Quake3World

I'm not sure where else I could post it where it'd get any relevant visibility, but I've been thinking of making a 32-level doom wad and I've never mapped for doom before, but always wanted to.

I'm very familiar with q3 mapping, so I get a lot of the core concepts involved, but I have some doom-specific questions:

How big can a map be?
How much of it can be on-screen at once?
Can you set timed events in a map to do things like..spawn monsters at a certain spot every 30 seconds?
Can (red blue yellow) keys be carried over from one map to another?
Is there a way to get monsters to trigger events?

Thanks

it's been a real long time since I did Doom mapping, of which I did a lot, but I'll try.

1) vertices can't be more thn ~32k units apart. or: from 0 to ~65k units.

2) a limit of 128 visplanes can be rendered at once. that is, 128 different combinations of floor/ceiling height, texture and lightlevels. Furthermore no more than 64 sprites can be rendered at once. Those over the limit will be invisible.
There's also a maximum amount of entities (items, monsters) allowed though I can't remember how many. A famous glitch in Doom2 was not picking up items in maps with Pain Elementals. Soon enough the monster will try to spawn Lost Souls but can't due to the limit and it'll just follow you around.
Useful link: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Static_limits

3) Nope. Check out the game's own maps on how to fake throttled spawning (E1M9's pentagram room for instance).

4) Nope.

5) More or less. Check out E1M8: the walls in the bossfight room will lower only when the two Barons are killed. If you're using the ZDoom engine you can use a larger array of triggers like playerbump and takesdamage (quake style buttons).

I can't help you more then to say that zDoom forums probably have a lot of these answers.

VolumetricSteve wrote:I'm not sure where else I could post it where it'd get any relevant visibility, but I've been thinking of making a 32-level doom wad and I've never mapped for doom before, but always wanted to.

I'm very familiar with q3 mapping, so I get a lot of the core concepts involved, but I have some doom-specific questions:

How big can a map be?
How much of it can be on-screen at once?
Can you set timed events in a map to do things like..spawn monsters at a certain spot every 30 seconds?
Can (red blue yellow) keys be carried over from one map to another?
Is there a way to get monsters to trigger events?

Thanks

I'm not sure if you've already found your answer but I'll give it a try:

In vanilla doom there are lots of restrictions. I don't recommend mapping for vanilla if you just started, it's really hard on limits and most people use more modern source ports.
Already with Boom (which is really old) these limits (except for the overall map size limit) are gone. Detail as much as you want.

Timed events: possible in Boom but it's really complicated. zDoom (one of the most used ports) support scripting through ACS (Action Script), and everything can be done, even more than in Quake 1 perhaps.
Note that in zDoom, slopes and 3D floors are possible.

Keys: Can't be carried over but in zDoom you can give the key for the player when the map starts, again in ACS.
ACS is a C like scripting language basically.

plus: there is GZDoom which supports openGL renderer.

But if you'd like to stick to vanilla style (without the limits) use prBoom and Boom map format. It's really common, too.

Not asked, but wanted to say: for editor, use Doom Builder 2, or GZDoom Builder, and maybe SLADE3 for textures.
There's been a huge mapping base for Doom, actually.