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TheNerdTurtle2

What's the worst part of dooms engine?

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What parts of doom's engine makes you frustrated you have to work around? I'm mostly talking about vanilla but you can include other source ports

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Infinitely tall actors. It allows some neat tricks but this is the only real problem I have with vanilla.

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In the pre-source port days, that would have been the way sprite loading was handled. It was not possible to simply include just the frames you wanted in a PWAD and expecting it to work, so TCs came up with solutions such as modifying the IWADs or including ALL sprites in PWADS, even those you didn't need to replace.

Legit mods included DEUSF and batch files that did the "merging", more shady ones simply came "pre-merged" with duplicate IWAD sprites, in addition to their own.

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Generally, the fact that a whole lot of features (ranging from engine physics over linedef/sector actions to thing AI) are hardcoded and can't be modified, customized or parametrized - and those that can be, not sufficiently well so. Although advanced ports (especially ZDoom) improve this... For the potential that I can see in a 2.5D engine, even ZDoom is still closer to being too little flexible than being comfortably well flexible, as I see it.

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Kira said:

Infinitely tall actors. It allows some neat tricks but this is the only real problem I have with vanilla.

Tricks like a speed up and shoot at wall and kill someone below, heh =).
I don't like vanilla port, i prefer more Boom port. It has much more abilities in mapping plus my favorite aspect in Boom - monsters can be push off a cliff.

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Hardcoded shit all the way. For a game that apparently supported modding, it kinda didn't much without .exe hacking and the like.

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Azuruish said:

my favorite aspect in Boom - monsters can be push off a cliff.

You, sir, are worse than Hitler.

Jayextee said:

Hardcoded shit all the way. For a game that apparently supported modding, it kinda didn't much without .exe hacking and the like.

Yeah, I think the "Doom was programmed to support modding" thing has been inflated and glorified over the years. The recently rediscovered reload hack kind of makes it obvious that PWAD support was mostly added only to the extent needed to speed up level development. For things like sprites, the source code clearly was written in a way where Carmack had the idea of letting PWAD sprite lumps override IWAD ones, but the code is half-finished and doesn't work.

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The list would be too long, much of it has already been named.
It's a shame that we are still stuck with most of these limitations because 'Boom compatible' hasn't removed any of these hardcoded things like special behavior for some monsters, level progression, which sky and music to pick and a few other things.

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Well, if you consider Doom engine composed of 1) rendering, 2) collision physics, 3) object AI and 4) player controls, then collision physics are IMO definitely the worst.

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I'm annoyed by the fact that wall sliding doesn't work against impassable lines that you'd be able to cross otherwise. Solid walls and cliffs you can slide against, but not impassable lines.

Infinitely tall actors are worse though.

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Collision box... huh... Especially when you can't goddamn it punch a Mancubus or Arachnotron and it feels like that fatass are more agile than ninja... Aggghh!

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I think one of my beefs is that we can't make vanilla maps with a cyberdemon being the final boss because after you kill it it doesn't end the level because we can't make it do that :/ Also indefinitely tall actors kills me

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Da Werecat said:

I'm annoyed by the fact that wall sliding doesn't work against impassable lines that you'd be able to cross otherwise. Solid walls and cliffs you can slide against, but not impassable lines.

Really? Are you talking about vanilla?

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Talking about non-ZDoom. (and non-similarly-advanced-ports with modified physics code)

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TheNerdTurtle2 said:

I think one of my beefs is that we can't make vanilla maps with a cyberdemon being the final boss because after you kill it it doesn't end the level because we can't make it do that :/ Also indefinitely tall actors kills me


Unless, of course, you make it E2M8.

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3D floors and room-over-room without silent teleports. Duke has so many options but the build engine is crap while it is the other way around in Doom - the build engine is good but there are few options.

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I should probably clarify that I'm talking about non-orthogonal lines. Wall sliding is always dodgy on such walls, but impassable lines work like they're a bunch of small corners.

I don't remember how ZDoom handles it.

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For me (an Average Joe) the worst part of the Doom engine is all the bugs it has. (ba dum tssss)
Seriously though, the part that pisses me off the most is the texture tiling stuff, mostly the stuff that causes Tutti Frutti.

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Da Werecat said:

I don't remember how ZDoom handles it.



That oversight has been fixed in ZDoom (as have been a lot of the things that were mentioned here.)

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HorrorMovieGuy said:

Being limited to 256 colors for graphics.


There actually was a 32k color mode in some of the DOS alphas, and presumably also a 4k color mode on the NeXTstation original, but for various reasons they didn't make it into the final product or released source code. Not the least of which was that in practice they didn't offer much improvement over 256 colors most of the time (4k actually looked worse in most cases).

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Thinking from a multiplayer perspective:

Weapon switching is forced.

Fighting someone toe-to-toe and accidentally run over the Chaingun? You're dead.

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