11 ms·

One Doom fan, 300 hours, and one gargantuan level

199 points by uptown 10y ago

clarry 10y ago
I don't know how to feel about this article. Four decent sized Doom maps (I'm assuming they're referring to the official iwad maps) doesn't sound like an unusually large map for a community creation. The 2-3 hour time requirement is rather vague (how experienced a player are we talking about? does the time include deaths and re-attempts?) too, but I've certainly played maps that took me as long, and I've watched others play such maps. I guess there's nothing wrong with TFA per se, but I don't know if there's anything particularly newsworthy in it either. It sounds like the author just isn't aware of what's been going on in the Doom community for the past two decades.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Perhaps they're unaware, or perhaps they just chose a case study they considered interesting as an article subject. "Look at the time and care devoted to this hobby" is a classic article pattern.
  - clarry 10y ago
    > perhaps they just chose a case study they considered interesting as an article subject That is possible. But the article gives me no reason why this particular map would stand out as interesting apart from all the others. At the very least, if "look at the time and care devoted to this hobby" were the goal, you'd be able to make a much juicier article by considering other cases, more impressive projects, such as one-man megawads that took more than 300 hours to make.. full of maps that are on average larger and harder (and longer in the time required to play sens) and prettier than the original iwad maps.
- wang_li 10y ago
  There's a video embedded in the article of someone playing through the whole map. The video is an hour long. And I just realized has full mouselook. ----- Unrelatedly, and perhaps it's just nostalgia, but I find myself wishing some of the more modern Doom variants had more of the aesthetic of the original games. Colors, sizes of the rooms and such.
  - clarry 10y ago
    Well there is nothing worng with playing the original games (perhaps with a beefed up engine if the original is too clunky for your taste). There's plenty of maps too so you'll never get bored. I think I've played around a hundred pwads now and it feels like I've only scratched the surface.
  - qznc 10y ago
    The embedded video is by the creator, so 1h if you know the level perfectly.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  Given the references to Dark Souls, I kinda hope it's a map approximately the size of Lordran.
- Kenji 10y ago
  Way to compliment someone on their fantastic 300-hour project that they finished and present to the internet. Typical HN commentary. What this guy has done is a labour of love. I love it. Other people have done great WADs too... so what? Everyone deserves credit for good work.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  At first glance, I thought 300 hours was the time it takes to complete the level in the game! :)
- dkonofalski 10y ago
  The WAD itself is pretty newsworthy. For someone that's never made a DooM level before, the author definitely read up on a few of the tricks that the engine could use because they did some neat things in the maps. If you watch the video, the switch tower (with all the Lost Souls) was especially cool as it uses a special trigger type to create the effect you see. As someone who is a huge DooM fan, this level wasn't the greatest, but it was pretty cool and noteworthy.
paulpauper 10y ago
It's amazing how there is such a huge fan base for old games and technologies. Not to take this too off topic but this may be why fears of technological unemployment may be overblown, because there will always be uses for old technology or integrating new technology with old technology.
- projektir 10y ago
  It's not like he's getting paid for making Doom levels, though, so I'm not sure how this addresses technological unemployment.
  - clarry 10y ago
    I'm thinking of taking a year or two to make my own FPS with an aesthetic & gameplay similar to the 90s classics. But I'm concerned that even though there's a huge number of people who played and liked these games, they would also consider these games a product of their time and that it would be quite difficult to sell such a game.
    - ludamad 10y ago
      Making a reasonable wage with a game is a lot of stress and luck. What if you approached it differently? A reasonable engineer could take a 50% pay cut and still have a living wage. Why not take a personal year now and then?
      - clarry 10y ago
        It's tough, I'm not an engineer.
    - CM30 10y ago
      To be fair, I suspect you would get at least a few people willing to pay for such a game, especially if it looked at least decent on Steam or in a Kickstarter campaign. People wanted a new Banjo-Kazooie, we're getting A Hat in Time and Yooka-Laylee (among about 20 others). People wanted a new Mega Man, so there are games like Mighty No 9, Recore and Azure Striker Gunvolt. If there's a style of play that's died down a bit in recent years, it's pretty likely there's an audience. So yeah, it's probably not hopeless. There likely is at least some semblance of an audience for an old school style FPS game with less cutscenes, maze like levels and a more arcade like feel to it all.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
This is totally nuts. I haven't gotten around to playing it yet, but I feel like I totally should. If Doomworld knows about this (they probably do: they maintain /idgames), it's definitely going to win the Mordeth this year.
- sdegutis 10y ago
  After watching like 3 minutes of it, I'm suddenly reminded of the suspense and sense of mystery that Doom had. I don't think I've ever experienced that in any video game since then.
  - projektir 10y ago
    I think the clones (Heretic and heXen) did a pretty good job with it. I prefer heXen and Quake to Doom at the end of the day. There was a whole slew of FPS games in that style around that time, many of which were great (Dark Forces, Witchaven, Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, etc.). You don't see that as much in modern games, though, because they seem to be targeting a very different audience. Neither Doom nor heXen style games are being made at all right now as far as I can see. Demon's Souls is also excellent suspense wise, even though it's a different genre. The author mentions it as inspiration.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      I found Hexen and Heretic a collection of boring slogs. Neither are particularly enjoyable, IMHO. Now Strife, OTOH... Quake was actually quite a lot of fun, especially in MP. Singleplayer was quite good as well, but it's not as good as Doom's: Technical limitations mean that you don't get the massive waves of enemies of varying power, instead getting maybe a strong enemy or two, and a weak enemy or two, as there can only be ~7 enemies on screen at once (at least, on the hardware of the time).
