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Reaper978

Hexen glitch at end of Shadow Wood

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On the topic of Hexen, I have to mention that I've encountered an annoying problem at the end of the Shadow Wood hub twice in a row. I go around and flip all six switches to light up the six key markers next to the door that leads to the Hypostyle. But one or two of them don't light up, even after flipping all six switches. So the door remains locked. Hahahaha...

At first I thought I missed a switch somewhere, but after going through a walkthrough, checking and double checking that I got all the switches, one or two of the symbols still didn't light up. If memory serves, two of the symbols didn't light up the first time I did this, and then one didn't light up the second time. I'm really quite sure I got all the switches both times, though. This happened with ZHexen a couple years ago, and then it happened again last year in Chocolate Hexen. I'd been meaning to mention it, but it's slipped my mind for awhile. This was with Hexen 1.1 both times. What do you think?

I started playing through Hexen again, but this time I'm playing it emulated in Dosbox 0.74 and seeing if it happens again.

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Never had this happen so far myself, but I've had plenty of other problems and enough to know that Hexen, including the ACS interpreter, is extremely buggy and is prone to corrupting segments of memory, particularly through access to uninitialized pointers and through access to freed memory.

This being the case, any kind of glitch imaginable is bound to happen if you play the game long enough.

A common one I get is that I'll reach the Hypostyle and play all the way through it, and suddenly the MIDI will get all fucked up sounding, and then when I go to fight the Death Wyvern, the goddamn thing won't wake up. It starts out dormant evidently, and so if it won't awaken, it cannot be killed. It's a real game killer glitch.

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Quasar said:

A common one I get is that I'll reach the Hypostyle and play all the way through it, and suddenly the MIDI will get all fucked up sounding, and then when I go to fight the Death Wyvern,

That sounds creepy. It would be interesting to record a YouTube video when it happens, and share it.

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I remember glitches in Hexen that created side effects similar to if you were to mark your HEXNDATA folder as read only. I've had it where it can't save, and you had voodoo dolls all over the place where your save files used to be. I wonder if that was caused by ACS.

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The first time I played a script failed to do what it was meant to. I'm not sure what it was - I think it might have been something to do with what happens when the Heresiarch dies. Anyway, it was a game breaker because I was unable to continue but, at that stage, I had no idea what was meant to happen so I wasn't sure what, if anything, had broken.

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I don't have Hexen, but I think from Reaper and Quasar's post that the ACS interpreter seems to go bonkers in the Hypostyle. Maybe someone who has this game can examine the script for Hypostyle and why does it make the interpreter get insane.

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The only consistent bug in vanilla hexen that drove me nuts was the failure of the script in Gibbet, the other heresiarch would not be revealed and I'd end up stuck in that final room.

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... and that one's the only show-stopping bug I ever ran in. As a result I play the game with a fixed map so that it won't bother me again.

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Quasar said:

Never had this happen so far myself, but I've had plenty of other problems and enough to know that Hexen, including the ACS interpreter, is extremely buggy and is prone to corrupting segments of memory, particularly through access to uninitialized pointers and through access to freed memory.

This being the case, any kind of glitch imaginable is bound to happen if you play the game long enough.

A common one I get is that I'll reach the Hypostyle and play all the way through it, and suddenly the MIDI will get all fucked up sounding, and then when I go to fight the Death Wyvern, the goddamn thing won't wake up. It starts out dormant evidently, and so if it won't awaken, it cannot be killed. It's a real game killer glitch.

That really sucks. I think Hexen is fracking awesome and deserves to have had problems like these eliminated. If I had fluid programming abilities I would give a shot at refining the code to make Hexen work without errors, but I don't have that kind of opportunity at the moment. Is that what they have been trying to do with ZDoom ACS? Getting it bug free?

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Reaper978 said:

That really sucks. I think Hexen is fracking awesome and deserves to have had problems like these eliminated. If I had fluid programming abilities I would give a shot at refining the code to make Hexen work without errors, but I don't have that kind of opportunity at the moment. Is that what they have been trying to do with ZDoom ACS? Getting it bug free?

ZDoom should be subject to none of the original Hexen game's memory corruption issues, though of course it may have a few of its own that have gone undetected.

Try setting a multipatch texture to the sky when a double sky is active for example: "ZDoom has stopped working and needs to shut down" is what you'll get ;)

No program will ever be perfect. I always think I have finally gotten all the undefined behavior out of Eternity and the next week somebody finds a new problem where it's writing one past the end of some array or accessing freed memory somehow despite every safeguard meant to make that impossible, etc.

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Quasar said:

ZDoom should be subject to none of the original Hexen game's memory corruption issues, though of course it may have a few of its own that have gone undetected.

Might Hexen's memory corruption also be caused by being based on an outdated version of Doom (if the charts I had read were correct)?

Try setting a multipatch texture to the sky when a double sky is active for example: "ZDoom has stopped working and needs to shut down" is what you'll get ;)

Tell that to the ZDoom crew so they may fix it.

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Hexen 2 has its share of bugs too, a couple of times I've had to noclip because of an elementary scripting bug in the Stables where you can't dig up the shovel if you get some items in the non-intended order.

