So despite being mostly a peaceful and sensitive guy, I'm a constant DOOM player. Not a really great DOOM player; I'm not one of those guys who do Thy Flesh Consumed in Nightmare mode with their eyes shut. It's just kinda fun, and for some reason relaxing. Lately, I've been fiddling around with DOOM authoring.
Here you can find my first distributed hand-built level "Nick Doom -- Secret Agent", a cute little pallete PWAD, SLIGE (the automatic level-creator for DOOM and DOOM II), and Pamplona: the Running of the Bulls, a level that I made starting from a level that SLIGE built. My daughter Mayanne also has a page with some of her favorite screenshots here. Feedback on any or all of this is always welcome.
Awhile back I bought one of these "eight zillion new levels and mondo tools for DOOM!" CD's for $9.95 down at Mr. CD City, and forgot about it. The other day I got it out and played with it, and found that one thing it had was a bunch of tools to let you create your own levels. I'd always known this was possible, but now I had the chisel right at hand! In fact it took me awhile to find a set of tools from the CD that would actually work on my machine, but I did, and after a bit over a month of sleepless nights and dreams of texture-alignment, I had my level finished.
Here's the obligatory screen-shot:
and here's the text file describing it and here's the thing itself.
(After four months of beta-testing that found three little bugs, I finally got up the nerve to call it done and put it up on cdrom.com. So it's now also available here and here. How exciting! Although the beta is over, any and all feedback is still more than welcome...)
Here's an odd little PWAD that can be used with any level at all, with DOOM or DOOM2, to give you a different DOOMing experience. A whole new level of challenge on some maps!
Screen-shot:
To use it, just get it and unZIP it and put it in the DOOM (or DOOM2) directory, and do "doom -file bw.wad" (or "doom2 -file bw.wad"). May also be used with other PWADs in the obvious way.
OK, so I'm an obsessive hacker. Having written one DOOM level myself, the next obvious step was to write a program to generate them automatically. There are a couple such programs on cdrom.com, but neither really had the features I wanted (and neither came with source!), so I started my own. It's called SLIGE. The current version is available here, as well as two sample levels generated by it (a pretty old version of it!).
The samples: you can get a description of "A Tight Place" (for DOOM), a description of "Deadly Haven" (for DOOM II), and of course you can get the WADs themselves. Both are relatively quick one-level PWADs. Here's a screen-shot from Tight Place, 'cause ya hafta have screen shots:
The generator: SLIGE is a Win32 (i.e. Windows 95 or NT) program that produces brand-new levels for DOOM or DOOM II. If you're tired of the levels and PWADs that you have, you can use SLIGE to generate dozens or hundreds or thousands more. Some of them will probably be pretty good, too (he said modestly).
You can get the documentation, the program to run, and even the source code. (You'll also need a node-builder, like BSP, to use the levels that it makes, and of course if you want to play with the source you'll need a C compiler!)
I would be very interested in any feedback anyone has; post to r.g.c.d.e, or send me a note. (Another, somewhat "edgier", SLIGE page can be found here.)
This is a PWAD with various interesting features: it runs under both DOOM and DOOM 2, I built it from what was originally a SLIGE-generated level (see the TXT file for details), and it's my first attempt to put computer-generated music into a DOOM level. Came out pretty well, if I do say so myself!
Here's the text file, and the level itself. I'll probably send it to cdrom.com eventually; I wonder if they'll put it in both the DOOM and DOOM II trees?
As the text file says, this isn't a game where you survive by just standing there and blasting away. Here's evidence of that, heh heh:
If you try out PAMPLONA, do let me know what you think of it! Note that it isn't really a typical SLIGE level, so if you're curious about SLIGE, don't just get pamplona.wad and assume that it's a representative sample; get SLIGE itself and try it out...