Patrick_wd: yes and no.
I’ve tinkered with Doom and Hexen mapping, but never very seriously. Only enough to make some simple two or three room maps and see what it’s all about. This was quite a while ago, mind you, with some of the early DOS based tools, so take this with a pinch of salt.
My impression was it’s a lot more hands-on than Duke3D. The Build editor did a lot of things for you, such as automatically creating/assigning sectors, texturing, and fiddling about with which is the outside/inside face of a wall (forgot the proper terminology). It felt a lot more like you could just create what you had in your mind without having to worry about the nuts and bolts.
Mind you, I imagine a lot of the newer tools for DOOM do this too, so it might not be an issue.
But the other thing was Build didn’t require you to fluff about with WADs and nodes and all these other filesystem level things. It just spat out a map file which you could launch straight into the game.
That said I’m sure all those things are not a steep learning curve. It’s just an extra little thing for me to reorient my way of thinking. I’m sure I can clobber together something playable, but I’m glad I’m not assigned one of the more iconic maps!
