rabidrage

Still playing and recording?

I'm the same. Better at being creative than at playing. Seriously, I suck. But I love 90s Wads when they're done by decent mappers...lots of corridors and exploration, not a ton of high-tier enemies being thrown at you in room after room, etc. That being said, while I haven't so much as beaten Thy Flesh Consumed or Doom II, I have gotten through SNES, 32X, Jaguar and 3DO Doom, as well as Absolution, The Outcast Levels, Redemption Denied, Chex Quest 1-3 and other relatively challenging stuff. So take from that what you will. Not that CQ is hard, of course. :P Guess I can play okay when I want to. Bit I try to take into account that a lot of people play better. It's harder to playtest, but I figure I'm doing well because I made the level and I know it.

Yes, of course. But I think it's both fun and important to debate the merits and flaws of such things. It fosters some good discussions.

I don't know what it is about treating health and ammo that way. I mean, I get it, but I hate having to save so often. Levels seem more fun to me when they're not quite so brutal. Why not just hide the health and make a secret or almost-secret out of it? Or put it someplace where the player has to work/grind to get it? Then they get to weigh their options and only go for it if it's really worth it to them. Kinda like the room in E1M9 where the rockets are.

1. Building a level or just a room around a gimmick. I have one with Cacodemons inside square-shaped crushers that are activated with a switch. You can get up onto the crushers and use connecting platforms to go get the key and try your best to not have the Cacos kill you when they see you...or you can run around on the ground and hit all the switches first..but then you have to avoid the Nightmare Spectres that'll come after you. 2. Borrowing assets from other Wads/Mods (with credit given, of course!), and mixing and matching what I think is the best of everything. I figure there's so much material out there that you can find pretty much whatever you need. I'd rather spend time furthering the vision than reinventing the wheel. 3. Using the soundtrack from the 3DO. Hey, that's the best console Doom soundtrack ever. Though if it doesn't fit for some reason, I'm most likely using the one from the Playstation. 4. Stuff from Doom 64.

...despite the fact that I'm stubborn and probably just looking for praise. Haha. If I got some of the credits wrong in the description, please don't yell at me! I'll fix it. I borrowed a lot. My map is a heavy edit of E1M1 that brings all the ambient lighting down to zero and makes it super creepy. I use glowing flats, brightmaps and dynamic lights in various forms to make it navigable, and have changed other aspects of the level to add a layer of realism (switches for doors, reverb, etc.). There are also some random additions that I put in just because. It's the first level of a megawad I plan to make this way. There will be many, many things added in future levels. It might get a bit spastic, but at least the next level will be a little harder than this one! This one's super easy. Hopefully what it lacks in difficulty it makes up for in sheer cool factor? I mean, despite the fact that it's not totally from scratch. https://www.moddb.com/mods/rabids-e1m1/downloads/e1m1

If you would be so kind, sir: https://www.moddb.com/mods/cyberbaron-land/downloads

For my part... I edited maps on a friend's computer in the 90s that never saw the light of day, using Waded. Back then it was all about stupid Vanilla tricks like invisible walls or having a teleporter with an exploding barrel on the other end. :P Other than that, we enjoyed wads from D! Zone and The Ultimate Addon. The 2000s brought some awesome random wads that I mostly can't remember the names of. One had a huge white castle and another ran in Doom Legacy, with 3D floors and weightlessness in parts. Though the best thing about the 2000s was Absolution and The Outcast Levels, and all the random gameplay mods. The 2010s seem to be even more mod and custom resource-centric, with an emphasis on realism and lots of pretty effects.

I've been finding some really noteworthy stuff out there. My computer can handle a lot of it, but it gets bogged down sometimes and even freezes if I try the top end stuff. I'm talking about that relatively new wall shadow feature in GZDoom (whatever it's actually called) and Cacodemon Textures. Those are wonderful, but they slow Doom down to less than a crawl. My computer is an HP p7-1380t. Nothing added to it or changed, just off-the-shelf. 8GB of RAM. What should I/can I do to upgrade it so it can handle more quality Doom? More memory? Better graphics card?

Okay, so I'm getting the impression that my computer is good for the average joe, not so hot for a gamer who wants to keep up with the latest and greatest. I understand a new one would be the best option for what I want to use it for; in the meantime, all I can afford is maybe a better graphics card, power supply and perhaps more memory. That being said...what works with my setup?

