Three wads containing examples of the new generation of slaughter mapping, that goes even further beyond stuff like HR, AV etc. I played them all a lot at the end of last year and they've all kind of merged together in my head.
This one is the only one so far that's been considered finished enough to upload to /idgames. It's by the same guy who did Shai'tan's Luck, although except for one map you'd hardly know it. The first dozen or so maps use the gothic textures, then he starts using the UAC Ultra textures. I don't think the whole thing is great but three stand out:
- map13, a ruined city
- map15, a pyramid fortress surrounded by a moat
- map21, a gothic castle within a red lava hell scape.
These are all enormous maps stuffed with thousands of monsters and I had so much fun running round them (although I can't play them properly, I use various handicaps)
Disclaimer: I had some hand in testing this wad during its many beta releases and so forth. I actually wrote ZDBSP extended nodes format support into rboom just so I could play map21. Also, I kind of miss the original map13, but oh well.
A similar set of maps. Some huge slaughter maps, some smaller ones, but they all have extremely high difficulty in common. The ones here that I keep replaying are maps 12 and 13. Some of the others are good but for whatever reason I didn't take to them quite so much.
Map13 is obviously inspired by the design of the final of these three wads:
Sunder has a unique architectural style driven by its author's belief that there are no really beautiful slaughter maps. It is best characterised by huge rooms and areas, really high sectors and height differences, a consistent colour theme (usually brown/red or brown/orange, although the first map is bright green, of all things) and a mass of detail that frankly can be rather repetitive.
I feel Map13 of Phmlspd and map06 of NGmvmnt1 are obviously homages to Sunder-style architecture.
To Break A Silence
rwadtools So far rwadtools pretty much only consists of programs to dump wads into text format. I spent a couple of days and eventually ended up with dumpmap able to do both the original one-object-per-line greppable format and the slightly newer can-be-read-back-into-a-wad-without-loss format in the same file with code sharing etc. I've still got about four or five other output formats that I've had going round my head for what seems like years (because it is years)
freedoom Apart from the usual collection and git-patch-ification of user-submitted maps and graphics, on a whim I wrote a patch that killed the shareware target. Hell knows if/when it will be taken, though.
rboom I rewrote a bunch of things to avoid static arrays based on the value of PATH_MAX. I would like to do this in PrBoom as well, sometime, but there's more places to update and more housekeeping to do so I haven't done it yet.
bsp dpkg recently started complaining about my bsp package not having an architecture. Since I no longer had the source for the packaging I did in 2002, I redid the whole thing. (although I could have just stuck the line "Architecture: i386" into the appropriate place in /var/lib/dpkg/status...)
1994 The "modernise 1994 maps" project on Doomworld put out an alpha. It's not as bad as I thought it was going to be (which was something like "let's get a bunch of old classics and ruin them with the horrible fashions of modern mapping")
I have a bunch of wads I should post about but I can't be bothered.
