ZDoom

FOURSITE - A new 4-in-1 map concept for Doom 2

This is my first ever map for Doom, so hopefully I haven't made too many newbie mistakes. It's been a real labor of love (took me well over 200 hours or so to complete) so I'm really hopeful you guys find it enjoyable!

Download from ModDB here. idgames upload pending.

It's designed to work on any limit-removing source port, but plays best with GZDoom and its derivatives.

Video play-though



A few screenshots on Imgur here


Technical Information

• Title: Foursite
• IWAD: Doom 2
• Source Port required: Anything that supports DeepBSP Extended Nodes. The map has no non-vanilla features beyond its physical size.
• Tested on: ZDoom, GZDoom, Crispy, Risen3D, PRBoom+, Eternity, Zandronum and Zandronum 3.0.
• Primary purpose: Single player
• Content: No new assets, but a DEHACKED file with some small gameplay changes

Background Story
The Foursite military base lies abandoned, rapidly deserted for apparently unknown reasons. You’ve heard rumors of a secret backdoor entrance: find the entrance, explore the four quadrants of the base, reach the heart of the base, and escape alive.

Design Information

• Build time: 200-300 hours over the course of 13 months.
• Difficulty levels: Implemented. Hurt Me Plenty is “normal” with HNTR featuring fewer enemies and UV featuring more.
• Estimated playtime: at least 60 minutes.
• Monster to total available ammo ratio (at UV): Between 1:1.6 and 1:2 depending on SS/SSG usage and excluding monster ammo pickups.

Very nicely done! I like the way you think.

Neat map! A bit of feedback

Pros:
-Detail and aesthetics with stock textures is amazing. All the rooms felt real, and had great charm.
-Monster placement seemed great, and some of the fights were imaginative...the mancubi fight in particular was very interesting, especially as I realized I didnt have enough ammo to really kill them.
-you seem talented with coming up with cool map ideas, and they seem really neat. The lost soul tower, the mancubi platforming section
-Challenging and a lot of variety.
-Spidermastermind room was awesome, you absolutely MUST explain how you did this!!!! This gave me vibes from ONI on the ps2, with the computer boss fights!

cons:
-size is waaaaaaaay big. Too much terrain, and monsters. could be broken up into like 3 maps easily, or maybe 4. Too much terrain and monsters means mods are almost hopeless to run well. I honestly try not to ever exceed 500 as a limit. Besides this, it drags on waaaaay too long, and I got fatigue, where as a map pack I feel theres good break points.
-Ammo balance is a bit fucked imo, we dont get a chaingun till far in, and even when we get the chaingun, ssg, rockets, it seems ammo for anything but the SSG is too scarce to use much. Because of this the SSG noise is now engrained in my skull. Keep in mind, 4 shells =40 bullets with the SSG. Because of this, until later I couldn't use the chaingun much, then after that, chaingun was too weak. Kinda forcd me to use the SSG way too much, to the point I got tired of it....maybe thats just me though. The ammo issue eventually got better when big cell packs and rocket boxes started showing, but it was a bit too late to be fun.... Even if they aren't strictly needed, ammo starvation + big fights aren't very fun to me. if your going to throw me big fights, give me enough ammo and then some.
-Your use of pain elementals seems a bit severe. Keep in mind every lost soul has the health of a pinky about, so pain elementals are massive bullet sponges because of this, which only exastrubates the problem above, where I use all my plasma or rockets on them, and then have no fireworks to break up the monotony later.
-Putting a bunch of chaingunners, revenants, and arachnotrons in a room firing squad style, and then having pillars which do not actually block shots is a dirty underhanded trick.... I guess that might be your style, but DAMN that was low.


Overall good map, biggest things is one, maybe break it up into smaller maps for several reasons, and 2, maybe provide more ammo for variety earlier on. Using the SSG is all well and good, but using it too much gets irritating.

Oh and pain elementals chew up a lot of ammo, especially good ammo, so keep that in mind...Really want to know how you got that tracking effect on the final boss, i really want to reproduce that for hideous destructor maps.

Thanks for the detailed thoughts!

Totally agree that the map is pretty huge, but I've been carrying around this idea of a circular hub-map in my head for about 11 years, so I kind of had to live up to that original vision.

Sorry you found the ammo balance off. I tried to provide ammo for everything but you're right, you do use up chaingun ammo much faster than the SSG. I guess I instinctively use the SSG most of the time anyway so I didn't really notice its over-use, but you're right, I could have put more clips and ammo boxes in.

As for the firing-squad room, truth is I wasn't trying to be low or trick you! Maybe it's just my brain, but I'd naturally presumed a waterfall wouldn't be solid. I certainly wasn't trying to be sly. That's a definite learning for future maps though!

For the Spiderdemon change: I spent a while playing around with Dehacked to get the desired effect, but in the end worked out you only need two very small edits:
The first change is to the Spiderdemon's firing sequence. Ordinarilly there are three frames to it: 616, 617 and 618, which run in a rotating sequence when the Spiderdemon is attacking. 616 and 617 are the firing frames, 618 is basically a line-of-sight check. If 618 passes, the Spiderdemon returns to 616 and the repeats the sequence. If it fails (because the player left its line-of-sight) it returns to the walk animation. The above edit simply makes 617 return to straight to 616, skipping 618 entirely. This locks the Spiderdemon in a constant firing sequence that can only be broken by a state change (pain, death of target or death of the Spiderdemon). It tracks the player's position automatically anyway so no edits are needed to ensure it keeps pointed at the player.

The second change is a simpler one: 614 is the last frame of the walk animation, which usually loops back to 603, the first frame. This change forces the Spiderdemon to progress into the attack pattern (615 is the long pause the Spiderdemon makes before attacking) as soon as it's finished one cycle of the walk animation. This basically ensures the Spiderdemon starts shooting a couple of seconds after being awoken, and removes the chance element of the AI deciding when to open fire.

I also added a few other changes to enhance the effect (e.g. reduced pain chance, increased HP etc.) but those are the only two you really need to make it work right.

Wow! What an exciting map, I had a ton of fun with this. I really expected slaughtermap levels of monsters and was surprised by the pretty sane yet challenging monster placement! A lot of beautiful, memorable areas and some really exciting encounters, fantastic work! I hope to see more from you!

One of the best maps I've played in a while. I never got lost, and the level was beautiful and flowed incredibly well. I think the only possible flaw I could find was that I expected to find a key in the first area, and was hesitant to leave there without it.
Great work, I'd love to see more from you, if you're interested.