Neat! I'm jazzed that you put unique music in too. Will give it a try this weekend.

I do see several authors doing the "one gigantic map" thing these days BTW. I'm interested to see how you tackle it. It's easy to do it poorly in Doom maps since spammy replication of areas is even quicker/easier than in Quake editing. But some big maps do manage to avoid feeling like a big sea of undifferentiated doomstuff. 

though screens don't show too much.
Seems like the doomworld guys are praising this pretty heavily too.
Congratulations on the release! 

 

Enemy count over 900!

I played it in 3 separate sessions, the only really big gripe I had was if I fell into the Lava in the big teleporter room I had to load up a previous save since I had no idea how to escape it.

Otherwise the balancing felt pretty decent, the combat mostly felt good too (I am not super big on slaughter maps but I managed to get through the slaughter sections ok), I ran out of ammo when overusing certain guns but I think this is right and I enjoyed having to switch it up.

Cool map overall. 

re: the lava, so I guess it's more a doom convention to always allow players to teleport out of death zones like lava or slime? I've often had lava in my quake maps that had no escape.

it should take around 45-60 minutes to get through. mostly it is linear but there's a hub area which lets you visit either wing of the map in any order, and one wing has two objectives that you can do in any order too.

this seems more of a quake thing as well. i've played lots of doom maps where there's just a giant area all interconnected and you have to search for keys and then remember where the locked doors are. i'm not a huge fan of that play style, just because it's so easy to get lost that way. 

I'm not a fan of inescapable lava/slime etc, I think if you're smart/quick enough you should be able to get out.

I think the quake mentality works better for map navigation, Doom has a lot of "hit a switch here, door opens on opposite side of map" that is frustrating and counter intuitive. 

After playing negke's Doom maps as well as lunaran's and scar3crow's, I kept thinking that it would be cool to see more Doom maps from Quake mappers so I was excited when I saw this. It took me a few days to finish since it was such an extensive map but it was quite the experience, almost like a mini-episode in one map. I was hesitant when I saw that you suggested free look and finite height monsters since I usually like to play close to vanilla but that map still felt pretty traditional even with those enabled.

For a first Doom map, it was incredibly ambitious and I couldn't imagine attempting something on this scale. I think that it worked pretty well. It was definitely a pleasure to look at with a lot of excellent detail and good texture usage. The only thing I found strange was mixing in base light textures with demon marble textures. I'm also with Fifth in that I really don't like inescapable lava pits, but I read his post before playing so I kind of knew what was going to happen when I jumped down to explore.

The ambient sounds were used well although one of them almost sounded like the Archvile idle sound. Turns out that one time, it did end up being an Archvile. Most of the fighting was pretty good but I think that UV could've afforded to be a lot harder. I died a bunch of times but I think every single death except two or three came down to me using the rocket launcher at point blank on an enemy. On the other hand, it was kind of nice to just leisurely mow down enemies and take in the sights and scale of the map, and you did mention that the pacing would be laid back so I should've kept that in mind.

I wasn't too crazy about monsters trickling in during some battles. I know that's hard to avoid in Hexen format so it is what it is. It resulted in occasional moments where I would just stand in one spot waiting for all the monsters to finish teleporting in and shooting a few rockets into them, only for more monsters to trickle in shortly after.

Aside from those issues, this was a fantastic map. I think it's awesome that you made custom music as well, and I'm glad that you posted your original works. I really dig the desert song. The advanced tricks like fake 3D bridges were a nice touch and I'm sure that Doom mappers playing this will appreciate those little touches. Amazing job and I sincerely hope that you make more Doom maps. I was already a huge fan of your Quake maps, and now I'm a fan of your Doom stuff. 

I'm not too knowledgeable about Doom mapping, but how does the use of a map format inform how monster encounters work? 

not sure? I only picked hexen format at the time because i figured Hexen came out after doom, so it would have more features... 'course I had no clue what I was doing. :)

I figured out how to spawn monster in via script near the end of the creation of this map, so for example, all those shotgunners that spawn back in the first building at the last cyberdemon fight are spawned in all at once (as are the cyberdemons). You can achieve a more quake style spawning method that way but you have to place individual spawn points for each monster which might clutter things up a bit.

