Null Space (UV-Max Demo)

not too long ago i played map 32 of congestion 1024, nullspace junior, and i thought i might as well try out the original map that inspired it. and oh boy is this a hefty slab of a map. not hard, necessarily, and not an overwhelming number of monsters, but there's a lot of tracking down and eliminating individual monsters that needs to be done. you're stuck with the pump action for the first little bit but i opted to lean on the berserk, even though i would usually prefer not to. it definitely speeds things up at the cost of health. this opening area is also where all of the secrets are. i like a lot of the ways these are constructed - a lot of them feel like attics, or a disused wing of a large building. one of those things that's hard to describe.
once you get the red key, you shortly manage to get your hands on a super shotgun... but the room it's in is really tedious. there are tons of imps in really dark cells surrounding you. they're almost impossible to see and need to be slowly taken care of one at a time. and you'll really only know they're there when they shoot. there are an absolute ton of these scattered around the level from here on out, including the big bridge between the buildings. those imps aren't reachable though, and will eventually teleport away elsewhere. oh and don't fall in to the null space, that's guaranteed death. it's still a really cool effect, and you can see it below the floors as well as a constant reminder that you're floating in the void.
the other side of the bridge has a lot greater resistance, but it still also has imps tucked away everywhere. these encounters are generally more interesting though as you've got the heavy hardware to deal with it. the final battle is actually the best part of the whole level, as you're running around to flip switches, expanding the arena and also releasing more monsters that need to be quickly tracked down before they cause too many problems. i of course then had to wander around for 5 or so kills to get the uv-max. it's still a pretty cool map, but i think the effect might work better on a very small map, as there's a lot more empty void to work with.
null space: www.doomworld....
get the demo: s3.yrriban.net...
source port used: dsda-doom 0.27.5
sound font used: arachno.sf2
flags: -complevel 2

[@Skronkidonk]

Such a cool concept. Nowadays its pretty common to see void maps but back then I bet this was pretty shocking when it came out. I think I booted this up once but never got around to actually playing it, imma try it out tonight. That hud is 90s as hell lmao. I like the texture usage of this map too, the bricks (which I assume are from Heretic) and the wood is very nice. Also listening to "Dark Halls" for 43 minutes probably got old pretty quick lol. Nice run !
Also great work with the double uploads everyday, I'm sure it isn't easy.

[@Yrriban]

i won't lie i actually like dark halls quite a bit. pretty good fit for the level as well. as for the textures, they do seem like heretic textures; i did check in the text file and didn't see anything about that, but there's a lot of stuff in there about getting the map to fit in vanilla limits. i didn't even think about that but it sounds like it was a challenge.

[@Skronkidonk]

@@Yrriban Dark Halls is pretty underrated when it comes to PWAD usage. And now that you mention it I'm sure it was a pain to get this to run in Vanilla. Those rooms are open as hell with full bright lmao.