Things about Doom you just found out

Plutonia Map29

While there is a Red Key in the map, there are no doors or lines that actually require the Red Key to open/activate, so you can beat the level without picking the key up (just step through the doorway where the key is to open up the room with the Arch-vile and the switch behind you). The red bars in the Yellow Key area are just lowered by a normal switch.

More sound related stuff I randomly stumbled upon today.

There was a leak of the DMX source code and/or libraries and Romero sent some stuff he obtained from Raven to someone: https://github.com/chocolate-doom/chocolate-doom/issues/639

Did something come out of that? No one seems to have been able to successfully contact Radek at the time :(.

19 hours ago, spd7693 said:

 

This is well known for years, even no shortage of speedrunners have used this trick. So this is nothing new honestly. 

@KVELLER You beat me to the point I was going to make.

spd7693, the title of the thread is "Things about Doom you just found out" so it doesn't matter if everyone else knows, if I don't know, and just found out, I can post about it in this thread.

Here's an example:

Suppose in all my years of playing Doom, upon starting E1M1, I never turned around. I checked ran off into the map. Then one day, for whatever reason, I turn around and see that there is a door texture directly behind the Player 1 Start. I could come on here and post that "I just discovered that you start out E1M1 standing with a door directly behind you, presumably the door you just came through." And that post would be valid for this thread.

7 hours ago, Agent6 said:

More sound related stuff I randomly stumbled upon today.

 

There was a leak of the DMX source code and/or libraries and Romero sent some stuff he obtained from Raven to someone: https://github.com/chocolate-doom/chocolate-doom/issues/639

 

Did something come out of that? No one seems to have been able to successfully contact Radek at the time :(.

I deliberately avoided looking at dmx code when working on pitch shifting to avoid any legal problems. I'm fairly sure at least one community stalwart had attempted to reach radek, again, when that turned  up, to no avail. 

40 minutes ago, Jon said:

I deliberately avoided looking at dmx code when working on pitch shifting to avoid any legal problems. I'm fairly sure at least one community stalwart had attempted to reach radek, again, when that turned  up, to no avail. 

Damn, how annoying it is when that happens...

Can't help but wonder though, why was the guy given the stuff by Romero as a gift, if it turns out he won't be able to do anything with it. We can only hope Radek will be successfully reached at some point, and that that wasn't for nothing.

i find from where coming the song from skulltag dmsec

Since I was dying of curiosity to know more about the pitch shifting feature I took an hour from my time today to contact John and ask him personally about it.

I've asked him whether the feature was going to survive until the very end of support of Doom or it was going to ultimately get the axe, if it was taken into consideration during the creation process of the sounds in Doom, and what take on its recreation seen in various source ports are closer to his vision/preference, despite the fact that it was likely going to be removed in the end since he himself was never a fan of it.

Here's what I got:

Quote

Hello (I deliberate removed my name here),

 

We did not plan for pitch changing when designing the sound effects for DOOM. When the feature was added in v1.4 it was mostly experimental. After listening to it for a while, I decided I wasn’t a fan of it. I’m happy it was removed one way or another (thru an API change, or code commenting).

 

For me, the best version would have been a softer take on the audio instead of a loud pitch change. I was the only person handling audio in DOOM with the exception of Robert Prince authoring the music and sound effects.

 

Cheers,

John

——————————————————————————----------------------------------------------------

John Romero

john@romero.com

So yeah, I guess that settles the debate on whether Doom was meant to have pitch shifted sounds or not, and also a bummer for fans of the feature who also prefer the way it is implemented in Doom Retro, Chocolate, and Crispy. He would've most likely preferred something similar to what we have in PrBoom+, more subtle.

As for me, I genuinely had very low expectations I was ever going to get a reply, but apparently I got just that. This is f*cking awesome. Surprisingly he did mistake the versions, as 1.4 is when it vanished, not when it was introduced, despite me literally pointing out that 1.4 was the version which axed it in the original message.

If you're spawned on a weapon, or any item, you don't pick it up until you start moving. This I knew. I didn't know that this isn't only true for horizontal movement, but vertical movement as well. In the map I'm currently working on I have the player start on top of a weapon and a switch right in front of his face which raises the floor. Hitting the switch will cause the floor to move vertically and the player to pick up the weapon.

Terry Nagy of Apogee Software has recently remarked he received a burned CD of music from Bobby Prince shortly after Doom and Doom 2's release that contains an unheard version of the track Donna To The Rescue.

For those who remember the alternate longer cut of Donna To The Rescue that Bobby included on his old CD release, Terry has stated that the version he has is not the same and is in fact "much longer".

However, Terry also said in another tweet that he won't be posting anything from his CD, so this rendition of the track may never be heard publicly.

homing revenant rockets has smoke trail (i.e. that trail is a sign of "homing missile").

wait i have never noticed this - is this on every source port?

this is vanilla feature, so every sourceport inherits it.

The homing and the puff spawning are done in the same function; so you can't have one without the other, even with DeHackEd.

