One year and the flaming corpses of three Doom editors later... Da Crypt!! For DOOM II NOT A DEATHMATCH LEVEL!!! (What IS it with alla these DM levs anyways?!? Deathmatch is okay for a couple of minutes, but what could possibly compare to the chill you get when it's just you. Alone. Against....them.-???) Created by: BOSCO (bosco@rspinc.com) Anyway, in creating this virtual fun-fest I had to ask myself some important questions. Mainly, "Why bother making yet another damn wad when there's billions available out there already?". The answer was twofold. One: 99.9% of all those wads REALLY SUCK!! I'm sorry, but you know it's true. And of the ones that don't suck, most are real puzzle oriented, which is okay, but not what attracted me to DOOM in the first place. I wanted a cool looking environment, a playground if you will, where I could run around and encounter cool shit and be challenged on a physical/skill/strategy level, rather than retracing friggin' steps for hours trying to find a switch or a key or where that sound is coming from. Puzzles are fine, but once you've solved it, what's the attraction for going back? I'll tell you. None. The other thing I hate are levels, however well desingned, that are SO HARD that I feel compelled to use the cheats to get through. So, THE CRYPT! While you DO need to find keys and switches, they tend to present themselves in your path. They are used as a way to guide you through the massive environment I've created, and (I think I might be the first to adhere to this philosophy) WHEN YOU HIT A SWITCH THE ACTION IT CAUSES IS ALWAYS VISIBLE FROM THE SWITCH AREA! I HATE it when I hit a switch and then have to backtrack all over the damn place trying to see what it did, or use the map!! Of course, I hate having the status bar displayed while I'm playing too. It ruins the realism. WHAT THIS IS... I have spent ages perfecting the enemy placement on this level. It is tricky to use the enemy AI to create cool "situations". Most wadsters settle for the "a big door opens and 12 hell barons, 5 arch viles and some imps come out..." usually this occurs when your back is to the wall and there's no where to run. WHAT BUNK!! Give me something I can use! -That's what THE CRYPT is all about. A concerted attempt to create a level that's fun AND challenging. THE CRYPT is about skulking and strafing and sniping and strategy! the surroundings were designed for multiple strategic methods. Use the enemies' AI against them! Use cover to defend! Find alternate routes to circle around the enemy and lure them to where YOU have the advantage! THAT'S the Crypt. Not tedious teleporter puzzles or obnoxiously placed keys and powerups. Not swarms of enemies that can only be dispersed with the BFG. In fact there IS no BFG. No annoying, tedious Cyberdemons, either. Just cool stuff, and a kick ass, well-tuned challenge that doesn't force you to use the cheats!. What more do you want? Par for this giant level without cheats and 100% across the board is 33:12 Please feel free to contact me at the above Internet address and let me know if you like or dislike my philosophies on WADmaking, and let me know which WADs you think rule. I like to argue! STUFF... for: DOOM 2 map: 01 single player: THE ONLY WAY!! cooperative: huh? deathmatch: The player starts are there....but I don't think so. difficulty levels: NO WAY!! This level was painstakingly designed to be fully playable at ultra violence. WITHOUT cheat codes. If I did well, players of any skill level will be able to enjoy this. SO BE A MAN (or woman) AND GET OVER IT!! new sounds: YES!! 100% kick ass soundage!!! (turn the music OFF!!!) new musics: naw. new graphics/sprites: YES!! You get--The cool sky tex from e1m1(what happened to the skies in D2??? Yucch!!) you get a WAY cool brown stone tex and and accompanying door, AND if you act now, you also recieve the BEST MACHINE GUN EVER and the shoulder mounted missle launcher! -Oh yeah, you also get a right handed pistol. (I guess the artists at ID are lefties or something.) known bugs: A few instances of the "sliver glitch" that I couldn't get rid of, and this weird effect involving the midbars tex. It occurs in a very dark room, you enter and to the right you can see through the midbars texture into another small room with the green nukeage floor. You will notice that the midbars tex seems to be tiling down into the