[pepsodent]

Thank you for playing!

Jan Satcitananda, on 05 March 2026 - 02:58 PM, said:

Personally I'm not a fan of TROR since it tends to produce low framerates and is prone to visual bugs, maybe you can try using it less extensively.

TROR exists on this map solely for the fancy roofs on some buildings, it was built late in the production and it took a massive hit on framerate so I regret it a bit but the buildings without it would look more blocky. If only there was some development around new mapformat or something and we had those fancy skyboxes like in Ion Fury and AMC... They dont hit on performance that hard as a giant TROR sector.

Jan Satcitananda, on 05 March 2026 - 02:58 PM, said:

But my only complaint was the way the combat works; to me, it feels like if everytime you complete some objectitve a bunch of random enemies spawned in random places just to keep the player busy shooting them. I think the final boss has no clear connection to the preceding action as well.

Because thats how it is, the combat is nasty because I wasted lot of time making the map and felt bad that it can be done in few seconds, so all the respawns exist just to pad it out. Cycloid has no connection to the story but honestly I couldnt come up with anything to finish it except making whatever Duke was supposed to grow into a field of alien eggs. I was thinking of using Queen as a boss but she doesnt seem fun to fight in such open area as there is no way to hide from her attacks. I didnt test the map with her so who knows, maybe she does work fine there.

Jan Satcitananda, on 05 March 2026 - 02:58 PM, said:

The objectives took some time to figure out, but I think you've provided enough hints to the player to make it fair. However, I was expecting that the gas jerrycans have something to do with refueling the machine, and that it will activate as soon as I complete all the objectives. I didn't expect that you have to go to bed after that, but it was a nice day-to-night transition rarely seen in Duke maps. The downside is that you have to build basically two different versions of the map, so you'll run out of walls a lot sooner, and the map ends up to be pretty small. But there's still a lot to explore and see! I love all the tiny detail you put there. I think you managed to depict an American country house setting quite well using just the stock textures. And yes, there's something Redneck Rampage-ish about it.

I'm happy you liked the quest, no matter how barebones and janky it is. I wish I could make the machine activate after you complete all the steps but I'm rather limited by default effects there (once again wish we had more new things without having to dig into coding). The jerrycans were just a little buildcute and I never thought of using them in any way for the quest.

Jan Satcitananda, on 05 March 2026 - 02:58 PM, said:

The pond that teleports you to the first stage after you resurface felt like a bug and at first I thought it was unintentional. Maybe turn it into an "endless" pit in the second stage if you want the player to travel "back in time", but of course it's up to you and your artistic vision if you like it the way it turned out to be.

I like the sudden flip that happens as you leave the pond, its a bit mindfucky in a cool way. Also the 3 way teleport wouldnt work that way or the endless fall would happen every time which would get jarring, What needed a good transition was the teleport to nighttime, I wanted to make some kind of little nightmare that would wake duke up, but ran out of walls for that idea.

[ck3D]

It's funny reading some of those scrapped ideas. Sounds like the vision for the level was even closer to Rural Nightmare than I thought with the nightmare sequences and Queen nighttime ending. Queen could have worked well if the pond didn't have the teleporter trick, that's actually how I realized that was a thing, resorting to trying to fight the Cycloid the same way you (are supposed to) fight the Battlelords at the end of Fahrenheit (dipping in and out of water). I agree the Cycloid came out of the blue but I thought that was funny given the change to blue palette made sense. But I didn't bother going back to kick its ass yet, honestly Nukebutton ending inside of train would have worked well with no need for boss. Last fight with all the slimers and rest of enemies is spectacular and mechanically interesting enough to end on and then from player POV it's rewarding to finish on a satisfying note as simple as figuring out the purpose of the train. Getting RPG there felt good enough though. I actually really like that train as a barrier, shame the clipping can act up.

