ipecacodemon

I've never been a fan of MLP and much less its internet fanbase but holy shit this whole males and females wannabe Freud armchair pseudo-psychology is the cringiest thing in this whole thread.

Uh oh, one of the most common and most dreaded questions in amateur game development: "what engine should I use?" Common because it's a perfectly logical thing to consider as a foundational decision for your project, dreaded because: 1. its importance is typically overestimated by the person asking and 2. it doesn't actually have an answer! It completely depends on what the scope of your project is, what your skills are, how you feel about the interface/tools, if you're comfortable with the workflow etc. because every engine and environment is simply going to be different in some ways and do at least some things if not most things differently than others. I'm not saying this with the intent of discouraging you, but making almost any game that's any complicated is usually going to take more effort than most people who haven't done it might imagine. It's true that making games has become exponentially more accessible and in many ways easier to get into and get started than it used to be even 10 years ago let alone 20 (and that's super awesome and good for us all!), but if we're talking about something more than a student project, something you hope will entice strangers into playing it and even give you money for it, it's still going to take a ton of work. Now to try to address your question a bit more directly, there are three main advantages I can think of when it comes to making a total conversion for Doom: 1. you don't have to worry about the structure of the game or defining your own game logic or any of the technical stuff as long as the scope of your project is relatively close to what the original game is. Just replace all the assets and provide your levels. The flipside here of course is that you might find yourself restricted by the limitations and arcana of the engine - really this is a universal, but the Doom engine is particularly old and weird when compared to most offerings on the market today. The ZDoom family of ports do offer some very powerful and flexible scripting features that can alleviate this, but learning how to use them well enough to implement major gameplay modifications might have you feeling like you should've chosen the other option instead. Well truthfully if you're not much of a technical person as you say, this will likely end up being the most difficult hurdle regardless of what route you choose. 2. it's actually really easy to make levels for Doom compared to "true 3D" games, especially with today's tools. The flipside is mostly covered in the previous point, i.e. engine limitations and quirks, like lack of sector-over-sector or inability to make geometry move in the horizontal plane. (yes, the ZDoom family of ports do have features that can accomplish some of this to some degree or at least create the illusion of it for the player, but again if you're not used to doing this sort of thing it'll probably be more difficult to learn versus how a "normal" modern engine would let you implement it) 3. despite how differently Doom does things, we have an entire community of people sharing and building upon knowledge and experience for almost 3 decades now completely for free, not looking for you to buy their courses or their asset packs or looking to make money from YouTube ads on their slapshod "copy and paste" video tutorials etc. Not to mention you can practically download any WAD you like and look at how each level is built in detail, pore over the DeHackEd or Decorate or UMAPINFO files yourself, etc. Of course it needs saying that the main advantage of engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot/etc. is that it's generally going to be much easier to make almost any genre of game you want in them, they have the kind of flexibility and all around performance to support that. But you'd have to figure out how to write and structure your game logic and everything yourself. They don't have the default scaffolding of here's these different guns that already work, here's an imp that already knows how to move and shoot projectiles, here's these things called doors and lifts and crushers you can have in your levels etc. Obviously there are a shitton of resources for these engines online, sure (though I'd argue many of those resources are nowhere near as thorough as they could be), and ultimately it's up to each individual developer which approach they're more comfortable with.

On top of all the gameplay and authenticity reasons people have already stated, since you're coming at this question from a level designer perspective too, I'd like to add another reason: designing for a limited view angle not only allows you to get away with little imperfections if they're not gonna be visible, but more importantly gives you the opportunity to create various illusions for the player. Using middle textures that are infinitely thin but carefully positioned within a scene (and often aided by lighting) can create the illusion of solid 3D geometry that is otherwise impossible in Doom and in all but a few specific advanced source ports. You can see all kinds of examples of this ever since the 90s whether as arches in doorways (Eternal Doom was big on this), a support beam spanning horizontally along a wall kind of at the middle of its height (I think it was either Requiem or Memento Mori 2 where I first saw this, or maybe one of the Gothic DMs), vertically standing crosses (don't remember an early instance but I know SlayeR Map01 and Sunder Map02 both feature instances of this), that hanging crate from Map01 of Suspended in Dusk, the "lightbridges" in Valiant episode 5, various types of floating cubes (Ancient Aliens does this a few times, Sunder Map31's secret exit as well), some of the ancient Greek looking structures near the end of Eviternity and uh, a lot of other things throughout Phobos: Anomaly Reborn ... and the list could go on forever, I'm sure I've missed someone's favourite doomcute from Kama Sutra or Claustrophobia 1024! Needless to say many of these will break if you're able to look up and down and notice they're actually paper thin and not solid objects. Of course if you've made levels before or know a bit about the engine you know it's not possible for solid geometry to exist in the middle of the air (i.e. not a floor or a ceiling), but the point is that with a fixed angle and some trickery you can make it look as if it's totally possible. Though of course if your intended target for your levels is something ZDoom-derived then you have access to that engine's 3D floors and polyobjects and whatnot so you probably won't be using any of what I mentioned above.

