Alternative to change in ceiling/floor height automap lines

Last night I added the first thing that I can consider an actual feature to my personal flavour of Boom. I'm not aware of it being done in any other port, so I thought I'd share it and see what people think.

Basically what I've done is made the automap only display lines that could restrict player movement instead of the usual change in floor/ceiling height lines. Here are some simple comparison screen shots. (before, after, before after - hopefully they appear side by side for everyone).




before images:
red = 1-sided lines
yellow = change in ceiling height
brown = change in floor height

after images:
red = 1-sided lines
yellow = barrier lines
brown = ledge lines

To do this I'm displaying what I consider to be ledges and barriers. A barrier is a line that can't be crossed by a player because the gap between floor and ceiling is too small, and a ledge is a line where the change in floor height is greater than 24 (the maximum step height). The result is that lines that can be crossed are not displayed by the automap.

The motivation for this feature is the more detailed user-made maps that contain a massive amount of detail that doesn't restrict player movement. I wanted a way to clean up what gets displayed by the automap making it easier to see what's going on when playing these levels.

Been wanting to see something like this for a while. Goes without saying that I approve. ;)

That's pretty cool, actually. What fork of Boom are you using as a base for this?

40oz posted in a thread awhile ago doing almost exactly the same thing, although I think he was manually hiding each linedef in an editor. It's a cool idea, if you have the time and dedication to mark each individual linedef as "hidden" in DoomBuilder. But if you're doing what I think you're doing, the effect should be auto-applied to any map you play, correct?

Vordakk said:

But if you're doing what I think you're doing, the effect should be auto-applied to any map you play, correct?

Seems like it. After all, it's a source modification to the automap code, shouldn't involve any map editing whatsoever.

That's an interesting feature. Would it be much more work to display impassible 2-sided lines as barriers?

Vordakk said:

40oz posted in a thread awhile ago doing almost exactly the same thing, although I think he was manually hiding each linedef in an editor.

Shouldn't be too difficult to automatically script something like this.

Sodaholic said:

That's pretty cool, actually. What fork of Boom are you using as a base for this?

Ye olde Boom 2.02. :P The reasons and motivations for that are another story really.

Vordakk said:

But if you're doing what I think you're doing, the effect should be auto-applied to any map you play, correct?

Yeahip. As Sodaholic said, it's a source modification, so it doesn't require any map editing and will work on any map.

GreyGhost said:

That's an interesting feature. Would it be much more work to display impassible 2-sided lines as barriers?

No, that would be easy to do and I've already thought of doing it. The reason I've not yet done it is because I'm undecided on whether it would be considered sort of like a cheat. The current implementation only omits automap lines, it doesn't add any new information. Seeing as I'm undecided, opinions and comments on that are welcome. :)

Vordakk said:

40oz posted in a thread awhile ago doing almost exactly the same thing, although I think he was manually hiding each linedef in an editor.

I've done this myself and really like the effect. Cleaning it up (without being cheaplike and hiding everything ) makes it really user-friendly.

Anyhow, this is a really cool idea! A bit mixed on the 2s-barrier lines being shown... dunno whether it would feel cheat-y or not yet :P

you should also make it so that lines where ceiling is less than 56 high appear on auto map as these would be too low for the player to pass under, but I really like this idea and would like to see it added as an option into the source ports

Nice work. Could definitely see this becoming standard.

Foodles said:

you should also make it so that lines where ceiling is less than 56 high appear on auto map as these would be too low for the player to pass under

Maybe it's unclear from the screenshots and explanation, but this is what I meant by a barrier line. It's the situation where you can't cross the line because the ceiling is less than 56 units from the floor.

schwerpunk said:

Nice work. Could definitely see this becoming standard.

If that happened I'd feel like I've accomplished something. :P
Truthfully, I'm hoping this feature gets noticed and incorporated in more used source ports.

Do you think you could also hide decorative ledges that don't affect player's movement in any way? Like on this picture:

Can you calculate whether or not the player can fit in such holes in a reasonable time?

Memfis said:

Can you calculate whether or not the player can fit in such holes in a reasonable time?

At this point I don't know enough to answer this. I think it could be possible, but it'd certainly require something far more sophisticated than what I'm doing at the moment.

Here's a comparison of Suspended in Dusk Map 01 (before, after):

In this case impassable 2-sided lines are included as barrier lines.

Nice. While at it you might like to fix the "feature" or "bug", whichever you wish to call it, when a line has the same floor and ceiling height either side, is flagged "shown" ( DB2 parlance ), but does not actually get physically seen on the automap.