It’s the 16th Anniversary

This Isn’t Quake II

Another snapshot of what may or may not see the light of day in 2008.

Baby, You’ve Come a Long Way

Odium (1998)

Odium (2008)

Maybe this Doom 2 project will actually come out some day.

Eternal Doom 4 SLIGE

Reference: Eternal DOOM IV: Return from Oblivion

Visit the Doom textures resource, download at least half of the sets. Attach them to the Eternal Doom resources. Open your level editor and add the follow:

• respawning enemy gate to artificially elongate the level
• doors that cannot be opened, ever
• dead ends
• obscure hidden switches (shooting dead bodies!)
• teleporters as a layout crutch
• long square hallways as a pointless exercise in connecting symmetrical rooms
• random symbolism (Christian and pagan imagery within the same room? No problem!)
• random architecture (we can now utilize slopes, so let’s make arbitrary use of them!)

Ensure to apply in excess so the final product is a tedious clusterfuck of unfun sequences. Espi’s MAP27, “The Shrine”, excepted.

Best Individual Add-On Doom Levels

Verbosity will be used and abused.

I am a massive nerd, this much is true. I make lists related to gaming on the Internet. This list is very subjective. They are my favourites and maybe not yours. This is the best Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 have to offer in the single modification department, when the technical limits of their engines are stretched and creativity is forced to run rampant. When reading this list, keep in mind I do not actually play this game. Every level I download and run through is done just as that: with god mode and an eye open for pleasure. I do not care too much for game balancing. This is why I loathe RPGs. Give me material that’s creative in music, story, visual splendor, and breasts. As a warning, this article is wordy as fuck. Here are the entries, in no particular order:

Knee Deep in ZDoom: When Design Goes Wrong

What’s this bullshit? I don’t fuckin’ care! It don’t matter to Jesus. But you’re not foolin’ me, man. You might fool the fucks in the league office, but you don’t fool Jesus. This bush league psyche-out stuff. Laughable, man – ha ha! I would have fucked you in the ass Saturday. I fuck you in the ass next Wednesday instead. Wooo! You got a date Wednesday, baby!

Keep Yourself to Yourself

Crucified Dreams is officially out. It will be on the /idgames mirrors within the next 24 hours so people can start their hate reviews. Sometime in the coming weeks, I’ll write a retrospective on each level telling why it rules or sucks or why someone that disappeared 8 years ago has their art released port-mortem.

On Tuesday, I will turn 24. That time will be spent on telephones listening to Americans rant about their futile little consumerist lives. Then I’ll come home to watch a movie on my computer or something, sleep another 10 hours, show up late for work, again, and repeat the fucking cycle again. Summer of George, my ass.

Another happy post. Still collecting thoughts on the new Muse, waiting for a decent rip to become available. I’ve been kicking it to some early 80s Depeche Mode for the interim. (Not gay).

Crucified Dreams Released

Crucified Dreams is finally out after eight years of “work”. The current release is really a test version to allow people to try it for a couple weeks. After the initial feedback, I’ll make gameplay modifications such as moving items about, making plasma/BFG weapons less available, etc. Once the v1.1 revision is complete, then it will be uploaded to the /idgames archive and I can forget about it forever.

I have single player work on the back-burner, but I don’t have a clue when it’ll be complete. There are 4 levels of 25k+ sidedefs almost completed now but I might be making major layout modifications to one of the levels that will delay the release further. I’m using a custom texture set that’s all kinds of hotness.

Now what’s the deal with the singer from Soul Coughing sounding exactly like Dave Matthews? It’s almost as bad as Linkin Park sounding like Savage Garden, although that’s a little too ironic. Word, my children.

