Draconio

Oy, forgot about that map, yeah it was pretty darn lame.

In my mind, not all of the Former Humans in the game were soldiers. I consider that some, even most, of them were the technicians, engineers, and other employees that would have been present during the disaster. Or in Doom 2, citizens that didn't escape in time. I also think some of them are damned people that came out of portal with the other hellspawn. If you consider all that, the likelihood of them having had marine uniforms in the first place is small.

Mount Erebus (E3M6). It has a lot of things in common with some of the bilge I find in old Doom 1 PWADs, although it is better than the majority of them. The strange design (not knowing what "Mount Erebus" is supposed to look like, but somehow I don't think it's "demonic military base built on radioactive volcano" which is the best description I can come up with for this level), heavy use of the flashing fire/radioactive textures, strange way of getting to the secret level, hardly any theme. It all seems very "experimental" to me, like many old PWADs were. Personally I think it's the weirdest level in Doom (not that I'm dissing it or anything, it's kinda cool.) (edit: I realized I could change "military base" to "demonic military base" to make the description a bit more accurate.)

What's that on the left side of the drawing? A scepter or something?

Thanks for the reviews, I'll try to keep all that you said in mind for any future levels that I make.

For ZDoom, type on the console: changemap map08 That will end the map you are on (with intermission etc) and warp you to map 8 as if you had exited the level.

Very cool. I like the twist of the main characters being those that were, in the game, villains.

None of them really scare me anymore. But the ones most likely to make me go "oh shit, not one of THOSE" in a level would probably be the pain elemental.

I prefer XWE

No matter how hard I try, I can't get the sound to work in Boom (or PrBoom, or MBF, or SMMU). I've tried the tweaking the configuration file thing. I've tried all different sound card settings. I don't have this problem with any of the other ports. Did they just use shit sound code or what? Is there any version of these ports that uses different sound code?

AC Bot. http://53073317.home.icq.com/acbot.html

What is the syntax for the Eternity/Legacy mapinfo? I can't seem to find docs on this anywhere.

My first encounter with Doom was in a games magazine. It was near when Doom first came out, obviously, and the article had screenshots and descriptions of every monster in the game, and gave strategies for beating them. I was fascinated by this article, and read it over and over, trying to imagine what the game would be like. Years later, the magazine and its article had long since gone. I hardly ever thought about Doom. Then, I first got my internet connection (I was late to get one) and started downloading lots of shareware and freeware of a site called The Gamer's Inn. After a while I noticed they had the Doom shareware there and I thought, "yeah I'm gonna try that". I played the shareware version, and at first wasn't too impressed by it, but got to like it more and more as I went through it. I played completely through Knee-Deep several times over the next year or two, and decided it was time to get the full game. When I got the registered Doom, I stayed up most of the night to play the new episodes. I can't remember if I beat Inferno that night or only Shores of Hell, I just remember I played it a lot. I got Doom 2 shortly after getting Doom, but didn't play through it right away for some reason (I forget why). After I played through Doom 2, I started getting some pwads. I wished that I could play multiplayer, but this was still before source ports and there was no one in the local area for me to dial up to. I did find a bot made with dehacked once, and it was horrible. Somewhere along the line I got Final Doom, and played through TNT (to this day, I still haven't gone through the entirety of Plutonia. I've been to maybe level 9 or so.) After a time I discovered my first source port. It was an early version of Doom Legacy, and it sucked. I don't remember what the version number was, but it crashed a lot and was generally bad. I discarded it pretty quickly and went back to using Doom95. The discovery of Doombot and ZCajun for bot play and ZDaemon for internet play was a great thing for me. Finally I could play the cool-ass deathmatch mode that had been denied to me so long. I liked this a lot, and started downloading some DM pwads. I made a website dedicated to Doom, kept it up for a while, then got annoyed with it and took it down. I have recently made a new site to put on my webspace, and though it's no longer dedicated solely to Doom, it still has a section of Doom there. And now we come to today, I have ZDoom and Legacy (which no longer sucks!) as well as the DoomBot 5.1 which is much better than the bots I first played with, and also the new AC Bot which might be even better than the DoomBot. I've registered to DoomWorld and have been posting here fairly often, and I've even created 3 pwads of my own for deathmatch. I play on ZDaemon or Doom Connector from time to time, and despite having played newer games I still consider Doom to be one of the best games ever. As a side note, here are some of the misconceptions that I had formed after reading the magazine article but before playing the game: * There are 6 barons of hell at the end of Knee Deep. * Cacodemons are very powerful. * The cyberdemon lives in a maze, with a small place in it that you could hide in and safely shoot him from. (I'm still not sure what the article meant about that narrow space. I assume it was talking about the gaps between the "tower" and the pentagram/skull blocks.) * Lots of lost souls, cacodemons and barons live with the spiderdemon. * Spectres are a humanoid creature that sneaks up behind you in the dark and stabs you in the back with sharp claws. Anyways, that's the history of me & Doom as far as I can remember. It's been a long post, I hope I didn't bore you too much ^_^;

Would I be remembered? Maybe not. I suppose if I were to be remembered, it would be for playing the game on ZDaemon/Doom Connector, and maybe also for my maps or my website. I don't plan on leaving any time soon, though! ^_^

Awesome. Can it fly with those wings?

