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Jayextee

900 Deep in the Dead [RELEASE!]

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Patch93 said:

*fixed :P


YOU DON'T FIX DUMB JOKES NUMBNUTS.

That's it, I quit the Internet. I'm done here.

(SPOILER: I'm not)

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Spit and polish being added. Here is the episode graphic overlaying a DEMO1 lump playback. In PRBoom+.

Title screen is done, now wondering about a DeHackEd lump for level names and intermission text.

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TITLEPIC made me lol fucking hard, if only because I've been playing the shit out of Mega Man lately.

Looks promising from the screens, I'll be giving this a look for sure when it's ready.

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Oh, now that was good. Kinda tricky in some places, with many close-up fights in tight surroundings. Despite the 100-line limit, the later maps (from about E1M5 onward) still manage to unfold in ways that require exploration and (minor) backtracking. A half-hour blastfest, and a lot of fun too. Very cool stuff.

I have no idea what E1M9's floor says though, if it's even supposed to say anything at all.

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Well played, sir Jrrr! e1m6 and 7 took me roughly 4 minutes to complete apiece and squeezed the most out of their layouts through multitasking linedefs. I was less a fan of the symmetrical setups in m4 and m1, but the better maps outweigh the poor and it's not as though you spend long enough in any map for it to outstay its welcome... so, 20 minutes well spent!

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Nice! I felt from m3 onwards there was increasingly efficient/imaginative use of lines to make more complex maps. Curious to know if you made them in sequence because m1 is basic and m7 was devious. Good shooting fun. Also: the automaps :)

Here is a 30 minute FDA but I cannot recommend it as I spend a good 10 minutes wandering around m7 like a numpty.

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theJF said:

Curious to know if you made them in sequence because m1 is basic and m7 was devious.


Almost. E1M4 was cribbed from my second entry to Capellan's 100 Lines Project, and E1M9 was made before E1M3. But other than that, yes. Saved E1M8 until last for definite, because I really wanted that Baron fight as it was.

Thanks, guys. Means a lot to me. :)

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Fun maps for playing with -fast monsters (on normal settings they are probably too short and easy to leave any impression, at least for me). The only thing that seemed silly to me was the last trap on e1m4: it's too easy to kill most demons without jumping down so what's the point? Pretty cool design too, in some maps only few minor details remind you of the fact that the author was very limited in what he could do. (e1m5 is probably the prettiest map) Liked the time limit concept on e1m8, didn't like how you repeated some elements (e1m6 and e1m7 have the same four level lifts, e1m5 and e1m9 have the same starts). Come on, it's only 900 lines, you can try a little harder to avoid repetition.

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Pretty fun. I actually died the most on E1M3, too many shotgunners, no chaingun yet. Dying in the special exit was also kind of annoying (forced between letting the demon bite me and eating nukage damage). After getting the blue on armor on E1M9 though it was fairly breezy until E1M7. My only complaint would echo Memfis' that its a bit repetitive to have the "central multi-level lift" concept repeated on E1M6 and E1M7.

Still, very nice set of maps. Fun to play through.

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Memfis said:

e1m6 and e1m7 have the same four level lifts


This was a complete and conscious decision on my part; I had the idea to have a few of them (like in E1M7) first, but I thought that players may need to see a less-complicated version of the theme before I expanded on it, hence E1M6. Sorry it wasn't to your taste.

I suppose I could change E1M5's start though; I wasn't major keen on repeating the small L-shaped entrance, but then I thought "most people skip the secret levels anyway right? Who'd notice?". Nice catch. :)

Yeah, -fast is the most fun. I tried flat-out Nightmare setting but I couldn't beat E1M2 with the respawning. I guess that's what I get for all those 'central hub' type layouts. ;)

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Just giving the thread a bump.

If there are no major issues (although I may give E1M5 a slightly different entrance section), I shall put this on idgames at the weekend. Sounds fair to me, yeah? :)

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Hi JXT,

Did you want any suggestions in terms of saving lines, alterations to maps etc? or just notes on game breaking stuff.

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At the moment, I'm most interested in gameplay-balancing; since I've not been able to make much in the way of elaborate ambushes or traps, I think balancing the health and ammo tightly may be the way forward for more challenge here.

I'm already thinking on removing all rocket launchers before E1M6 (keeping E1M9's in as a reward for getting to the secret level), and maybe toning down some of the health; although I seem to hover around the 50%-75% area during a playthrough, folk here seem to find it easier than that.

Also, stuff like this:



Floating floor lamp? I know what caused it, not sure how/why I didn't catch it before.

Just odd shit that needs fixing, I guess.