Self-Promissory Notes

I had today off from work, so I was planning on going for a run, taking care of my student loans, visiting a nearby shopping mall to pick up some DVDs, clothes, & books, call a couple friends to see what was up… but of course plans are made to fail. I got out of bed at 3PM. It was overcast and raining for much of the afternoon. I walked around the house in shorts and a hoodie, without showering. I sat on my computer on MSN Messenger and surfing the wild world of the Internet while listening to Swans’ Children of God and The Cure’s Disintegration. I spent some time working on item placement for Jon_R’s Crudreams entry. I watched a fair amount of the Jays playing the Devil Rays. Who fucking wants to watch Tampa Bay? Then I read an article on procrastination. I have now paused Blade Runner a total of 4 times tonight to get a snack, to check email, to write a journal entry, to check IRC, and what- oh look, something shiny! *walks away*

Doom Maintenance Releases

A few new downloads:

• Jägermörder 02: Terra Nova v1.2, now runs with PrBoom-Plus and has some texture misalignments fixed. I also removed some cell ammo near the end to make the Cyberdemon battle a bit more difficult. At least you can now record demos for this level with a port that actually feels like Doom.
• Horizontal Spinning Fan in Doom, a tech demo level I made in 1999 that displays how to make a fan using animated textures, similar to the waving flag effect found near the end of Batman Doom. You can also see this demonstrated in one of my Surge DM 2 maps.
• Deadly Simplified v1.3, an update to my Doom II MAP07 deathmatch tribute that adds more detail and fixes some texture alignments. I had forgotten to upload it to /idgames for its initial release but now it’s there to prepare for the inevitable fact that doomworld.com will not always be around.

Crucified Dreams? It’s finished except for Jon_R’s MAP04. The full web site should be back up soon as I’m right now in the middle of changing around the layout and retaking screenshots. Early 2006, babies.

I have also redone this site’s code switching from tables to proper XHTML 1.0/CSS so future redesigns should be made much easier. Mad props to Manc and various Shackers for helping out with my layout ineptitude.

The Browser and the Damage Done

Happy New Year’s. It’s a celebration, bitches.

One of the great things about consistently keeping personal document backups is finding web design projects of yesteryear. Even now my illustration skills are absolutely brutal so I rely on other’s peoples hard work instead (see: this site’s layout). However, imagine me with a few less years experience. Now that we have that in mind, let’s continue with examples.

• SacrificeDM circa 1999 [846 KB]
  Go green. The logo represented my then fascination with the text rendering app Xara3D. Note my mad pixel-art skills for the grey borders without any anti-aliasing whatsoever. When keeping it real goes wrong, no? Instead of <hr> I use a dotted line again made with Xara3D along with a sidebar of lame facts and standard “fuck you for not having the proper browser” message. I like how the bottom right of the page is completely empty leaving the last few map boxes misaligned with the screen. The colour scheme makes me dry heave.
• SacrificeDM circa 2000 [421 KB]
  This is where I enter an Ola Björling phase by going back to the bare basics of a black background with plaintext and an image. The big text at the top of the page also known as a “logo” is somewhat bearable in this redesign. Bonus marks for the pixelated, pseudo-beveled screenshots. Hey, at least you don’t have to press ctrl+a to read the content.
• Doomworld circa 2000 [526 KB]
  Ah, the famous display of unreadable text and a visibly jarring juxtaposing of objects. What the fuck is with that top menu? Srsly. I’m quite sure that I did all the shadowing pixel by pixel in Paint Shop Pro and I’m glad to see my work bring on the comedy. Note the pushed in “News” button that seems to be pushed into an aqua surface, yet the background is gray. The geometrically fucked curves and discovery of PSP’s noise filter completes the disgusting visage. The only good thing I can pull out of this is the logo’s font which I will now have to look up.
• SlaughterDM circa 1999 [239 KB]
  Here’s more use of the noise filter for every graphic and now the content boxes are misaligned in modern browsers because my code was a hack (“text-align: center” is not supposed to align <div> or <table>!). Why is there a download page when it’s only one link? Why not have that link on the front page? Also, what is SlaughterPM? Pre-menstrual? The logo could work if the typography wasn’t so borked. This is pretty much a demonstration that I found out how to change an images’ src attribute using JavaScript. I believe I actually changed the web site’s code after 2000 to use CSS. Hurrah!
• Alkali circa 2003 [744 KB]
  I think this one is repsectable simply because the content is so simple that you can’t really fail. Yet I somehow did since the page covers 100% of the width so in 1280×1024 mode, the lines in the news updates would be so wide that people would fall asleep trying to read a post (note: again, work on your metaphors). This design along with the others also seem to indicate that I don’t think about using pastel colours (wouldn’t they look fabulous!?). This was made during my tables hack-styled with CSS phase. I think those two updates are also mis-dated as Canada’s junior team won World’s in January of 2005. The green is still fugly.