      - sdegutis 10y ago
        Yeah but Quake was the first Doom clone where you could actually aim in two dimensions, X and Y! Doom's only letting you aim in X felt a bit cheesy and limited after playing Quake. Especially Quake 2 with mods, those were extremely fun times.
agentgt 10y ago
The one thing I didn't like about Doom is the surreal look both of the artistic and map layout. e.g. no space ship or space station would ever be designed like that (it is the same with Star Wars Death stars... did no one think of putting up a guard rail?). It is one of the reasons I liked Duke Nukem 3D a lot more as a teenager. The map does look cool but it doesn't have that real space station feel. I guess you could argue hell alters the layout.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > I guess you could argue hell alters the layout. I like that. Hell is Earth with less OSHA regulations. ;)
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  One thing I'd really love game designers to do when designing levels - focus first on what it is, and then only on how it plays. E.g. if designing a space station, first consider how a space station would look like, what facilities it needs, what would be the optimal placement, etc. Only after that add the puzzles, enemies and stuff. In other words, I'd like game designers to pay more attention to details in world building.
  - dkonofalski 10y ago
    The problem with that is that space stations and whatnot aren't designed to be fun as you go through them. Games are supposed to be fun. It would be incredibly misguided for a game designer to design the level around a real-world location first and then add the puzzles and enemies. Do you have "fun" walking through the halls of your doctor's office or through your local water treatment plant? There's a reason why they don't do exactly what you're suggesting.
    - rwallace 10y ago
      Different people have different tastes. Yes, I do find it interesting to walk through unfamiliar buildings in real life, and I'd find it more fun to go through a realistically designed level even if that meant e.g. the pacing was a bit uneven.
Scuds 10y ago
Every time I come across one of these AAA+ doom maps, I kinda blanch at the setup involved in running these with no background knowledge. You need an old Doom2.wad, to download an appropriate sourceport from Sourceforge, probably without an installer, maybe some looking up commandline options to run the game with a pwad if it's not immediately apparent. Sure, none of this is a problem for the HN crowd, but what I'd like is a "Click to run this wad" button on a WAD gallery page that would download and run the WAD either via NaCl or even just javascript, making the experience of playing these fan created levels seamless and opening it to a much wider audience. edit: yes I realize the IWADs are not freely distributable even though the engine is OSS
- clarry 10y ago
  I understand the frustration. I think at one point in time, the Freedoom project was moving in the direction of cloning the Doom assets closely enough that it'd suffice as a replacement for the original iwads, and as such would've made a setup like you described possible (without committing copyright infringement). People argued that the iwads are easy enough to get now, and somewhat recently, the freedoom project seemed to take on a new direction, which is less about making close clones of the original assets and more about being a game on its own right with its own theme and roster of enemies and all that. It's a bit weird, especially considering that they're still maintaining the vanilla gameplay elements unchanged, as if it were still built for the original purpose, yet the assets won't look good with pwads. Needless to say, I'm not super happy about this new direction. There are launchers that supposedly make it easier to run pwads though. I don't have the background knowledge to recommend one though; source ports are available to me through my package manager.
- derefr 10y ago
  > "Click to run this wad" button on a WAD gallery page that would download and run the WAD either via NaCl or even just javascript The Internet Archive's "Internet Arcade" project (https://archive.org/details/internetarcade https://archive.org/details/internetarcade) is the perfect place to preserve and display these, just as much as it is for old arcade cabinets. What that implies, though, is that MAME/MESS would need to get over their singular goal of emulating real hardware, and build in support for "abstract" platform-neutral virtual machines that games have been built on: say, ScummVM, or the Z-Machine, or even Shockwave Flash(!). If they started down that path, they could maybe go further, and also support the execution of low-level game engine "runtimes" like Löve2D. But go any further than that, and I'd question whether we're really doing "emulation" of a game using an interpreter, rather than shipping a game engine and loading levels in it. With things like the Doom engine—or, say, the RPG Maker 2000 runtime—you get to a the point where, to faithfully run a "game" made with these things, your emulator would have to include the original asset bundle that came with the reference engine. That's not quite an emulator any more. Maybe what we really need is a Docker-like abstraction for MAME: the ability to have "base images" for game engines, and then "derivative images" that represent projects loaded into those engines—where you only have to load a new "game engine" layer into the emulator when the game you're playing references a version you don't have cached yet. You could even split things into three layers: a layer for the OS (Windows 95, say); a layer for the game engine; and then a layer for the game project. And the whole thing gets "pulled", revived into a merged container, and then loaded into DOSBox.
bluedino 10y ago
Wow, that level is _massive_. I wonder what the system requirements are on that. Doom played perfectly on a 486/66 with 4MB. Like how many linedefs are in that thing...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ggambetta 10y ago
  Interesting question. I guess with today's processing power you could have a much more expensive offline preprocessing step and create a much better BSP tree, reducing the impact in runtime? I don't think linedefs take that much memory, but you could hit the limitation of number of textures in the same level, since I doubt 90's Doom did streaming from disk. So you probably can get massive geometry but a relatively homogeneous-looking level.
proactivesvcs 10y ago
It's already scared the jeepers out of me several times. I've also now managed to telefrag a Pain Elemental for the first time ever. Seems a bit late to only achieve this in 2016!
tomw1808 10y ago
two things I will never forget: iddqd idkfa and the compaq presario I wasn't supposed to use for that.
alexellisuk 10y ago
Fantastic work, this reminds me of playing Doom after school on the LAN. Good video walk-through but a shame you know where are all the monsters are ;-)

