A Beginner's Guide to creating levels for DOOM
Part 2
Essential Tools and Resources
| Of course, to be able to construct new maps it is essential that one owns the IWAD for the game. |
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The Tools
If the objective is to only create new maps, regardless of map format, then just a map editor program will do the trick.
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| Ultimate Doom Builder |  |
development by ZZYZX, biwa, dpJudas and others an iteration of GZDoom Builder - Bugfix status: current github |
| GZDoom Builder-Bugfix |  |
development by ZZYZX an iteration of GZDoom Builder status: development has stopped github |
| GZDoom Builder |  |
development by MaxED an iteration of Doombuilder2 status: development has stopped github |
| Doombuilder2 |  |
development by Codeimp a rewrite of his Doombuilder1 status: development has stopped |
| Doombuilder X |  |
development by anotak an improved iteration of Doombuilder2 status: current github |
| Slade3 |  |
development by sirjuddington status: current github |
| Deepsea |  |
development by randomlag no UDMF support is now freeware status: development has stopped |
| Eureka |  |
development by andrewj limited UDMF support status: current |
However, if one wants to be more ambituous and change some resources or create new resources, then the editors below will import/export lumps.
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| Slade3 | Deepsea | XWE |
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current Slade3 is the preferred lump editor |
development has stopped Deepsea is good, but cannot edit pwads for the UDMF format |
development has stopped XWE is not recommended |
Editor to change the behaviour, strings, etc of the original DOOM.
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To learn what is involved see the DeHackED tutorial by Enjay.
New Resources
| resources linked to on the | ZDoom Forum |
| A host of new monsters, special effects and textures can be downloaded from Realm667 |
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| Another good site for textures is Afterglow |
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| Excellent textures can be found on David Gurrea's site |
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| Here is a collection of photographic textures |
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| A collection of Skyboxes |
Kothic skies lvlworld skies Wadfather skies |
Good programs to create and manipulate new textures
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Gimp is freeware. it may take a while to effectively learn its interface. |
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Paint.net is freeware recommended |
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Paint Shop Pro is not freeware. |
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Good programs to view textures
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XnView is freeware. It is used for viewing and/or manipulating images, not to create them. |
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Irfanview is freeware. It is used for viewing and/or manipulating images, not to create them. |
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Good programs to work with models
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Blender |
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MISFIT³
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NOESIS
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Good programs to create sounds and music
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Audacity audio software for multi-track recording and editing. |
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Sekaiju OpenMIDIProject. |
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More resources
WIKIsThe definitive information, other than the source code, is available in several WIKIs, for original DOOM, ZDOOM based ports and for Slade3. ForumsThere are many forums. Thanks to modern search engines, these forums are not difficult to find. The most active ones being the ZDoom Forum and the Doomworld Forum. Video tutorialsMany videos are available on Youtube, just enter a DOOM related term in the Youtube Search line. Good video tutorials are those from AlysiumX and from Chubzdoomer. |