Late entry to the special olympics...
[retard]I don't really have a problem with online "cliques" as they have (mainly) been described. In real life people have friends and groups who they get on better with than they do with other people. They share in jokes, have similar tastes, go to the pub together etc etc etc. It's only natural to expect something similar online.
However, when such a group of friends becomes one that exists to try have some kind of influence and may even get that influence (however valuable that may be) that it can start to become problematic. Or when people say things to defend other members of the group, regardless of whether they need to or whether they actually believe what they are saying, or perhaps band together to pick on others etc etc To me, that's more of a clique. A group of friends is just a group of friends.
I have to say, I don't see anything particularly sinister in this "clique".
As for a group of friends who have similar likes in a WAD meaning their testing may make it no more valuable than testing oneself, I'm not convinced. Certainly, a group of like minded individuals may tend to push a WAD in the same direction. If someone else from outwith that group got involved, they may be able to influence it in different directions, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. What the like minded group will (presumably) do is make a WAD that they are happy with. That doesn't mean that other people will be happy with it but, to me, that just means the WAD wasn't for them. Taking onboard the opinions of non-like minded people may widen the appeal of the WAD or, alternatively, it may make a WAD that has features that most of the development team were not entirely happy with, or perhaps it may make it have features that feel "tacked on" or perhaps have things implemented that the dev team weren't fully behind. You could end up with a "too many cooks" situation.
To me, a group of like minded people working on and testing a WAD can be a valuable situation. Such a group are more likely to have a commonality of vision about the project and, perhaps, make it have a more unified approach. The value of more people, even like minded people, rather than just one tester is more eyes to spot obvious problems. I don't necessarily mean problems with style choices, but actual errors in the map. More people wandering through the corridors simply means more opportunities to spot a misaligned texture, or get themselves stuck because they go into a room and don't leave before the door closes with no way out when the person who made the level had always just ran in and out before the door shut and never noticed the problem etc etc. [/retard]
Stuff that is actually to do with the maps...
So, um yeah, lost episode. I've now played it and... It was quite good fun. I thought it stuck to its original idea pretty well: to take little-experienced levels and put them into Doom as an episode of maps that had somehow fallen into the void (which, in some way, they have). I thought that the idea was quite well carried through to the overall theming of the level set: the void space sky and intermap in particular.
The levels generally had a simplicity of architecture that was appropriate for Doom levels, perhaps, at the "Thy Flesh Consumed" stage of development. However, there were quite a few places where textures didn't fit onto walls very well and there were certainly quite a lot of places where flats on the 64x64 grid were cut across by sector lines in not very pretty ways. How much of that is down to the original layout of the levels, I don't know.
One thing that... I dunno, nagged at me I guess, was that there was so much use of Doom2 resources. I have always thought that a weakness of "Thy Flesh" was the lack of new resources and thought that a monster or two from Doom2 would have been an easy way for id to provide a bit of extra value in their add-on episode (eg a boss fight on E4M8 with a horde of mancubuses (not seen up to that point) would have worked well IMO). However, walking down corridors in these levels, that were totally clad in very recognisable Doom2 textures and getting attacked left, right and centre by mancubuses, revenants and pain elementals did make it feel like I was playing a Doom2 add on and, to me, took away some of the character of Doom. I think it just bothered me on an almost subconscious level that I knew I had loaded up doom.wad but the level felt like doom2.wad. Probably silly, I know, but it was there.
I guess my summing up is that this is a project built on an idea, a good one, where Xaser felt there was a gap in the PC Dooming WAD experience and he sought to plug it using a plausible and cohesive motif. As such, he took a series of relatively unknown levels and stitched them together with a unifying theme (essentially, that of the levels being "lost"), modifying the levels to a point where he felt they worked well enough for a modern audience and fitted in with his theme too. I think he pulled it off pretty well. It is a simplistic level set. It is quite "old school" yet curiously new as well. It has some flaws and some things that I would have done differently but it also has some very nice touches and some interesting ideas. All in all, it was a worthwhile experiment, and an interesting departure for someone with Xaser's modding style to date and, bottom line, I had fun playing it so that's all I need to get from it. I hope Xaser and his team also had fun making it.
And I thought the endpic from "Infernal Sky" was a nice touch but, IIRC, that could have been left in its own palette and even Zdoom would have shown it correctly, rather than forcing it into the Doom palette. IMO, it would have looked better that way.
Oh, and I liked the Swiss cheese/Child's play equipment walls.