Note: I know about the error in the intermission text. Going to get a different version of WhackEd and sort that out. ;)

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Ah crap, that's where the floating one is. I'll remove that one, it's just a pain in the ass now. Hahahahah. Nice catch, thanks. :D

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Jugding by the images, It feels like I have to play it today!!!
EDIT: just finished my playthrough. Excellent, probably the best of its kind. I think that line limitations forced you to take advantage of every possible strategy for good gameplay and design. The radiation suit strategy on E1M8 forcing you to hurry up was brilliant. Check the wooden ceilings on the lateral demon closets in E1M4, if they are intentional forget about it. This goes straight to my top wads folder. Thanks!

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nicolas monti said:

Check the wooden ceilings on the lateral demon closets in E1M4, if they are intentional forget about it.


They're not, nice catch -- it shows that E1M4 was speedmapped in the early days of Capellan's 100 Lines Project, and I did repurpose it for this one since I thought it had a bit of an E1 feel to it.

Thanks for the compliments, too. :)

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Good stuff man! I played with DOOM v1.2, in DOSBox. Got up to E1M5 where it crashed upon entering a sector type 17. Changed those to 1 (blinks randomly instead of flickers) and then it was all good. That map was kinda tough for me on pistol start though, found myself at 1% health at several points. :-) Will try the rest later (unfortunately I overwrote the other maps after saving in DEU).

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hex11 said:

Good stuff man! I played with DOOM v1.2, in DOSBox. Got up to E1M5 where it crashed upon entering a sector type 17.


I had no idea that either (a) that would happen or (b) anyone would play this with v1.2 -- nice one. :)

Sorry about that though. As far as I was aware, I was sticking to vanilla Ultimagte Doom v1.9 types and such. ^^;

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I'm probably the only one who will try. I've been playing that version a lot lately. At first I was only half-serious, just playing the Doom 3 (Mr. Smiley Head's Safari) - that 1.2 hack from 1994. But then I downgraded my real IWAD to 1.2 and started playing most maps that way, in DOSBox (with the v1.2 doom.exe, or course). And then I realized that version of the game really IS everything that I like about DOOM. The other changes that came later were made for DOOM II, and I was never as fond of it, and in fact dislike many aspects of it.

But part of the fun now is to see which wads can run, and how long I can play before a crash or other show-stopping bug (like say, a door that's stuck due to unknown linedef type). I never really expected your episode to run flawlessly in this version, but I figured that it would be a good candidate, since there was a low chance for HOM effects (1.2 has drastically lower limits in that area). Anyway, my next step is to hack up a little script to detect and automatically fix these problems (as much as possible). But I'll probably just stick with the "small" wads like this one, because I don't want to hack the doom.exe to increase its limits. They were good enough to create episodes 1-3, and so they're good enough for me.

Also, the target engine for any of my own maps will be 1.2, because I really like the aesthetics of abstract, low-detail maps and want mine to turn out that way. :-)

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That's actually really interesting. I'm wondering if it would be possible to knock up a custom config for Doom Builder, as well as a custom version of the Visplane Explorer plugin for the lower limits...?

I'd certainly be interested in mapping that way. :)

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This was rather fun to play through, also despite the limits it still looked OK. Maybe 1800 The Shores of Hell? ;)

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Jayextee said:

I'm wondering if it would be possible to knock up a custom config for Doom Builder, as well as a custom version of the Visplane Explorer plugin for the lower limits...?


It should be possible. The most significant changes for mapping seem to have taken place during the 1.4 releases, according to this changelog:
- 39 new linedef types
- 1 new sector type (but has no effect yet)
- Visplanes increased from 128 to 256

The DEU 5.21 source has all the DOOM v1.2 linedef & sector types in names.c, and that serves as my primary reference. Later map editors expanded on that list. In the case of DETH for example, all linedef and sector types are defined in a common.cfg file, so just removing the unwanted entries would theoretically be enough to guarantee v1.2-compatible maps. With some luck, maybe DB is that easy to change too (I can't guarantee anything, since I've only ever used DEU-based stuff like Yadex).

I don't know about the visplanes stuff though. All I've ever observed in the 1.2 doom.exe is just more HOM effects, rather than more actual VPO crashes. In fact, I walked around in my Undeath '94 map (designed for v1.9) where there are some areas that are marginal. In those places, the game used to crash in Chocolate Doom, until I removed enough 2-sided linedefs. But running in that map with doom.exe 1.2 only produces a lot of HOM effects in those areas, no actual VPO crash.

So anyway, I think maybe the author of that changelog got his terminology wrong, and he meant to say the drawsegs were increased to 256. The Doom+ changes seems to confirm that. So maybe you would just need to set MAXDRAWSEGS=128 in the Visplane Explorer (assuming it also does HOM detection). If you're lucky, there is a config file to edit, if not then have to edit the source code and recompile...

Me, I'm just using plain old DEU 5.21 right now. :-) I'll probably edit the DETH config file though, since it's a really nice editor with the best damn keyboard-friendly interface I've ever seen in a DOOM map editor.

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