I can now pray to albino, black baby Jesus that The Wayback Machine didn’t archive the full design for my old Doomnation web site that was _all_ brown or my ml.org site (pre-frad.org, bitches) that had blue (0, 0, 255) and red (255, 0, 0) pixel-by-pixel created logos and layout markers. It was a site to behold. Cornholed.

This fascination with my own personal destructions and design come full circle in my present activities redoing the AG @ Doomworld and Crucified Dreams web sites using pure XHTML/CSS. Once I got over the hump of not thinking in the mindset of every bit of content of tables, I started getting use to the fact that I fucking hate CSS and the inconsistencies with web browsers. I have received much help from verbatim from The Shack and Manc when it comes to getting the layouts I want, but most of my own experiments have been complete failures due to misunderstandings of [inline|block] for elements. I have had The Zen of CSS Design eBook downloaded for months but have been too lazy to get around to reading it. I also have about 100 URLs bookmarked on web design, standards, and layout how-tos.

Think I should spend time more wisely by looking for a job? Forgetaboutit.

• Dangerous Questions
• Layout Reservoir
• Content With Style
• Top 20 Web Design Tips of 2005
• Poor baby seals.

Not all Rio funk tracks are about violence; many are about sex. Out in Acari, on the outskirts of Rio, Valeska, the bleached-blonde lead singer of Gaiola das Popozudas—The Birdcage of Big-butted Babes—is teasing the crowd with their hit “Se Marcar”: “If you check me out, I’ll make out with you,” she sings. Behind her, three girls in skintight outfits grind out a dance routine. Halfway through their 20-minute set, Valeska invites a member of the audience onstage. She and each of the dancers take turns rubbing their bodies against him. “Show us your butt,” she shouts, and he bends over. Suddenly, a dwarf dressed as Trinity from The Matrix and holding a giant inflatable penis jumps out of the crowd onto the stage.

A Dish Best Served Cold

Jon needs a comment system so I can personally note that the White Stripes are homosexual. Really, what do people see in them? The drummer can’t stay in time (it’s endearing, charming, lo-fi, down-to-earth, DIY, indie, STFU), the guitarist is only adequate (didn’t some fuckface major music magazine put him in the top 100 guitarists of all time?), and their claim to fame is one bassline with an annoying kaleidoscope music clip. They’re also from Detroit and ugly. Fade, my pretties, fade.

Since most of my day was wasted getting my PC back up, gaming productivity wasn’t too high. I have three more levels to skim through to correct the item placement and balancing and after that I believe I’m sending an alpha test out to the Crudreams project team. My father’s first cousin is getting married this weekend so there’s people staying at my house taking away my bed and limiting computer/Internet access, so that prolongs my plan to rid of this bloody game. Next week, I’m probably headed to Halifax to look for work since sitting on my ass at my parent’s place hasn’t amounted to much of anything during the past four months.

What’s with all the ads and bloated interface with the latest MSN Messenger? I was waiting for Microsoft to start selling me penis pumps, viagra, and mail-order Russian brides. They’ll smother me with their firebush commie snatches. Reinstalling Trillian… now.

