Macil

I think it was stated somewhere in the thread that friendlies are part of the standard but it's a part the official port doesn't currently support.

I hate any situation where I've saved my game and then later realize that the level became unbeatable before I made my save. Usually this is because I hadn't yet realized the map is trying to starve me of ammo and I killed too many nonessential enemies, but sometimes it's because I've been soft-locked out of progression because I've entered into a section of the map that the mapper unintentionally (or intentionally?) didn't make any way out of at my current stage of progress. I've had this happen sometimes when I go to re-explore an earlier part of the map for ammo and then it turns out the area had a one-way door to get in and a one-time switch/door sequence to get out. I usually give up on a wad entirely when this happens.

Help, I can't tell from the thread whether this is terrible because it's hilariously inconsistent, or terrible because it's great and going to outcompete Doom mappers and steal their money-paying Doom mapping jobs

A fun thought experiment is to imagine the results of a system like this made to support splitscreen multiplayer/co-op. With its struggles with object permanence and geometric consistency, both players will probably be lost into separate dimensions as soon as they lose sight of each other in distinct-looking areas, and then as soon as the players both enter similarly-textured areas the model will try to contrive things to bring them back into view of each other.

I'd love to see the result of training it on both Doom and Duke 3d footage and seeing it make a cursed hybrid of the games.

Shocktrooper and Mindweaver feel like they're adding more monster variants for the sake of it, which I don't really mind but I also won't mind if I never see them again. The Ghouls and Banshees are cool additions. It's neat having some more flying enemies that aren't exactly lost souls and aren't as hard to take down as the Cadodemon and Pain Elemental. I thought the Vassago was just going to be an annoying Hell Knight variant, but I like how its flame attack is unique to play around and their size makes them more of an obstacle. The Tyrant was kind of neat in that it enabled maps to have multiple rocket launcher enemies without making us deal with taking down multiple Cyberdemons, but I was kind of glad they were used sparingly. I like the idea of map-specific bosses or mini-bosses.

As a kid I started with Doom 2 and Duke 3d, and I had a low opinion of Doom 2's levels compared to Duke 3d because of how abstract they were, and mostly only bothered with it for the custom maps and mods. I later played the first episode of Doom 1 and it felt like a huge step up from Doom 2 because the levels kind of looked like places with some kind of purpose, and the intermission graphics helped portray the idea that you were at actual identifiable locations, accomplishing something at them, and traveling between them. Then I played the later episodes of Doom 1 and could not have been more let down as they were much more abstract and more cramped. I remember finding it hilarious to think about how when people bought Doom after playing the shareware release, the first new map they would encounter was E2M1, which I felt so let down by. I remember double-checking I didn't accidentally launch some d-zone map lmao.

I think the Zandronum/Skulltag Invasion gametype and maps are a great example of Doom content primarily designed for co-op play, especially the Alpha/Delta Invasion map pack with levels that expand and expose new areas as the match go on. In regular co-op, it often feels like if you want to stay where combat is, you're forced to hurry along constantly to keep up, and in general your time spent exploring the map is less rewarding as many areas you find are already explored by other players and don't have anything left for you to do in them. Invasion-style maps mostly avoid these issues keeping the players together in a common area and pacing the gameplay challenges and area reveals for the amount of players.

I think a big part is that it managed to appeal to both newcomers and experienced Doom players. There are many interesting things for these two types of players to focus on throughout the level. The basic gameplay and mystery of the map doesn't depend on any Doom knowledge, and it lets itself reference modern cultural ideas unconnected to Doom like liminal spaces. At the same time it's filled with extra jokes and details just for the experienced players, like how the map initially pretends it's only going to use Boom features and eases itself into using more advanced features so it can keep surprising the player about what it will allow itself to do. Compare this to another recent map that plays with the player's expectations, TNTPhobia. I like the map, but it only really has something special to offer the whole way through for experienced Doom players. This stops it from having the same level of breakout potential that MyHouse had.

There's no reason to strictly enforce that here. iD reserving an id range is them saying "If you want to be compatible with future iD content, don't make your wads or source ports conflict with these values because we might use them". Most people want their content to be compatible with future content like that, and if for some reason someone wanted to purposefully conflict with another wad/port/expansion, there's no shortage of ways they could do that intentionally, like by providing unused invalid resources named the same thing that another wad/port/expansion uses or by making specific gameplay decisions that don't work well with outside content. None of the Doom ports are designed to try to sandbox intentionally incompatible wads into working together, and that's been fine. --- I think several times in this thread people have misunderstood the nature of what it means that the standard says part of some Dehacked id range is reserved for official iD usage. I think some people are worried that this means we've divided up some scarce resource that was ours with iD. These id ranges aren't scarce resources! If running out was a practical concern, then the 32-bit value would be replaced with a string value, giving an unlimited range of possible values to use. (The standard might then say that some prefix like "idsoftware." was reserved so that people would know not to release content that used it or else it might conflict.) The only real valid technical concerns with reserving values like this are around whether it's compatible with existing content and whether it's an easy enough system to respect. iD reserving some of the negative range that no one was using is a very obvious choice that minimizes the effort anyone else has to do to keep compatibility. I think people lose sight of that this standard is about saying what the new official content and port are compatible with. If the standard says not to use a certain id or line special number or whatever, it's to inform you that the new port/content might not work with that, not because the person writing the standard wants to restrict your freedoms or sue you.

It's amazing that this is a superset of MBF21, or in other words, that that the official re-release decided to support MBF21 and the many mods using any part of it like UMAPINFO, Dehacked, Boom, MBF, etc. Seriously, what a pleasant surprise it is that the official release is now directly compatible with so much more content created over the years by the community. It's obviously a little short of perfect knowing that this new port isn't open source and is not likely to get as continuously maintained as some community ports will be, but no one fully expects that's a possibility, and it's flatly better to have the official release be more compatible than less. I really dislike the accusation of "GPL launderer" repeated against the new port's developers earlier in this thread, because 1) to my knowledge clean-room re-implementation of code like this especially for compatibility purposes is generally accepted as legal, and 2) I hate the implication that even though it's legal and the developers put the work in, that it's somehow wrong for them to make their port compatible with the same modding features that community ports have. If I make a wad using a custom feature added by a specific port, I generally want the possibility to exist for other ports to add support for that feature and become compatible with my wad. I really would not want it to turn out that whoever implemented the feature considered the feature and all community mods depending on it to forever be their port's competitive advantage over other ports, and that they tried to claim some authority (beyond the legal authority that copyright gives them over their own code) over the feature to prevent other ports from implementing compatible support. Doing that would be putting the developer's own interest in user lock-in unfairly above the actual interests of players and wad developers. It's in the interests of players and wad developers that this new release is as compatible as it is.

I definitely preferred when the slayer was more of an abstract character like in Doom 2016 (or especially the original games) than in Eternal when he was a more established character with some dialog and a backstory that characters talked to him about. So I think I kind of agree.

Here's the March 26 version, which I believe is the second of the three versions: myhouse.pk3.

A few months ago I finally reinstalled Doom, Gzdoom, Doom Builder, etc after not using them for more than a decade. Before that sometimes I'd bounce away from Doom for a year here and there before coming back to it.

The gate outside near the exit initially requires a blue keycard, but under certain conditions¹ changes to require a blue skullkey instead. You must go back into the house in order to continue through the map when this happens.