Centrum As I said, the latest in a series, and an E2M4 replacement. Tightly-packed rooms and hallways, switches everywhere, 12 secrets, and quite a lot of monsters; pretty much the same as the series' E2M3 replacement. Not overwhelmingly difficult, keeps it simple and Doom-ish, and looking nicely like an old school map. Not that much like E2M4 though. Two halves divided by a giant bridge..?
Elizabeth A classic Doom 2 techbase, recently appearing in /newstuff. Built on a large scale with high ceilings, wide corridors and some intriguing interconnections. Quite plain, but not too dull. Mix and match theme, techbase panelling next to bricks. The classic look of a myriad of mid-nineties Doom 2 maps. I liked this. I think its monster placement and ammunition distribution could do with a bit of tweaking though.
Outpost (outpostj.wad) A short brick map. Vaguely residential. Not bad but felt to me like it is unfinished and there should be more of it. However its datestamp in the zip was 2003 so I guess it's not going to be developed any more...
A few sentences to keep the page updated
- Working on some nice code that turns Doom maps into text and back. Being able to grep and awk maps is really useful. Unfortunately still not able to diff them in any sane way though...
- Freedoom: a few more trivial patches. Getting a list of maps that had missing reject lumps and building them all with one single three line long shell command was a highlight.
- PrBoom: I can't seem to motivate myself to fix the non-free menu lumps problem or finish prboom_7_compatibility. However I submitted my entry to the Most Pointless Commit Of The Year Award by, um, removing sixteen bytes from the middle of CRBRICK.
- Haven't played much of the actual game lately but there's another one of those Mr. Chris E2 wads, namely Centrum, an E2M4 replacement...
- ...unless testing maps for Community Chest 4 counts. Three so far this month, in various stages of completion. The deadline for submission is supposed to be tomorrow. Offhand I can't say exactly how many maps I've seen but it might be about a dozen.
- Not Doom-related: Crawl 0.5 came out, I've played it a bit but not really got anywhere. No change there, then. It doesn't help that I prefer fragile spellcaster types over tough but boring melee characters.
Mr. Chris's E2 series
Three maps so far, quickly-made and inspired by the release of Doom Builder 2. I mentioned the first two briefly a couple of weeks ago. The unnamed base is also by the same author.
Stoned An E2M1 clone, more or less. Actually rather good. Looks decent but not too showy, uses light and dark well, and is not too hard (although there was one trap that seemed noticably nastier, but it caught me off-guard - I got past easily when I was expecting it)
Iconic This is a trek through a base, loosely based on E2M2 although I can't see it much. Was all right, fun enough, but somehow not as good as the previous one. Can't really say why. The "corridor of traps" was pretty entertaining. Charge and let out everything at once, it's more fun that way!
Abyssus The author put a lot more time into this one, it is significantly larger and more well-made. This is a really nice level. Author makes good use of light and dark contrast again, although somehow I feel it needs more sourced lighting. Difficulty is pitched just right for me, except for being a bit short of ammunition occasionally (but I survived, somehow)
Some traps need tightening up - if you lock the player in a room, do it before you open the walls and let the monsters out, and put the monsters where the player can't hide from them without waking them up until the door opens again - and I thought there was a bit too much backtracking, like you get the blue key and have to run all the way across an empty level and almost back to where you started from. Lots of secrets, most were fairly easy to find if you press on absolutely everything and keep your ears open.
Author obviously used a GL port to test as there are floating middle textures sunk halfway into the floor, but oh well. It only ruins the look of one place in the map.
Site is back up again, obviously.
Congestion 384 This is, I think, what Congestion 1024 could have been. The idea is the same, make maps whose area accessible to the player is restricted to a given size, in this case a 384x384 square.*
A 384 square is a lot smaller than a 1024 square. It is impossible to miniaturise an entire "normal-sized" map into this size - there simply isn't the room to do anything other than one room with a few monsters in. So 1024's problem of masses of filigree detail and cramped, annoying gameplay is avoided. It's just a set of 20 tiny maps that can all be played in under a minute.
I really like this wad and recommend it.
* following 1024 and 64, some might point out 384 is not a power of two. However perhaps the pattern is not powers of two, but numbers that end in 4! The most important thing is to be a multiple of the flat size (64) or perhaps the common texture widths (64, 128) for ease of alignment. Right?