199 points by uptown 10y ago

I don't know how to feel about this article. Four decent sized Doom maps (I'm assuming they're referring to the official iwad maps) doesn't sound like an unusually large map for a community creation. The 2-3 hour time requirement is rather vague (how experienced a player are we talking about? does the time include deaths and re-attempts?) too, but I've certainly played maps that took me as long, and I've watched others play such maps. I guess there's nothing wrong with TFA per se, but I don't know if there's anything particularly newsworthy in it either. It sounds like the author just isn't aware of what's been going on in the Doom community for the past two decades.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
Perhaps they're unaware, or perhaps they just chose a case study they considered interesting as an article subject. "Look at the time and care devoted to this hobby" is a classic article pattern.
- clarry 10y ago
  > perhaps they just chose a case study they considered interesting as an article subject That is possible. But the article gives me no reason why this particular map would stand out as interesting apart from all the others. At the very least, if "look at the time and care devoted to this hobby" were the goal, you'd be able to make a much juicier article by considering other cases, more impressive projects, such as one-man megawads that took more than 300 hours to make.. full of maps that are on average larger and harder (and longer in the time required to play sens) and prettier than the original iwad maps.
wang_li 10y ago
There's a video embedded in the article of someone playing through the whole map. The video is an hour long. And I just realized has full mouselook. ----- Unrelatedly, and perhaps it's just nostalgia, but I find myself wishing some of the more modern Doom variants had more of the aesthetic of the original games. Colors, sizes of the rooms and such.
- clarry 10y ago
  Well there is nothing worng with playing the original games (perhaps with a beefed up engine if the original is too clunky for your taste). There's plenty of maps too so you'll never get bored. I think I've played around a hundred pwads now and it feels like I've only scratched the surface.
- qznc 10y ago
  The embedded video is by the creator, so 1h if you know the level perfectly.
s_kilk 10y ago
Given the references to Dark Souls, I kinda hope it's a map approximately the size of Lordran.
Kenji 10y ago
Way to compliment someone on their fantastic 300-hour project that they finished and present to the internet. Typical HN commentary. What this guy has done is a labour of love. I love it. Other people have done great WADs too... so what? Everyone deserves credit for good work.
cpeterso 10y ago
At first glance, I thought 300 hours was the time it takes to complete the level in the game! :)
dkonofalski 10y ago
The WAD itself is pretty newsworthy. For someone that's never made a DooM level before, the author definitely read up on a few of the tricks that the engine could use because they did some neat things in the maps. If you watch the video, the switch tower (with all the Lost Souls) was especially cool as it uses a special trigger type to create the effect you see. As someone who is a huge DooM fan, this level wasn't the greatest, but it was pretty cool and noteworthy.

