MADNESS
I am told writing about clocks and lightbulbs is a symptom of insanity?? Fine, I'll just write about Doom and you can lump it. Haha, lump. No-one's going to get that...
Holy Hell
Holy Hell is, as I just wrote on Doomworld, a parody of Deus Vult. Apart from that it's a complete waste of space but a funny waste of space. It's funny because the sheer size of the monster teleporters made me giggle. However I didn't even bother trying to play it without god mode and the super weapons patch - apparently it's "just about playable" in Easy mode but I didn't try.
It replaces MAP01-MAP05, 5 (20000 monsters, the cause of low framerate) being the accumulation of maps 1-4 (3000-7000 monsters each). There is also a map named HOLYHELL to access which you need an engine that can run maps without conventional names (or you can edit the map's name with a hex editor) It's not worth it though, it appears to be a very early prototype of the first area of MAP01/MAP05, and isn't complete (it doesn't even have an exit as far as I could see)
The architecture is quite sparse, nothing special but okay. The texturing is also mostly okay, except in a couple of chambers where it is rather garish; the theme of the map varies wildly from area to area, bricks, hell, modwall, etc.
There are bugs: after you get the red key a wall takes nearly 5 minutes to descend, after which, if you run over the wall, you will get a MapPlane segfault unless you switch to the automap beforehand; also, in the final area, whose texturing hurts the eyes and whose number of rendered sprites hurts the framerate, some of the monster teleporters fail to go off if you don't press the buttons in the right order. There is a sequence of switches to follow, repeated twice; what you need to do is start with the south wall, then do the same thing on the north wall, and so on. In particular you must visit the south alcove before the north one.
Hell Wad Pack
Hellpak (evil.wad, tex.wad) is a set of seven maps and new textures from the author of Hell Gate; indeed the latter could fit into this wad quite seamlessly.
Many people might call these maps ugly but for some reason I really like his style of architecture. There are high ceilings. There are large windows, everywhere. The maps are very open and there is bags of scenery and room. There are little glimpse points and other points of interest hidden around the place. The new graphics aren't bad, the tree sprites are okay - probably better than Doom's originals, but that's not hard - and I particularly like the pink "cloudy sunset" sky texture.
However the gameplay utterly frustrates me. There are huge crowds of monsters basically everywhere, and they don't behave well. They sort of come at you in single file; you're never quite safe from lone wanderers. Health and ammo are very tight in the initial stages of a map, but if you manage to finish it you'll have piles left over. It all suggests to me that there has only been a minimum of playtesting.
Let's take map02 as an example. You have to do over half the map with single shotgun and rocket launcher, despite there being large quantities of cells available. You're almost three quarters done by the time you get the plasma gun, though, and the BFG is right at the end, when there are less than 50 out of 1000 monsters left. The second secret area... I could go on.
Map03 purports to be for ZDoom only but it works fine in PRBoom except that you don't get the extra species of monsters there. I'd say it's still populated enough without them, though.
In contrast map04 has about 20 monsters and is trivial; map05 is manageable but suffers horribly from top-heaviness, having to kill all the monsters with very limited resources, before you can get to the larger weapons; and then having nothing to use them on.
Map01 starts off okay but you basically run out of ammo halfway through. Map06 in contrast overwhelms you with zombies and you run out of health before you can clear out a "safe zone". Map07 is just stupid - give the player a bfg, a roomful of cells and invulnerabilities, then throw a huge cavern of monsters at him, complete with a monster spawner. It purports to be another Nuts tribute - like Nuts Lite then, only more blunt.
In summary, I think that there is the potential for greatness here - map02 could be wonderful with just a few tweaks, most of the others, too - but it has not yet been realised. Perhaps in the future...
Hell Meets Earth
HME won first prize in a competition in Acorn User magazine to design a Doom map, after the source came out and was ported to RISC OS. If you don't have a soft spot for RISC OS you won't think much of this map, its theme varies rather oddly, it's like a mansion surrounded by a huge wooden corridor, and could just be a random level from 1994/5. I'm only really mentioning it since I found the page again the other day and gleefully decided to play it again.
