The THE BFG

What makes a video game weapon feel powerful?

The easiest answer, the gut reaction, is to say that the weapons that feel the most powerful are the ones that kick the most monster ass. That, however, is not a complete picture. In ZDoom it would be trivial to code a weapon which simply reduced every monster in the map to its death state, but, how satisfying would that really be?

Nay, for a weapon to feel powerful there must be something more, and that something more is mystery. The reason that the BFG 9000 possesses the most satisfying damage payout in all of video gaming is the enigma of its inner workings. Many have spent years playing Doom without understanding the BFG 9000, much less mastering it. Essays have been written to shine light on what is dark, but, for most, the BFG 9000 remains unknowable. This mystery has not detracted from its power, however, but has enhanced it within our hearts and minds. The BFG 9000 is a universally revered object - a Platonic ideal, of which we can only see the shadows.

So, in that vein, I present to you the THE BFG. You may find that it's not particularly effective for crowd control. However, it feels marvelously powerful. There are forces at work within this weapon which none may never come to understand.

(I was messing around in WhackEd2 the other day with a young friend who's taken an interest in Doom. He asked me to upload this, so, here you go.)

So basically it's the BFG without the hitscan spread? Just the original projectile with nothing else?

I got an effect so powerful that it destroyed the (Marine's) universe:

Z_Free: freed a pointer without ZONEID

If it's not working for you guys then I apologize for getting your hopes up.

I tested it in GZDoom and didn't really see much of a difference other than it not having its tracers.

How can it work on one computer and not work on other?
Maybe just tell us what you did, so we know what to expect...

Heh, actually all we did was replace the BFGSpray codepointer with the FireBFG codepointer. In PrBoom+ this sends the BFG ball careening and teleporting around in a way that we couldn't figure out. Sometimes it targets monsters, sometimes the player, sometimes nothing at all. It can disappear for a while, but then reappear if you fire any other weapon. The mod is really just the DeHackEd equivalent of a mapper's first square room full of cybers, but the effect is strange enough that my friend wanted to share it.

I know what makes the BFG feel powerful.

Doom has an extensive damage range between all of its weapons, and conversely, a huge range of feeble to ridiculously powerful monsters to use your weapons on.

When you first play Doom 1, you're presented with a pistol in one hand, and brassknucles in the other. The first monsters you fight are lowly zombie men and imps that take a mere couple of shots to bring down. This early in the game, you have no idea how useless your pistol will become. Pretty soon, few levels into the game, youre encountering larger quantities of these same monsters. Now the shotgun is available, imps that usually could take a beating before biting the dust can now be brought down in a single shot! Hell yeah! Towards the end of the episode you're locating secret rocket launchers, which turns just knocking down monsters into splattering their entrails all over the place! Now your fuckin shit up!!

Once you get to the end of the first episode, you're expelling all of your shotgun shells on the first boss, a seemingly invincible pair of baddies that are tall, ripped, and hideously ferocious. Your rockets that could once easily clear out an entire room are now becoming increasingly weaker. These monstrosities are not absorbing five, but six full rocket blasts in order to be taken down! You've never encountered such a burly pair of beasts.

In episode 2, you start dealing with much more pinky demons, imps, cacodemons and lost souls and now Hell barons. These monsters are taking a toll on your chaingun bullets, and your shotgun simply isnt fast enough. You need something better. That's when you locate the plasma rifle, which combines the best attributes of your beloved shotgun and chaingun. It's deadly and it's fucking fast. Now you can use that Cell ammo you've been wondering about. Your kicking down doors. Hell Baron and a couple cacodemons? You melt those dipshits with your plasma gun. In seconds, rooms infested with giant beasts are showing clear paths. Cacodemons are crashing down and spitting their eyes out, Pinky Demons are being leveled and drenched in their own blood, and Hell Barons are being split open and crumbling to the floor.

Then you move on to approach big bosses like the Cyberdemon. Holy shit this mammoth is BIG. Well you wouldn't dream of using your pistol of shotgun or chaingun now. It's time to get the big guns out. The cyberdemon is withstanding a seemingly endless number of rockets, the plasma rifle is now the weapon of choice, a good number of plasma raining hell on the hideous Cyberdemon proves too much for it.

Then as you progress through hell destroying everything in your wake, you acquire the BFG9000, which only makes matters easier with a single shot consuming forty cells! Soon an entire wave of imps and zombie men becomes a floor of burning ash in a single blast! You feel like a god now! At least until you approach Dis, the lair of the Spider Mastermind! Jesus christ it can withstand a full BFG shot! Maybe one more. No?? (assuming you're not a whacko who just runs up to your first boss encounters at point blank range) Now your delivering everything you got to bring this fucker down. Never before have your weapons felt so futile. This guy is taking some of your worst firepower and still standing. A couple BFG shots and a round of rockets later, the spider mastermind is demolished and crashes to the ground signaling the end of the game.

The point I'm making is that because of the huge range of damage your firearms do, and the increasing difficulty of the game, It's much easier to detect the differences between the versatility of your guns. Unlike games where people complained the weapons were garbage such as Heretic and Quake. The Hellstaff isn't really a huge step up from the dragon claw, and the Rocket Launcher is the same thing as the Grenade Launcher acquired in Level 3. However the difference in damage between what a shotgun will do versus what a plasma gun can do is extreme. This is why the BFG feels so powerful.

Of course this all multiplies in Doom 2 when the supershotgun shows up. Shotgun shells are everywhere now and deadly beasts are a dime a dozen.

40oz said:

These monsters are taking a toll on your chaingun bullets, and your shotgun simply isnt fast enough. You need something better. That's when you locate the chaingun, which combines the best attributes of your beloved shotgun and chaingun.

Indeed.

40oz said:
You need something better. That's when you locate the chaingun, which combines the best attributes of your beloved shotgun and chaingun.

I take it that you meant to type the Plasma Rifle.

Oops. yes I did. Edited.

You're calling a code pointer that takes a player_t and passing it a mobj_t. Weird stuff is bound to happen. I'm surprised the game doesn't crash immediately - IIRC there's a big warning in the DeHackEd docs about not mixing player weapon code pointers and others.

In PrBoom the BFG shot calls A_FireBFG with a pointer to itself. Thus in the line

P_SpawnPlayerMissile(player->mo, MT_BFG);

player is that pointer. Therefore player->mo is looked up as a pointer at offset 0 in a mobj_t. Fortunately this actually is a pointer - a pointer to the previous thinker in the thinker list. Again fortunately this is probably another mobj_t, which is used as the source location for creating another shot, which is why you see it teleporting around, emanating from various other, apparently random, things.

Nothing interesting happens in ports that do EE-style code pointer unification (like mine ☹)

ellmo said:
How can it work on one computer and not work on other?

The same way a web page may work on one computer with Internet Explorer 7 yet fail on another running Netscape Navigator 4.