Made another Doom2 map that is ready to play!

[Skippable]
Alright. A while back, I was having mapper's block. Mapper's block is against my religion, so what I do is just open an editor and start mapping out random stuff. Well, after a while, I got pretty into this one and it turned out fairly nicely, IMO. The gameplay consists of a combination of mass slaughters and more tactical fights. Unfortunately, I started getting a bunch of strange glitches I couldn't figure out, like this one. I've worked around it, though, so this version works correctly. BTW, I've got the erroneous map if anyone wants to try and figure it out. I may have just done something careless, but this isn't a standard scenario that I check for, though.
[/Skippable]

Anyways, you can download the map and look at some screenies at the link below:

DOWNLOAD

Like usual, the default skill is HMP while UV is something extreme. If you like the bizarre maps I tend to make, you'll probably like this one. There is a somewhat challenging tyson slaughter at the beginning on UV, so if that doesn't sound appealling, HMP starts with the SSG. The demo I made is for HMP, for which the par time is like 20 minutes or so. UV's par time is 30 minutes. Have fun.

Death-Destiny delivers another quality UV slaughterfest map. :)

I was a bit bemused by the first room, I'll have to admit. That screen holds a lot of info that would probably be conveyed a lot better in a pictorial form - say, a basic diagram of the map layout with the room names and power levels. Furthermore, there were a couple of glaring texture...oddities. Not errors per se, but they just looked odd... the console in front of the massive screen, as well as a few of the similar looking consoles around the map had their textures facing the wrong way... and what was with that huge STEPTOP wall? Ew. In fact, I'm not sure I liked the usage of STEPTOP throughout the whole map in general.

Now, the rain was a nice aesthetic touch, not annoying at all, in fact I soon learnt to ignore it (I mean, with your maps, stopping to smell the roses virtually always equals death). And I really liked the canyon constructs, the overwhelming amount of alien-esque green in the texture palette, coupled with the acidic-looking rain, really gives the illusion of a strange, alien planet. Now, I'm not sure if that's what D-D was trying to convey with the aesthetics of this map, but hey. :) Another interesting concept is that this map features sliding doors, in a Boom format map? I didn't even know that was possible. Props to D-D for that fine mapping ingenuity. o_O

As for the difficulty, this wasn't mind-numbingly frustrating like Disturbia. While the fights are still extremely tense, the monster numbers are a lot more forgiving. Health is still scarce as hell, which I found kept me right on my toes and forced me to use my fist instead of my plentiful supply of rockets to avoid damaging myself, in most cases. Overall, on that front, I recommend any average Doomer setting their skill level to HMP, which I struggled on, but not nearly as much as on Disturbia. D-D has mentioned that UV is mostly a complete rapefest. :O

However, one thing I really disliked about this map was the music. It's syncopated and weird-sounding, slightly reminiscent of the Grove music, but not very suited to the feel of the map. In fact, I switched to the music from the Mucus Flow a little while into the map as I know that Death-Destiny's maps similar to this one have been based loosely (or heavily) around that map, but yeah... I couldn't listen to that music.

But it's an overall good map, with a nice environment/feel (sans music), extremely tense gameplay, and really good looks. I recommend it, highly. :)

...

Now if you'd submitted to this /idgames (I assume you haven't...yet?), that would've been my review, by the way. ;)

Cool map and demo. The map looks really nice and I like the music. Nice crate secrets (the last crate was funny). Exiting in the demo with 1 health was funny too. :)
Will you upload this to /idgames?

Death-Destiny said:

BTW, I've got the erroneous map if anyone wants to try and figure it out. I may have just done something careless, but this isn't a standard scenario that I check for, though

I would like to see it, as I've been curious about it ever since you posted that thread.

I've been failing demo attempts at scythe2 27 and feel like I need wrist casts, so I only watched the demo so far and will try it later. It looks very challenging and creative like usual. I went :) when I saw the cyber/caco part. Punching sure seems harder in prboom than zdoom. Cybers/arachnotrons/mancubuses seem almost unpunchable in prboom. Cool the blue + red fire stick made tall rain.

gggmork said:

Punching sure seems harder in prboom than zdoom. Cybers/arachnotrons/mancubuses seem almost unpunchable in prboom.