The basic idea is you have to find the three keys hidden in corners of this surreal environment. Killing the monsters as you go, obviously - unfortunately this map, like so many others, also suffers from top-heaviness; by the time you've found the larger weapons, you'll probably have dispatched most of the monsters with lesser ones. Anyway, while running around watch out for 10 walls with pictures of skulls on them (e.g. there are two either side of your start position) Once you have the three keys you can press a large switch which causes these 10 walls to lower, revealing switches, all of which need to be pressed to raise a staircase to the exit. The exit itself is in fact a monster spawner and you exit by shooting it - fortunately no jumping is required here. Also if you make sure everything is dead after you get all the keys you can then take a route around the map to avoid waking up the spawner before it is absolutely necessary.
Having written that I've just realised how similar the structure - find three keys, then 10 switches - is to Blastem2, which is three keys then 10 Commander Keens. Oh well, now I can see another reason I like this map... Also I think it was the first map in which I noticed lost souls would bounce off the floor and ceiling.
If you decide to play - and why would you? - you might have to rename the file, adding a .wad extension. PRBoom is full of crazy DOS-isms - its ancestor, Boom, given a filename without .wad on the end, will add the .wad for you as a convenience in a DOS environment, and a bloody nuisance anywhere else as it doesn't try to use the unappended filename first.
Subheading without the word "hell" in it
I also found DIY's page once more. It's still the same, it hasn't updated, but the URL was changed by the ISP that hosts it, which broke all other sites' links. It still hasn't been updated since 2003 and I don't think it'll ever be again, as its author Andreas Dehmel seems to have given up on RISC OS entirely.
Clock and Bulb Enumeration
With the passing away of the ancient bulb in the cupboard under the stairs and the transition of the local timezone to BST both happening in the past week
Clocks
I have lots of clocks.
- My 16-year old watch
- Digital alarm clocks:
- black, ancient, indeed it's as old as my watch
- silver
both of which, despite being very loud, can run for two hours without waking me up (compare an external authority's ability to wake me up instantly)
- Wall clocks
- Gold one over the door
- White office clock (with day and date) on opposite wall, though I should move it as I never look at it
In the past visitors have told me the ticks are quite distracting. However, I never notice them.
- Small alarm clock stuck to the top of a monitor. There is a clock on my computer desktop but I never look at it.
- My stereo, which these days is nothing but an amplifier for the computers, has a clock in it
- The computers all adjust themselves when there is a timezone switch, so I don't have to remember them.
- Gadgets:
- My phone has a clock in it but doesn't seem to have the ability to self-adjust like the computers do. I hate my phone and I wish I didn't have one but there you go.
- My camera also has a clock in it. Everything has a clock in it these days. I forgot to change the clock in my camera last time and now have a bunch of pictures whose datestamps need adjusting
And that's just in here - elsewhere in the house there are
- More wall clocks
- Kitchen
- Middle room - I don't know, there isn't a better name for it. We don't use it for much.
- Another gold coloured one in the front room that is the third of the four wall clocks I rescued from my step-grandmother's house. The first two are as above. The fourth I never could find a place for until my aunt happened to mention her kitchen clock had packed up. I was happy to find a home for it.
- The video has a clock in it
- The boiler has a clock in it (so the heating can be turned on and off at given times)
- The cooker has a clock in it but it doesn't work (this one doesn't really count)
- Ros also has two alarm clocks and a watch
Bulbs
I have tons of lights as well, I prefer lots of small ones to one big one
- Ceiling light is an 11W compact flourescent (55W tungsten equivalent - most of our bulbs are compact flourescents, they last longer and don't use so much power) in a pink lampshade (my room is painted bright green, so when you turn the light on everything not green turns pink, it's fantastic)
- Spotlights in the corners of the rooms:
- I have a 60W spotlight by my bed for reading but it's pointed at the wall so when you turn it on you don't get a harsh bulb light but a softer light reflected from the wall (and thus tinted green)
- I have another 60W spotlight on the other side of the room on my writing table. It has also been turned to the wall for a diffusion/uplighting effect, I don't like working under a spotlight.
It would be nice to replace these with compact flourescents as they are used quite a lot, but they don't make compact flourescents that are sufficiently compact yet...
- Finally there are two sets of fairy lights wound around the shelves over the computers. I bought them in a sale just after Christmas one year and I never take them down. Lots of small lights are better than one big light.
And in the rest of the house
- All the rooms have ceiling lights, obviously
- Front room, 20W compact flourescent (it claims to be 100W equivalent but it blatantly isn't)
- Middle room, 20W compact flourescent
- Kitchen, flourescent tube of unknown power.
