SMG_Man

I'm sorry, but I'm going to drop out from this project. I've had a lot of neat ideas for building a Boom map, but work's been rather stressful lately and I just have not had the time to actually put any of them together into a coherent map. Sorry for the inconvenience, and best of luck.

The playable areas of most stock Doom II maps fit within a 4,096 x 4,096 bounding box, usually erring smaller than that. Map20 (Gotcha!) is a bit larger, at about 6,144 x 5,120, and Map24 (The Chasm) at about 5,120 x 5,120. The maximum size supported by the original engine would technically be within a 32,768 x 32,768 square, and Gez pointed out in 2012 that the safest range for vanilla maps would be in a roughly 18,800 x 18,800 square so as to avoid overflows. However, issues can still arise depending on the complexity of your map (visplane overflows, drawsegs overflows, blockmap limits, etc.) so you may end up with a smaller playable area than even that.

Ultimately, the feeling of "how large" a map is also depends on what you do with the map space, and how taxing you make remembering locations/getting around on the player. I hope this all helps.

Bonus: TNT's Map20 (Central Processing) fits in a 14,336 x 9,216 box, Map21 (Administration Center) fits in a 16,384 x 8,192 box, Map22 (Habitat) fits in a 10,240 x 6,144 box, and Map27 (Mount Pain) fits in a 15,360 x 11,264 box

You can have the script clear the action of the other line trigger, or simply remove the other line's trigger condition(s) so that the script doesn't run again. Alternatively, both lines can run the exact same script with the exact same arguments, but have the script terminate if it checks and sees that it's already been run before. There are multiple ways you can go about it.

Personally, I would go about it by using SetLineActivation at the start of the script to disable the other line's trigger condition(s), and you could define arguments for the script so that you don't need to have two separate scripts ultimately doing the same thing.

I guess technically the Master Levels and a smattering of the Maximum levels were my first exposure to custom WADs. Besides that though, the list of PWADs I've played is very short - Eviltech, Plutonia 2, Knee Deep in ZDoom, Mock 2, and a small bit of Psychophobia were pretty much all I'd touched before I joined Doomworld, and honestly since then the list hasn't really grown.

26 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

They do work, you just have to put the sector action thing in the control sector of the 3D floor.

I distinctly remember having trouble with this, but in trying again you're 100% correct and it's working perfectly. What the fuck was I doing in the past???

if the issue is that cacodemons are bunching up UNDERNEATH a platform, then simply using a "Cacodemon-only" teleport line will have the unintended effect of teleporting them even if they're ABOVE the platform.

My suggestion, if it's feasible - have your script check the actor's Z-value when determining whether to trigger the teleport or not. For example, I made a script to keep track of where the player was in a map and have it displayed in the automap (like how Doom 3 keeps track of where you are in a level). The problem I was running into was in a level with multi-story buildings built with 3D floors; the regular line trigger would activate regardless of which floor the player was on, and I couldn't substitute in "actor touches floor" thing triggers since those don't work with 3D floors. My solution was to implement a check via "GetActorZ" to look at the player's height when crossing the line - if their height was above the 3D floor's floor height, then it would give their location as the upper room, and if not, then it would give it as the lower room.

I hope this helps!

@Doomy__Doom hope I'm not bugging you in asking this, but do you have a visual theme in mind for your map (32)? Based on the texture pack we have and the project specifications, it would be pretty easy to do either an Egypt or snow-themed map for the secret level slots without importing more resources, so I figured I might do one of those for mine (31).

Your best bet would be either

1. Use Portals instead of 3D Floors to make the structure

2. Use specially-constructed Polyobjects that have limited height

Both approaches have their merits and are definitely possible, but I can't really remember the method for no. 2 off the top of my head. Conventional Doom-style raising doors just don't work well with 3D floors unfortunately, so you'll probably have to learn something new to get this going.

When playing the original games, I can pretty much go level to level with a single save at a time. Playing my own maps, I'll usually save wherever I know a hard part is. Playing someone else's maps, I'll rotate three or more save slots to help offset going in blind.

17 minutes ago, Archvile Hunter said:

I think the biggest issue with harder challenges in video games is whether or not the added difficulty makes the problem more engaging, or just more tedious.

This is prob the largest dimension of it that I can think of. Things like arbitrarily reducing the damage the player deals or increasing the damage that enemies deal are easy examples across all genres of games.

19 minutes ago, Benjogami said:

Did they give themselves piles of weapons and ammo to approximate what they might have when playing continuously, or use idfa? Surely not.

Gonna be honest, this is exactly how I playtest my own maps lol.

This sounds like an older version of the game. There are minor differences in some levels between v1.666 (first commercial release of Doom 2) and v1.9 (the last official release).

7 hours ago, CrazedCleric said:

I've got a tentative first version of Map 23.

I played your map on HMP via GZDoom (no freelook/jump/crouch). It's definitely on the harder side in my appraisal (though for full disclosure, I don't generally play custom levels, so I have no idea what the difficulty landscape is like beyond "harder than Doom 1/Doom 2"). Your architecture and atmosphere are pretty solid, and I dig the choice of midi. A few concrete thoughts:

Nice map!

