[mjr00]

Yep. I made maps regularly between 95 and about 2001. Then I went and made a map in 2006, and the difference was night and day. Moving from the 1995 workflow of DOS editors like WADED[0] and DCK[1] to Doom Builder was an incredible experience. My previous workflow had been: make as much of the map as I could (with just the top-down sector view; no previews other than seeing what the textures and flats looked like!), exit out of the editor, run a node builder like BSP or WARM, then start up Doom to see what my level actually looked like. With Doom Builder, all of the sudden I could essentially build the entire map in the editor and only actually start up Doom when I needed to test it.

It really gave me an appreciation for how much of a difference tooling and infrastructure, specifically fast feedback cycles, can make in a final product. Even if you don't see the difference in the development pipeline as a player, you can definitely see the difference in Memento Mori[2] and Sunlust[3].

[0] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/WADED

[1] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DCK

[2] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Memento_Mori

[3] https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Sunlust

[skocznymroczny]

As a kid making Doom maps in late '90s, the worst part for me was that it was common for the editor to crash, especially during the node building step, often taking all my progress with it.