Map20
- Down switch added to the upper side of the big pipe lift, in case the stealth worms are in the way.
- The lift in the small brown cave area is lengthened (and the upper catwalk widened) to lessen the chances of the worms getting stuck.
Map23
- Teleporter room stimpack is now a medikit, if we're going to allow the possibility of having to flee a combination of arbitrarily wandering necromancers and shotgunners.
Map24
- Ripsaw is now a minigun outside of hard. I believe this ripsaw had been added back when FD did not have to consider that the ripsaw is much more unreliable in vanilla against something as big as a trilobite. Given the near-complete arsenal from Map23 making this encounter extremely lopsided versus pistol start, this is probably an unduly conservative change.
- Adjusted some of the tekgreen textures so you didn't see that blue window half buried in the floor.
- Extended the ledges to let you walk all the way around the red key slime pit.
- Adjusted the lighting and markings on the door in the long corridor leading back into the main hub.
- Moved some vertices in the green rock hall to avoid unsightly unintentional fake contrasts.
- Made a bunch of switches eye height for the player.
- Realigned the big bricks in the southeast reuins.
- The room to the second switch in the southeast ruins is now marked by an analogous appearance to the first switch, missing only the gargoyle itself. Trails of armour bonuses are also added to get the player to check that area, because the pain bringer does not ever acquire line of sight without the player actually committing to going that way.
- The pads that actually let you advance have different glyphs.
- Got rid of the fake contrasts in the exit room.
- Exit room necromancers are reduced to 1 on medium and 0 on easy.
Map29
- Blue key pillar was doing damage. At first I thought it was a bug, but it turns out it was intentional. Bug found between chair and keyboard of whoever did this (almost certainly me if I recall).
A lot of visual details tend to get lost on them when you can't see them up close in vanilla (can't look down).
Also some maps targeting id actually use specific things about these offsets...
This is a mandatory damage exit that could kill someone even if they do everything else (more or less) right in beating this map. Worst case scenario, they "learn" from their "mistake", "realize" this is a "fake exit", and spend forever trying to find the "real" exit before giving up and learning much later that they'd actually found it before.
- You can pick up at least 30 health right next to the exit teleporter pad.
- The actual teleport landing itself is not a hurtfloor. It is, however, extremely narrow and right in front of an ambushing trilobite. The only way to dodge its fireball is down.
- Made the exit portal huge and fireblu and not a St. Peter's cross (which is often used elsewhere as a purely decorative thing).
- The "EXIT" map lines are now actually faintly glowing on the floor.
As an additional bonus edit: if you exit without finding that creepy area in the facility and have all those guys warp in, those un-warped guys are now all free to roam the entire area as soon as you fall off that high ledge. This means the necromancers can go into that crowd of zombies and raise them, as well as close range to attack you. Enjoy this epic battle - or panicked rush for the exit.
The skin panels have finally received the care they desperately needed.
The skull key signs now raise to reveal the entire skull.
The starting switch takes up and takes centre place in the entire pit wall.
Thanks to Berubaretto for these.
You can now simply walk into the secret cabinet, instead of precisely planning a jump that gets foiled half the time because the invisible corner of your square hitbox snags the corner.
I feel like I never want to look at a texture alignment again.
One general comment: this map could use a more consistent and clearly visible way to distinguish switch gargoyles from decorative gargoyles. I've taken care of the two most annoying and frequently encountered cases, but a much more thorough review could be done.
- Redid the central pillar in the first room. There is no way to avoid making those lion faces look like they're supposed to be switches.
- The blood stairs were (RNG-dependent) mandatory damage. The streams now only merge at the bottom.
- So was the yellow key fountain. The edge is now climbable.
- So was the rightmost big cross room switch. Switch platform embiggened.
- So was the SSG. There's now a big bottom rim on the "O".
- The switch for the door leading out of the water T is now stay-open.
- There was no apparent light source in the big hall to the west. Added skylights.
- Moved the lion heads on the yellow key pillar to the top to make it more clear they are not switches.
- The first door into the sigil sequence is opened by a switch that is next to a vista overlooking a clearly unexplored area. A right-handed player's first instinct is to look that way, not towards the door; given an identical switch immediately before this was clearly operating something out of sight, and the precedent with the red key having that remote switch+window combo, the first instinct after seeing the outside unaffected is to leave the room to find out what the switch did. Redirecting the player's attention to that previously totally blank wall requires either a sound or being hurt by a monster or both. The door is now clearly marked as an advance warning.
- "Not on map"'d a bunch of control sectors.