All those reports of TROR ruining performance for lots of people are concerning to me, a lot of my unreleased work is TROR heavy but always ran fine for me on a PC from 2009 in software. Same goes for other TROR heavy maps like WG's. elandy is someone else who has made maps I've seen extensively use TROR in Alien Armageddon which is meant to be played in Polymost and it seems like those run fine for the majority of the AA player base. So I wonder what the deal breaker is and how bad.

[pepsodent]

ck3D, on 05 March 2026 - 06:30 PM, said:

All those reports of TROR ruining performance for lots of people are concerning to me, a lot of my unreleased work is TROR heavy but always ran fine for me on a PC from 2009 in software. Same goes for other TROR heavy maps like WG's. elandy is someone else who has made maps I've seen extensively use TROR in Alien Armageddon which is meant to be played in Polymost and it seems like those run fine for the majority of the AA player base. So I wonder what the deal breaker is and how bad.

From my experience with mapping and playing countless TROR heavy maps, it all depends on how big is the TRORed sector is. You can have million tiny TROR connections there and there and it will be fine, but if you have a massive sector that acts as TROR it will hit on performance.
Another interesting quirk of TROR is that lag only happens on certain layer, for example my train map stutters only when I'm running on top layer, the roofs of the train. Now looking at upper layer from the floor of the train it works fine somehow

[ck3D]

Oh OK thanks a lot, then that means all of my stuff should be really well optimized. Always seemed just to me to almost overdo it with splits and portals in a manner that respects the way traditional Build walls like to draw/work, so the same way one would treat the rendering of sectors in somewhat normal conditions and not use the transparency of the layer(s) as an excuse to conceal a lot of technical shortcuts, I feel like that's when people start getting glitches (and also lose fine control over the environment). I am sure my TROR style unnecessarily wastes a lot of resources though, that is the trade-off but also gives me some flexibility if I ever run out of walls, then I can go and simplify TROR somewhere that doesn't matter to gain walls again. (In general, overdoing wall spending in given places on purpose can be wise so that later on when it eventually comes to the point that you are running out of resources for mandatory structures, you have marked some obvious overkill, it's a form of safeguarding, simplifying is easier than cutting and usually you can just reimport the cut detail into a different map).

Pretty sure I've read before that the more bunches the slower things are supposed to get though. But from experience that only seems true when dozens and dozens of them are visible on one frame. On my old computer only starts lagging when in the 100's or something like that.

[Aleks]

pepsodent, on 06 March 2026 - 06:03 AM, said:

From my experience with mapping and playing countless TROR heavy maps, it all depends on how big is the TRORed sector is. You can have million tiny TROR connections there and there and it will be fine, but if you have a massive sector that acts as TROR it will hit on performance.
Another interesting quirk of TROR is that lag only happens on certain layer, for example my train map stutters only when I'm running on top layer, the roofs of the train. Now looking at upper layer from the floor of the train it works fine somehow

I have a completely opposite experience with TROR so far, which probably means there is no golden mean and it just depends on many factors and/or jank. Der Zorn Gottes used some massive TROR sectors (only split between the three main sides of the platform and always ran fine for me; however, with some more complex splits to account for more complex geometry in one of my newer maps, I started getting some lag on my older (2016) laptop - but at some point, even regular maps started to lag there and I couldn't figure a reason why, so I switched to a new laptop. I didn't have any viruses or stuff like that there either and the laptop itself runs fine, so I assume there might just be some intrinsic settings/bad luck that makes various stuff lag for various people in a 30-year-old game.

I played Locked and Loaded (where I reported the lags) back using the older laptop BTW, which also now that I think of it might have been the first symptoms of the laptop "getting the lag" rather than something wrong with the map!