Run, DOS, Run

G:\games\doom2\utils> deutex -usedtex g:\games\doom2\cd\crudream.wad | sort > g:\games\doom2\cd\usedtex.txt

Result:

DeuTex V3.6 Copyright (c)1994 Olivier Montanuy (montanuy@dmi.ens.fr)

DeuTex -help will give you the available commands

Doom directory is g:\games\doom2
listing texture used in the levels of g:\games\doom2\cd\crudream.wad
Reading WAD g:\games\doom2\cd\crudream.wad: (1405 entries)

Checking LEVEL MAP01
Checking LEVEL MAP02
Checking LEVEL MAP03
Checking LEVEL MAP05
Checking LEVEL MAP06

Error: *** Out of memory (Needed 388110 bytes) ***

I have 384mb RAM, dude. Stop the hate.

Kukuka-fuku

Executable: Risen3D ßV1.7.00 Oct 13 2005
OS: Windows XP 5.1.2600
Z_Init: 32.0 Mb allocated for zone.
Game path: G:\games\doom2\risen3d\
EDIT MODE: OFF
UDIR: none set
SAVE PATH: G:\games\doom2\risen3d\savegame\
Building gl nodes for g:\games\doom2\cd\crudream.wad
NODES BUILD: error Input/output error
Shutting down: A B C D E F G H I N Complete

Boom-compatible, huh? Thanks for the useful error message too. N stands for-

Doom 2-Sided Linedefs Debacle

Pro tip #1: In order to make ZDoomGL run like molasses, put as many 2-sided lines in a scene as possible. As a case study, I shall take a map for the much delayed Crucified Dreams and show you screenshots of my findings. See below for visual evidence. Click the thumbnails to enlarge the scene.

As we can see, transparent areas of textures show white pixels instead of the scene behind the 2-sided line. There are noticeable white lines on the floor surface at the edge of polygon sectors. Oh and have I mentioned that this runs at less than 5fps on my machine? Most of my keyboard/mouse input was being ignored at the time too. It took pressing the Print Screen button 10 times until I finally got a screenshot taken.

Pro tip #2: Don’t run Crucified Dreams with ZDoomGL when it comes out.

Corollary: Timmie needs to stop working for the Evil Empire and fix the bloody ZDoomGL code!

Edit: GZDoom runs the scene properly and Timmie says the next version of ZDoomGL will be based off that code, so problem resolved! Now to try Risen3d…

• Everything Needs Standards
• Ho Ho Uwe
• They’re Like Me
• That’s sure to put bigots in their place. Yeah.
• The Deacon Effect

Jägermörder 02: Terra Nova Released

A month late, I’ve finally released Jägermörder 02: Terra Nova for Doom II. It’s BOOM-compatible but the SIDEDEF and SEGS lumps go over the engine’s limit of 2¹⁵ so the only port that will run the map at the moment is ZDOOM.

Jägermörder 02 Update

No Crucified Dreams yet which can be blamed on Jon Rimmer and Michal Mesko. Go harass them and don’t forget to insult their mother.

Jägermörder 02: Terra Nova is well underway, with the layout about 90% complete. I was aiming to make it Boom-compatible, just as the first in the series, but currently the sidedef count is 30,282, rapidly approaching the Doom engine’s limit of 32,768. Even with SEGS, I doubt it will even run with Boom after I add the final area. I only have 384MB of RAM on the machine I’m working with causing Doom Builder to swap like madness, especially when I’m in 3D mode. It isn’t too fun to wait 10 seconds for a texture change to complete.

The style of the level is the same as Jägermörder 01: Chemical Lab, except I will fix a couple complaints about that map in its sequel. First off, the map isn’t short, it’s huge. Almost Xbox, even. Secondly, the map won’t be easy but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go all Hell Revealed on you. I know some players will be turned off by the two introductory fights that force you into a small area with plenty of crossfire. Lastly, the linear aspect of the layout’s design isn’t as much of a problem. The first 33% of the layout is linear but after that there are multiple paths to accomplish goals and multiple steps to reach goals.

