Weird vanilla lift problem.

Ok. So I have a couple of lifts triggered by 2 switches. All correctly tagged and whatnot.

Now the interesting thing is this. When I run the lifts in -nomonsters mode the lifts are fine. But when I run these lifts with all the monsters on the level, activating the switches causes Chocolate Doom to crash. Now there are no monsters standing directly on or near the lifts in question, so it cannot be that the monsters are stuck or ceilings are too low or something of that nature.

Any thoughts? Because I am out of ideas.

Thanks guys.

I cannot give specifics, but I remember weird-ass problems with lifts and other actions when monsters were too close to walls. I'm not sure if they have to be all the way stuck. One thing we know for sure: there's a problem with a monster somewhere. Try jiggling your monsters.

KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

Now there are no monsters standing directly on or near the lifts in question, so it cannot be that the monsters are stuck or ceilings are too low or something of that nature.

It can, NaturalTvventy knows what he's talking about. :) I remember how some monsters being too close to each other (not stuck!) prevented faraway doors from opening in his NEIS e1m9. Only Eternal could figure out how to fix that. He has a lot of experience with such problems, in Epic 2 he had a map where some monsters were getting killed by crushers, and during that process any trigger could refuse to work and break completely if it was a W1 trigger. Monsters being stuck or even just too close to something can cause some really weird stuff happening in vanilla. Would be very interesting to see a technical explanations of this btw...

I had the same problems with lowering floors near to monsters, I agree with the former responses, move the monsters just a bit and try until it works. A vanilla manual would be great btw.

Work on a throwaway copy of your level.
Delete monster groups until the lifts work. If you just circle 1/4 of them and delete for each test, this should only take 4 to 6 tries to
narrow it down. Repeat with smaller groups of monsters until you find a few that are the problem.

Then try the same thing but move them way off to the side (into the void) to see if the lift still fails. This distinguishes monster interaction with walls from monster-monster interaction.

Then tell us what it was.

Hey all, thanks for the responses. I haven't yet solved the problem, but thanks to this thread I now know where to look. Seeing as there are > 800 monsters on the level this may take a little time to work through, but I will work through it until I solve it. Will post more to let you guys know how it progresses.

Thanks again. :D

My solution for this in the zdeamon port and vanilla, whenever i do not feel as moving around every monster is to do following :

Put a monster blocking linedef at the side of the lift or door that
is being bugged by the monsters.

Example :


@ @ @ monsters in some sector touching the door or lift @ @ @

________________monster blocking linedef_____________________

--------------------------------
| door or elevator sector |
--------------------------------

Thanks for the suggestion FireFish, but as it turned out, this was not really the issue, as there were no monsters directly touching on the on map lifts directly. :)

So, long story short, the problem is fixed. (Fixed, tho not solved, for reasons we shall soon see.)

The switches that were crashing the level had a linedef tag of 5. Now this sector tag was linked to three sectors. Two lifts next to the switches, and one off-map monster closet. When you hit one of the switches, it would lower the two lifts, and the third sector around an off-map archvile, allowing it to teleport onto the level. (The archvile would not be woken up until much later in the level, so you would not trigger it until a return journey past those lifts much later in the level). Removing the archvile fixed the problem, the level would no longer crash when you hit those switches, so NT and everyone, you were correct. I tried to widen the area around the archvile, raising ceiling and floor heights and moving that sector around to different points on the level, but no matter what I did, as long as that archvile was even in existence, the level would crash, irrespective of how close or far it was from associated linedefs.

So archvile deleted, problem fixed. But here is the interesting thing. This archvile never used to crash the level, but at some point, as I continued to make (relatively minor) modifications to the level it suddenly did start crashing. So the deeper issue is that the archvile, along with other unspecified changes, would cause the level to crash, as in its original state, the archvile did not crash the level when the relevant switch was hit.

So in the end I took the simplest solution. Arch BALEETED! Problem given a most fFIXACIOUS solution! So, problem fixed but the deeper issue not really solved. Much appreciation for you guys pointing me in the right direction. Soz if this post is rambly.

cheers :D

How large is your BLOCKMAP lump?

Hey Mr Grey.

62.94kb according to slade3.

That can't be the problem then. Make doubly sure there aren't any zero-tagged lift walkover linedefs the archie could stumble over, contrary to what's stated in the Wiki some can be triggered by monsters.

Isn't the block map limit 64kb (file size wise) in Vanilla?

Certainly, the map is close and it could be that Vanilla Doom starts flaking.

Archie traps are overused anyways :):)

NaturalTvventy said:

Archie traps are overused anyways :):)

You think Archvile traps are overused?

I think Revenant traps are overuseed. :P

Can you send me a copy of the map exhibiting the problem? I'd love to research this.