I'll have some time to get started on my map here in the next week or so. Before I get started putting pen to paper though, I have a question - In the main post you said re: the secret level slots "The only guideline here is to not make a map that you would see ending up in any of the six episodes listed." Is this only in terms of the aesthetic, or would this include gameplay design as well?

Here are some thoughts I've had about weapons in the past

Fist - After re-playing some Metroid games, the idea of adding more "permanent" upgrades to Doom wouldn't leave me alone, and I figured a sort of cumulative Berserk effect could be interesting. Each berserk pack picked up throughout an episode would slightly increase the damage the fist deals, and once a certain threshold is crossed the fist's DPS would solidly outpace the Chainsaw's (though the Chainsaw could still have some utility in stunlocking certain enemies for example). I don't like the idea of taking the Chainsaw away from the player, since it offers an interesting dimension for a melee weapon that an axe/wrench/etc. kind of "slower but stronger" melee weapon doesn't.

Pistol - doubling the damage and increasing its accuracy is probably fine enough, though I did try going further in a mod I was working on and made it where firing the pistol click-by-click gave it a much higher rate of fire than simply holding down the mouse button. Don't really have enough data/feedback whether this was a good change or not, but it's an idea.
 

Shotgun - This one's difficult to me. The idea I've settled on liking the most is rather boring: simply increase the base shotgun's pellet count from 7 to 9, narrowing the ammo efficiency gap a bit, and maybe make it slightly more accurate/the SSG slightly less accurate.

Chaingun and Machinegun split - I like how Quake II's chaingun functions: a slight windup, then just fucking BULLETS raining everywhere chewing through your ammo like no tomorrow. Then have the Machinegun function as Doom's original Chaingun does, with maybe a 5 tic delay between shots instead of 4 tics.

Plasma Gun - I actually never really thought about this one too much until I saw a recent thread regarding the disparity in damage-to-ammo the Plasma Gun faces compared to the BFG, and I still don't have a good answer. Again, the boring option screams at me - maybe add in another cell-using weapon to complement the Plasma Gun (a Rail gun, or a pseudo flamethrower, or something) and have the BFG9000 use a new type of ammunition and then add in the Unmaker and Quake III Arena BFG10K and have them share that ammo type.

Playing the remaster jogged my memory on something fairly obscure I came across in the (original) Ground Zero expansion:

This compass item, when used, will give your coordinates and direction. I wonder if the compass in the remaster came about from trying to make this item more useful to the average player? Or perhaps it's just a small coincidence that a compass already existed in Quake II.

On a related note, it always bugged me that Quake II only had Red and Blue keycards, then a Security Pass (that was always associated with yellow). Then I played the Reckoning expansion, which had a Green keycard! ...But still just the Security Pass.

Then I played PSX Quake II at my neighbor's house and there was an actual honest to goodness Yellow keycard

Off the top of my head, I have two ideas.

Quick and dirty way: In the weapon's Ready state, it will remove the inventory item every so many ticks. If you swap to another weapon, you can put something in the Lower state to remove a set amount of the item (or clear it entirely).

More thorough way: Ignore modifying the Lower state above, and instead in every weapon's Ready state, apply the same item removal code that the new weapon has, so that way if the player switches to the Shotgun for example, the cooldown for the other weapon reduces at the same expected rate.

I think I like my theory the most - @Doughnut1321 do you by any chance have "Use" and "Speed" bound to the same key in your setup?

a possibility - the default "Run" (or rather, "Speed" as it's shown in the options menu) key is the Space bar. If you re-bound "Use" to the space bar without removing it as a binding for "Speed", it's possible you're getting interference from conflicting actions while trying to run in the game.

edit: The specific interaction I ran into when I was playing on Steam - I unwittingly set the binding for Speed to be both Left Shift and Space, and remapped Use to Space instead of E. As a result, I would have Shift held down to run, but whenever I pressed Space to use a door or something, it would also act as if I'd removed my finger from the Shift key (even though it was still held down) and I would get put back to the slower walking pace. The solution was simple: I removed the Space bar as a binding for "Speed".

The soulsphere jump there can be a little tricky. Try running at a diagonal (holding down 'Forward' and 'Strafe Left/Right' at the same time); because of the way classic Doom's physics work, that will increase your speed and "jump" distance and should make getting across the gap easier than just running straight forward.

19 minutes ago, Chezza said:

Does the AOE blast only apply on ground?

The splash effect can hit and fling you while you're already in mid-air.

9 hours ago, JBerg said:

I haven't found a way to not get hit by it once they launch the attack.

just kill them first lmao

Being a little more serious, I find that usually (usually) the problem is less the damage from the attack and more so getting flung around and losing my bearings. Berserkers have become my immediate target for combat scenarios because of this, much like the Pain Elemental and Archvile in Doom 2.

I forgot, I recorded an instance some time ago where I re-directed line portals to mess with the player a bit in a map:
 

Sometimes seeing is believing

Figure I should ask this now - what's the level of detailing that's expected of us for our maps?