That's because they pretty much are. IIRC, it was a side effect of how Doom handled bounding boxes (that only manifested itself for larger/fatter creatures) that caused the problem. It was altered/fixed in ZDoom.

I'm having a deathz0r moment - what compatibility flags should I set in PrBoom to exit the first room?

GreyGhost said:
what compatibility flags should I set in PrBoom to exit the first room?

-complevel 9

TimeOfDeath said:

Will you upload this to /idgames?

We'll see. Actually, I'm starting to hate this map more and more, and I'll get to that in a minute. I doubt I would anyway since I'm not a fan of the anonymous comments and I have a site now anyways.

gggmork said:

I went :) when I saw the cyber/caco part.

Thought you'd like that. I really find your work to be quite inspiring, believe it or not.

Anyway, the reasons I'm hating this map are because it's full of wierd glitches. Actually, I think these glitches are all related to PrBoom V2.4.8.2, so I guess that's what I'm actually hating. I was designing and testing this map with PrBoom V2.4.8.2, but I actually think this map is full of "PrBoom-isms", if you will. For starters, the flats never line up right in PrBoom V2.4.8.2. It appears this version of PrBoom is rotating them all 90 degrees or something. The player should rightly never be able to escape the first room at all in Boom because the voodoo scroll floor goes too slow, but apparantly in PrBoom V2.4.8.2, your voodoo dolls scroll faster while you're moving, which is how I made it out of there. And also, the janky bug with the enemies seeing me through walls only happens in PrBoom V2.4.8.2. Either I enabled a whole mess of wierd PrBoom+ features without meaning to (which should be disabled anyway since I'm using -complevel 9) or i have way to much faith in this version and it still needs a lot more work. I guess it was advrtised as a test version.

Sorry everyone. I'll fix these "PrBoom-isms" and post an updated map sometime in the near future. =(

Alright, I've got this one Boom-compatible now. That was actually a pretty quick fix. I think all I needed to do was use different flats for the consoles (I believe all the other flats I used had 4-way symmetry) and adjust 3 of the scroll rooms very slightly. You can download it here:

DOWNLOAD

So talk to me here. Is PrBoom V2.4.8.2 supposed to do any of the stuff I mentioned in the previous post? The way I understood it, it was only supposed to have more support for demo-ing, but otherwise be identical to PrBoom V2.4.7. At the very least, the scrolling floor thing will mess up or alter all of my Boom maps since I use voodoo scipting so much, and I would imagine it would probably at least alter something like DVII, which also used a ton of it. I probably should submit a bug report, but I want to be sure these bugs haven't been mentioned yet.

Nobody know? Hmmm... I guess I'll just have to test my maps with PrBoom V2.4.7 in the future to be on the safe side. Oh well... =(

Don't know if you like reading changelogs any more than I do but it might tell you if some of the glitches are bugs or features. There's a new test release to play with.

myk said:

-complevel 9

Thanks - must have had my brain parked in neutral.

Yeah, the changelog only mentions fixing the flat's orientation, but doesn't mention either of the other two bugs. V2.4.8.3 still has the scroll speed bug and whatever makes the enemies see through walls in the old version of my map, so I'll let someone know. Thanks Greyghost.

Anyway, this topic's getting sidetracked. We're supposed to be commenting on the map. So yeah, have fun! Speaking of which, is my mapping really that "mucus-y." This is the third map in a row I've made that's been compared to "The Mucus Flow." Not that that's a bad thing since B.P.R.D. is easily my favorite author. I guess I like ASHWALLs and green slime too much, or something. ;-P

This is definitely reminiscent of The Mucus Flow, in terms of both visuals and music (and even gameplay, to some extent). However, you definitely don't need to feel ashamed of reusing that aesthetic. We've seen four bajillion tech bases on Phobos, so the more bases that we see in some other interesting setting (such as Planet Mucus) the better.

I really liked this one. I played it on HMP, and found that I could have the most fun by tackling each big fight separately, and only saving in between them - this lets me get the satisfaction of conquering your monster hordes all at once while letting me avoid the pain of replaying some fight I was already over and done with.

I never felt like not knowing what was about to happen was a big disadvantage, which is good. As long as I stayed on my toes, the fights were no easier the second time around than the first time (I frequently had to give fights a few tries to win, which is just fine with me). This is an improvement over The Beesong, where even on HMP I often felt like I had to know exactly what was about to happen for a chance of survival.