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Quasar said:

Try setting a multipatch texture to the sky when a double sky is active for example: "ZDoom has stopped working and needs to shut down" is what you'll get ;)



Yes, the doublesky drawing code is quite a mess... - but I never heard before that this doesn't work.

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printz said:

That sounds creepy. It would be interesting to record a YouTube video when it happens, and share it.

That sounds familiar. When I played Plutonia with DOSBox 0.74 and was in MAP17, the music sounded quite different than Doom1's and then I heard loud noise after 3 secs and the game crashed. Same thing happened in MAP29, which aswell used the music At Doom's Gate. I played it by moving plutonia.wad to Doom2 (1.666) directory and then typing ''doom2 -file plutonia.wad''. Nowadays I have a better way to play Final Doom for DOS.

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ASD said:

That sounds familiar. When I played Plutonia with DOSBox 0.74 and was in MAP17, the music sounded quite different than Doom1's

Were you using Doom 2 v1.666? Also, how was the music different? By instruments, or was it off-key? If by instruments, then yes, Doom 2 or Final Doom's music sounds different to Doom 1's, by design. Or was it actually glitchy?

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Graf Zahl said:

Yes, the doublesky drawing code is quite a mess... - but I never heard before that this doesn't work.

esselfortium triggered it while testing how the command affected double skies on IRC the other day and just happened to mention it; that's the only reason I know about it. Unfortunately I have no further details to give you.

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ASD said:

When I played Plutonia with DOSBox 0.74 and was in MAP17, the music sounded quite different than Doom1's [...] Same thing happened in MAP29, which aswell used the music At Doom's Gate.

That may be unrelated to the crash. If you use DOSBox's OPL synth, the game will play music using the register info from the GENMIDI lump. It's not identical in Doom and Doom II, so Doom songs played in Doom II or vice-versa will sound slightly different from what you'd expect.

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printz said:

Were you using Doom 2 v1.666? Also, how was the music different? By instruments, or was it off-key? If by instruments, then yes, Doom 2 or Final Doom's music sounds different to Doom 1's, by design. Or was it actually glitchy?

Different instruments, I think. Since Final Doom uses the sources of The Ultimate Doom, is it possible to play TNT or Plutonia by replacing DOOM.WAD with the TNT/Plutonia.wad?

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The instruments are not in the exe, they are in the GENMIDI (for OPL) and DMXGUS (for Gravis) lumps in the IWAD. No need to try to fool the game into believing TNT or Plutonia is The Ultimate Doom.

Besides, if you do manage to fool the game, what you'll get will be errors since there's no ExMy map lump in TNT/Plutonia, so you'd never be able to start a game.

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printz said:

That sounds creepy. It would be interesting to record a YouTube video when it happens, and share it.

It almost sounds like some kind of strange trick devised by Korax or the Heresiarch.

hervoheebo said:

Hexen 2 has its share of bugs too, a couple of times I've had to noclip because of an elementary scripting bug in the Stables where you can't dig up the shovel if you get some items in the non-intended order.

Hahaha...

I can't help but laugh at how absurd that is. You need to dig up... a shovel? And you can't dig up the shovel if you get the items in the non-intended order? Lmao... That's a real crowning moment in gaming history, eh? Not that I'm singling Hexen 2 out, as all games have ridiculous things like this happen. It just struck me as so ironic and ridiculous, and such a cliché game script/programming mishap.

ASD said:

Nowadays I have a better way to play Final Doom for DOS.

Out of curiosity, what would that be?

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I've played Shadow Wood at least a hundred times, both in the original engine and in various ports, and that's never happened once.

On the other hand, the Gibbet script error has happened countless times, and that final room always gets my nerves like no proper game design tactic ever has.

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Lüt said:

I've played Shadow Wood at least a hundred times, both in the original engine and in various ports, and that's never happened once.

On the other hand, the Gibbet script error has happened countless times, and that final room always gets my nerves like no proper game design tactic ever has.

Just always kill the Brown Chaos Serpents one at a time, leaving at least 3-5 seconds between each kill, and it'll never happen again :P

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Reaper978 said:

It almost sounds like some kind of strange trick devised by Korax or the Heresiarch.

Hahaha...

I can't help but laugh at how absurd that is. You need to dig up... a shovel? And you can't dig up the shovel if you get the items in the non-intended order? Lmao... That's a real crowning moment in gaming history, eh? Not that I'm singling Hexen 2 out, as all games have ridiculous things like this happen. It just struck me as so ironic and ridiculous, and such a cliché game script/programming mishap.

Out of curiosity, what would that be?


Shit, I typo'd that one. You need a shovel to dig up an amulet or some such. It's not as absurd as I made it out to be.

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It's still an amusing thought.

Lüt said:

I've played Shadow Wood at least a hundred times, both in the original engine and in various ports, and that's never happened once.

Strange. I didn't know if anyone else experienced this problem before, and that's why I posted about it. I just found it immensely annoying after going through all the effort to find those six stupid switches, and then checking and rechecking that I had gotten them all, and one marker still would not light.

I remember distinctly the second time that it was the swamp key marker to the left of the door leading to the Hypostyle that would not light. I checked and attempted re-throwing both swamp key switches numerous times. Still it would not light.

The first time it happened one of the indicators that did not light was the Horn Key marker to the right, but I can't remember the other one, maybe Swamp again?

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