05/02/2006 @20:10:33 ^21:06:53

UNLEASHED UPON AN UNSUSPECTING WORLD

I spent a couple of days last week firstly writing a README for the overdetailed map cheat, then pissing about with "svn merge" to eventually form a patch to apply it to prboom (both the 2.2.6 release and whatever is current in upstream's repository) Finally I took a bunch of screenshots, and posted the whole lot on Doomworld.

I don't think anybody cares though. Well, it's their loss. You might expect me to be more negative about an apparent failure, but the way I see it, it's no skin off my nose if nobody else likes it. Although I suppose if extending the map cheat were a good idea someone else would have come up with it and probably implemented a better version already.

I could also post it in the patches tracker on sourceforge, but I'll have to wait until I can work out how to convince sourceforge I'm actually logged into the site.

DEUS VULT REVISITED

So I played map 5 of Deus Vult the other day. Okay that won't seem significant unless I link back to the previous article on it. To recap it is an extremely large map which has, in particular, over 32768 sidedefs, so I had to fix RBoom to accept maps of this size* (as well as a couple of other stupid little hacks, but that's another story)

I think I like it better all in one piece, if only because there are all these interconnections between the major areas of the map that you don't get in the smaller ones, and so you can revisit earlier areas. However, it still feels like a bunch of independent scenarios joined together. A lot of maps feel like this. Earlier parts are completely separate from later parts and they have no influence on each other. You just pass through them and move on. They might as well be in separate maps. It's almost as if the author has started making the map and hasn't really known when to stop, and has just kept adding more sections.

*Okay I admit I stole the fix from Prboom+. I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to, Prboom is GPL which as far as I'm aware means any derivative project also has to be. It's hard to tell if I did it properly since every single changed line in Prboom+'s source is marked with "//e6y" but there are no other additional comments so you don't know which changed lines are part of this patch and which are part of another, if you see what I mean. Oh well, it seems to work. I suppose I should try to construct a map with an even greater number of sidedefs to check it further.