[pepsodent]

Aleks, on 06 March 2026 - 10:52 AM, said:

I have a completely opposite experience with TROR so far, which probably means there is no golden mean and it just depends on many factors and/or jank. Der Zorn Gottes used some massive TROR sectors (only split between the three main sides of the platform and always ran fine for me; however, with some more complex splits to account for more complex geometry in one of my newer maps, I started getting some lag on my older (2016) laptop - but at some point, even regular maps started to lag there and I couldn't figure a reason why, so I switched to a new laptop. I didn't have any viruses or stuff like that there either and the laptop itself runs fine, so I assume there might just be some intrinsic settings/bad luck that makes various stuff lag for various people in a 30-year-old game.

I played Locked and Loaded (where I reported the lags) back using the older laptop BTW, which also now that I think of it might have been the first symptoms of the laptop "getting the lag" rather than something wrong with the map!

yeah to clarify on that, I wasnt talking about multiple bunches seen together. Those are always heavy on my craptop. So splitting a giant TROR sector into few small bunches wont help, it will actually most likely make the map even laggier.
Big TROR, lots of TROR seen together through multiple layers, lots of different small bunches seen together = lag.

I need to play your map, it sounds interesting from what I read about it.

[ck3D]

[lllllllllllllll]

I might be misunderstanding how TROR works so don't dwell on this post much. I've never used it

Taking a blind guess I think the reason TROR tanks performance here is too many neighboring vertical sectors + their contents getting rendered.

On your first map (I think) with the flood level below an upper concrete room with a big crater hole opening in the center it does not lag because it is isolated from most of the map by walls.
On the train map you lag up top because you see all the upper sectors (which renders the insides of the traincars below). You don't lag below because the cars are split and you do not directly see the sky above the traincars except at hatches.
On this map there are certain spots you must face certain directions to tank your fps. It might be getting too many of the sky sectors in view causing it (each of the 3 buildings rendering their insides) and the remainder rendering everything outdoors because everything is touching the same one or a few TROR sectors.
The gains of splitting such a TROR sector would not be in reducing the area of the sector but the shape so as to touch sectors most likely to be seen together and avoid those that aren't or sectors that absolutely get seen at the same time and those that don't.

Taking a 2nd blind guess if you truly have a TROR sector above all of the map I don't think it was necessary to have. The building roofs could be islands and the open sky merely needs the ceiling raised to not clip them from view.

[ck3D]

I was too curious and just took a quick look at the TROR in this map. The map indeed uses very few bunches and huge sectors, including for the background sceneries; the bunches seem to correspond to whole bits of map too, or at least something seemed off when I tried what I had recommended earlier - lowering the sky above the train - and witnessed the ceiling of randomly distributed areas along the edge of the street come down with it (so indeed my trick would have been impossible with this design), in the sense that that isn't how I would have made it. So yeah it is basically one big bunch per region, and all comprise detailed sectors (wall count). I thought it was interesting/cool how the roof of the train indeed didn't align with a TROR layer by the way, which to me would have seemed logical to make but no it really is its own specific height and then a sophisticated gap on top.

May be completely wrong but from what I've followed I understand TROR works in terms of rendering passes per visible bunch (which is sector(s) associated with a specific portal ID # in the map; different sectors can share or not share bunch), the more bunches you can see at once the more passes but the number of walls per bunch probably matters (I would imagine more so than area size), not to mention every loaded sector also loads sprites etc. In the case of this map, it has few bunches but most of them are visible at once from certain angles with little obstruction and each one of them potentially can draw tons of walls, balance looks a bit off in that sense. I know elandy makes TROR that is a bit similar (and mostly works in Polymost, does weird things in classic). WG is closer to my style with splits and lots of bunches, I think for the same surface area this map has I probably would have used at least 4x the amount, but I'm not even sure that would have changed much given the openness. But maybe it wouldn't be so many sectors having to load and compute at once with the map broken up like that (since more bunches would comprise it and so less of them visible and calling sectors per screen).

I only know so much about the internals, really just map, but I like to observe and guess. Would be funny if it were something as silly as windowed vs. full screen mode causing it. Again the level didn't even lag one bit for me.