DescentBB

Hello everyone!
I finally released the level set I've been working on the past year or so. There's only 10 levels, but they are expansive and complex. Lot's to explore and secrets to find. It's designed to be challenging, you may take deaths here or there, but it's definitely not unfair. Download on DMD!

http://www.enspiar.com/dmdb/viewMission.php?id=1810

This is my first attempt at going full "HOG." There was a lot of trial and error, online tutorials are pretty limited, haha. I'm pretty proud of the result though. The hardest part is balancing. Since I made all these levels, I know all the tricks, haha. If I make more in the future I'll try to learn the lighting engine better. Feedback is welcome! I'll update if there's anything major. Probably not as well crafted as some of the really polished campaigns on DMD, but they're pretty well refined. Happy holidays everyone, and I hope you have fun with it!

Played through the first couple levels and I very much like the way they play-- you certainly seem to have a knack for the enemy placements.

I could share some tips on visual presentation if you're interested in doing something like this again, and if you want to hear what I have to say

Downloading

Alter-Fox wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 11:42 am Played through the first couple levels and I very much like the way they play-- you certainly seem to have a knack for the enemy placements.

I could share some tips on visual presentation if you're interested in doing something like this again, and if you want to hear what I have to say

Thanks! The way I see it, traps and surprises can be fun, but getting dropped into a million robots isn't fair. I really like how Vertigo blended D1 and D2 robots too so I tried to mimic that. Had to keep Drillers to a minimum though. The amount of damage they output on Ace is stupid.

Of course, all feedback is welcome! I know I could have done a lot more with secondary textures. Some of the geometry also would have come out different with what I know now, but if you have any other tips I would be happy to hear them.

As far as doing more in the future, I will be taking a break for a while. I'm sure I will keep building when I get ideas. Will work on more focused, but more numerous levels. I put a stupid number of hours into these, so you won't see more from me anytime soon, haha.

Cheers!

Alright, well, I'll try to keep it somewhat brief. No idea if I'll succeed (future me here; I definitely failed at briefness!)
Keep in mind I haven't quite finished the pack yet, so while I see you moving toward some of these ideas as the levels have gone on I don't know if you've already got there without me... so don't be mad at me if you've already figured out a few of these things. That is the sort of thing that tends to happen with good general principles

I tried to pick four things that I think would be most useful for building "good-looking" maps in this game:

First off, the thing I mention to everyone when I play their early levels, because it's by far the most common thing mappers for this game can do better: whenever you can, it's a very good idea to put doors into square alcoves, similar to what you see in all the stock levels for Descent 1 and 2. The reason is that the doors in this game are flat textures with no depth, and putting them in spots like that removes any frame of reference for that paper-thinness. It tricks the brain into perceiving the shading on the texture as something closer to actual depth. Basically, doing this as much as possible will make your doors look a whole lot better, and it also gives you convenient spaces for those border lights.
Worth mentioning too, that if you ever want to try making maps for Overload, you'll need to do this for every door, no matter what, because of the way that game's doorframes are modeled.

Secondly, for whatever reason Descent's textures don't tend to render very well when they're stretched. Most other games I've tried mapping for can handle this sort of thing much better... but not this one. :-/ It's best to always reset the textures before aligning them, in order to let them tile rather than stretch across sides. If you get seams when trying to align textures this way, it's often possible to cover them up with creative use of secondary textures. Gratings and warning stripes are especially good for doing that. And because it does sometimes make aligning textures a pain, it's a good idea to build your geometry with some of those those secondary texture placements already in mind.
When push comes to shove, it usually still looks better in this game to have a visible seam between tiling textures than to have anything stretch. Most of the "professionally" made maps that have been built for D1 and D2 haven't got any stretched textures at all.

Thirdly, because most of the textures in this game are designed to represent rock walls, it can be jarring to have too many different colours within one room or area. It's usually a good idea to pick one or two colour schemes and stick with textures using those colours through at least the majority of a map. Surprise splashes of colour work best when they're treated like surprises, and colour transitions work best when they're separated by either a door or a secondary texture. When it comes to texturing maps in this game, what you don't use is far more important than what you do, and if you can figure out how to choose what you want a map to look like and excise any textures that don't serve that look, you'll be well on your way to making levels that feel professional.