Before other posters reply to you with each and every slaughter map of the last 15 years, I just wanna say The Mucus Flow and also Equinox 12 and 13 although I'm not even sure if those latter two are legit possible.

From my experience I sincerely believe people who would go to the effort of doing this are far more of a minority than 100%ers.

I am honestly shocked by so many remarks in this thread, made seemingly completely unaware of trends in the broader gaming community that have been around since the arcade days when home internet wasn't a thing! Completionism in some form or another has always existed and will always exist, whether its score attack or time attack or getting all the collectibles or unlocking all the costumes and characters or whatever. I'm even more perplexed to read someone else saying exploration is just a fad? Like mate have you heard of the game Myst? That was literally one of the best selling games of its day almost 30 years ago! Granted, internet availability and especially the achievement system popularised by Xbox Live probably exacerbated some of the pressures and unhealthy tendencies of those kinds of mindsets and playstyles, but it's always gonna be there in some form no matter what. I've known a lot of people for whom getting 100% achievements is their "default" way of playing through a game and for whom this inevitably leads to frustration at times; most of them have never touched Doom or any other FPS with an end of level stats screen! I also find it a little silly to level real blame at the Extended HUD of all things, as if completionists wouldn't just be tabbing constantly to the automap instead since most source ports do put info there and have done so for a very long time (I may be speaking from experience also :P).

On one hand you are kind of right, on the other hand these kinds of content creators also act as gateways for people to get into Doom and start playing/participating themselves, so it's not quite as disconnected as you're making it out to be. Ideas and opinions do spread memetically through communities though, and people on the internet are prone to simply repeating opinions they've heard without having verified them themselves (remember AVGN completely trashing certain games back in the day that people still claim to this day as some of the worst games ever made, even though the guy has since gone on record saying his videos were greatly exaggerated and he thinks they were actually pretty decent for the time).

Boom has generalised actions meaning you can mix and match parameters like target, speed, how it's triggered etc. however you please. In Doom Builder you will want to click the "Browse actions" button on the right of the dropdown menu that shows the predefined actions, then tab to "Generalized Actions" and simply create the action you want. Otherwise, vanilla only offers "Floor Lower to 8 above Highest Floor" (36, 98, 70, 71) which may not be what you want depending on your level geometry. Alternatively, "Raise Floor to Lowest Ceiling" will instead lower your floor *instantly* if the lowest adjacent ceiling is below it, but again this may not be what you want.

Most things can be set in motion and thus activate teleport lines using Boom conveyors, including item pickups and non-ceiling decorations. Dragonfly's idea is also great if your level design permits it and probably gonna be vanilla-compatible if you're interested in that. As for the deh/bex itself, If you're willing to target MBF-compatible as opposed to Boom-compatible (i.e. cl11 vs cl9), then MBF offers you A_PlaySound as well as allowing you to attach an action to any frame even if it didn't previously have any. So all you'd need is a thing with a single spawn frame, with a duration equal to or greater than the duration of the sound in ticks (otherwise it will cut itself short in order to loop again) and have that frame point to itself under "next". Otherwise, you'll have to give a thing a frame with a Look action and a frame with a Chase action, and then put your sound into its Alert and Active sound slots. This is how All Hell Is Breaking Loose did it back in 1996, but it's not perfect because of the way A_Chase works internally, so it will loop fairly inconsistently and you may need to place multiple things in the area to get a satisfactory audio result.

Got it, that did the trick. Thanks a bunch!

Ahh, that would make sense. However I just tested and it turns out if I use a manc or a cyber instead of a zombie it will actually work in GZDoom but still nothing happens in DSDA-doom.

How is UMAPINFO's bossaction to be used exactly? I made a tiny wad wanting to play around with the possibilities and put bossaction = ZombieMan, 19, 666 into my MAP01 definition in the UMAPINFO lump; doesn't throw any errors, great! Obviously in my map I have one former human and one sector properly tagged 666, but when I kill him nothing actually happens. I've actually tried a few different floor lowering specials but to no avail. Testing with DSDA-doom 0.24.3 (primarily interested in targeting Boom-compatible with UMAPINFO support) and GZDoom 4.2.3

I take it the only two options are stick to cl2 or manage it from ammo pickups and total instead?

Well I'm already back here with a completely unrelated but certainly doomier question: Do Boom and MBF handle/implement A_CheckReload differently than vanilla? I was messing around with DeHacked trying to make a silly pistol that would shoot lots of times per cycle without going to negative ammo by calling CheckReload in between FirePistol frames, but it wasn't working as expected. Then I decided to look it up and landed on a bunch of different posts by SciFista including this one and decided to download his patch, try it out and see what he did differently from me. Except that one doesn't work either if playing with cl 9 or 11. It does work fine with cl 2, and so I went back to what I had done and found that mine also worked with cl 2. I'm aware the whole issue can be bypassed by tweaking ammo drops accordingly, but it seems kinda weird that this is the case. Does anyone know what's up? +EDIT: all testing with PrBoom+ 2.5.1.5