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Draconio

PWADs which crash ZDoom and Legacy, yet work in Doom 95

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Here's something strange for you. While going through my collection of Doom PWADs, I found these two anomalies. They crash both ZDoom and Legacy on startup, but run without difficulty on Doom 95.

Fonti.wad

A pack of 6 deathmatch levels for Doom 1. The cause of the crash seems to be corrupted textures, as both ports give an error relating to R_InitTextures and some of the walls appear screwed over when playing in Doom 95. Otherwise Doom 95 runs them fine, besides a crash on E1M6 when picking up the chaingun in the water. More's the pity, since the author seems to have known a lot of those neat little editing tricks.

ftp://3darchives.in-span.net/pub/idgames/levels/doom/deathmatch/d-f/fonti.zip


Malgnant.wad

A single player Doom 2 level. This one really puzzles me, since as I play through it I can find nothing out of the ordinary, save one place where I was blocked by an invisible wall, which seems to be intentionally placed and doesn't really interfere with play. Legacy reports a "segment violation", and ZDoom just plain dies trying to load this wad. Quite a nice map, although nothing spectacular.

ftp://3darchives.in-span.net/pub/idgames/levels/doom2/m-o/malgnant.zip


I haven't bothered to check either of these in an editor, but if you want to then by all means do. The results might be interesting.

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I ran Fonti and it didn't crash getting the chaingun in the water, but I used doom, so maybe that's caused by a slight difference in doom95, or you were unlucky. The patch problem is odd, since I'm sure the designer should have noticed, but maybe he used a slightly altered IWAD with it, or messed up the PNAMES or TEXTURE patches just before uploading.

Malgnant ran OK on doom2 and didn't crash prboom... I guess legacy and zdoom are rather bitchy about things. It's odd that the author never upgraded to 1.9, but I do not think this is the cause of those crashes/freezings.

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I tried malgnant with the latest zdoom. It crashed. I looked at the wad entries with Wintex, saw a custom titlepic. Selected it, it was gibberish in Wintex. Deleted the titlepic entry and saved. All fixed, zdoom is happy. I don't know what it is in the titlepic which causes the crash, maybe it's not a .bmp at all.

Edit: It appears to be a corrupted bitmap. Pixels per inch data is missing.

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Biffy said:

It appears to be a corrupted bitmap. Pixels per inch data is missing.


Yeah, I had forgotten about that, in both doom2 and prboom the titlepic looked really crappy, with the colors all messed up, no wonder.

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FYI, DOOM does not use bitmaps. All the graphics in DOOM, including the titlescreen, have to be in a column/post format that is unique to the game, and is designed for maximum efficiency in a column-based renderer like the one that DOOM uses. Anytime you use WinTex or deutex to insert a graphic, it is being converted from BMP to this format behind your back, and vice versa when you extract them.

If you use some binary tool to put a bitmap directly into a WAD lump, you'll find out fast.

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Woolie Wool said:

....and everyone knows about ZDOOM's problems with Alien Vendetta.

Can you say specifically what the problem is? I played some of the AV maps without problem.

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Woolie Wool said:

Egyptian DOOM (found at Sir Robin's site blows up with ZDOOM unless sent through ZWadConv, and everyone knows about ZDOOM's problems with Alien Vendetta.


AV and zdoom problems? I've almost played the whole game on single player in zdoom without a hitch (i'm on lev 27). Is it the secret levels? cause i didn't find them this time :\

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Quasar said:

FYI, DOOM does not use bitmaps. All the graphics in DOOM, including the titlescreen, have to be in a column/post format that is unique to the game, and is designed for maximum efficiency in a column-based renderer like the one that DOOM uses. Anytime you use WinTex or deutex to insert a graphic, it is being converted from BMP to this format behind your back, and vice versa when you extract them.

If you use some binary tool to put a bitmap directly into a WAD lump, you'll find out fast.


I always thought Doom used gif/pcx formats for pitcutes



I have no problems playing AV in both versions of Zdoom I have. [v1.19(dos) and v1.32b33(win)]

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Woolie Wool said:

Egyptian DOOM (found at Sir Robin's site blows up with ZDOOM unless sent through ZWadConv, and everyone knows about ZDOOM's problems with Alien Vendetta.

Wool, I got and played most of the way through Egypt.wad and could not find a problem. Made it almost through map05 and I think there is only one more map. At what point did you notice zdoom having a problem? If it was on startup, apparently that issue has been fixed.

By the way, that is one great piece of work, glad you mentioned it.

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Woolie Wool said:

and everyone knows about ZDOOM's problems with Alien Vendetta.


I think Woolie Wool is referring to the fact that under ZDoom, the main menu to Alien Vendetta is all screwed up. It happens in Legacy too.

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ravage said:

I always thought Doom used gif/pcx formats for pitcutes


No, there's nothing even remotely like GIF in DOOM. PCX format pictures are written for screenshots, but this is totally removed from the internal format of screen patches, texture patches, and sprites, which all use the custom column/post format.

BTW, note that Heretic uses the same format as flats, which is just a plain linear block format, for some of its fullscreen graphics. You get a nice crash if you try to view Heretic's help screens in a non-supporting source port :->

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