[Doom] SAMPRAS.WAD - E3M1 UV Maxdemo

Pwad: Sampras Author: Paul Ramster Date: 4th July 1994 Map: e3m1 Category: UV Maxdemo Executable: Doom.exe Time: 3:44 First off yes, this is a Dos capture, as I wanted to show off some of the bugs in this level. You can see the first at 0:03, and probably most clearly at 0:53 - the doors have a weird multicoloured banding covering part of them. This is known as the tutti-frutti effect, and it's a defect of the original engine as opposed to the level. In Doom, textures that tile vertically do so only at heights mod 128, and the BIGDOOR texture at 0:53 is only 96 units high. So the remaining 32 units (which are actually at the bottom given how the texture is pegged) get overwritten with whatever old junk happens to be at that memory address. It actually doesn't look too bad really - there's just a couple of weird lines and patches out of alignment. Next bug is a bit bigger - at 1:07, after picking up the yellow key I run into the wall - and the game doesn't stop me! Again it's not really the level's fault. The wall is one continuous linedef, it's one-sided, and marked as impassable. This is more the fault of the early tools used to build Doom levels, probably a crappy nodes builder. That wall at the yellow key isn't perfectly aligned with the grid, it actually slopes outward slightly. Which probably confused the nodes builder and it left a neat little gap for people to run into. It's easy to get into and out of, so I take a quick detour to show how the original engine renders a level from "outside". And given how perfectly this short gap aligns with the placement of the yellow key I have to think the level author knew about the problem and purposefully put the key there. Apart from these problems, it's not a bad level. The main issue is that the author designed this huge outdoor area, and then couldn't think of anything more interesting to put in it than some dead trees and a jagged cliff full of imps. Which is very tedious to clear out. The central quadrangle keeps the level tight and gameplay focused. But I really don't get how spectres are supposed to resemble Pete Sampras... Download levelset from idgames here: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/inde... Video captured from original executable with Dosbox 0.72