- The bathroom has two lights because it's split into two rooms for some dumb reason (don't ask me, I didn't build it)
- 60W tungsten in the little antechamber, with the sink (probably replace it with a compact flourescent eventually)
- the rest with the shower, bath and toilet actually has a spotlight pointed at the shower. It doesn't get used much, I always try to have showers in daylight hours
- 11W compact flourescent at the top of the stairs
- The back room upstairs is the last remaining large room to still have a 100W tungsten filament. It doesn't get used much and so hasn't yet needed replacing.
- The cupboard under the stairs has a 60W tungsten bulb in it. This is a new bulb, the previous one having died after lasting for nearly 10 years. It's never been replaced in all the time we've lived here. It was such an old bulb it wasn't even pearl, the glass was clear and you could see the filament directly. It was also very, very dusty.
- There is also a table lamp with a 60W bulb in it in the front room. As with my spotlights this gets used quite a lot but unfortunately the shade is too small to have a compact flourescent put in.
Conclusion: Yeah, I just wanted an excuse to use the word "enumeration"
Visplanes and large dropoffs
I've managed to waste the whole day trying and failing to work out why rboom segfaults when you go over a large dropoff (say, 0 to -31000). All I've learned is that it's not in the gameplay code as I first thought, it's in the renderer; specifically, the part that handles visplanes. If you compile it with rangechecking you get a R_MapPlane error instead (and then the thing segfaults somewhere else... damnit)
I've also learned that I still don't understand how the renderer works at all and also that I still don't know how to use a debugger properly. Damnit. I even managed, while typing that last paragraph, to spell "renderer" as "rendererer". It's one of those words like "banana" when you don't know where to stop.
This all came to pass since Andy's WAD (review somewhere in this post) was uploaded into /idgames this week. I mentioned the fault, which also happens in prboom stable, in the thread and another WAD in which it happens was posted in response.
It's all so very frustrating, very little I've tried to do these past couple of weeks has actually worked. Anyway I've played some maps:
Baron's Keep This is Agent "Mapper of the Year" Spork's first map. I can't imagine why he uploaded it to /idgames, except perhaps egotism, because it's dire. There are literally thousands of shells in piles of boxes, and barons and hellknights everywhere, usually in quite small rooms where they're hard to avoid. There are also ugly mazes with teleporters most of which are traps and instantly kill you and ends up in a mad circle-strafe around a crowd of cyberdemons. If you want a half-decent "my first map" with barons in the title, try "The Baron's Domain" (av46sp01.wad)
Endoomed A sequence of rather unmemorable rooms. The least unmemorable was the strobelit poisonous maze full of crushers. It's easier than it looked to start with as you get another megasphere every 10 seconds or so, though. I liked the look of large brick chamber with the spider, I like starkly lit grand chambers with high ceilings.
Haslam's Book Store of Doom Some guy who owns a book store made a map out of it. It's not bad, actually, there's quite a lot of room to run around, certainly a lot to shoot at, plenty of ammo and so forth. Lots of barrels around too, except they don't look like barrels. The one secret area is a right pain to find, I needed a map editor, so I'll spoil it: you have to get up on the shelves to the balcony with the rocket launcher and then run all round the edge on the bookshelves to the yellow door. When you fly off the end of the shelves (over a sign that says "Gunt/Hunt/Nautical", there's some shells on top of it) you should hear a floor descending. Oh yes there are also a number of invisible doors that you need to find to end the level, so maybe you should use the map cheat or an editor anyway just to get it over with. Anyway niggles aside this is actually a very fun map to play and the extra graphics aren't too annoying so give it a go.
The Apocalypse Project Man, look how long this has been in the archives, it has a three-figure /idgames frontend id. This is a whole episode of 9 maps that replaces Doom episode 1.
- Map 1: you start in a jail cell and break out by shooting the barrel. There follows a rather featureless maze of tunnels. There's a crashed spaceship, but that isn't the exit - that is behind a big throne with a baron on it. It reminded me of that bit in Ghostbusters 2 when Vigo spouts off about living in a castle of pain on a throne of blood. It always amuses me how in really old maps certain monsters like barons and cyberdemons are often given their own rooms with massive amounts of revenance and splendour. Now you get huge crowds of barons and they're just another species. Anyway I'm kind of wittering here.