No. It's done anyway (even by the Gothic DM crew) but is still technically illegal.

In that situation I might choose to do something similar to the way music is set up in Half-Life, which has ambience most of the time, but with more action-oriented music at certain special points. But I'd use genres of a sort of eerie/creepy music for normal-time music (think D_E2M6 or D_ROMERO) and techno/metal for the "heat up" parts of the game, at least I think that's what they would be (I'm not too good at differentiating genres) but think of something similar to: the Duke Nukem 3D theme song, the Raptor: Call of the Shadows music, or other similarly fast paced/heavy style of music. As for what my "futuristic game" would be themed like, I think it would invole a colony of humans who have become hideously malformed and hostile from a biological weapon release. But now I'm straying from the topic, so I will end here. I hope you could understand it, it seems a little incoherent but it's the best I could do right now.

One of my most memorable multiplayer stories is this. I was playing Team Fortress (Quake version) as a Spy on 2fort5, and had gotten into the enemy's basement with a disguise. I found a sentry gun there, blew it up with a grenade, and feigned death (still disguised as opposing team) in the nearby corner. The engineer who had built the turret soon arrived and was looking around. He stared straight at me, and I thought for sure I was about to get bashed with his wrench, but I kept still and waited anyway. After about a minute, he stopped looking at me and built a second sentry gun right where the first one had been. When he left to resupply, I blew the second turret up too and got the hell out of there.

Did you try running it under a sourceport? If only the exe is screwed, it should work fine under a port.

I have a few that I don't intend to develop any further that I'd let you have, but they are total unfinished sh--. Most of them have no more than a few sectors and nothing terribly interesting at all. Want 'em anyway?

Liero: Doom Edition An admirable attempt at converting Doom to the freeware worm dueling game, Liero. The original worm graphics have been changed to worms wearing space marine helmets. All the player weapons from Doom have been converted (including berserker), as well as these additions: imp fire thrower, cacodemon fire thrower, arachnotron plasma, archvile fire (not much like the original), lost soul summoner, cacodemon summoner, and a grenade launcher. Like in real Doom, you are only allowed to start with pistol and fist, all other weapons must be found in the bonus packages that spawn into the level during play. It also includes some maps which are not all that pretty, but seem to play well. Other gameplay aspects are more or less the same as with unmodified Liero. A nice TC, maybe it could have been a bit better, but fans of Doom and Liero will probably want to pick this one up. Draconio rates it: 7 of 10 You can download it from here: http://lierobattleground.tripod.com/tc.html

Well maybe I'm not the greatest judge of scary, but I'd reccomend Hellrazor and Blackgate. From the textfile of Hellrazor: "Six sick levels, designed for maximum disturbance of your conscience. Journey through the gates of Hell and locate the spawing portal of all evil and destroy it. Dark and similar to Hexen in texture choice and level design, and only truly evil characters were used(no wimpy former humans and shit!). Mostly medium sized levels that have a sort of gothic but hellish vibe to them. If you like levels that are visually clean and cool looking then this is the PWAD for you." ftp://3darchives.in-span.net/pub/idgames/levels/doom2/g-i/helrzor.zip From the textfile of Blackgate: "A dark, sick, medium-sized castle-like level in a hellish dimension. This level is inspiried by John Diamond's HELRZOR.WAD, and it resembles some of Helrzor's levels. True to its theme, only hellish creatures are used (i.e. no former humans!)" ftp://3darchives.in-span.net/pub/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/blakgate.zip

Doombot 5.1 has a CTF mode already. The readme explains how to make a CTF map for it (it's pretty simple). And don't think that just because it's a bot mod that you can't play with other players as well. You can use Doombot online the same way as with ZDoom 1.22 (which is what Doombot is built on.) The Doombot can be downloaded from the deathmatch/doombot/ subdirectory of the Idgames archives. The bot that is the central feature of this mod usually works a lot better than the one built into ZDoom, also.

I wanted to upload some levels I made to the Idgames archive, but I couldn't figure out how to upload them. I've read the README.incoming message and I know I'm supposed to upload to the "incoming" directory, but as far as I can tell, there is no "incoming" directory. WTF is up with that? If you know how to upload to this archive, or if the uploads are temporarily down for some reason, please let me know. Thanks. In the meantime, if you want to download these levels, they are on my own website at http://www.geocities.com/draconio2001/

Ok, I've got the files uploaded, now if all goes well we'll be seeing them on /newstuff soon. Thanks for all the help.