What on hell is "Dead lost soul"!

For years, I have been wondering what the heck is it for.

When adding it to a map, only a strange explosion frame happens before dissapearing. Other than that, it seems to be useless.

Anyone knows?

There are dead imps, dead cacos, and so on. So why not a dead lost soul?

Originally lost souls did leave a corpse. You can see them if you try the press release beta version; the lost soul had a totally different design back then, a white horned skull with some sort of hitscan attack. And when you killed them, they left bone fragments that just hovered up in the air because they forgot to make them fall (or maybe they were meant to float? who knows). Anyway there were staying lost soul corpses originally, so a dead lost soul thing made sense. Then they changed the lost soul death to make it disappear and get removed, and now dead lost souls, quite logically, disappear and get removed right from the level start.

There's a term for this kind of things: development garbage.

58 minutes ago, Gez said:

some sort of hitscan attack

Actually, it had more in common with the way most monsters did melee (and all of them post 1.2) than any kind of hitscan. You couldn't hide behind another monster to avoid taking damage and/or cause them to infight. Clearly, this is boring and unfair bullshit, hence the redesign.

58 minutes ago, Gez said:

they left bone fragments that just hovered up in the air because they forgot to make them fall (or maybe they were meant to float? who knows).

No, just really bad alignment.

Like the others have said, development jank.

That said, they're not quite useless.  I think some level generation utilities added them to levels to ensure you couldn't -file them in an older version of Shareware Doom.

I think it's mainly useful for Dehacked purposes afaik

On 5/22/2017 at 11:16 PM, AlexMax said:

I think some level generation utilities added them to levels to ensure you couldn't -file them in an older version of Shareware Doom.

Could you even -file with the shareware IWAD anyway? I don't think you could.

1 hour ago, YukiTakashi said:

I think it's mainly useful for Dehacked purposes afaik

Not that it was ever id's intention, Dehacked not being their creation. Still, that's what it amounts to; free stuff to hack.

4 hours ago, Blastfrog said:

Could you even -file with the shareware IWAD anyway? I don't think you could.

 

Not that it was ever id's intention, Dehacked not being their creation. Still, that's what it amounts to; free stuff to hack.

IIRC, you could with 1.2 if the PWAD didn't depend on IWAD resources that weren't included in shareware, which was why it became somewhat of a standard for even the most basic PWADs to use E2M1 or E3M1, rather than E1M1 as one might otherwise expect (with some exceptions, particularly ones like UAC_DEAD that depended on being E1M8 for tag 666).

In the later versions (probably starting with 1.4 open beta, but definitely a thing by 1.666) id decided to explicitly forbid doom1.wad from loading PWADs. But it was definitely possible at one point.

Seems like they could be useful for decorative purposes...

On 5/22/2017 at 8:16 PM, AlexMax said:

That said, they're not quite useless.  I think some level generation utilities added them to levels to ensure you couldn't -file them in an older version of Shareware Doom.

This. I don't know how widespread this custom was or where it originated, but it was not unheard of.