ZDoom

Hello everyone

I've built a map that demonstrates some design concepts I've researched many years ago, but illustrate them with actual examples not just theories written down I'd understand but no one else would.
I wanted to help my mapping friend get over troubles with mapper's block. With encouragement from him and Phobus from these forums whom I contacted via mail I've decided to pre-release the map here.
It's pretty much beta stage.
It takes about 2 hours to play through and gather all the information.

Spoiler:

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I'd love to know what you think about it.
Other than it being weird, I know that already
Oh yeah, it's designed to play with limit removing port - tested with Crispy Doom and works fine.
There is one single, optional section that requires vertical jumping and has Legacy water, so a Legacy compatible port is necessary - Gzdoom had no issues with it and the rest of the map, ofcourse.
Vavoom had issues and refused to play the map. I haven't tested in Edge 32 yet...

Link to the file: https://ufile.io/nsdof

That's a good idea. There's a lot to be seen here, and the examples get the ideas across quite well. I like how positive and negative examples are put in contrast, and the part about rearranging five areas. It gets the point across better than the average text guide would.

I think mappers starting out should see this.

This is wonderful! Simply being a teaching tool is great enough, and a rather comprehensive one at that, but I also love all the little bits of flavor you've added outside the actual examples.

I'm guessing there are no enemies, so one doesn't get distracted while reading and such.

This is great! The information is nicely laid out, paced well, and comes across coherently. While playing, I thought of a few potential concepts that may be added to the map, if you like!

* Sight lines - Being able to see what switches do, how the map flows, and hinting at future encounters or level geometry. The mini-maps (the good ones) all display this, but adding it as a distinct concept might be useful!
* Sawteeth - "Locking" a player into a decision, for some amount of time, by either having them leap off of an edge, go through a door that automatically locks, or otherwise forcing them to commit.
* Light levels - This one's pretty self-explanatory, but knowing when, where, and how to light rooms is incredibly important both for atmosphere and gameplay.
* Weapon/Powerup/Encounter Balance - The idea of placing monsters gets a good showing, and I like the combat section a lot. Covering how and when to parcel out resources and enemies might also be useful. The combat mini-maps are great for a bird's eye view, but getting down to the nitty gritty about why a particular encounter is or isn't fun would add a lot to the combat section.
* Borders - Just kidding.

This really gets into the "look and feel" aspect of level design, so I'd consider it a valuable resource for mappers who have a technical understanding of the basics of Doom, but perhaps haven't captured what it is they like so much about the IWAD levels or their favourite PWADs. Plenty of strong examples here to illustrate the points being made, as well, which helps immeasurably. It certainly have me plenty of food for thought, and I've been mapping for decades at this point!

Wow, I didn't expect so much positive feedback Thank you very much.
Yes it was my point to illustrate this stuff. Someone posted a scientific approach to mapping back over at Doomworld some time ago I've seen, but it was mostly theory I didn't understand, I needed examples to better understand the theories themselves.

AvzinElkein wrote:I'm guessing there are no enemies, so one doesn't get distracted while reading and such.

The gameplay section has enemies. I was puzzled to the end wether to put enemies in the layout demonstration maps or not, but by advice I've decided not to so they wouldn't distract from the study of layout. The gameplay obviously must've had enemies to demonstrate certain approaches to the matter.

Scripten wrote:A few potential concepts

Your ideas are absolutely great! So far I've run into the limit of sidefeds of I believe 65536 which inspired me to cut down on some ideas, including ones I had about ammo/weapon balance and monster combinations (the latter I've ultimately decided to leave up to the mapper tho). I don't think ZDBSP should have any problems managing the compilation... right? IIRC KDiZD maps broke the sidedef "limit" and still pulled off. I especially like the sawteeth concept and light levels ideas.

I'll be back sometime soon with an update for this.

Thanks again!

EDIT: Sorry for not spoiling the screenies, mod. Hugs and thanks for that.

I really love the idea of this - I was just talking to people on the discord for ZZT earlier about how there were tons of "demo worlds" like this for ZZT but Doom didn't really have any on the same level! I've gone through a couple of sections and they're full of really insightful ideas.

Something that would be great is if you could add some more commentary within the before/after sections of the maps that describe why you made the decisions you did - what makes this change better/more dynamic than the original "bad" version of the map. Specifically, I'm not sure what the good/bad switches example was trying to show - to me, the effect of the switches was equally obtuse in both versions of the map

Nice touch with the 667 enemies

@DavidN - thanks for the kind words
I'm contemplating, most definitely, adding more infopanels the whole thing. I just realised I pretty much can't make more "demo sections" as I pretty much hit the tag limit for teleports (I think I ran up to 251) and I want to keep this vanilla compatible. If it was for Zdoom I'd just do a lot of stuff otherwise.
By switches I believe you're referring to the "Navigation - Architecture" bit. I was aiming at diversifying the architecture so that certain areas are more recognisable than others, but that section I believe is the worst in the entire map so I'll definitely think about making stuff different there.
I'm not sure what you mean by "667 enemies" though?

Anyone else have the file? The download link no longer works. Well, it works but the site said that free hosting has expired and now it has been paywalled.

Bezhael wrote:Anyone else have the file? The download link no longer works. Well, it works but the site said that free hosting has expired and now it has been paywalled.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/vvrqeruf ... D.wad/file

[imgur]https://i.imgur.com/c6UmLJN[/imgur]

Hopefully the next version has all the salient features of GZDOOM

I think the intent was for the map to be Boom-compatible? A separate GZDoom-based UDMF tutorial map would be cool, though.

No it was meant to be for Doom 2 as to show how much you can do with vanilla/chocolate (smoothies). I would never finish a Gzdoom map like that as I'd probably never stop adding in new eye candy and fancy shit.

Can we get a link for this that *doesn't* require you to pay for a monthly subscription to access? Looks like the site you used to originally upload it only hosts the file for a limited time for free before requiring payment. Perhaps try something like mediafire, anonfile, dropbox,google drive or mega in the future to avoid issues like this.