It was possible to grab the armour without triggering the secret. The sector has been lengthened so you must be clearly stepping into it before you can touch the armour.
E1M1
- Easy-only south shotgun now moved to climbable crates.
- The column-lowering switch now starts in the "1" position, done after what happened with line 1728 in E4M2.
E4M2
- Closes#1109 by making the bridge to the one-way blue key route raisable repeatedly (but collapsible only once). While it is raised, the bridge is also usable as a safety lift, as the normal safety lift is inaccessible if you fall in on the north side. There is now only one teleporter onto that patio/boardwalk thingy, down where the radsuit was; the only way to get back to the blue key after a successful run is to raise the bridge again, crossing which a second time will (a) undo the raising floor in the next room and (b) not cause the bridge to collapse again, thus allowing free movement back and forth without touching any hurtfloor.
- Adds some stairs out of the slime pit in between that switch and that bridge.
- That raising floor is no longer crushing and if you're caught in it you can slip out back into the main slime area. This avoids the (extremely improbable but theoretically possible) situation where you can actually get softlocked by getting caught in there but not dying from the resulting damage.
- Made the silver trim on the switch in line 2287 almost fully visible as it was already awkwardly peeking out slightly and all the obfuscation did at this point was risk it being missed.
- The slow up elevator in the northwest is now activated by a switch *inside* the car, and made both switches repeatable. The old regular-lift use line is now a second move-down line, just in case you want to get back up there after someone's gone up in multiplayer and then rocketed themselves.
- The slime pit with the bridge leading to those elevators now also has safety stairs and the bridge itself is a usable lift.
- That first chunk of pre-raised bridge leading to the exit is now a usable safety lift.
- "Not on map"'d a bunch of control sectors.
- The lines on sector 592 were a flat-bleed trick and should not have had textures.
- Line 1728 now starts in the 1 position rather than 2, because I ran three laps around this area thinking I had already hit this switch.
- The big super-bright lift en route to the yellow key is now called down by using it directly. The remote switch simply raises it to the correct position so it can be called down.
E4M9
- Closes#1110 by removing the forcefield as soon as the player jumps off the switch ledge into the slime pit.
- Added safety lift to southeast nukage pit.
- Reduced all green nukage damage to 10%.
Map05
- Numerous attempts to fix#996.
- The switch letting down the red key now also releases the trilobites, removing the need for those additional walk lines which were preventing the player from activating the switch at the usually permitted distance.
- Massive makeover to the first courtyard. The orange walls are now only on the west and the insides are tan.
- Darkened all outside areas so the distance fade does something.
- Made all TANROCK5s STONE6 instead where it should be lit up by the "sunset" implied by the new STARG walls.
- Got rid of a lot of the weird unnatural zig-zags in the river.
> The massive brutes collapse onto the ground, falling apart bit by bit. The starport is yours.
Semi-iconic stylized shot of the tripods dying on either side of the lift, the plasma room blue thing opening as a gate, revealing... something...
> You kick the corpse in anger, and it feels good. You kick it again, and a remote falls out. You press the button, and the ground gives way to reveal a teleporter.
Pan from the visibly smoking technospider corpse amidst the scorches and bullet holes to reveal a new teleporter. Animation types out "TO BE CONTINUED..."
> The ship rumbles as she wakes up; you think of Earth as she lifts off.
A serpentipede shakes its fist at the Double Impact starry sky, now covered by the smoky star-capped column of the departing rocket.
PASG HUD sprites are Blastfrog's originals with significant modifications.
DBSG HUD sprites are Fredrik's originals with not *as* significant modifications but I believe the wires are new. (Did Rei do those?)
PASG pickup sprite is my edit of the current one. (Removed the stock because the guns give a lesser sense of recoil now, and the pump animation makes way more sense if you assume the gun is not shouldered; also I didn't feel like adding a stock to the DBSG pickup for consistency.)
DBSG pickup sprite is my edit of Z86's original.
E1M1
The main goals here are to make things actually easy on easy skill, and to make the lower route actually a viable starting choice instead of a shitty gotcha (or, more charitably, an extra challenge). Tested by using only keyboard in Chocolate while trying to avoid moving and turning at the same time.
- In the courtyard room, there is now in easy a dead shotgunguy and a shotgun, right by the door.
- Removed the soulsphere in the starting corridor. Sorry, it's just too much especially given the *second* one outside, and it really doesn't help mitigate...
- In accordance with the above, removed pinky no. 244 and serpentipede 241 from easy skill. An ambush being totally surrounded by 3 serps at once is not exactly an E1M1 easy mode sort of encounter!
