Design

I realize that I don’t make posts here as often as I use to. I guess there’s hasn’t been much need for me to use this place as an outlet lately. Been entirely too busy with projects and real life…or something . I do have some things on the horizon that I hope to be sharing with the Doom community very soon though, which I’m excited about. Actually I was hoping to get that stuff out in the open before now, but things kept getting in the way.

But this post isn’t about big projects. This post is about 32in24!

It felt like the 11th session had just ended when the 12th session was announced a few weeks ago. In reality it’s been almost a year since the 11th session took place (and it feels like I’ve accomplished a whole lot of nothing since then). Anyways, the 12th session was started on August 11th. This time we were tasked to create Capture the Flag maps compatible with the major multiplayer ports (Odamex, Zandronum, and ZDaemon). I panicked a little because the day it was announced I was getting ready to go out of town on a short vacation trip with the family. So I crapped out a simple 10 minute layout. Shaikoten was kind enough to do the item placements and naming of the map in my absence.

The maps were then playtested in a session of Odamex Saturday Nitro; a similar process was used in the previous 32in24 session and it worked out very well. Once the maps were tweaked from the playtesting, a week was spent on detailing and polishing the maps for the another Saturday Nitro and then the eventual release. I was able to detail my bare layout, although I took way too long to do it and actually broke Odamex because it busted through the SEGS limit (I didn’t realize Odamex didn’t support doubled SEGS…but I also stupidly didn’t realize that my map had broken through that limit either). I thought the map was going to be excluded from the main wad as a result, but the wad’s compiler, The Green Herring, was kind enough to go through the map and remove some of the more useless detail to get it under the limit and thus compatible with Odamex. That was a task I would have undertaken myself if it weren’t for the fact that I was out of town, AGAIN, on that last day of the detailing session.

Anyways, enough useless chatter. I present you with screenshots from my submission, lovingly entitled A Roboticized Lizard Comprised Entirely of Moving Wooden Parts, Neurokinetic Circuitry, and the Heart of a Moldy Bald Eagle (aka “the most amazing map name ever conceived by a mortal being)”.

Those who are interested in my inspiration can keep on read. Otherwise you can skip to the bottom for a link to the wad

Part of the reason why it took me so long to detail this map was because I decided to make the base of my texturing with GSTONE. GSTONE is that oddly gothic large green marble brick texture which you can see plastered all over the map. It’s a really lovely texture, maybe one of my favorites out of all the stock Doom textures. It has lots of personality and works well for gothic-themed maps. Plus its green, which looks awesome in Doom maps in my opinion. I wanted to make heavy use of it because I’m currently using the texture quite a bit in Vela Pax MAP04. This map is heavily inspired by what I’m doing in Vela Pax MAP04 actually, making this the 2nd map for a 32in24 session I’ve made which has a direct Vela Pax link. The problem with GSTONE, though, is that the vertical brick seams use non-standard heights…that is, they aren’t power-of-two (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc). The horizontal seams do run parallel to each other, which certainly helps, but if you are a stickler for texture alignment like I am, you want to work your map with those brick seams so things look nice and clean. So working GSTONE with other textures that do use those power-of-two seams can be a challenge sometimes. And that’s why I didn’t do a whole lot of texture variation in this map (I could have done more if I had more time and patience). Working with GSTONE is something that has been very time intensive so far in Vela Pax MAP04.

You can grab 32in24-12 from the /idgames archives right over here!. I will try to update the design page sometime soon.