Loading…
12
Appreciation post: MAP01 in vanilla Doom beats my old ZDoom setup and I finally get why
For about 6 months I was building my first real Doom wad in ZDoom with all the fancy stuff turned on, slopes, 3D floors, the works, and it ran like a dream on my machine. Then a guy from the Doomworld forum in Cincinnati asked to playtest it and his laptop choked so hard the frame rate dropped to single digits in the big room with the lava. I went back and rebuilt the whole thing in vanilla limits, just 256 visplanes and no fancy tricks, and honestly the map got better. Having the ceiling and floor heights locked meant I actually had to think about sight lines instead of hiding everything behind a slope, and the fights feel meaner and tighter now. My buddy said the vanilla version plays like a real 1994 map instead of a tech demo, and I took that as a compliment. I spent three Saturdays stripping stuff out and the final version is 1.2 MB smaller, which is dumb but satisfying. Anyone else gone back to plain vanilla mapping after getting lost in source port features, or am I just late to the party?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
craig.parker19d ago
Man, I feel this. I did the same thing after years of piling on port features and it was weirdly freeing to just work inside the old limits again. Good on you for taking the playtest note and actually rebuilding it instead of just telling the guy to upgrade.
3