I also appreciate how the spaces in this map are generally smaller and more complex then you'll find in the majority of slaughter maps. If the spaces were any smaller or more crowded then it would be too cramped, but right now, this map provides an excellent test of agility.

I felt that the health supply was fair for a map of this sort, but I would have appreciated it if a fresh medkit was revealed when those final four archviles teleport into the level after getting the red skull key. (I had to kill those and the pain elementals with 10% health, and after a few tries finished the level with 1%.)

Very good secrets.

Opening console is a little text heavy.

Now, bugs:

Lines 5958 and 5146 need their texture aligned.
Sector 747 is too low.
In Sector 2 (ie. the low-power area in your game, not the wad construct) one of the thin walkways to the east and west of the sunken rectangular pit seems to have a blockmap line running straight down the middle of it. I can't remember which side had the problem, but this caused my shells to consistently pass through demons as they ran towards me through one of those walkways. This is annoying when it happens, but hard to prevent, hard to test for and hard to fix. However, you can probably fix this one just by shifting all of Sector 2 to the left or right by 16-32 map units. Also, I can't remember which corner the blockmap is built from in modern level editors, but if you changed the coordinates of your level's extremities that could move the blockmap's dividing lines, fixing this problem (and possibly placing this problem somewhere else). Or maybe I should just play this map on ZDoom like a normal person.

Death-Destiny said:

Nobody know? Hmmm... I guess I'll just have to test my maps with PrBoom V2.4.7 in the future to be on the safe side. Oh well... =(

The rotation seems to be a side effect of recent flats rendering changes. You can work round it for the time being by turning render_precise off in prboom-plus.cfg.

I'm not sure at all what the problem is with scrolling floors, can you be more specific? Which sector is moving at the wrong speed? And am I following this correctly, you're saying the speed of a voodoo doll is changing when the player moves around?

Also some other bugs: on UV there is an archvile, thing 352, which is stuck in its holding pen. I think sector 1323 needs a tag.

Not sure why linedefs 7410 and 7407 don't meet. Pessimism states the monster in that holding pen could escape without tripping one of the necessary linedefs, which means you're stuck in the first room forever. (Indeed having a mechanism dependent on monster movement to escape the first room is really annoying when you try to use -nomonsters to debug the map. I stood there for ages waiting for the door to lower :) )

RjY said:

I'm not sure at all what the problem is with scrolling floors, can you be more specific? Which sector is moving at the wrong speed? And am I following this correctly, you're saying the speed of a voodoo doll is changing when the player moves around?

Yeah, see for yourself. Make the length of linedef 7398 16 units long instead of 24. This should scroll the voodoo doll too slowly to get past the the lift in the 3 seconds the Archie lowers it for. I tested this quite a bit and the player's movement was the only thing that seemed to determine if the voodoo doll would get by or not. Everytime I was motionless when the Archie lowered the lift, the STEPTOP wall would always fail to lower, and everytime I was moving when the Archie teleported in, the same would never fail to lower. I even IDCLIPPED to this room and observed the voodoo doll increase its speed when I started moving.

This was much more enjoyable than the chaingun map, IMHO. The ammo balance was pretty good, except the final fights had little too little ammo. Then again, you could easily just skip most of them anyway (after picking skull key, run past the chaingunner by the smaller crates and don't shoot until you're back inside with the archies).

This is harder than I thought it would be, due to low ammo and health, and I really like it. The horizontal doors look interesting in doombuilder. UV has some quirks, like easy to waste some of the shell boxes that are placed in an unavoidable path when you only need a couple shells. And if you don't raise some ground enemies at the start they can block in the horde (if you take the route of not killing them yet), thus making the trip down the lift harder.
When a bunch of pain elementals start warping later you can escape that place easily by running up the wall all the way to the left, then clear them from the other side of the rail since it blocks them.
For the red key I found I can trigger the voodoo doll lift then quickly trigger the 2nd linedef to make those crates lower quicker.
Too bad punching kinda sucks in prboom compared to zdoom.

Lines 4834, 4833, 4832 and 4831 need a lower texture. Also, I'm not sure whether it was intentional, but the patch OWELCOME has spelling errors - unregistered and presence.