I think if I had known that sooner, I would have handled spawning differently and done a more targeted approach like Quake maps as opposed to just building a box full of monster who walk over a teleport line.

re: Difficulty, I only realized when I picked this back up to finish it, that UV was going to be too easy. Interesting story, I only decided to finish this map after watching some guy on youtube play through all the old episodes on UV with fast monsters. So yeah, when I was testing gameplay I realized it wasn't going to be nearly hard enough. :S

Anyway, I would like to make one more doom map, building on what I've learned. Also, there's UDMF format that lets you build sectors over sectors (sort of) and this can actually be done infinitely... I could probably achieve some near-quake like map design that way. 

alright, im a doomer :)

its a solid map and a very good first map. it delivers many fun encounters and enemy situations. and the built places look significant. i actually cant believe that this is your first doom map :) the ambient sounds helps with the atmosphere, i know you did this in your quake 1 maps too.

green marble is a ongoing trend in the doom community so it shows a good taste. i liked that i had enough ammo all the time; some mappers do counted ammo which i dislike because it feels forced.

i think players will remember this map, associated with green and huge. i do. you nailed it. i see the whole worktime in it.

constructive feedback
the only bigger point i have is that the lightning is not on par with all the other elements. to set it up is just so much work. anyway.

the pathfinding is straight forward, which makes sense for this huge map. but even so, some more backtracking would be good. you can ramp up the difficulty a notch. for doom players on UV skill its not that hard here (doomers fist revenants if they need to). there was a known green marble map with many revenants in it called the eye from mouldy. would be cool if it had a menu picture - i guess you didnt want that for some reason.

great fun map! 

Nice map, a bit grueling, but obviously less so than a hour-long slaughtermap. Not too hard but I'm out of practice with Doom anyway.

Mazelike maps of this size are more appropriate for Doom than for Quake I think, because you move faster by default in Doom, and you have the automap. Although it can still be a pain when the mapper puts the door in some out-of-the way corner, or some random corridor. In any case I felt this map had enough looping to make for a satisfying Quake-style map.

Anyway, I'm not necessarily a Doom purist, but room-over-room stuff always felt inappropriate in Doom to me. I'm also not sure how I feel about ambient sounds. Whenever I walked near a torch I kept thinking an archvile was attacking me.

Looking forward to the next Necros Doom level. 

A very valiant effort on your first Doom map. It was quite large but at no point did I get lost as the monsters always tend to point you in the right direction. Even on ultra-violence the map seemed pretty easy, but I wound up dying twice as a result of getting stuck on a tree and getting cornered by a cyberdemon.

I don't know how to record a demo in zdoom so I just recorded a video here https://youtu.be/aFkBH1cKN-Q

I did play it in zdoom as opposed to gzdoom and with the exception of one graphical glitch it works fine. Nicely done Necros! 

Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for recording that video Orl! Yeah you were pretty much done after you kill that last cyberdemon. I had trouble earlier with demos when someone else recorded one in-game, it seemed to desync early on for some reason; i suspect a different engine? So yeah, much appreciated with the video, that's the first time I've seen someone else play the map.


Also, it definitely feels like Doom's rockets are 'fatter'... They seem to catch on floor lips and wall corners a lot more often than Quake...

lpowell: I think I will keep map size down a bit more in the future, maybe do 2 20 minute maps instead of 1 50 minute map or something. I think fatigue starts to set in near the half way mark, even for me.

Badb0y: interesting your comment on back-tracking. I feel maybe Doom players are more amenable to this than Quake players are? My impression is that some Doom map conventions would not fly as well in Quake.

re: Purist vs non-purist, I've always had a strange outlook on that kind of thing, for example, in Quake, I love linear texture (eg: no smoothing) with normal size pixels (eg: no high res textures) but also love modern reflecting water. But I also think my grasp on what makes Doom pure is less firm than what I feel makes Quake pure. I am more flexible with that definition in Doom because I never really grew up mapping for it so I kind of do whatever I feel like without as much concern for 'is this Doom'. I figure as long as there's guns and demons to shoot, that should be fine. 

...how does the use of a map format inform how monster encounters work?

Different formats afford different features to the mapper with the tradeoff being that some source ports do not support certain formats. Boom format for example has scrolling floors and this allows for less variable monster teleports, avoiding the slow trickling in of monsters than can sometimes occur when using vanilla teleport methods.

@necros I mostly share your views on purism. I also agree with Lane's views on true room-over-room. At the end of the day, I enjoy any good Doom map regardless of the features that it uses and I'm looking forward to your next one. I would hope that you wouldn't just stop after your next map either.

I also forgot to mention before that it was a relief to play a room where every single key or significant item didn't trigger an ambush. I can't remember the last time that I played a user map where picking up a key didn't result in 500 enemies ambushing me from all sides and it was a nice change of pace from this.