[WIP] Wicked Onslaught

[Tenement Funster]

After a hitting the books hard and learning the in's and out's of Doom Builder, I bring you my first ever project: Wicked Onslaught. I'd like for this to eventually be a full 32-level megawad, but I'm not sure if I'll ever get to that point. However, I plan to just keep adding and adding until I just can't take it anymore.

My brilliantly written story:

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Doomguy's oddly-built household has come under attack from an onslaught of hell's minions. Mr. Guy must bust out of his house and collect some keys to open some doors while killing some monsters on the way. Sometimes you can pick up some ammo or patch yourself up in a jiffy with some medkits. In later levels you could get to the mastermind of the whole operation, who may or may not have arachnid-features.

Here's some nifty screenshots of Map01:

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Guy's bed and nightstand thing:


Guy has nice roofing:


Guy has mountains in his front yard:

Map02 Screenshots:

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Central room:


Over-detailed key holding device:


Non-descript machinery:

So download that dag'gum attachment and tell me what you think!

[Phobus]

Right. Played it, and I thought it was a nice little map. The red key was pointless though, as you could just have given the player the blue key instead of the red key, not bothered with the red key bit at all and sent him straight outside and it'd have made no difference. Heights and stuff where "real" architecture is concerned is always a bit dodgy, so I'll not bother going into detail about that. Otherwise it was a nice little blast. Not challenging but not boring either. I managed to miss some of the monsters (dunno where they were) and I felt a secret or two wouldn't have gone amiss, but oh well. There were one or two walls that looked like they might open on the map, but didn't whilst I was playing - perhaps they don't work?

To stop the door tracks sliding, tick the box next to "lower unpegged" on each door track line. This renders them from the bottom up, meaning they won't move up with the ceiling of the door.

Here's the bugs and texturing errors I noticed whilst playing:



The red key floats when you lower the floor, due to being too close to the window ledge. It also seems that the floor itself goes down too far or something, judging by the way the shadows and light effects seem to leak into the floor. You seem to have used GZDoom to test and I'm sure it works fine there, but it looks quite dodgy in ZDoom.



Just a texturing issue, but not aligning this here where you've used shadows is painfully obvious. Pressing "a" in 3D mode whilst looking at these walls should sort that out.



This shadow sector seems to have gone into the floor, either before I pressed the switch to lower the red key or afterwards. I think it might have been tagged the same as the red key sector.



God knows how you did those cliffs, but they HOM like hell in ZDoom. My guess is it's a skybox or portal hat's not set up properly, but gotten away with in GZDoom.

[Tenement Funster]

Thanks for the input Phobus.

That sucks though, as the dropped shadow sector and the shadows going through the floor don't occur in GZDoom/Skulltag. I have no idea why the red key floats; the size-box in Doom Builder doesn't touch the window, which is what I originally thought was causing the issue (and also why it's not set right in the middle of the pedastal)

I set the pedastal to "lower to lowest floor." I assumed it dropped to the lowest thing next to it, but it's probably lowering to the height of the lowered red floors in the trap-rooms near the red key. Maybe that's causing the issue in Zdoom...

As for the cliffs thing, I used the easiest way I could find to make an outside skybox: I just left the outer linedefs untextured as a test, and it happened to work beautifully in Skulltag, so I kept it; no HoM or anything.

Anyone have any ideas about what may be causing those small shadow sectors to drop in Zdoom? They have no actions assigned to them, so there's no reason for the to be dropped like that!

[Tenement Funster]

I finished up map02 and figured out/fixed the skybox issue in map01 (no HoM in Zdoom now!), along with a few very small changes there. I still can't figure out the dropped shadow sector thing at the red key room though

I put up the new file in the first post with some screens of map02. It's much larger than map01 and a fair bit harder too, but still nothing that'll give you too much trouble. This time I tested in Zdoom as well and found no odd sector errors.

Any critique is appreciated. Be brutally honest, I can take it.

[Phobus]

Well, both maps are fun, but they're sort of sloppy, if you see what I mean. It's like playing through one of the older, good megawads... like MM I suppose, but in ZDoom. Good use of shadows, very fun gameplay (that bit when the bars come down and you get opened up on was particularly cool)... ammo seems rather excessive though

If you look in my screenshot in my previous post, you can see a texture error in the red key bit. Likewise the STARGRN corridor is still misaligned. The shadow part just seems to be lower than the rest of the room TBH, so I'd look in the editor and check it's height against the sector next to it. Also, the switch to lower the red key pedestal has a line in front of it to open a trap. However, this isn't very frequently stepped across, as I missed it twice but went back and tried it and got 100% kills this time. Overall this map seems quite finished though, and it is fun.

MAP02 seemed pretty much fine, but some of the texturing choices seemed very Doom2 (ie. it worked, but seemed odd at the same time) Also, I fell down in the non-damaging nukage around the crushers to go get the red key and had to fly back out, so that wants changing (either shrink the gap or make the nukage damaging). Didn't find the secret, but that'd be me not you Overall, pretty good.

[Tenement Funster]

Wow, I had all that stuff in mind when I went back to edit map01 and I still forgot to fix the texture errors (and that non-damage nukage thing for map02). It'll DEFINITELY be fixed for the next update. I'll work on balancing out the ammo too. Most of my play testing goes towards making sure all the switches, traps, and whatnot work fine and the everything looks right, so I haven't been paying much attention to it. Will keep in mind for later.

And those dropped shadow sectors are all the same heights as the ones next to it. I triple checked that a while back, so I'm at a loss for that one.