transfer skies in vanilla

I was playing around with the editor and found that using the linedef action 271, boom transfer texture to sky special doesn't crash doom when playing in vanilla. Obviously the special doesn't work in vanilla, but it gives the player the option of playing the maps with the default sky or with the 'correct' skies per level in a wad with more than one map.

Is this worth doing or would it cause too much confusion with demo recording at different complevels depending on preference?

If the wad were broken up into mini episodes, say 3 episodes of 3 levels each, would it make sense to release it as 3 seperate wads, maps 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, each wad with its own rsky1 graphic? So if you record in vanilla, you could play the maps with the correct skies by loading the corresponding episodes' wad alone, and if you were to play in a boom compatible source port, the special would correct the skies and you could just load all 3 wads at once and play all the maps consecutively without quitting?

Would that be a convenient solution?

personally, I'd use the boom transfers and keep it all in one wad, but mention that it is possible to record demos in vanilla.

Most speedrunners are used to recording with different tools for different wads, so its not necessarily important to explicitly support vanilla just for demo recorders.

Also, vanilla demos can be played in boom ports, so even the graphical issue (which is minor, to be fair), would be immediately solved by just playing back the demo in prboom-plus for instance.

Hmm. At first I was going to agree, but when I think about it for a while, I think you should keep the intended lowest-compatible experience to be the proper experience. And your solution with 3 different wads seems weird and inconvenient to me. In your place, I'd either use a single fitting sky, or ditch vanilla compatibility and use the sky transfers, or put the episodic maps to the first slots of 3 different episodes inside a single wad (easy with Doom 1, but possible in Doom 2 too).

If you can find a sky that's suitable for all 9 maps and use that, but have optional different skies in Boom or above, I say go for it. As long as it isn't a blue sunny sky with green mountains in an overtly hellish map, I don't think it would look too bad.

Hell, I do this in many of my vanilla compat DM wads via MAPINFO lump. Every map works perfectly in vanilla, but when played online, you get the added bonus of unique skies. I even use the ANIMDEFS lump to make water/slime falls faster for Z-based ports, that way it still looks good in vanilla, but looks even better online.

Personally, I hate Boom for monsters getting stuck on ledges and falling off, and SSG changing to another weapon even though I picked up more shells "just in time". So it would be unpleasant to have to use -complevel 9 just to see the correct skies in an otherwise vanilla level. But obviously using -complevel 2 would be unpleasant as well because that would not be the correct experience, and sky can constitute up to 80% of level's atmosphere. So that would be a "pick your poison" situation for me and a reason to avoid the wad. The separate wad solution is better, even better would be to convince entryway to enable sky transfers in -complevel 2.

I've been using cl2 so often that the differences of cl9 are glaringly obvious.

I tried using a basic black starry sky across the whole thing which looked okay, at times, but sucked a lot away from what should have been obvious tributes and references.

It sucks I can't do the three wads with different skies routine, and then tack on the black starry sky as the replacement for all the skies in the event all 3 wads are run together, but the only way I can think to do that is to include a fourth wad just for that reason. Perhaps I could just redesign the third episode to use the black starry sky intentionally, but it's kinda boring :/

Are you against separating the maps into episodes while keeping them all in one wad? (MAP01-03, MAP12-14, MAP21-23) (or E1M1-M3, E2M1-M3, E3M1-M3)

Vanilla Doom crashes with unknown sector types, but it can handle unknown line types as far as I am aware.

The problem is whether any port happens to reserve a non-vanilla linetype number for a different one to the one you expect?

Well, I think that's generally a rarity. The 4 ports I have the most experience with are Odamex, Zdaemon, Zandronum and Doom Legacy. Legacy maps are compatible with Zandro, and all of them (sans Legacy) are compatible with most of the same Boom/ZDoom line types. For something as simple as sky transfers, it shouldn't ever cause problems, but for more complex actions it definitely could.

Vermil said:

Vanilla Doom crashes with unknown sector types, but it can handle unknown line types as far as I am aware.

It can handle them - until the player tries to cross them. Then it crashes, if I recall correctly.

scifista42 said:

It can handle them - until the player tries to cross them. Then it crashes, if I recall correctly.

Wrong. All unknown linedef types are ignored.

Alright, I'll remember it, thanks.