Area Nine: A Mutiny mapset (Development thread/ DM Maps)

Very cool set of maps. I'm excited to see what comes of this! This makes me want to map for mutiny again.

I played it in prboom-plus complevel 2, and it crashed at the start. with a texture related error. The added textures need to be contained within the PP_START and PP_END lumps. If you've been testing in a ZDoom based port, it tends to let those kinds of errors slide. All I did was move the new textures there and the maps worked fine after that.

MAP08

Damn this music slaps! This city looks great and the advertising is super cool. The Capstone ad made me laugh. Nice wide open areas but there are a few dead ends. Getting caught in one of these is pretty much certain death, so these spaces are guaranteed to be totally ignored by players once they find that out.

One thing I felt was kinda lacking was height variation. This map is pretty much totally flat. It's understandable since roads don't look good as stairs, but it would be nice if the buildings had fire escapes so I could go in a few of them and maybe dive out of a window to spook players lol

The thing props like the lamp posts and big tech pillars were a little annoying. I bumped into them quite a few times. I'd probably recommend putting them in little alcoves so I can see them but out of the way of the play area.

MAP09

Great music choice again this is really cool!
Another great looking level with great attention to detail and texture alignment. Looks very nice!

The map is a little too dark in places -- you want nearly full bright lighting (176 or more) everywhere in dm except maybe in small shadowcasted parts. Full rooms should be well lit otherwise. Plasma gun area and green tech area really ought to be brightened up for sure.

in some ways i felt like the map resembled a race track, which is good, but i found myself colliding with map geomoetry and going off road a lot. I fell down in a lot of places with no clear way to get back up to where I was, There is a way, but if I'm fighting with someone, I'm kind of a sitting duck if I accidentally fall, which happens pretty often. This can end fights pretty abruptly and unsatisfactorily if the other player who didn't fall doesn't drop in to chase me down.

there's a lot of pillars and heights that I feel are intended to be used as cover, but the map doesn't seem to have any particular main fighting area, which will likely slow the game down a lot, since players won't be able to naturally fall into any particular area to find each other. They just have to run around the map to hunt each other down and likely meet in a bad hallway.

There's an invulnerability sphere in this map -- I didn't spend much time trying to figure out how to get it, but if it is accessible, a player that is unkillable for a full 30 seconds is guaranteed to win any deathmatch round

The corridor-heavy design made it very difficult for me to map this out in my head. I just kept zooming in and out of rooms with little foresight about the specific room I would end up in. This layout is not very easy to pick up and learn. I feel like I need some openings to see what's happening on most of this map so I can really feel it out.

MAP10

Great music again! Did I mention you pick great music? This is a MOOD. I never heard these tracks before. Can I use you to be music director for a future doomer boards project? Goddamn!

This map is pretty cool. The windows to look outside in the cloudy void give off a grand sense of scale.

lots of height transition, smooth layout I could glide through it without much effort. I like this map the most overall.

I especially like the windows to see different parts of the map. I imagined being able to see in my peripherie some dudes fighting in another part of the map that I need to run over to. but because they are small, you really can't use them for any advantage without going right up to them and stopping to look. It's a very cool idea, but I can't really do that while cruising through the map naturally.

I dont know if this applies in modern source ports, but impassable lines (around the green armor room windows) are sticky when they're used on angled lines. I'd recommend making them passable again and adjusting the height value of the bottom half of the windows to be 25 units above the surrounding floor. That's the lowest height they can be without the player stepping over it. Maybe put impassable lines on the outside part of the window so players can't get rocket jumped out.

The switches that lower the powerups are pretty far from the reward. It feels like if anyone were to press it they would just be handing it over to the other players.

This map is better than the previous one, but still uses corridors a bit more than I would hope for.

Here's a picture of the overhead view of this map where I kinda mapped out in yellow what looks to me like the main clash areas (i think), and then marked the other paths in red. There's a lot of weaving threads of paths around the map while the largest rooms are generally pretty small and offer a meager amount of options for the player to move around in.

The reason corridors are bad for deathmatch is that if players see each other in there, they're both kinda trapped. The narrow path kinda frames the shot in the player's crosshair making aiming pretty easy, and the walls close the players in so they can't dodge or move unpredictably in order to escape in time if they need to, so the combat becomes a question of who reacts at the draw better with little room for innovation. It's not a very fun way to die.

Better deathmatch maps have really wide spaces to increase visibility, and reduce the likelihood of the player colliding with the map geometry. The layouts tend to have a large designated arena designed for the majority of fighting, (usually designated by useful weapons or a desirable item) while any corridors are very short and mostly just function to scatter deathmatch starts and funnel everyone into the main area.





Not many people play deathmatch anymore, and most people tend to gravitate towards the tried and true maps before playing something new. Sorry if that's discouraging, but it's true that even some really amazing deathmatch maps don't get much play time at all. You could definitely repurpose these maps as single player levels for sure, though. I'm sure they would play really well.

Also MAP01 is seriously trippy for what it is. Nice job!