Nevermind. I found it. Right-click on the sector in question and set the sound sequence, and voila. Last element required for it to work.

I've been working on my no ambient light version of E1M1 for a while, and I came up with the idea to have a busted door. It's partway open, but not enough to get through. You hit the switch, it starts doing a ceiling waggle...but there's no sound. I figured out how to make ceiling waggle and a sound both happen in a script, but the sound plays once. I need it to loop. It would be nice, after all, if the busted door makes some kind of noise to further demonstrate that the mechanism is busted. How do I make it loop?

Sorry to be super literal, but when you say add "platform #" at the top, what does that look like in the definition? Is it followed by a number? I could use a visual. I'm slow at this. No background in programming until I started messing with Doom, though I've pulled off a few things...

It kinda works the way I set it up. Only plays once, though. Here's the SNDSEQ definition: :JammedDoor playrepeat DSDOROPN end and the script script 1 (void) { SoundSequence ("JammedDoor"); ; Ceiling_Waggle(6,48,50,50,0); } So what's going wrong?

Thanks, guys. I'm gonna give it a shot. Who knows? Maybe I'll actually have this level ready to go soon. Then I can continue and make a whole megawad.

It's currently just DSDOROPN. I might swap in the PSX/Doom 64 sound effect. It plays once, then the ceiling continues to noiselessly waggle.

Doom 64 was actually made on a modified version of the PSX Doom engine. Not just similar. Like, Midway continued to tweak it for Doom 64 after the tweaks they made for the PSX. So extrapolate further and you can see what's possible. Props for acknowledging where the GBA Doom fits into all this. Then Doom II for GBA was made on the Southpaw engine. They apparently split a level in two on GBA Doom for some reason, probably having to do with processing constraints. But I'd love to see a port/conversion of it to PC. I recommend looking up the Doom 64 tech bible. It makes a fascinating read!

If they had stuck with the same engine, they could have preserved the gameplay. It was perfect. Throw in the lighting effects of Doom 64, reverb from Playstation, then like DynamiteKaitorn said, take inspiration from Strife and Hexen as well. After that, source ports show us what could have been next--3d models, 3d floors, hi-res, looking up and down, jumping...and we could have had an official Doom game with all that prior to the year Doom 3 was released.

Yeah. Unfortunately, Doom on PS2 would probably have been Doom 3 or an attempt to make a more perfect straight port of 1 and 2. What I wish they had done is continue to build on what they started with the original Playstation version. Upgrade the resolution, maybe add some features to the engine beyond colored lighting and reverb...show us what the Doom engine can be with the right hardware! What if it had evolved forever?

Dude, that's just...when they look beautiful even from the map view, I envy the skill of the person who made them. Damn. Definitely not my specialty.

I didn't want to be cheap. I wanted to change some other things too. And the lava rock texture gives the whole sector better visibility because you can assign a glow to it and it makes more sense than assigning a glow to the original floor texture. Also, the bridge doesn't extend to the wall. It doesn't go beyond the nukage pool. It just looks that way because it's so dark.

Pics of Hangar with absolutely zero ambient lighting. Still very much in progress, though...and I'm using it with a few gameplay enhancements, but they don't affect the way it's lit in the standalone wad.

I have no screenies as yet--don't get a lot of time to sit at the computer these days. Just married, working 40 hrs., trying to write more novels on the side, you know how it goes. But I'm sort of rebuilding the resources for a wad I started a while ago (my magnum opus?) so that the code is cleaner and the excess crap is cut out. In the meantime, I'm making heavy edits to Knee-Deep in the Dead. The goal is to add new things, make major sector shifts and set the whole thing up to work without ambient lighting. This will be done through dynamic lights/light sources, glowing flats and brightmaps, and I'll have to use a bit of ingenuity to keep the framerate up. I plan to seriously alter the dynamic and basically make it feel like a whole new episode. If this is of interest to anybody, I'll upload screenshots. E1M1 looks pretty good so far!

I'm just wondering what the rules are about this, considering that acquiring the official IWADs for free is strictly forbidden, as is sharing content that someone else made without giving credit (positions I support!). If I have edited Hangar, for example, to the point where it's got some new textures, light levels, decor and even some new sectors drawn in, can I share it?