Things about Doom you just found out

1 hour ago, Gez said:

No, it doesn't quite clearly state that. It says that offsets are unsigned, contrarily to most other WAD structures.

Yep. And regarding the use of "-1" instead of "0xFFFF", or "0xFFFFFFFF" for unsigned constants: Using "-1" does make sense, in general, in a lot of instances. Using -1 insures that all bits will be set via sign extension, regardless of variable size. It also insures that you are storing the largest value, when interpreted as "unsigned", regardless of variable size.

I've been noticing that there's a lot of good information on ZDoom's wiki, making it a good resource for all ports, not just ZDoom and derivatives. Some of it gives the Doom wiki a run for its money.

If that's the case, then sounds like the Doomwiki ought to be copying over that good information with attribution, as that's the point of a wiki's sharing license, right?

I've actually submitted an update to the doomwiki. There are still some details that are missing, but it's a lot more complete and gives a better description of the format.

58 minutes ago, Linguica said:

If that's the case, then sounds like the Doomwiki ought to be copying over that good information with attribution, as that's the point of a wiki's sharing license, right?

Yeah, probably - with caveats. A straight copy wouldn't work - you don't want duplicate/similar articles in the same wiki. And, you'd want to mark ZDoom-specific articles as such, if you even wanted to bring them in at all. I mean, that's what the ZDoom Wiki is there for - to document ZDoom. If Doom Wiki were to include all of ZDoom Wiki, it would make sense to also bring in info for all ports, which seems like overkill to me.

There's also the issue of structure: Doom Wiki is naturally organized a bit different than ZDoom Wiki. Because of that, and the desire to prune dups, the requirements to do the job properly become unwieldy. A team of people in charge of such a task would first need to thoroughly study and become familiar with the entirety of both wikis - content and structure, to be able to recognize dups, and devise a plan for how to structure the new data logically. This team would also have to be experts in ZDoom editing and non-ZDoom editing, to recognize which features are ZDoom-specific. Some articles will contain both ZDoom and non-ZDoom info... they might need to be split in two.

Finally, there's the philosophical question of links. Should copied ZDoom Wiki links remain as-is, turning an "intranet" link into an external link? Or should the links be changed to keep traffic within Doom Wiki? This question might have to be asked for every link encountered.

Despite that splash of cold water, there are lots of articles that are easily recognizable as being quite suited for Doom wiki. For example, that Blockmap article would be perfect for Doom wiki (if it's not a dup.) The article could use some more info about extended/compressed formats and the like, but it does contain solid info that applies to all ports.

It's actually the kind of work I'm pretty good at, and I'd be interested to accept such a task, if I weren't so bogged down with other Doom, and non-Doom-related projects. At some point, a man has to stop taking on new projects, and I hit that point 5 years ago...

The good news is that everyone can access both wikis, which is not too much to ask, I suppose.

7 hours ago, Anidrex_1009 said:

That the Doom 1 and 2 OST actually sound a lot like some popular metal songs. lml 

Do you know the story behind that? Because it's almost blatant copies of some. John Romero gave some music to Bobby Prince for inspiration, apparently.

The pain state percentage is not just simply (pain chance value)/256, but it's something different than I expected. I guess that's because the RNG in classic doom is not random.

That the E2M2 music, "The Demon from Adrian's Pen" is inspired by Metallica's "Call of Ktulu." Hmm. Besides the evil-sounding tritone interval between the first 2 chords of the chord progression, and maybe the choppy guitar rhythm that comes in, I'd say it's just a coincidence. If it is actually inspired by it, it's certainly Bobby Prince's most loosely-inspired adaptation of them all. 

After I finished MAP15 of HR2 the song got stuck in my mind, and in my browsing I managed to find the original version. Didn't know the original wasn't MIDI.

And supposedly, this track, along all the other songs credited to Grave in HR2 are mistakenly credited as such.

Yeah I remember being super confused about the music in HR being composed by 'Grave', because there is a death metal artist called Grave, but it has nothing to do with them.

12 hours ago, Chezza said:

Do you know the story behind that? Because it's almost blatant copies of some. John Romero gave some music to Bobby Prince for inspiration, apparently.

And that Bobby Prince was formerly a lawyer.

1 minute ago, cyan0s1s said:

Yeah I remember being super confused about the music in HR being composed by 'Grave', because there is a death metal artist called Grave, but it has nothing to do with them.

Yeah. And well, the track is surely death oriented but very far from Grave's style anyway so it would've been very surprising if someone from the lineup of the time actually got involved, it's much cleaner and far more epic than what they're usually making.

This guy claims to have written the tracks that were later attributed to Grave.

13 hours ago, Chezza said:

Do you know the story behind that? Because it's almost blatant copies of some. John Romero gave some music to Bobby Prince for inspiration, apparently.

