ZDoom

Hi! I'm new to the forum and I just started learning doom builder (ultimate) and I was wondering if there's anything important I should know about mapping before I jump in? Thanks in advance!

While UDB gives many clues with respect to what each item will do, it is always a good idea to become familiar with the Doom terminology and check out what the map editor is capable of, see the manual from Help. To that end I made a website to help new mappers become well versed with the mapping process.

Other tutorials can be found here and here, as well as many videos on Youtube.

Once you progress beyond a basic Doom map and include a fair number of new actors, map item housekeeping becomes very important. The first level of keeping a map structure well organized is to learn about namespaces. To learn which items are cumulative and which are not is part of that.

Just something to keep in mind for future maps: including a vast number of new actors (monsters and weapons and decorations) and models is best done with the pk3 map structure. A master of this is Enjay. I always cite his pwad Gene-Tech: Before the Storm as a perfect example how a pk3 map is stuctured with using folders and subfolders.

In the past new mappers had the idea to construct a megawad right off the bat. I would advise against that. The best way, which has proven most effective, is to take it easy with a simple map and build on that, learning to including new construction methods along the way.

And the most important tip is: Have fun building maps.

Download, play and debug every Cacoward Wad.

I'm not an expert, but I finally tried some basic mapping in DOOM recently. First, I wanted to answer my own questions: "how important is compatibility to me?" and "how many features am I going to use, and do they make it easier or harder to map?" so that I didn't invest lots of time in things that I ultimately didn't want to use. What I found most helpful, to start, was a thread over on Doomworld explaining the various DOOM map formats:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/1 ... does-what/

There are many other threads about the matter with different bits here and there as DOOM map format history (including Hexen) is a complicated story. But the good news is that UDMF is pretty simple to work with.

As Kappes says you can invest tons of time in learning DOOM, although I think UDMF and modern ports mitigate it a bit. But it is good to know, for instance, that vanilla DOOM was not designed for modern square pixel video graphic outputs. But it probably doesn't matter unless you are extremely interested in compatibility.

Then I went rapidly through building (or at least attempting) some of the advanced features to see what I needed / what I could tolerate. Helping me along were tutorials on YouTube by "The Lazygamer" such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR4sI24 ... b&index=25

I found the current version of Ultimate DOOM Builder very helpful. Owing to the nature of DOOM mapping, it's not easy and intuitive to build wild 3D features (like bridges, especially multiple bridges over each other), but the plug-ins (like the arc tool, again) make it much easier to build out these features. There are also some other very cool tools that let you build modern-ish features in a "less painful" way, like terrain generators - https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/1 ... c-27-2020/

Everything else is personal preference, though I recommend especially taking a look at the semi-joke mapping project that became a Cacoward-winning megaWAD, 50 Shades of Greytall: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/50_Shades_of_Graytall for good examples of how to be creative in DOOM with very strict aesthetic limits.

Good luck!