Macil

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.

The moon of Mars it's supposed to be at, Deimos, has a surface gravity of less than 0.1% of Earth's and is 8 miles wide. Nothing really makes sense about Doom taking place on Deimos. (EDIT: Doom's second episode takes place on Deimos. The first one is on Phobos. Regardless Phobos is nearly as small and unsupporting of the in-game environments.) In the original written plans for Doom's plot, the game was meant to take place on the planet "Tai Tenga", which slightly makes more sense.

How into Doom are they? Are they someone who is generally into Doom wads and knows what they like but just hasn't played the classics and wants to do that specifically and get good, or are they a newcomer to Doom who wants to see the whole modding scene but thinks they need to go through the official games and get good at them first? If it's the latter, I'd recommend against that approach. The strength of the Doom modding scene is its variety. A newcomer shouldn't consider the official levels a prerequisite to trying out other wads, and they shouldn't necessarily shy away from trendy wads that get away from the classic gameplay or level design. The classic abstract Doom level design isn't everyone's preference and a newcomer should be shown that it's not all there is. In my opinion a good middle ground for someone who does like the idea of playing through the official levels but hasn't actually been able to stick with them is to play them with a gameplay mod like Project Brutality (latest version is the staging version).

This seems to be partly intentional as part of the map's attempt to appear as an old map. The map restricts itself at the start to using only vanilla textures plus early pre-2000 Boom source port features like silent teleport lines. The purpose of this seems to be to make it initially believable to very experienced Doom players that the map is an old map and to lower their expectations so that the later use of newer features catches them by surprise. Silent teleport lines cause that kind of issue you saw there. In the first version of the house, when you're in the garage far away from the basement door, the door you see is actually just a solid wall. When you get close to the door, you're teleported into a copy of the garage that isn't connected to the first floor but is now connected by to the basement by a real door. It creates a smooth illusion of a single continuous space if the door is closed and no enemies/items/bodies are visible around, but the illusion falls apart if something is changed between the two spaces when you pass between them. It's not until the house has its first changeover that the map starts using custom textures and newer Gzdoom features such as level scripting, custom items and enemies, portals, and true 3d floors. These last two features allow the map to do room-over-room architecture without this kind of issue.

He originally had configured Gzdoom to use the software renderer until he realized MyHouse needed the hardware renderer. He got pretty lost in the options menus while trying to change mouselook to on and then again when changing the renderer, so I would not assume him to be familiar here. When I originally used Gzdoom, for years while playing and mapping I thought software renderer = classic pixel style, hardware renderer = blurry mess. It's a very prominent option and this is the most obvious difference when toggling it so I fully thought it was the option for it. I didn't know that the combination of hardware renderer and texture filtering set to "None (something mipmaps)" also got the classic pixel style. I'm kind of convinced Romero may have thought the same thing because there's relatively little other benefit to the software renderer. Regardless of the default setting, I wish Gzdoom copied the Quake 2021 rerelease and vkQuake and had a prominent setting labeled "Texture smoothing" that was a simple on/off. The more specific texture filtering options could go in the advanced section.

It's worth mentioning silent teleporters, which is the technique the map uses at the start. The basement staircase ends in a dead-end that looks like a door, and when you get close to it, the level teleports you to a separate staircase that has a real door leading to the basement. This is actually noticeable because if you back away from the door right after opening it, you'll see it appear to instantly shut. This silent teleporter technique has been supported by zdoom for a very long time, while those other features are much more new, so the first version of MyHouse's house restricts itself to just silent teleporters in order to appear like a genuine old map. The first house's refusal of the newer features is also why the first version of the house doesn't have any windows outside that show into the basement level.

Just wanted to say I really enjoyed seeing Not Jabba's very investigative posts and then their conclusion. I'm not hurting for details about their private communication they had. I feel like my itch for the out-of-game mystery has been fully itched and I'm comfortable leaving that part there now. I'm more curious now about how this mod is going to inspire other mods and what design lessons people are going to take from this map.

I had a funny experience while watching my total Doom noob boyfriend play this: he ran completely out of ammo, I tried to use my ancient zdoom experience to do some console commands to give him ammo but they all failed because of the map's anti-cheat, and then as soon as I gave him back the keyboard he immediately ran up to a wall, pressed use once, and found a secret door with an ammo backpack behind it. We were both in disbelief and cracked up laughing. Not sure if it really captures the moment without our dialog but we happened to record the game footage of it: Though he ended up running out of ammo again pretty quickly. The map is very punishing on ammo especially if you don't loop through a basic ending and Underhalls first before going for the full ending. Thankfully by then I realized what to do:

Amazing map. I haven't been into Doom modding in more than a decade, and some tweets about this map are what finally got me to install Gzdoom again. What a map to return to. The way the map plays with your expectations sets the bar for what I want in games and media. I once spent a lot of time brainstorming a map that would open like the classic first levels but introduce ambiguous unsettling changes. The idea had a big hold over my imagination but this map completely trounced my small version of the idea. It's exciting to see what that idea looks like properly executed.

Does it correctly convert lines with the TranslucentLine and Line_SetIdentification specials on them?

Problem I hadn't noticed before - in 3d mode, there is no cursor/reticle, and no messages show up on the screen (like when I change height of a floor). Anyone know how to fix this short of using a marker to mark the center of my screen to be a reticle? :/

In the wine configure menu, I added a setting for Doom Builder to disable having the window manager decorate the windows, and that fixed the turning glitch (and gave it the windows look to the window). The textures selector in 3d mode didn't work - to fix that, I turned on windowed mode for 3d, and set it to use the standard texture selector.