Personally I did not know most of the things on this list I'll link below. It's actually super interesting, and worth a watch for sure if you have a few minutes. My personal favorite thing on the list is the fact that they named it Doom after the scene in the movie "The Color of Money" when Tom Cruise opens the box and tells them it's Doom as he proceeds to dominate them at Pool, and John Carmac wanted it to be similar as in they would dominate the industry! Pretty cool. 

It would have been very cool to see what they did if they had moved forward with making it a licensed Aliens game, but obviously I'm happy they didn't because we got the beloved franchise we know and love today. 

13 hours ago, antares031 said:

The pain state percentage is not just simply (pain chance value)/256, but it's something different than I expected. I guess that's because the RNG in classic doom is not random.

It is approximately equal to pain_chance/256. For an exact figure, you have to test pain_chance against each of the 256 numbers in the random table. The random table has some deficiencies: some numbers are duplicated up to 3 times, and some numbers are not represented at all. However, the numbers are distributed well enough to expect pain_chance/256 to closely track the exact percentage.

On 4/23/2018 at 3:20 PM, cyan0s1s said:

To punish the curious, presumably.

John Romero has stated that he likes to pay close attention to out-of-map detail in an E1 playthrough if I recall correctly.

@Agent6 Yep, he says so in his video description, so that was his song. Great hearing it in MP3 finally.

10 hours ago, PvtHudson206 said:

Doom facts.

I knew all of them :)

11 hours ago, The Mysterious Moustachio said:

 

John Romero has stated that he likes to pay close attention to out-of-map detail in an E1 playthrough if I recall correctly.

I remember hearing him saying something like that in one of the playthroughs.

If I remember the context correctly, he was saying that there was a recess in a wall (it may have been where the armor is in E1M2) where the upper texture on the front of recess (the side that faced away from the player) was untextured. It wasn't an issue during play because there was physically no way for the player to actually see that texture, but he said if he had to do it again, he would add a texture to it (even though no one would see it) because details matter (or something like that).

Just now, Pegleg said:

I remember hearing him saying something like that in one of the playthroughs.

 

If I remember the context correctly, he was saying that there was a recess in a wall (it may have been where the armor is in E1M2) where the upper texture on the front of recess (the side that faced away from the player) was untextured. It wasn't an issue during play because there was physically no way for the player to actually see that texture, but he said if he had to do it again, he would add a texture to it (even though no one would see it) because details matter (or something like that).

I remember him saying that people could call him lazy for not texturing it, or something along those lines.

The first Heretic episode makes a lot of sense. 

First off, to access the city, you sail to The Docks. 

To avoid many guards and enemies, you take a detour through the Dungeons. 

Once near the citadel, you strike the Gatehouse and the Guard Tower so that the Citadel loses its main points. That's when you enter it. 

In the Citadel you find a place that just doesn't feel right, and it's The Cathedral. You go down to its Crypts and you discover a portal to Hell's Maw. 

It sounds like a fanfiction but it's an incredibly realistic way of things. 

TIL that the FWATER* flat was made by skewing the alpha nukage flat -45 degrees. With presumably some adjustments to the base flat, but still.

(recolored the fwater flat green in this example so it's easier to see)

It would explain the weird checkerboard pattern in the flat, especially if the program they were using didn't perform skewing very gracefully.

On 4/25/2018 at 8:59 AM, Pegleg said:

there was a recess in a wall (it may have been where the armor is in E1M2) where the upper texture on the front of recess (the side that faced away from the player) was untextured. It wasn't an issue during play because there was physically no way for the player to actually see that texture

Two walls at least! His reputation is crumbling before our eyes.

I just found out that when you get hit, Doomguy's face in the HUD turns in the direction he got hit from. I've noticed the head turning, but just never put it together until I read it. Also recently found out this switch exists in Perfect Hatred.

Zombiemen, imps, demons, spectres, barons, hell knights, and cyberdemons don't go full-bright when they attack. Lost souls and spawn cubes are always rendered at full brightness.

This is about GZDB moreso than Doom but:

I just noticed it adds "very" to the message if you draw a sector with many linedefs!

This.

Bots are not available in Doom 2016's Orbital map.

You can sneak around the linedef that opens up the rooms with the first imps you see at the start of MAP17.

Nearly all Heretic monsters move a bit faster on skill 5 than on lower skill levels. Even more, this only applies to skill 5 and not on -fast. Sabreclaws don't get any faster, ironically.

21 hours ago, printz said:

Nearly all Heretic monsters move a bit faster on skill 5 than on lower skill levels. Even more, this only applies to skill 5 and not on -fast. Sabreclaws don't get any faster, ironically.

Vanilla Heretic doesn't support -fast.