After 6 months of tweaking a modern HD texture pack for Quake, I hit a wall where every stone brick looked too clean. Last Tuesday I swapped it out for an original 1996 WAD with the chunky 256-color palette and honestly, the fog in E1M2 finally feels like fog again. I kept the old alpha testing save file and the frame rate jumped from 90 to 144 on my old rig too. It was a hard choice because the HD pack had better lighting, but the mood won out. Has anyone else gone back to vanilla assets after pouring hours into a fidelity mod?
Last month I had my PC hooked up in my garage while I was sanding floors in there, and a storm rolled in. Lightning hit a transformer down the street, power flickered, and my external drive with 60 plus hours of custom Quake maps just died. I mean, I know I should have backed up to the cloud, but now I have to redo my favorite arena mod from scratch. Has anyone else lost work to a power surge and found a decent recovery program that actually works?
I spent about 3 weeks on this big Doom 2 map for a community project, all dark corridors and moody shadows. Someone in the playtest thread said 'dude, I literally cannot see the imps until they are biting my face, this is not scary it's just annoying.' That hit different because I thought dark meant tense, but they were right. I went back and added subtle glow strips and flashlight-style light cones near item pickups, nothing crazy. Turns out you can keep the horror vibe while still letting players actually read the room. Now I test every map on a crappy 2004 monitor with brightness at half just to be safe. Has anyone else had a tester point out something obvious that you completely missed for weeks?
I saw this bundle on a shady site last month for Quake mods, looked like it had like 200 custom levels and cool screenshots. Paid 40 bucks thinking I was getting a treasure trove, turned out every single file was just ripped from free modding forums. Half of them wouldn't even run without missing textures, and the ones that worked were ones I already had downloaded for free in 2019. Took me a whole Saturday to sort through the junk folder and delete it all. I get that people want to make a buck, but selling pirated content to a community that thrives on sharing is just low. Has anyone else gotten burned by one of these 'ultimate collection' packs for old games, or found a legit paid mod worth the money?
I mean, I thought my old CDs were fine for 15 years, but when I finally dug them out last month that drive was the only way I could read any of them, and now I'm wondering if anyone else has had to burn their custom WADs to newer discs just to keep them alive?
Stopped by this arcade off 6th Street and they had a kiosk running 30 custom WADs from 1994 to 1998, and the physics glitches in one of them made me rethink how map editors handle doors, has anyone else ever studied old WAD quirks up close like that?
I kept fighting with sector brightness in my Doom 2 mod, shadows looked flat no matter what I set the light levels to. Turned out the issue was my custom wall texture had a bright top edge that killed the contrast. Darkened that 4 pixel strip in Slade and suddenly the whole map read like it had depth. Anybody else ever have a single texture detail messing up their whole lighting mood?
I was 3 weeks into building this big Heretic-style hub map in Doom Builder and the file just gave out on me. I was sitting in my basement in Akron, testing a teleporter trigger for maybe the 20th time, and suddenly the textures went all garbled. Tried to save and it locked up, then the whole file wouldn't open anymore. I lost almost everything because I kept relying on the little autosave thing and never made my own copies. Now I copy the wad onto a flash drive at the end of every single mapping session, even if I only changed one monster spawn. I know most people say the built-in backup is fine, but I don't trust it after that. Anyone else had a mod die on them right before a big release?
I spent two weekends in Denver trying to speedrun through it, and the third map forced me to redo my whole keybinding setup because my jump and shoot fingers kept fighting each other, so what key layouts do the rest of you use for old shooters?
Had a custom Doom mod almost done. New levels, custom textures, the whole thing. Then my hard drive started clicking. Tried to recover the save. Nope. All gone. 40 hours of work down the drain. Had to start from scratch on Thursday. Has anyone else had a project just vanish like that?
Old thread from '04 said to scan crumpled grocery bags for rust textures. Tried it this weekend and it actually gives that perfect gritty metal look, way better than any filter I found. Made my whole E1M2 replacement pop. Anyone else got weird real-world texture sources that worked?
I threw together a small map for Ultimate Doom over a weekend just messing with slime pits and dark corridors. I put it on the idgames archive and forgot about it for like two months. Logged in yesterday to see the counter at 1004 downloads and I couldn't believe people actually played my janky level. Has anyone else had a mod or map blow up way more than you expected?
Made me realize how many people just see old games as outdated junk instead of a sandbox for creativity. Anyone else feel like we're a dying breed of tinkerers?
Was messing around in my basement last Saturday, running some old Quake maps through a conversion tool I found on GitHub. Got about 30% through the process and the whole system locked up solid. Had to hard reboot and lost three hours of texture alignment work I'd done beforehand. Has anyone else had issues with those map converters just tanking your machine?
I spent years thinking Brutal Doom was just a gore gimmick until my buddy forced me to try the latest version and the weapon feedback and enemy AI changes convinced me those devs actually put in real work, have any of you had a mod you judged too fast that turned out to be legit?
I was building a custom Quake map last Tuesday and the skybox just showed up as solid black no matter what I tried. Turned out I forgot to include a proper sky texture in the WAD file after I swapped out some assets.
Spent 3 hours swapping load orders and turning off scripts one by one until I found out the rocket trail effects from both mods were fighting each other, has anyone else run into weird conflicts mixing gameplay overhauls?
Spent three straight evenings debugging a custom monster mod that kept crashing the game. Turned out the sprite offsets in the DECORATE file were all wrong - one number off by 32 pixels made that cyberdemon teleport into a wall every time. Finally fixed it after finding a random forum post from 2016 that explained the exact fix. Anyone else ever waste hours because of one tiny number in a text file?
I went with Project Brutality because the extra weapon mods felt more interesting, but now I'm wondering if the performance hit on my old PC was worth it - has anyone else had trouble running it on a system from 2012?
Went to a small modder gathering at a coffee shop off South Congress last spring. Bunch of us were showing off our custom Quake maps on laptops. This one guy, Tom, pulled up his map and the light beams from the windows actually looked like real sunlight hitting the floor. My maps always looked flat and washed out. He showed me his trick: he was using negative light entities behind walls to fake ambient occlusion. Blew my mind. I had been relying on just placing random light sources for years. Spent the next weekend redoing a whole level from scratch and it looked 10 times better. Anyone else got a hack like that for old engine lighting?
Every single talk was just showing off reshade presets and texture packs for Doom, nobody talked about actual code tweaks or engine hacks. I counted 4 panels and 3 of them were basically just "look how pretty my game looks now." Anyone else feel like the community is losing sight of the technical side of modding?
I spent years thinking mods just broke the feel of classic games. Then my buddy forced me to try Brutal Doom on his rig last month. The way the weapons kick and the gibs fly actually made the game feel fresh again. Anyone else have a mod that completely changed how you see an old game?
I used to just slap on the biggest weapon packs and gore mods for Doom back in 2018, thinking more explosions meant more fun. But after a few dozen hours blasting through maps with all that chaos, I realized I was just running through levels without actually looking at them. Last month I tried playing the original Doom 2 with just a simple lighting mod and the original weapon sprites, and it completely changed how I play. The slower, more careful movement makes you actually notice the map design and monster placement that the devs intended. Idk, maybe it's just me but the over the top mods feel like they turn the game into a brainless arcade shooter instead of the tense survival thing it was originally. Has anyone else gone back to vanilla style after modding everything to hell at first?