- The easy-only shotgun in the southern route is now moved to where those two shotgun shell pickups are above the lift, rather than requiring the trick jump.
- Pinky 214 has been moved somewhere where it's less likely to be hit by a stray bullet from below and alerted prematurely.
- One of the starting medikits has been moved to the door after the lowering pillars, swapping places with the stimpack.
- Southwestern blue key corridor had a lone pinkie on easy. Added two zombiemen instead.
- Removed easy-only shotgun from said corridor. Zombieman 88 is now on easy as well.
- Removed shotgunguy 96 from easy skill.
- Removed zombieman 176 from easy skill and added an easy-only zombieman behind the door.
- More attempts to fix#996.
Map09
- Added a couple health boosts on top of that crate that needs to be moved away, to remind the player that they might need to revisit that spot later.
- Changed the texture on the door leading into the lava pit since the new one doesn't really work with it.
E3M2
- The lava *is* the light source down there. It should be *brighter* in the confined tunnels not darker.
- Added a little catwalk to reward players who can make the (non-straferun-required) trick jump across the bridge.
Map11
- Major bugfix: softlock when entering yellow key room from the blue key branch. Added some walk lines so that wall can be opened up from below as well as by that switch above.
- The earlier lift is no longer time-sensitive but just a matter of lowering and raising.
- Similar with the lift going from the security checkpoint down into the lab area - the remote switch simply opens up the lift, which then acts more like a conventional step-lift.
E1M1
- First door switch sector needed to be 72 units high to avoid tutti-frutti effects.
- Removed fake contrasts on corner "AGM" pillar.
- Removed secret flag on that crate you can jump onto, after feedback by various people.
[Undead003's old sound from way back in 2015](c48644582c) never got used because of a typo.
This is that sound, cut off and faded to match the pain elemental's death animation duration and mixed with the hatchling attack and a slowed-down DSBAREXP.
Generally there should be nothing *necessary to finish a level* that requires any of:
- straferunning;
- extremely sensitive timing that could softlock you if you're on keyboard, lagging in multiplayer or have motor issues;
- checking only for a sound cue that something has happened;
- remembering how to distinguish two visually nearly identical areas; or
- backtracking to a previous area on the map that you had previously been given no reason to revisit.
I haven't caught all of them by any stretch of the imagination but it's a start.
Also some regular minor fixes.
E1M9
- Fixed some textures around the big blue-trimmed lift and removed an extraneous use line that triggered a faraway lift for no reason.
- The red key bridge lowerable section is now textured differently from the rest of the bridge.
E3M5
- Teleporter platform to get back up to the catwalk from the northeastern blood maze is now clearly marked as having a switch, as it is a mandatory progression rather than a secret.
E4M8
- Got rid of some fake contrasts on the noodles at the start.
- Added a radsuit for the northwest switch. While it is possible to avoid damage even without straferun, unless you've got a tic counter display and can time it to the damage interval this is basically RNG.
- The water flat on top of the lowering wall in the east was very, very noticeable. The switch is now stepped on instead of hit. (Not too sure if the secret isn't *too* obscure now...)
- Removed asymmetrical doortrak on the slime bridge on the southeastern piston switch.
- The linedefs of said slime bridge pit are flipped so a deathmatch opponent trying to grab the berserk in there is not magically immune to rocket blasts. (see #996)
- Realigned the four pistons by the gate to the starship. They also reveal moving parts when activated - not nearly as good as the crushers on the original DI, but better than nothing.
- Made the southern walls use PLAT1 to make it more obvious that those walls will lower later (with the added bonus that they match the four pistons).
- The southern light bronze area now has a strip to guide the player towards the switch in case they lose track of their direction while fighting monsters and forget to explore inside that area, as well as to better distinguish it from the southeast.
- The gate threshold to the southern light bronze area now matches that of the pre-opened southeast.
- There is now actually a threshold where you can tell where the starport ends and the ship begins.
- The two light bronze areas are a bit too similar-looking. Added a few health boosts so the player can spot/be attacked by them and know this is an unexplored area.
Map11
- The lift going down into the yellow key room requires a switch that is out of sight from the lift itself, which is not clearly marked as a lift to begin with. The only real way to realize what's going on if you don't already know about the lift is to locate the sound and immediately turn to investigate before the lift comes back up. I thought this was annoying when I first did my big overhaul of this map, but ultimately left the basic mechanism alone out of an abundance of caution; however, with the recent discussion of accessibility in the proposed changes to the documentation I'm revisiting this. That upper switch now lowers a wall to reveal the lift which is triggered by a walk line.
