Raining Doom

Would it be possible using the thing_spawn ACS command (with ZDoom of course) to create rain? I think so.. as a matter of fact, I could probably just test it myself.. but as of right now I am at work so, that would be later.. anyway.. any ideas? let me know.. i'll try a few things myself..

That would be excellent!

You could have a level called Raining Blood and have Slayer as the soundtrack. Yeah, that would be pretty nifty!

That's a cool idea (We are doing raining blood for a gig, the band that I'm in). I think it would be cool to call a level Killing fields, that track rocks and it's such a suitable name for a doom level :-D, you could use the music for Map23, as it's similar in a way, or use a midi version of the track, or even a mod >:-D.

As for rain, it's a very cool idea, but wouldn't the spawn thing cause way too many sprites and slow the game right down, maybe not, d it would look cool if you drew a chunky white snow drop thing had had them raining from the skies, or a rain of dead bodies, maybe that's a bit too over the top :-D.

Alternatively, you could do what was done in xmas Doom (that was cool, level 3 has snow) basicalyy, what they did was got the bfall textyure (although with zdoom you don't have to replce any animated textures for new animated stuff, so, yeah) but the changed it so it was totally transparent, then had white snow drops dotted here and there, then the built a cobweb type room (it was square then had lot's of tiny triangles made of Linedefs) and added this texture to the tiny lindefs which gave the illusion of snow, you could do the same with rain, but add sounds too, and use the random light effect with a sound effect for thunder, or, you could have a sky box, make just that have random lighting, and have thunder paying at a random intervall, so it would give the impression the it's thundering, tha would look cool, hey, that's not half a bad idea :-D, although the texture thing could be very tedeus, so, yeah, sprite being spawned could be cool, not a bad idea :-D.

I think it would be cool to call a level Killing fields

Somebody who likes Slayer and Funker Vogt?? That's a rare find ;)

Alternatively, you could do what was done in xmas Doom (that was cool, level 3 has snow) basicalyy, what they did was got the bfall textyure (although with zdoom you don't have to replce any animated textures for new animated stuff, so, yeah) but the changed it so it was totally transparent, then had white snow drops dotted here and there, then the built a cobweb type room (it was square then had lot's of tiny triangles made of Linedefs) and added this texture to the tiny lindefs which gave the illusion of snow, you could do the same with rain, but add sounds too, and use the random light effect with a sound effect for thunder, or, you could have a sky box, make just that have random lighting, and have thunder paying at a random intervall, so it would give the impression the it's thundering, tha would look cool, hey, that's not half a bad idea :-D

Damn, that's the longest sentence I've seen in months.

Also alternatively, you could use EDGE which has rain, or wait for Millennium, which has a lot more rain/dripping particles.

You are right about a lot of rain slowing down the map though. One map I made an entire outdoor scene with hard rain and the game ran at about 0.1 FPS :\

Lut - what kind of computer did you run it on?

I can't find it ATM, but a short while back there was a nice DM level released that had rain effects in Zdoom.

From memory it was done by using dehacked to convert the imp fireball into a harmless projectile, changing the graphics so they looked like rain drops and using an ACS script to spawn them as falling projectiles all over the place. Looked pretty cool too.

I did rain in ZDoom quite at the beginning of my ACS career, and believe me, when you want to have much rain (as in GB Doom) and also want the raindrops to be transparent you'll get big speed loss.
I guess the level Enjay is talking about can be found at http://edspage.doomcenter.com

Lut - what kind of computer did you run it on?

Celeron 500/256 MB RAM.

Map objects are high-bandwidth, meaning that each additional one spawned uses quite a bit of memory and a generous-enough slice of processing time per game tic to make you feel the difference whenever there are more than about 600 active on a level (the exact threshold depends mostly on your processor speed, but my PII 333 MHz begins to lag seriously at around 1000 or so).

A better solution to environmental ambience such as rain and snow, I believe, would be through the particle system. As you might know, I recently incorporated zdoom's particle code (with minor modifications) into the Eternity Engine, and I'm seriously looking at creating some such effects using it to see if they'll work. Particles are low-bandwidth because they use virtually no memory since they have only two or three state variables, and they do not use masked sprites, which are significantly more complex to clip and render into the frame buffer. It should be possible to do rain with them much faster than with map objects.

Anyways, if my code works, I'll ask Randy if he'd like to look at it for use in zdoom too.

My Gawwwd - I just HAVE to reply to this...
THIS IS INSANE!!!!!!!

Every time I come back to Doomworld, there's even more features!!!! If you guys don't quit makin' shit up, I'll NEVER get done with my mod!!!!! Oh, God...my mod is gonna be the best TC ever.

My God. Rain. RAIN of all things!!!! That would add a completely new atmosphere to the game! I don't remember seeing rain in ANY other FPS, although I'm sure I've seen it somewhere before. Maybe Blood??

Oh! I just thought of something. If you're game is generally inside, you could fake outside rain by comming up with a texture for a window and scroll it or rotate the .gifs around. Then, you'd have your rain, and not worry about system resources or comming up with new code or Scripts.

Got to http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~jonasf/xmasdoom to find an old version of the Zdoom engine modified to create particle snow for a Christmas themed mod.

IIRC the snow effect is tied in with one of the things that you have to place on a map. Looks pretty nice though. It's only a light snow shower, not a blizzard.

BTW, I haven't been able to connect to the site Tarin mentioned to check if it is the map I was talking about. I suspect it is, Tarin is usually right about these kind of things.

Could you please tell me the name of the file? I would like to find it on my CDs, but my filing system seems to have messed up. I know I have it, but can't find it anywhere.

Lut - what kind of computer did you run it on?

Celeron 500/256 MB RAM.

Lüt: You SOOOOOOO did not run that on my computer.

As Tarin says, the level Enjay mentions is by Ed C., and I believe it's called rc00.wad.

AFAIK the only place to get the level is Ed's page on Doom Center, but hosted pages there don't work ATM.