floor(even though midbars isn't a tile-able tex!) but later, when the room lights up to full brightness, everything looks fine. ?!?!? WARNING... I created and playtested this WAD on a 486dx2-66 with mucho RAM. There is considerable slowdown in the last two areas of the level. I have done everything I can think of to speed it up, but only achieved marginal gains. So, if your machine is any slower than mine, you probably should pass on this WAD. Sorry. And if you somehow manage to speed it up let me know so I can update the file. Also, this file works best on ver. 1.9, on 1.666 there seem to be many more "sliver glitches". WHAT YOU GET... The file CRYPT.ZIP should include: BOSCO1.WAD = The level and all additional coolness DEUSF.EXE = The cool util that puts in the sprites CRYPT.TXT = This file (duuuhhhh) PIS.DEH = If you know how to use DEHACKED, this file will make the right handed pistol look a little better when it shoots.(takes the jerkiness out) CRYPT.BAT = This tells DEUSF and DOOM2 what to do and puts it all together for ya. Then it returns everything to normal when ya quit. No fuss, no muss INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE... Just unzip these files into your DOOM2 directory and type CRYPT. To use the optional PIS.DEH patch, you need to know how to use DEHACKED and what the ramifications are, so I won't explain it. CONSTRUCTION... Okay, It's like this... About a year ago I started with DOOMED 2.something, because I liked (and still like) Geoff Allan's interface best. Unfortunately, somewhere around the 100k mark it started to puke on my map. I tried DEU and some others at the time, but no other editor could successfully open and or save my map. So I put it away for a while. Much later I got the DOOM bug again and decided to see if DOOMED had been upgraded. It had, so I tried it again. I got to the 125k mark before it hurled. Again, I tried DEU, and this time I was able to continue construction of THE CRYPT. At least until I hit the 200k mark. Then it started screwing up some of my linedefs' sector refs and adding illegal tex names, etc. Annoyed that I had been denied when so close to completeion, I went on an Internet rampage and tried EVERY editor I could find. Only DCK could carry on my mission. Now, I don't like DCK's interface much, and it crashed a bunch of times, but it was the only one capable of letting me create this 300+k masterpiece, so until DOOMED catches up, it's the only editor I will use. Then, noticing the advanced level of slowdown I was achieving as my map grew, I applied RMB on it to optimise the REJECT and speed it up. Some people like WARM. WARM13 rendered my wad unloadable by DOOM. WARM14 could render a playable wad, but introduced MANY HOMs and medusa effects. Plus, it's "documentation" SUCKS!!! IT SUCKS!!! RMB is WAY better and easier to use. So there. Oh yeah, and I had to use BSP 1.2x from the command line, because for some reason the same code runs about 100000 times slower from within DCK! Oh! And then I used WINTEX to put it all together! YAY! blahblahblah HINTAGE... SAVE ALOT! DON'T jump into the lake right away to investigate the pillar with the blue key on it. Unless you're some kind of ultimate badass, you will regret it. USE COVER!! Enemies cannot shoot through walls! Use that to your advantage! SAVE ALOT!! Let the monsters do some of the work for you! They hate each other!! SAVE ALOT!!!! Keep moving!! And remember, the WIMPY shotgun is real good for sniping barrels at long range....heh heh. HAVE FUN! SPECIAL THANX TO: the authors of MANSION.WAD, CITDOOM2.WAD, ALIENSX.WAD and URBAN.WAD for the cool sounds that I ripped off! (in my defense though, I must admit that few of the purloined sounds were used as-was, most of them had to be cleaned up, volume increased, etc. and then I did things like add echo and slow down the speed and in many cases I spliced two or three different sounds together to create even better ones, SO THERE!!) And of course to ID for taking away all my free time and making my girlfriend hate me!! LEGAL JUNK You may NOT use this level to generate your own. But, who'd want to anyway? (that doesn't apply to the sounds or my cool textures though, use them at will, just give credit where it is due) You may not charge for these files, or include them on any compilations, etc. that require purchasement in any form without cutting me in.