paulpauper 10y ago

It's amazing how there is such a huge fan base for old games and technologies. Not to take this too off topic but this may be why fears of technological unemployment may be overblown, because there will always be uses for old technology or integrating new technology with old technology.

projektir 10y ago
It's not like he's getting paid for making Doom levels, though, so I'm not sure how this addresses technological unemployment.
- clarry 10y ago
  I'm thinking of taking a year or two to make my own FPS with an aesthetic & gameplay similar to the 90s classics. But I'm concerned that even though there's a huge number of people who played and liked these games, they would also consider these games a product of their time and that it would be quite difficult to sell such a game.
  - ludamad 10y ago
    Making a reasonable wage with a game is a lot of stress and luck. What if you approached it differently? A reasonable engineer could take a 50% pay cut and still have a living wage. Why not take a personal year now and then?
    - clarry 10y ago
      It's tough, I'm not an engineer.
  - CM30 10y ago
    To be fair, I suspect you would get at least a few people willing to pay for such a game, especially if it looked at least decent on Steam or in a Kickstarter campaign. People wanted a new Banjo-Kazooie, we're getting A Hat in Time and Yooka-Laylee (among about 20 others). People wanted a new Mega Man, so there are games like Mighty No 9, Recore and Azure Striker Gunvolt. If there's a style of play that's died down a bit in recent years, it's pretty likely there's an audience. So yeah, it's probably not hopeless. There likely is at least some semblance of an audience for an old school style FPS game with less cutscenes, maze like levels and a more arcade like feel to it all.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

This is totally nuts. I haven't gotten around to playing it yet, but I feel like I totally should. If Doomworld knows about this (they probably do: they maintain /idgames), it's definitely going to win the Mordeth this year.

sdegutis 10y ago
After watching like 3 minutes of it, I'm suddenly reminded of the suspense and sense of mystery that Doom had. I don't think I've ever experienced that in any video game since then.
- projektir 10y ago
  I think the clones (Heretic and heXen) did a pretty good job with it. I prefer heXen and Quake to Doom at the end of the day. There was a whole slew of FPS games in that style around that time, many of which were great (Dark Forces, Witchaven, Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, etc.). You don't see that as much in modern games, though, because they seem to be targeting a very different audience. Neither Doom nor heXen style games are being made at all right now as far as I can see. Demon's Souls is also excellent suspense wise, even though it's a different genre. The author mentions it as inspiration.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    I found Hexen and Heretic a collection of boring slogs. Neither are particularly enjoyable, IMHO. Now Strife, OTOH... Quake was actually quite a lot of fun, especially in MP. Singleplayer was quite good as well, but it's not as good as Doom's: Technical limitations mean that you don't get the massive waves of enemies of varying power, instead getting maybe a strong enemy or two, and a weak enemy or two, as there can only be ~7 enemies on screen at once (at least, on the hardware of the time).
    - sdegutis 10y ago
      Yeah but Quake was the first Doom clone where you could actually aim in two dimensions, X and Y! Doom's only letting you aim in X felt a bit cheesy and limited after playing Quake. Especially Quake 2 with mods, those were extremely fun times.

agentgt 10y ago

The one thing I didn't like about Doom is the surreal look both of the artistic and map layout. e.g. no space ship or space station would ever be designed like that (it is the same with Star Wars Death stars... did no one think of putting up a guard rail?). It is one of the reasons I liked Duke Nukem 3D a lot more as a teenager. The map does look cool but it doesn't have that real space station feel. I guess you could argue hell alters the layout.

kbenson 10y ago
> I guess you could argue hell alters the layout. I like that. Hell is Earth with less OSHA regulations. ;)
TeMPOraL 10y ago
One thing I'd really love game designers to do when designing levels - focus first on what it is, and then only on how it plays. E.g. if designing a space station, first consider how a space station would look like, what facilities it needs, what would be the optimal placement, etc. Only after that add the puzzles, enemies and stuff. In other words, I'd like game designers to pay more attention to details in world building.
- dkonofalski 10y ago
  The problem with that is that space stations and whatnot aren't designed to be fun as you go through them. Games are supposed to be fun. It would be incredibly misguided for a game designer to design the level around a real-world location first and then add the puzzles and enemies. Do you have "fun" walking through the halls of your doctor's office or through your local water treatment plant? There's a reason why they don't do exactly what you're suggesting.
  - rwallace 10y ago
    Different people have different tastes. Yes, I do find it interesting to walk through unfamiliar buildings in real life, and I'd find it more fun to go through a realistically designed level even if that meant e.g. the pacing was a bit uneven.