As is the theme in my Doom career, this level was started long ago; the summer of 1999, I believe. It has ended up being a combination of a bunch of different maps I started but never completed, including: Mordeth: Episode 2, Jägermörder 05, a Quake-style wind pipe effects demo (you get vertically sucked up, then spit out the other end), SMMU/Eternity start map, an E1-style DM map for Crucified Dreams, an Ultimate Doom map I started in 1998 and areas from my remix of Lee Szymanski’s Crucified Dreams contribution. Oddly, the theme and architecture are still consistent. Sprinkled throughout are subtle homages to some of my favourite mappers which you historians should be able to easily spot.

I’m not going to claim it’s my best work yet since there are a few too many tight corridors and I didn’t experiment with tenebrism enough as the whole layout is rather well-lit. I guess I’ll delay that type of work to Jägermörder 03, which has a huge layout that’s 66% complete. 04 has also been started.

Crucified Dreams will also have a deathmatch version of Jägermörder 01 with a modified layout more conducive to multiplayer. They’re all just words, aren’t they?

Doom Mapping Update

Hello folks. I guess I can make an update despite not releasing anything Doom-related in months. While you look at my wadography (I’m coining this term to refer to an author’s list of Doom works), you’ll notice I have very little work in the public’s hands. This is tiresome since I’ve been working for years on levels which for one reason or another I haven’t released. I have seven unfinished single player levels, each in the range of 10,000 to 25,000 sidedefs. These maps include two sequels to the Jägermörder series (Boom) and two ZDoom maps that I think will be one of the first serious explorations into the capabilities of slopes within the Doom engine. One annoyance pertaining to these matters is the stretched look of steep slopes, but I’ll make due.

I suppose to next topic of discussion is the much maligned (wait, I mean forgotten) Crucified Dreams. Yes, it is still being worked on. It was started in 1998 but think of it this way: when I picked up the project from Covaro in March 2000, most of the maps in the project either sucked (Hi Pixel!) or were Gothic Deathmatches 2 rejects. I’ve cut out a fair amount of material and the rest has been heavily reworked. From there I also finished a bunch of levels from scratch. Along with this, I took the texture resources which were mostly gothictx.wad, added SlaughterDM resources and some textures of my own. This led to me retexturing many levels and reworking layouts and redetailing… I’ve pretty much gone through each level four times detailing. Some of the geometric detail is approaching being obscene but I think it’s was all worth it. While Gothic DM2 pushed the limits of doom2.exe, I’m trying to push the visual limits of Doom2 within a 2.5D space without slopes… although I’ve also added some slopes composed fully of 1 pixel wide sectors, but it looks aesthetically pleasing since I made sure to align textures and flats to avoid repeating pixels. You read all this thinking it’s Gothic99 MAP01 all over again, but it’s far from that. Many of the areas are modest, kept clean and simple… for the most part. In fact, only one level is above 1MB… actually it’s above 2MB and will reach Doom II’s limit of 32,768 sidedefs. I think it will be the largest deathmatch-only Doom level ever made so I can add myself to the annals of the Doom community as the fool that put the stupidest amount of hours into editing a twelve year old game. What is the largest Doom deathmatch level anyway?

Other distractions taking up my time include writing and editing Doom Wiki articles, mostly in the realm of authors and wads. I want to fill in the info on pieces relating to the GothicDM team since they were so influential on myself and the Doom community in general. Yeah, go ahead, start whining about gameplay now. Forget the fact that nothing of worth ever has shown up in Doomworld’s /newstuff reviews in months.

Sacrifice Skull Tag Capture the Flag

There’s a CTF version of SacrificeDM’s MAP04 in the latest Skull Tag as D2CTF8: “Ghastly Abode”. Otherwise, nothing is new except that I’m slowly finishing up the last maps for Crucified Dreams.

Lamentations

Hello kids. I’ve released Lamentations, a new 6 level add-on for The Darkening. It’s fresh and in your face (and deathmatch-only so nobody will ever play it). There’s also a new version of SurgeDM II available which fixes some visual errors in a couple maps. I haven’t told Nick Baker about this version, but he’s British so I’ll release it to spite his people that has been raping and pillaging my lineage for centuries.