- Map 2: This is a town or something, there's a bunch of buildings and you start in the open air, anyway. There's plenty of zombies around so watch out. Actually it was at this point that I realised I'd played these maps before, but I think it was the really crappy Doom 2 conversion on the D!1000 CD.
- Map 3 is a number of slime-filled sewers vaguely reminiscent of that part of Galaxia.wad. They collapse sometimes as you walk past them. The second half of the level has a large dark cave and a tunnel with a load of imps in ambush positions. It's very bland.
- Map 9 is directly led on from map 3, that is, map 3 has no real secret exit. I didn't get very far here as this was the map I mentioned above as having been pointed out for having reproducible R_MapPlane errors in it. I didn't see much of the map itself but it's basically one large cavern with some really massive height differences and huge staircases. It's kind of a shame it doesn't work in a way...
- Map 4 is a large featureless maze, similar to the computer core maze on E1M2 if anything. Monsters roam it constantly, and more come in from side areas as you trip hidden wires. This map is really quite annoying and I did it firmly with the help of the Overdetailed Map Cheat and I don't feel guilty at all!
- Map 5: you're in some kind of hell cavern, but you can't go anywhere except into passageway that leads out into another jail cell. The rest of this map is some kind of dungeon or torture chamber.
- Map 6 is a maze of grandiose marble hallways and stone rooms. There's another couple of barons on thrones too. The best part is right at the end where there's a spider and a crowd of 32 barons in a huge cavern; I don't think you're actually meant to fight them as there is a bypass mechanism but I still did!
- Map 7 is a huge chamber supported by pillars and with a central core. You get the red key from the core and then can open the side doors and get bogloads of guns and ammo. Then you can press a button and fight two spiderdemons and search for a while and find another key to exit. This one's okay for speedrunning.
- Map 8: finally another grand marble hall that's quite empty besides two barons. Kill them though and the huge wall descends to reveal an even bigger throne with a cyberdemon and a BFG on it. There's a bug in this level that means you can exit the map instantly, but doing a 100% kills run from a pistol start is quite entertaining.
So yeah I didn't hate it, well, I hated the mazes but not all of it, but nevertheless it's probably not worth the bother. A final note on the Doom 2 conversion: it's terrible and really lazily done. It's basically a search and replace on all the textures that aren't in Doom 1, and a search and replace on some species of monster - for example, barons have turned into arachnotrons. However no tweaking or bug-fixing appears to have been done afterwards; on map 6, where instead of getting two barons chasing you after you pick up the computer map, you get two arachnotrons stuck in the wall. Hilarious.
Trip Report
Imagine: several hours of overly loud music from the best era of dance music ever known? What could go wrong? Let's see:
- Stu Allen was great, he started off with 1991/2 era breaks and house and hardcore and also played a bunch of 1996-era happy hardcore as well
- N-trance however were shite, I mean, this woman comes on stage and starts singing over this weak euro house beat and I'm like, "bugger this, I'm going next door"
- Spent about an hour next door with a range of jungle and drum and bass, 1995-2000 ish I think. Ray Keith has a darker taste in d&b than I do but I very much enjoyed his DJing style.
- Went back to the other room when Slipmatt came on. I love this guy even though he's cut his hair and indeed gone bald now, haha. He played basically the same thing as he did when I saw him in 2002, old school anthems, new school breaks remixes of old school records, and the occasional house tune.
I knew nearly all the records I heard although I'm hopeless with names so I could probably only name about half of them. Such a variety of different styles of beats and even of tempos, too. I mean, there was old school hardcore, happy hardcore, jungle, drum and bass, new school breaks, house, all sorts. You go to things these days and they play one beat, one tempo. It's boring! Anyway maybe later if I can be bothered I'll post a list of names of records I can remember hearing. I won't get them all because it wasn't like I was standing there with a notebook, but, you know.
Also in a break from tradition I didn't have a hat on. In fact I was pretty nondescript, I mean I had a black t-shirt and navy blue trousers and that was it, no hat, no glow in the dark whistle. But for some reason a lot more people than usual talked to me. I don't know. Maybe it was nothing to do with that and I was just going round smiling a lot because of the music? Maybe the crowd at this type of event was friendlier than usual? Hell if I know.
Oh and also I hardly left the floor in like four hours and my legs didn't hurt much at all afterwards and certainly not when I woke up the next day, unlike the thing last month after which my back and legs hurt for a week.
So what went wrong? Get this: Nothing!
