AbstractDread

You know, normally I'd recommend a support group for people like you and I but who doesn't love a good tussle with stronger, older games? I sure do. I wish my school could have afforded computers like yours. I went to some inner-city thing, and I think the only computer they had could only play Oregon Trail. I'm vicariously living through your memories of your childhood right now. Do you still make maps at all? Did you ever get into mapping for Quake? Haha it was absolutely innuendo. Some of the bits from my "childhood" had some spice added, but the story I told of my first time (with Doom, of course) is largely factual. Scout's honor. My god, am I showing my age already? I always promised myself to be one of the cool kids and never judge anything for its lifestyle choices when I got older. I just slut-shamed shareware Doom, what has happened to me? Also, I've learned way more about geometry, math and murder from Doom mapping than I ever would have at my local child-prison, so I'm gonna have to agree with you on that one.

You know, I think it was estimated that Doom shareware was installed on over ten million computers back in the day. This was even long before games became super mainstream like they are now. I'm not commenting on anything specifically by saying that, I just still get blown away by that. Also, big yes to episode 1's ending. Getting to that bit on SNES Doom (my first Doom experience) also freaked me out when I was a kid, although I didn't understand thematically what was happening until way later when I was a teen. Like, dying and then going to the "Shores of Hell" didn't register with me at that time. Also, good on you for immersing yourself into the experience! Most people I know who have heard of (or played) classic Doom always talk about Brutal Doom when talking about their first experience. I mean, people not on Doomworld, anyways. Not to shit on Brutal Doom but I just think there are better ways (like yours) to experience Doom for the first time.

Dude, the Revenant on PS1 Doom always scared the hell out of me. The ambient sounds it'd make whenever they were hunting for you. Also, my first experience with the arch-vile was on my grandparent's PC which had Doom 2. Going from consoles to PC, I had NO idea about the Arch-Vile. The fire attack that launches you up in the air also used to scare me lol also, puns and dark humor are a big plus for me so it's good to hear you had a *hell* of a good time hahaha also, kudos for being a Chex Quest kid! I never knew about the love everyone had for that little game until I was in my mid-twenties. Slipgate - I feel you, for sure. On SNES and PSX, I'd always play on I'm too Young to Die/easy. Even with cheats! haha Suburbs on PSX Doom was always my favorite level to run around in with cheats. ZeroTheEro - I've never played Doom with PC speaker sounds, but the fact that it still scared you is a testament to Doom's perfect design choices.

Did Doom treat you right? Did Doom buy you breakfast the next morning? Did it call you back? Was Doom introduced to you by a friend, or did you guys/gals meet organically somehow? Was it love at first sight? I'm really curious about everyone's first experience with Doom! What's your first memory of Doom? What platform did you first play or see it on? Do you like to make levels yourself and, if so, when did you first start? Gimme the deets! Be verbose or be brief. Reply with an essay sharing your story or just reply with glyphs and gifs! Or don't reply at all and keep it to yourself! Don't just start writing cause some dweeb like me asked you to! I'll kick it off: I first saw/played Doom on the SNES (I know, I know) at a homeless shelter with my mom and brothers when I was about 7 years old. There were some dudes in the common room playing it and I remember being blown the hell away. I'd never seen a first-person shooter before so I was geeking out, of course. Later on, my mom got a boyfriend who had a Playstation. We still only had a SNES while the PS1 gen was already a couple years in. The boyfriend had Resident Evil and Doom, so of course I'd ask all the time if I could play Doom on his Playstation while him and my mom would practice their wrestling moves upstairs. My mom's boyfriend's favorite move was the pile-driver, because he would always shout really loud that he was going to pile-driver her. I mean, what kinds of actual nerds cared about wrestling when you had DOOM? I was too grown up for childish things like Wrestlemania or the WWF. DOOM was way cooler, and still is! Anyways, I would crank the TV and just soak in the ambience of PS1 Doom. It defined my childhood! I drew pictures of Doom at school, got sent to special classes because my teachers said they liked my pictures so much, I got to talk to a bunch of doctors who also liked my Doom drawings, talked about DOOM with friends, played pretend-DOOM on recess, etc. You get the picture! Now YOU guys tell me YOUR stories!

I'm obsessed with the sawed-off shotgun from Blood. I think it's just so satisfying, so I took it upon myself to make an upscaled version of it. It's definitely still a work in progress and by no means am I an artistic expert, but still. It's been a lot of fun to work on this. I downscaled the big PNGs just to make them more upload friendly, but if anyone wants me to post the raw ones, let me know. [Original Blood Sawed-Off Sprite] [AI-Upscaled Blood Sawed-Off. Passable enough, but I wasn't satisfied with the detail or the smooth "clay" appearance] [My manual touch-up of the AI-Upscaled Sawed-Off sprite. I photoshopped in a lot more detail, cleaned some things up, etc. I am still working on it, but I felt like it was in a good enough state to show off where I'm at with it. Feel free to grab it if you want, especially if you can do better or don't like my detailing work. Some honest to goodness feedback would be cool, too!] Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: still WIP, and I know there's still pixel-garbage around the edges of the upscaled sprites

Hell yeah, dude. The Doom community has definitely evolved over the years. Whether you see that evolution as good or bad depends on your own views, but I agree with you. Any question I've ever asked on the forums, no matter how dumb I thought it was, was always answered pleasantly. You're in with a great crowd on Doomworld.

