Talk:Valiant

Map templates
User:Spectra has recreated all the map templates for Valiant. I did, however, already generated them in March this year. Whose ones should be kept?--MtErebus (talk) 12:15, 3 November 2016 (CDT)
 * Comparing both, I prefer yours. --Gez (talk) 13:26, 3 November 2016 (CDT)

Sorry, I didn't saw those. Because nobody made a Valiant level page, I thought nobody created a template. Yours is really better. Spectra (talk) 14:10, 3 November 2016 (CDT)
 * Your templates on the other hand provide the full navigation for maps of the entire wad, while mine require switching onto other episodes' templates to find a map in the corresponding episode.--MtErebus (talk) 15:06, 3 November 2016 (CDT)
 * IMO this is a strong point, and one reason we've handled megawads that way for years (examples: 1, 2, 3, and basically everything else here) Of course it's OK to propose improvements, but is something actually wrong with the current approach?  One click takes you to the next related article.    Ryan W (usually gone) 11:14, 12 November 2016 (CST)
 * Counterpoint: Ultimate Doom, Heretic, Hexen. Most Doom II megawads don't have a strong episodic theme; but when episodes are clearly defined (and Valiant certainly does) it makes sense to have episode names in the navboxes. --Gez (talk) 09:01, 28 November 2016 (CST)


 * Yes it does, but why not have the best of both approaches? I find not having the full numeric navigation annoying, as it indeed requires an extra click via the episode page to get to the next map. And as you may have noticed, I've been clicking through whole megawads a lot lately. ;) Also, most user-created episodic megawads won't have their own episode pages like the stock levels, and linking from main space to template space doesn't feel right to me in this situation, nor very useful.
 * Instead, I tried the approach from Perdition's Gate that Ryan already linked to, and Strife's approach. My current sandbox shows Valiant E2 both ways, and each with the various font size combinations that we need to reach sufficient consensus on as well. Keep in mind that Valiant is a short WAD name, longer ones make things look differently too.
 * If Quasar could be so kind :) as to create the necessary CSS classes in the Common and Mobile style sheets, then I can apply those and we can all examine them on desktop and mobile platforms before making choices, too. --Xymph (talk) 12:14, 28 November 2016 (CST)
 * Okay then, counter-counter-counterpoint: Ultimate Doom, Heretic, Hexen. ;) --Gez (talk) 10:27, 29 November 2016 (CST)


 * No, sorry, you lost me; what is your point? A one-liner of stock episodes, of which I've already said that I don't consider them directly comparable to the Doom II-based megawads that we're trying to sort out, while not agreeing or disagreeing with any of my arguments or proposals, does nothing to advance this discussion IMHO. No wonder the pace here is sometimes labeled as glacial. ;-P
 * Do you really think linking to a template is useful and informative? Or do you expect every such episode to get its own stub page? Wouldn't that fragment or repeat the small amount of info too much? The only ones I see for user wads are for DtWiD which makes sense because of that WAD's goal of mimicking Doom (1). For Doom II user episodes I'd rather link back to the episode anchor in the overview page than a template. (That means turning the Valiant and Ancient Aliens episode headers into subsections, but that would be trivial.)
 * Yes, you've already given your font preference, but that's not the only aspect to finalize. Wiki users looking at Doom II wads are accustomed to have all the maps one click away, as RyanW also observed, so why not keep that feature for episodic wads via one of the sandboxed layouts (or yet another one)? --Xymph (talk) 16:29, 29 November 2016 (CST)
 * Okay, to be less obscure, here's an example of what I meant. Using your G sample because it was the last and therefore easy to copy-paste.

Something kinda like that. (Relative font sizes being a different bikeshedding matter.) Or I could see something javascripted where the other episodes are collapsed but can be opened. --Gez (talk) 17:28, 29 November 2016 (CST)


 * Alright, that's a nice "another one", it gets my vote... structure, font sizes and all. Also, collapsed stuff is a no-no for me in this box. Edit: on second thought, for consistency with the non-episodic navboxes and to reduce visual clutter, I'd ditch the bullets and commas on the other episodes:

--Xymph (talk) 05:13, 30 November 2016 (CST)


 * The updated episodic navboxes are in place and the duplicates removed. This topic has been wrapped up. --Xymph (talk) 04:13, 18 January 2017 (CST)

Custom monster mapping
I've added to DMMPST the ability to specify a list of thing translations so that custom things like monsters can be correctly represented in the Things tables it generates. For Scythe 2 compiling that list was easy, but for Valiant I'm not sure my list is complete and correct. I've examined the DEHACKED and SLADECFG lumps in Valiant.wad in tandem with the descriptions here, but I suspect the latter are incomplete. However, I'm not familiar enough with DHE to be certain. For example, DEHACKED specifies Thing 25 (the Commander Keen slot) to be the Arachnotron, and Thing 61 (the computer map) to be a Big Brain in MAP13? The hassle of converting DHE Thing numbers to Thing type IDs complicates matters a bit.

Can someone familiar with Valiant and/or DEHACKED help me out to verify or amend my mapping? Here's what I have so far (TSV format): 2	2002	Super chaingun	Valiant#Custom weapons 0	84	Heavy weapon dude	~ 0	72	Arachnotron	~ 0	2045	Spider mastermind	~ 0	2026	Romero's head	~ 0	3001	Super imp	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	3002	Super demon	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	3003	Super mancubus	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	69	Pyro Knight	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	7	Cybruiser	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	888	Arachnorb	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	36	Lightning orb	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	23	Suicide bomber	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	44	Super vile	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	43	Ghost arch-vile	Valiant#Custom monsters 0	54	Ghost revenant	Valiant#Custom monsters (Class 0 = Monsters, 2 = Weapons; thing type = DoomEd number) --Xymph (talk) 13:22, 20 December 2016 (CST)
 * 1) class	thing	wikiname	wikilink


 * I've generated the pages with the above custom Things. If anyone provides additions/corrections as yet, I can always regenerate the Things tables. --Xymph (talk) 04:13, 18 January 2017 (CST)


 * Updated table with MAP32's shadow monsters. You can see them in the DEHACKED lump on lines 142 and 213 . As the DeHackEd page shows, Thing 91 is normally "Grey Tree" (aka "Short Grey Tree" in SLADE, "Gray tree" in UDB, and TorchTree in ZDoom) and Thing 127 is normally Large Tree (aka "Large Brown Tree" in SLADE, "Large brown tree" in UDB, and BigTree in ZDoom). --Gez (talk) 05:24, 14 January 2020 (CST)