- The lower far switch on that same lift was actually literally *impossible* to make on keyboard and no straferun (and no vanilla wallbounce exploit), even if I change it to a regular lift instead of fast. This is completely unacceptable for something necessary to progression (rather than an obscure secret). The lower switches are now permanent repeatable floor-lowerers, while the line crossing from the lift into the lower chamber is a permanent repeatable floor-raiser, with the line crossing into the lift from above being a simple lift line.
- Retextured the stairs out of the water in the eastern branch so it's not an unreadable mess of criss-crossing grey lines.
- Realigned the new skull switch texture in the skull room.
Map19
- One of the stealth worms was stuck in a burning barrel.
- Removed monster block flag on line 2083.
- Unmerged and remerged a few identical sectors to better match the intended sound travel.
- Flagged line 281 as a monster blocker. This allows the player to always be able to make the jump onto that bottom stair without being blocked by the octaminator.
- That octaminator is now a pain bringer in easy mode. The far end of that platform path is well outside the maximum vertical autoaim range in vanilla, which means that to actually hit the octaminator without up/down aiming you'd have to be on one of the later platforms - i.e., confined to a relatively narrow area with no cover *against an opponent that has seeker missiles*. The best way to solve this is to charge towards the octaminator as fast and as soon as possible with the SSG, minigun, or ripsaw+prayer to RNGsus that you'll get a good painlock. This is not the kind of tactic the sort of person who *needs* to play on easy will think to do, or could do while also being ready to sidestep if the octaminator fires at the wrong time.
- 347 and 249 are now also monster blockers, and the worms in that slime pit have been moved to the platform just behind the combat slug since they're awakened early on and that's where you'll first encounter them anyway.
- Replaced the teleport pad in the vertical platforming sequence with a lift, to minimize disorientation and going the wrong way. (In retrospect I probably could have just made the teleport destination face the pit you came in from, but the lift worked aesthetically better anyway.)
- A good chunk of that entire platforming area has been moved 8 units to the west so that things would align with the flat grid.
- Lines 307 and 309 are now also monster blockers. The worm that would be trapped between them is now moved further down the route and marked ambush.
Map20
- Removed the useless, misleading skull switch texture on the bars at the start.
- The door leading into the blue key arena needs no blue key; the door leading out needs a blue key. Both are marked with blue-light trim. Removed the blue lights on the first one.
- The lowering wall leading to the teleporter now uses a pipe texture.
- The door leading out of the giant quadruped arena now has a bright flickering light.
- Yellow key is another case of effectively-randomly-mandatory damage. Added a path.
- Same with the lava tunnel on the red key route.
Map25
- The silver lift near the river and shack is now activated by SW1GSTON switch right on the wall at eye level, rather than counterintuitively and invisibly recessed into additional sectors.
- The painlord ambush lift is now accessible after the encounter. A small health refill has been added there for easy and medium.
This started as an attempt to think through how to make the last stretch of E4M8 look a little more like the inside of a spaceship, when it occurred to me that it's very possible to end up with a lot of monsters still alive inside what appears on the map to be the body of the spaceship - so what happens with them? How do you relax with them banging down the door the whole way home?
This describes them fleeing the ship in the immediate aftermath of hitting the exit switch.
When I first started up Map19 with music for the first time in ages I thought the MIDI had glitched somehow and the instrumentation fell back on "Acoustic Grand" the way a lot of things did when I was younger. When I checked the MIDI it still sounded like it was supposed to be something else and the composer forgot to set the instrument, or it's a *really* experimental thing that frankly doesn't really fit a game - or at least not something that is not itself an extremely experimental abstract concept level which Map19 is not.
After some experimentation tremolo strings stood out by a fairly large margin as the best option.
* levels: more minor fixes.
E1M2
- Hide all outdoor inaccessible areas and monster warp closet lines.
- Fix some texture alignments in the blue key room.
E1M3
- Untag 1-sided walk trigger line 821.
- Make the western secret dead end room look less like id E1M3. (Not touching the specific powerups that are also from id just yet.)
E1M9
- Retexture the edges of that ragged hole in the wall revealing the tekwall underneath, now that the rounded-corners STARG textures no longer work like that.
- The stairs just beyond that corridor are also redone, to avoid that perfect line of ickwall bullet holes.
Map28
- The way out of the blood pits in the huge marble skull face courtyard is now much easier to find, rather than being a de facto secret.
* levels: minor fixes.
Map11
Replaced that fake door near the red skull with a drop tunnel.
Map12
A few random texture fixes, especially around the south end of sector 147.
