Doomy thoughts

This is pure experimentation, born out of having random thinky-things about the game that I don't really want to make individual topics for. Consider this a wall for one-off, short Doomisms that don't necessarily require much exploration.

Doomy Thought:

Having an enemy push a voodoo doll into a soul sphere; would it boost the player's health? Also, triggering an enemy to start attacking a voodoo doll (such as imp fireballs, probably one of the slower ways to die) and using that to encourage the player to get past some final trap in a map, lest his health tick away completely.

I don't think a voodoo doll picking up a health item would boost the player's health. The health of the doll and of the player are tracked separately, which sometimes results in strange behavior. Look at the Doom wiki for more info.

Second, I don't think it is possible to make a monster target a voodoo doll.

Sometimes I have Doomy thoughts about thinky things while sipping from a thingy of beverage - like how do Cacodemons open doors or why do Pinkies in E3M1 in that narrow corridor retreat from you even though they're right in your face.

Is the BFG tracer-hit animation the same as the teleport animation?

2 minutes ago, 42PercentHealth said:

I don't think a voodoo doll picking up a health item would boost the player's health.

It would. This is how the weapons work at the start of Evilution Map18, for example.

What if Doom 64 demons were brought into Doom 1 or 2...

hmm...

"Where are all the bathrooms on Phobos and Deimos?"

"Who are the Doomguy's family?"

"Is he right or left handed?"

From the doomwiki:

Quote

If the player has the same amount of health as the voodoo doll and the voodoo doll is then attacked until its hit points are reduced to zero, the player dies as normal, effectively killing themselves. Problems occur when the player's health is not equal to that of the voodoo doll, causing strange effects.

If the player had more health than their voodoo doll when the voodoo doll was killed, the player enters a strange "undead" state: they lose their weapon, fall to the floor and cannot move or attack; the status bar face however does not appear dead, and monsters who were already pursuing the player will continue to attack them until the player's health is reduced to zero, causing them to die a second time (and killing them properly). It is possible to restart the level even while the player's health is still positive; in any case, restarting the level (or finishing via type 11 damaging floor) in this undead state is functionally identical to a suicide exit and does not affect the gameplay in any way.

 

Conversely, if the voodoo doll is damaged to the point of reducing the player's health to zero without killing the voodoo doll, a new class of undead player occurs. Like the other case, the player drops their weapon. The differences start in that the status bar face changes to a dead one, but the screen does not lower. The player can continue to move around and open doors, press switches, trigger linedefs and collect items exactly as if they were alive. Monsters who were already pursuing the player continue to do so, but other monsters cannot target the player until their health becomes 1% or higher. Eventually, when the player takes enough damage so that the remaining health of the voodoo doll is depleted to zero, the normal death sequence takes place. Picking up any health item will "revive" the player, enabling them to awake monsters again, though not restoring the ability to use weapons. Exiting the level with positive health remedies all effects of the undeath, including the use of any weapons and ammo picked up while undead. Otherwise, the player will not only retain all zombie characteristics, but also will lose the ability to pick up objects and becomes unaffected by enviromental hazards, such as crushers and damaging floors - thus, unable to take damage nor heal, becoming permanently trapped in this state.

I think the only way this could possibly happen is if the player and the doll pick up health items "independently" of each other. Any damage they take is shared between them, and they both spawn with the same amount of health...

9 minutes ago, VK17 said:

What if Doom 64 demons were brought into Doom 1 or 2...

 

hmm...

I think there's a mod that lets you do that?

When the doll picks something up, you get it too. But not the other way around.

So how does the case ever happen where the doll has more health than you?

11 minutes ago, 42PercentHealth said:

So how does the case ever happen where the doll has more health than you?

you make it so X dolls take Y damage, which totals Z damage for the player. This means Z is the total damage dealt to the player, not to a single voodoo doll, but several ones instead. Voila... That's how it could work

50 minutes ago, 42PercentHealth said:

So how does the case ever happen where the doll has more health than you?

