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Doom Builder

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85 pointsecliptik25 comments

Doom’s ‘internet hub’: https://www.doomworld.com/

For any non-experts intrigued about the current doom scene, Decino below has excellent play-throughs and videos explaining how Doom works at the code level:

Decino: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8V9aiz50m6NVn0ix5v8RQ

- and some more play-throughs from an engaging Canadian chap:

SoBad: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5aIjCUK6VWTbeOJu59RCdQ

I can thoroughly second that recommendation for Decino's playthroughs. I don't think I'd personally enjoy playing through things like Going Down[0] or Eviternity but I really enjoyed watching him play through them while I was cooking dinner or half-working :)

His "analysis" videos are also excellent, he's really good at talking through and presenting some interesting Doom engine curiosities and quirks. They'll be interesting for many HNers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o78DzBJ4Rv8&list=PLYZp53E4M0...

[0] = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB43knQTmss&list=PLYZp53E4M0...

[1] = https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYZp53E4M0t8PqX4cVilk...

I watched a few of their playthroughs and I sometimes see things in maps that appear impossible in the original Doom engine.

I'm often wondering if those are some clever trick in the map or if the map is running on some newer variant of the Doom engine that has features not available in the original.

Sometimes they do explain it in the video, like in that one map that had a randomly chosen math question the player had to answer by pushing a button. I wish they would do that more often though.

Yeah there are definitely things that rely on a specific version of a given doom port. If you ever hear Decino (or others) talk about something in a level being specific to "GZDoom", they mean exactly this - some functionality wouldn't work in the original Doom engine, often some simple scripting

“Silent teleport” is a original Doom trick often used to good effect - Doom isn’t true 3D, but one floor ‘above’ another can be achieved by invisibly jumping between areas horizontally displaced in the underlying map.

I've never seen that in any custom Doom maps, but it was a common thing to see in Duke Nukem 3D and other Build Engine games (Blood, Ion Fury et al)

The original Doom engine does not have it, but a very popular port called Boom added many new things and one of them was a silent teleporter, as in, walk over a line and get teleported to the same position in a line of the same length somewhere else. It can be used to make many interesting effects. I used them in... I don't want to say every single one of my maps, but 90% for sure. The one caveat is that they don't render what's on the other side, so you have to recreate the geometry manually and monsters will suddenly disappear or appear.

Vertical, floor-to-ceiling portals are a bit more new. I think only the Eternity Engine and GZDoom support those. They also support portals that render the other side, monsters and everything.

Edit: Oh, I forgot that you can get portal-like behavior in the Vanilla engine by hacking the BSP tree used for rendering, see https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Linguortal and also here for a more visual demonstration: https://www.doomworld.com/vb/thread/74354

Wow I had no idea - every day's a school day! Thanks for sending those links over, the Doom engine continues to surprise me :D

Yeah but like the GP said, the other commenter was confusing Doom with Build. What they described wasn’t a feature in the original Doom engine however it was a common trick used in original titles on the Build engine.

If I recall correctly, the only way Doom (the game) achieved dissecting planes was to have stepping stones.

Decino is amazingly prolific. I'm not sure I know of another creator that has the depth and breadth into a specific category of gameplay as him. Over the pandemic there were some creators that started going deep into playing various Super Mario spins, but Decino is almost on anther level. He has been churning out Doom play throughs regularly for the last 3 years, and he really goes into the theory and code of how Doom works in his yellow background videos. Very impressive YouTube channel.

Hasn't been updated in over a decade. Seems there's an active fork though https://github.com/jewalky/UltimateDoomBuilder

Came here to say this, yeah.

UDB supports a lot of the fancy new features from ports, like the Eternity Engine portals, or the 3d floors GZDoom gives you.

Even if someone wanted to map for good old vanilla limits, the newer nodebuilders can both minimize things like slime trails and add effects like infinite horizons (this one is fun, it rotates the wall rendering by 180 degrees and since it's a single-sided wall, it just keeps rendering the same floor and ceiling texture forever).

I was building Doom levels in high school and founded the group that created the Final Doom. We didn’t even collaborate over the internet; we used FidoNet…

I really enjoyed creating levels. It was a blissful process of pure creativity.

dope. is it documented or even blogged anywhere?

The TeamTNT project started in 1994 if memory serves me. This is well before blogs were a thing. The FidoNet discussions are not archived anywhere (AFAIK).

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Category:Ken_Simpson_levels

TeamTNT ?

Community-built map editor for Blood: http://cruo.bloodgame.ru/xmapedit/

Blood is another classic FPS that is at least as fun as Doom. I especially enjoy the "Death Wish" mod.

Community-built map editor for Quake (if you prefer to build 3D games): https://trenchbroom.github.io/

Trenchbroom significantly cuts down the development time of mapping as it provides tools to simplify the creation of say arches and other complex geometries.

I constantly playing GZDoom with shareware levels.

Anyone wishing to make some night cooperative play?

Take a look in Doomseeker. I always see many servers running cooperative or survival games

Thank you! I didn't know about that!

It's been along time since it built doom levels. At the time I used WadAuthor.

Made one of the first game-in-doom wads with it: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/sna...

> Editor(s) used: WadAuthor, Paint Shop Pro 6, WinTex

I used to love PSP. It perfectly filled the void between Photoshop and MSPaint. Everything else I used, either at the time or since, hasn't been a patch on PSP. That's not to say there haven't been other good tools but PSP was so damn easy to get excellent results from.

WadAuthor was great at the time. It was the first editor that really clicked with me as it had a simple "just draw/make sectors" UI. I remember the other popular editors at the time like DEU were more like janky CAD software and very difficult to use.

its a super user friendly tool. its the second version of a much older mapping tool.

>Despite the age of this game, it is still very popular and the most well known first person shooter.

not really

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