zark

I'm not sure that higher fidelity artwork of an almost-20-year-old video game is really necessary. The forums do their job, and do it well without a lot of the modern nonsense you see on many sites.

I've just finished reading Masters of Doom which gives a great deal of background concerning the development of Doom. John Carmack is reported as being pretty stubborn about the decisions he made while programming his engines; one particular example was that when programming the Wolfenstein engine, Romero and the rest of the design team had to practically beg Carmack on several occasions to include sliding walls before he included them. Carmack made decisions like these and the design team had to abide by them. Let's also keep in mind that the vanilla Doom engine isn't entirely modder-friendly. Sure, the data files it uses allow for additional maps and textures to be included without overwriting the originals; but back in the day, you had to edit the executable directly in order to change most of the game's behaviour. It was made easier by the developers of third-party tools such as Dehacked. Carmack didn't include any easy direct ways for modders to change the engine's behaviour, but he wasn't trying to stifle creativity or limit modders in any way. Comparing the development of ZDoom to development in the commercial games industry is a little like comparing a professional graphics artist to someone who makes levels for a game as a hobby. In the games industry, programmers and designers are generally paid salaries to create content, be it a game engine or game assets. On the other hand, hobbyists are doing it on the side: in most cases (I'm fairly sure this is the case for ZDoom) they expect and will receive no financial recompense for their efforts. For many, it's a personal project that they do for themselves. From my point of view, I design Doom levels the way I want them to be: I appreciate feedback, but I will not make changes just for the sake of a group of players who want to play it "their way". I guess we're going to disagree on this, which is fine. But in order to allow complete (and I mean complete) creative freedom so that modders can do anything they like, the ZDoom developers would have to rewrite the engine so that anything is possible; should a level designer be upset and feel his creativity is being crushed because he cannot build perfect spheres in software mode? Should he request that the developers implement mechanics for complete open-world gameplay akin to the Elder Scrolls RPGs? Some things just can't be done. If you want complete control, make your own engine with the features that you do want.

Absolutely not. It is the programmer's right to do what he or she wants to do with their own project. Sure, they can listen to suggestions from modders and the people who will use their project; but they are in no way obligated to do so. You are also not entitled to feel hard done by or stifled creatively, simply because the developers have made the decision not to include a feature that you would like. If someone wants complete creative control (outside what a particular source port is capable of) then it really is their responsibility to either use a source port that allows them that extra level of freedom, or to write their own source port instead. Your personal preferences do not come before those of the developers of the source port. You contradict yourself in saying that the ZDoom developers are free to shape it as they see fit, yet you then say that they must recognise that the opinions of modders come before their own. To summarise, it appears that you're saying that you're fine with the ZDoom team doing what they like with their own project, as long as the design decisions they make are aligned with the beliefs of the community and, in particular, those developing mods which use ZDoom. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that anyone holding this belief could be accused of having a distorted, over-inflated sense of entitlement. ZDoom is the personal project of a dedicated team of individuals, and they can develop it however they wish, with no conditions stipulated by anyone.

In 2D mode, select the sectors and bring up their properties. If you want to increase the floor or ceiling by a certain value, enter "++" and then the value you want to increase it by, for example "++32". To lower, just replace "++" with "--" and then the value. Pressing OK will update the heights accordingly. In 3D mode, select the individual floors and ceilings of the sectors you want to adjust; they should glow red. Then just increase/decrease the height as you normally do, and they'll all increase/decrease together. Hope this is more what you're looking for.

Doomworld needs a "like" button.

Just because you prefer using a different tool, doesn't necessarily mean ReX's suggestion is wrong. There are a number of tools available for Doom editing - both lump manipulation and map editing; different people prefer different tools. Surely it's up to the individual user to decide what works best for them after evaluating the information given to them? On-topic, I'm not sure how up-to-date this is, but I've found a tutorial on the Slade wiki on how to import textures using Slade.

No, but close approximations are, and I think that both the author of the original post and authors of the subsequent replies understood this.

Thanks dude, I really appreciate your help :D WAD now loads and runs correctly, in both Doom Builder and ZDoom, and I've been editing for an hour or so now and it seems stable. Thanks again!

Sorry about the 403; here's the correct link. I've fixed the sector errors (clearly I was rushing to release this WAD the first time round :P) and the missing textures, most of which were simply in dummy sectors. In terms of the monsters stacked on top of each other, boris is correct - the overlapping monsters have different difficulty flags. I've uploaded a copy of this fixed map. Conversion with WAD2UDMF gives the same issue with the vertexes and still crashes upon adjusting the geometry. DoomConvert gives me too many vertexes however I've deleted a few and changed some lines around and it appears to still be stable. Manually removing 3000 loose vertexes doesn't sound like fun though, and the vertexes in the TEXTMAP lump don't have their indexes listed like they do in a WAD2UDMF conversion, so I wouldn't easily be able to remove them through that method either.

Thanks again. This runs fine, however now I'm getting the floating vertexes issue again. Here's a screenshot of an area as it appears in Doom Builder - I've highlighted a few of the vertexes in question, though there are many more. I'm not familiar enough with UDMF to understand what's going on here - to me, it's even stranger that the vertexes are appearing in straight lines. On the occasions that ZDoom does run, it reports in the console that the map had "5613 invalid side references". I'm not sure if this has something to do with the problem. Curious, I found that there were 4,545 extra vertices from the original map. Editing the TEXTMAP lump, I removed these. They were gone in Doom Builder and the map ran fine in ZDoom - UNTIL I make geometry changes. At this point it refuses to run again. I'm pretty confused about this whole thing. Edit: Correcting hyperlink

Thanks for the reply :) I really appreciate it. I downloaded the converted WAD, however it still crashes ZDoom for me. Doom Builder appears to display it correctly though - without those floating vertexes thankfully. Were you able to get it to run successfully? Here's the crash report for zdoom.exe while running the updated WAD. Do you have any thoughts? Maybe I'm doing something else wrong?

Hey guys. I've been out of the Doom editing game for a while, and I'd like to convert one of my old maps (Doom format) into the new UDMF format to experiment with it. However, both WAD2UDMF and DoomConvert produce maps that, while work, show a ton of random floating vertexes when I load them into Doom Builder 2. The vertexes are sitting on lines but are not actually attached to them. When I move them/remove them, it often causes the map to be unplayable in ZDoom (latest stable and SVN builds). I've tried copying the architecture manually from the source map to a new UDMF map however this map doesn't run at all. I've also tried creating a prefab out of the map's architecture, but it gives the same results. Can anyone suggest a safe way to convert my old Doom format map into UDMF? Or can anyone spot something I've been doing wrong? Here's a link to the WADs in question, plus the ZDoom crash report. Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

Self-shaved head here, have been for several years. Long hair in combination with hair loss does not look good, and it's now cleaner, cheaper to maintain and better looking than before.

It's from a picture of a member of ICP (Shaggy 2 Dope I think), that BBG originally claimed was a picture of him. 3rd image down on this page: http://www.icp.bappy.com/photo2.html