For testing purposes, I would rocket-face myself and keep vodoo at a safe distance. I believe in this case I would have less than 100hp and vodoo would have still 100hp. :thinking:

Theres a useless linedef trigger where the floor can raise up to the ceiling until it crushes you, but it doesn't hurt you fast enough to kill you before it stops at the ceiling. So if you have 100 health or more you just get stuck there alive.

I bet you could make a bunch of tiny sectors go up into holes in the ceiling and when you get caught on the outside, the floor will continue to push you through this waffleiron/meatgrinder thing until you die a brutally painful death.

In the map I created for DWMP2017, there's a bit near the end where I teleport in a series of demons in front of the player in a wide corridor, one after another (about a second apart).

Every single demon, upon teleporting in, turns to the player's left, marches about two meters to the side, before turning the face the player and advancing as per normal.

Every time I've played the map, I've always wondered why they do that.

I sometimes reflect on the heightened notion of being in a "real" environment that the classic games evoked when I was younger. It seemed like the level was more than it was.

@Bauul For the first two meters, they probably continue walking into the same direction that they were walking into when they crossed the teleport line. Even though teleportation sets their angle to the teleport destination's angle, it doesn't also set the movement direction variable that is used by monster AI, so they immediately turn back into that direction. Their movement then follows the same pattern as it normally does.

10 hours ago, YukiRaven said:

"Is he right or left handed?"

He's, uh, centre-handed. Quite possibly his penis grew really long and formed into a third hand. >;)

what you are thinking ?

11 hours ago, YukiRaven said:

"Is he right or left handed?"

 

I guess he is right-handed.

14 hours ago, YukiRaven said:

"Is he right or left handed?"

I remember that someone said that he's left handed, but since some weapons like the Shotgun are harder to use that way, he uses them like a right handed person.

Disclaimer: I'm just repeating what that guy said. I don't really know about this.

I wonder if there were any games before Doom that utilized the unique sculpture/pixel art look for enemies/players.

I wonder if anyone made a map with a super-secret area that basically acts as its own hard map, well hidden, even to the point of deceiving the player by making the secret part use hidden lines and giving the player a map.

How do the demons reproduce?

6 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

How do the demons reproduce?

Icon of Sin.

Inb4 storm of sex jokes.

I don't think the demons have genitalia and I doubt they were "born" or "conceived." I've traditionally seen them as biological chess pieces summoned by the Icon of Sin.

The idea of summoning a demon is of course magical, as opposed to some standard physical/quantum process. I think it's somewhat pointless to try to determine what exactly summoning would consist of, but I suppose on some level it's a form of demonic alchemy; taking inanimate matter and making it not only animate, but having "programming" within it, that is, having an innate instinct to kill whoever is perceived as a threat to the Icon.

if you have a sector that is the same lighting as the surrounding sectors and uses the sector effect 8 Light Glows, then have a linedef action that changes the brightness to 255, the light will blink once and dim down to its original lighting without glowing back up to its original brightness. Could be a cool way to simulate a lightning storm in vanilla.

I wonder if those walkover light change triggers can be applied in other ways to create new lighting effects, like reversing the effect of randomly flickering lights or something, or use something like the sector donut effect to inherit properties from other sectors and layer lighting effects on one sector.

Something I realized last night:

I think my enjoyment of campaigns might be inversely related to the number of zombiemen in them.

They never lead to interesting combat, either serving as spectacle for the player or to plink away at health in a crowd (which can be dangerous but isn't very interesting).

The faster they're eliminated from a mapset's vocabulary, the more I tend to enjoy it.

This is amazingly consistent for me. Worst monster. Harder to use well outside of first-level scenarios than the Spider Mastermind.

9 hours ago, 42PercentHealth said:

Icon of Sin.

 

Inb4 storm of sex jokes.

Now imagine the Icon of Sin in H-Doom.  Whoever created H-Doom could have a field day with that level...

Today after a long stressful day of work I flopped down onto the sofa with a drinky drink while thinking thinky thoughts about Doomy stuff like even though the player has the fist selected, hitting the attack button, the Doom marine sprite shows him firing his assault rifle.