Scuds 10y ago

Every time I come across one of these AAA+ doom maps, I kinda blanch at the setup involved in running these with no background knowledge. You need an old Doom2.wad, to download an appropriate sourceport from Sourceforge, probably without an installer, maybe some looking up commandline options to run the game with a pwad if it's not immediately apparent. Sure, none of this is a problem for the HN crowd, but what I'd like is a "Click to run this wad" button on a WAD gallery page that would download and run the WAD either via NaCl or even just javascript, making the experience of playing these fan created levels seamless and opening it to a much wider audience. edit: yes I realize the IWADs are not freely distributable even though the engine is OSS

clarry 10y ago
I understand the frustration. I think at one point in time, the Freedoom project was moving in the direction of cloning the Doom assets closely enough that it'd suffice as a replacement for the original iwads, and as such would've made a setup like you described possible (without committing copyright infringement). People argued that the iwads are easy enough to get now, and somewhat recently, the freedoom project seemed to take on a new direction, which is less about making close clones of the original assets and more about being a game on its own right with its own theme and roster of enemies and all that. It's a bit weird, especially considering that they're still maintaining the vanilla gameplay elements unchanged, as if it were still built for the original purpose, yet the assets won't look good with pwads. Needless to say, I'm not super happy about this new direction. There are launchers that supposedly make it easier to run pwads though. I don't have the background knowledge to recommend one though; source ports are available to me through my package manager.
derefr 10y ago
> "Click to run this wad" button on a WAD gallery page that would download and run the WAD either via NaCl or even just javascript The Internet Archive's "Internet Arcade" project (https://archive.org/details/internetarcade https://archive.org/details/internetarcade) is the perfect place to preserve and display these, just as much as it is for old arcade cabinets. What that implies, though, is that MAME/MESS would need to get over their singular goal of emulating real hardware, and build in support for "abstract" platform-neutral virtual machines that games have been built on: say, ScummVM, or the Z-Machine, or even Shockwave Flash(!). If they started down that path, they could maybe go further, and also support the execution of low-level game engine "runtimes" like Löve2D. But go any further than that, and I'd question whether we're really doing "emulation" of a game using an interpreter, rather than shipping a game engine and loading levels in it. With things like the Doom engine—or, say, the RPG Maker 2000 runtime—you get to a the point where, to faithfully run a "game" made with these things, your emulator would have to include the original asset bundle that came with the reference engine. That's not quite an emulator any more. Maybe what we really need is a Docker-like abstraction for MAME: the ability to have "base images" for game engines, and then "derivative images" that represent projects loaded into those engines—where you only have to load a new "game engine" layer into the emulator when the game you're playing references a version you don't have cached yet. You could even split things into three layers: a layer for the OS (Windows 95, say); a layer for the game engine; and then a layer for the game project. And the whole thing gets "pulled", revived into a merged container, and then loaded into DOSBox.

bluedino 10y ago

Wow, that level is _massive_. I wonder what the system requirements are on that. Doom played perfectly on a 486/66 with 4MB. Like how many linedefs are in that thing...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ggambetta 10y ago
Interesting question. I guess with today's processing power you could have a much more expensive offline preprocessing step and create a much better BSP tree, reducing the impact in runtime? I don't think linedefs take that much memory, but you could hit the limitation of number of textures in the same level, since I doubt 90's Doom did streaming from disk. So you probably can get massive geometry but a relatively homogeneous-looking level.

proactivesvcs 10y ago

It's already scared the jeepers out of me several times. I've also now managed to telefrag a Pain Elemental for the first time ever. Seems a bit late to only achieve this in 2016!

tomw1808 10y ago

two things I will never forget: iddqd idkfa and the compaq presario I wasn't supposed to use for that.

alexellisuk 10y ago

Fantastic work, this reminds me of playing Doom after school on the LAN. Good video walk-through but a shame you know where are all the monsters are ;-)