Finally, the hostage placements don't snap to "floor" automatically (because the game's engine has no way of knowing where "floor" is), whenever you place them you have to manually move them down a few units in order to not have them floating in the middle of a cube.

Umm... so there is already a fairly well-known D2 campaign that uses the filename entropy.hog: http://www.enspiar.com/dmdb/viewMission.php?id=212
Wondering if there's some tweak that could be made to the filename of this one to avoid a collision...

Yeah I had to rename the files on my download... small potatoes, though

@Alter-Fox

Thank you for the feedback! That is all really useful advice. Sorry it took so long to reply, it is just a lot to take in, haha. These are all details I will take into consideration in the future.

I like the door idea a lot, especially to add the frame lights, there were several places I ran into that problem. However, I was scrambling to cut cubes in order to finish all these levels as it was, so I doubt I can change it now. When I do start a new project, my main idea is going to be to keep things a lot more focused and concise. Smaller, but more numerous levels, so cubes will be less of an issue and I can implement proper door frames.

Stretched textures are definitely a struggle when dealing with larger or heavily warped cubes, they get this strange twist. You can repeat then rotate to the right angle, which I tried to do for the most part, some lend themselves better to this than others. (Looking at you dark blue with white lines >.>) I have seen it's possible to tie textures to the cubes as you're building, but I do all the geometry first, haha. Is there a way to pattern them in relation to eachother? Or would I be better off redoing the geometry with textures once I know how I'm going to build it? That wouldn't be too difficult. My levels are on the colorful side, I noticed that especially towards the end. I've also seen the other side though, where you have whole rooms with one texture, which makes things hard to navigate. Seems the goal is to strike a balance between distracting and fitting a theme with a defined floor. Would also be easier to do with more refined levels.

Finally, the hostage textures were something I struggled with the whole time and kinda just gave up on, lol. The sprites seem abnormally small and I never could figure out how to resize, which I have seen done in other levels. Yeah, I definitely could have positioned them like I did with the robots tho. Pretty sure it has something to do with where I set my asset folders, which I plan to compile in the future. I was missing a lot of D1 textures etc.

I do really appreciate all the insight your experience has brought, and has given me good motivation of what to improve on in future projects. Hope you enjoy the rest of the levels! :{D

Sirius wrote: ↑Tue Dec 29, 2020 1:54 pm Umm... so there is already a fairly well-known D2 campaign that uses the filename entropy.hog: http://www.enspiar.com/dmdb/viewMission.php?id=212
Wondering if there's some tweak that could be made to the filename of this one to avoid a collision...

I did not know that! My mistake, that would definitely cause problems. I guess you could keep both in separate folders, and just move in the one you want to play. Inconvenient, but probably the easiest option. I wanted to keep the title short, and there's only so many space words. zzz

You could play off entropy being disorder, which the player is ultimately seeking to prevent...

With hostages, a good rule I've found is to have them 4.5 units away from whatever they're standing on.

With textures, if I understand correctly, the editor does have an align function which might be what your looking for. In DLE it's an icon with two squares, one rotated, to the right of the quick stretch button. Be careful about when apply to all is checked though, as fun things can happen with doors. On the other hand, it is quite useful for aligning around corners. Also worth checking out is DLE's projection feature, though it's worth trying in a test map first since it's a bit quirky and likes to over/underflow alignment coordinates when you have larger distances involved.

LightWolf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 10, 2021 1:26 am You could play off entropy being disorder, which the player is ultimately seeking to prevent...

With hostages, a good rule I've found is to have them 4.5 units away from whatever they're standing on.

With textures, if I understand correctly, the editor does have an align function which might be what your looking for. In DLE it's an icon with two squares, one rotated, to the right of the quick stretch button. Be careful about when apply to all is checked though, as fun things can happen with doors. On the other hand, it is quite useful for aligning around corners. Also worth checking out is DLE's projection feature, though it's worth trying in a test map first since it's a bit quirky and likes to over/underflow alignment coordinates when you have larger distances involved.

I do have to shout out LightWolf for helping a lot along the way, answered a lot of DLE questions I had. I have seen the feature you're talking about, just didn't know what it did haha. I'll play around with a lot of the settings in the future!

Yup, playing around with buttons was how I figured out most of it too
A lot like teaching yourself a musical instrument in that way -- you have to play around with everything and understand why it's there, you can't just focus on practicing the concepts that were easy at the beginning.