Eschewing the mild drama on here; MyHouse is such a beautifully creative map, and it was something very cool to experience. This map definitely goes on my personal list of "things I wish I could wipe my memory of so I can play it again for the first time". Actually, it was kind of dismissive of me to call some of the posts on here "drama". I think it's really cool that a Doom map in 2023 can spark conversations and threads like this. It makes me really happy to be a part of this community.

Excellent, thanks a lot Gez! Much appreciated!

Excellent, thank you! Does this also apply if I am just using the "Auto" method of loading in materials? Like if I have normals and specular in the materials\normalmaps\auto?

Gotcha, yeah I was using a few editors to try and hand-create some of my own HD textures just to learn how. I just wasn't sure if I should be pre-scaling both the materials and regular textures, or if the GZDoom engine already knows to scale the materials along with the regular textures.

So, I never thought of this until now but when you scale a texture down (or up) in Ultimate Doom Builder, do the Normal Maps and Specular Maps get scaled along with it? Example: a 256x256 texture is scaled to a factor of 4x4, bringing it down to 64x64. When the map is loaded up in-game, are the Normal Maps and Specular Maps also scaled by a factor of 4x4 (256x256 to 64x64)? Thanks in advance for your help/answers!

Sorry for the late reply, but oh my god I LOVE your voxel pack! It's not like I've been working on any sort of commercial project, so seeing what you can do with world building with stuff like this is always fun. Seriously, I KNOW the work you probably had to put into this. In the time it took me to reply to this, I did manage to rip voxels from various games in the 90's and even learned how to create voxels from scratch (interesting, but tedious and very hard to master). I made a chunky light bulb that wouldn't have been out of place in Blood or Shadow Warrior! As ramon and you stated, I did find that editing the pivot points and z-orientation was definitely a thing you have to do. I practiced converting Ion Fury's voxels into GZDoom using MagicaVoxel (I think). It really blew my mind realizing the massive amount of work Cheello put into creating voxels for EACH frame of animation for Doom's monsters and stuff. That person is insanely talented, as is any voxel artist. Also, I'm not sure about the rules about replying to a post I made a couple months ago so I apologize to any mods or staff if this reply put it back up top.

This is all very informative and good info. I've spent the last few days testing out various performance scenarios, and I have been enjoying how resilient GZDoom can be towards certain things. Thank you again Edward for more clarification on scaling hi-res textures. Also, that is an interesting idea, Boris. I did some digging, it definitely makes more sense to use actual sprites to fake floor decals. I saw a few posts on the ZDoom forums regarding flat, non-moving sprites as decals.

Thank you, Edward! This is excellent. To me, it seems the only reason to compress textures (in my case) would be for me to lower the size footprint of the texture archive. I also had another question, and I wasn't sure if it was different enough to start a new thread over. I've noticed there are still a ton of pre-made texture packs out there that still use the WAD format, with textures/flats in the Doom format and patch files, etc. I personally use the .pk3 format, sometimes even converting other texture packs from WAD to PK3. I do this, then I convert each texture/flat to true color PNG and then compress/optimize those images to cut down on file size bloat that comes with the conversion to true color PNG. Then I like to manually go through each texture, and I organize them into an easier-to-read folder structure for use in Ultimate Doom Builder. Is there any sort of disadvantage to what I'm doing? Researching some of this on the wiki points to PK3s maybe being slower and more unoptimized, but I'm not sure myself exactly how. I genuinely love the tedium of organizing pack structures, and then when I'm editing with that pack I can easily find what texture I need next. I'll attach a screenshot of the structure template I use. I generally modify it to fit whatever texture pack I'm converting (like if a texture pack has no brick textures, then I won't have a section dedicated for bricks). Quick edit: I also use 3D floors to place "decals" (blood splats, scorch marks, etc) on floors and ceilings. Do 3D floors/sectors bog down performance? Or is it mainly just the things Kan mentioned? Also, I will ask over on their forums, as well. Thank you all again for the input!

This is all still excellent information. I am also trying to take pk3/wad MB size into account. I knew that for a while there, having a rather large pk3 or wad was not seen as desirable. That doesn't seem to be as big of an issue as before, but still. I know not everyone has access to high speed internet. I will also keep play testing in mind, as well. It's kind of an invaluable resource, if you think about it. I'm not sure who to upvote, as both answers were great. Thank you both again!