If you only want the final 1.0 release, I suggest you hold off for now.

That's an awesome trailer! I love some good old Ministry :)

Heh, I have older unreleased stuff than this in hibernation on my disk, like a Darkening E2 mission pack that I started in 2007 and that will probably never see the light of day. Nevertheless, nos4dead was too close to the finish line to abandon. I never gave it up, it was just a matter of finding the time and inspiration.

Good news everyone! All levels are now near completion. I'm pretty much done with E1M4 and E1M9 and I'm basically just doing some final tweaking of gameplay, texture alignment and things like that. Oh yeah, I also swapped E1M4 and E1M5 around because the level progression works better that way. The plan is now to let some people playtest the whole thing before the release, and perhaps I'll do a public beta in a couple of days after I've incorporated their feedback. Stay tuned!

I put up some new screenies here: http://imgur.com/a/nn7UZ

Travers! Wow long time no hear man :) What are you up to these days?

I was thinking of either doing a rejects.wad of what I have and throwing it out there for people to use as they see fit, or save a level or two for a more "Thy Flesh Consumed" themed set.