Hell Beneath in progress

I am working on a wad for Doom2 that i call Hell Beneath, It is going to have over 32 maps
on it! I am working on map 9 at the moment, i made a short video of some of the stuff i have made so far:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8yB2PkuDyM

Wow, good way to show off maps in progress :-p

BTW, I agree: Classic Doom never dies :-)

And I'm sure everyone will appreciate a set of good, solid maps like the ones shown in the video. I hope you will post some downloadable teaser once in a while ;-)

Maes said:

Wow, good way to show off maps in progress :-p

BTW, I agree: Classic Doom never dies :-)

And I'm sure everyone will appreciate a set of good, solid maps like the ones shown in the video. I hope you will post some downloadable teaser once in a while ;-)

sure! But not any time soon. I still have a lot of work to do and there are some bugs i have to take care of.

Nice video the maps looked like they could use more work underdetailed areas and texture errors caught my eyes.

dutch devil said:

Nice video the maps looked like they could use more work underdetailed areas and texture errors caught my eyes.

true, like i said. I still have alot of work to do.

Hell beneath: PartI, a new nightmare is complete!

I was going to make a wad with 32 maps but i think it woud be smarter to
release it in parts to get peoples thoughts so they can tell me what i can do better. This partI of Hell Beneath is now ready and has 8 maps,

enjoy!

http://rapidshare.com/files/22934974/Hell_Beneath.rar.html

I'm not trying to discourage you from mapping, but there's definitely some room for improvement.

First of all there isn't enough variation, the same textures used all the time and not enough height variation between sectors. Some Doom maps don't have a lot of variation either, but they make it work with decent architecture.

Also there are a lot of texture alignment and HOM errors. It crashed GZDoom, but worked in Legacy. Oh and for scrolling walls try to make each wall the length of the texture or it looks really weird.

There is some hope though, the architecture overall got better as I advanced. If you keep mapping I'm sure things will improve.

Map02 lacks a player 1 start position. I find it interesting that you managed to get your wad as far as a public beta release without noticing this, because a missing player 1 start is usually an instant crash.

Bizarrely, it does have a player 4 start position. Perhaps you use an engine that can cope with using a multiplayer start if the singleplayer start is missing? I wasn't aware of such an engine, although apparently Legacy works (a side-effect of which, at a guess, is its broken voodoo doll support)

i warnd the wad coud be unstable with zdoom in the Readme file. As for the player start on level 2, sorry, i use Doomsday to run and test my wad and i saw no problems on level 2. I will do the best to fix any bugs there are.

I'd suggest replacing the original Doom 2 music with more fast-paced tunes; the original D2 music is poor as it is.

Also, do you really need to edit for Legacy/Doomsday? Switching to Boom based ports might give you some wide freedom on level editing. Or maybe I don't know enough about Legacy or Doomsday...

You have a lot of potential and pasion, as mapper and mod author.

Here some suggestions:
-Be sure to allways use the tools your editor have to check for bugs, this can help you to address missing textures, missing player starts, unclosed sectors, and things like that.
-Look at the original maps to see how they're textured. A map with good texturing work MAY look better than one with odd or poor texturing but better architecture and detail.

Indeed the maps show a good understanding of triggers and such. However the levels themselves are pretty bland to look at and have alot of texture/flat misalingments.

BTW, the level's themselves are vanilla compatible other than any bugs like the player start one. The only Doomsday feature used is an optional ded to add the authors name to the start of each level.

You are correct in that Doomsday does not treat a missing player start position as a fatal error, if there are other start positions in the map which can be used in its place (a warning message about this will appear in the console).

Similarly, surfaces with a missing/unknown texture are reported in the console also and an attempt is made to "fix" the problem using a suitable replacement (usually this means taking a texture from a neighboring surface).

I have been considering adding a "report all map errors" mode to Doomsday. In this mode, instead of fixing/working around the problems, we would force an abort when trying to load the map and dropping the user back to the console. However, as yet we've had no requests for such a feature and it is fairly low priority. If anyone would like to see this implemented in Doomsday, please submit an RFE.