However, you could make the puffs invisible if you really want to. Keep in mind it'd also affect the regular bullet puffs, though.

https://zdoom.org/wiki/A_Tracer

ZDoom wiki but explanations are largely valid for other ports and vanilla too. The only real difference is the stuff about the SEEKERMISSILE flag: in vanilla there's no such thing, it's hardcoded in the revenant's attack function instead.

from other thread: ultimate doom manual (steam version at least) uses a picture of the wrong game for automap

I believe it's using the manual from the Collector's Edition, which, as I remember, did that, too, but it's distinctly possible that Ultimate Doom revised the manual from Registered Doom, and they used the automap image from Entryway as the example, and so the Steam version inherited it. The point gets across either way.

1 hour ago, Gez said:

The homing and the puff spawning are done in the same function; so you can't have one without the other, even with DeHackEd.

 

However, you could make the puffs invisible if you really want to. Keep in mind it'd also affect the regular bullet puffs, though.

 

https://zdoom.org/wiki/A_Tracer

ZDoom wiki but explanations are largely valid for other ports and vanilla too. The only real difference is the stuff about the SEEKERMISSILE flag: in vanilla there's no such thing, it's hardcoded in the revenant's attack function instead.

2 hours ago, ketmar said:

this is vanilla feature, so every sourceport inherits it.

yup i just loaded up a demo and saw it; cant believe i never noticed

53 minutes ago, rehelekretep said:

cant believe i never noticed

Can't believe you never did too since

3 hours ago, ketmar said:

that trail is a sign of "homing missile

It's the key difference that tells you that you have to dodge it somehow.

i normally just move and notice the missile move or not move as well, never had to work it out beyond that!

I always thought visible difference between homing and non-homing missiles was a GZDoom feature, because I never even noticed it in other ports or vanilla.

55 minutes ago, Rathori said:

I always thought visible difference between homing and non-homing missiles was a GZDoom feature, because I never even noticed it in other ports or vanilla.

Back when GZDoom was my primary source port I thought the same since it comes with player rocket particle trails enabled by default. Then I noticed its existence in virtually all ports and eventually DOS Doom and realized it was a vanilla feature.

In testing a map, I've only just come to find out that apparently monsters who are far away and shooting at a downward angle can aim too high. I noticed it with arachnotron plasma consistently landing some distance behind me. Then I tried a baron. Same thing. It seems to depend on the distance and/or angle. I got the monsters to miss consistently on Retro, Crispy, Gl and PrBoom+, but it seems to be fixed in GZDoom. I don't recall ever experiencing this phenomenon before.

2 hours ago, HAK3180 said:

In testing a map, I've only just come to find out that apparently monsters who are far away and shooting at a downward angle can aim too high. I noticed it with arachnotron plasma consistently landing some distance behind me. Then I tried a baron. Same thing. It seems to depend on the distance and/or angle. I got the monsters to miss consistently on Retro, Crispy, Gl and PrBoom+, but it seems to be fixed in GZDoom. I don't recall ever experiencing this phenomenon before.

Most likely a rounding error. The computed angle is off by a tiny amount due to limited precision. Doom has a few of these, they're usually not an issue. I doubt you would ever notice this on any of the id iwad maps.

I'm pretty sure there's been an in-depth discussion about this phenomenon a few pages back in this thread, you might wanna check it out.

18 minutes ago, Rathori said:

I'm pretty sure there's been an in-depth discussion about this phenomenon a few pages back in this thread, you might wanna check it out.

Found it, thanks. Just didn't search the right thing.

"You thought an imp was a cute little dude in a red suit with a pitchfork. Where did these brown bastards come from?"

It's just struck me after 25 years - who says they're "imps"? There's no-one around to tell Doomguy they're "imps", so apparently Doomguy has christened them that himself, then is complaining it's a silly name.

23 minutes ago, damerell said:

"You thought an imp was a cute little dude in a red suit with a pitchfork. Where did these brown bastards come from?"

 

It's just struck me after 25 years - who says they're "imps"? There's no-one around to tell Doomguy they're "imps", so apparently Doomguy has christened them that himself, then is complaining it's a silly name.

When I read the manual as a kid, the Lost Soul description is something like "Tough. Dumb. Flies. On fire. 'Nuff said." I always thought to myself "Who's Nuff? And what does Nuff know about Lost Souls?"

And on the Imp description, I thought SOB was "Sorry Old Bastard"

I honestly forgot that Bloodfalls even exists. it's the only Doom 2 map that was so distant that I thought it was a new map, and I remember the map that comes before it, Chasm, very darn well.

Boring map, incredibly great atmosphere

On 1/11/2019 at 5:17 PM, peach freak said:

 

When I read the manual as a kid, the Lost Soul description is something like "Tough. Dumb. Flies. On fire. 'Nuff said." I always thought to myself "Who's Nuff? And what does Nuff know about Lost Souls?"

 

And on the Imp description, I thought SOB was "Sorry Old Bastard"

When I read the manual as a kid, I misinterpreted the revenant's description (Apparently when a demon dies, they pick him up, dust him off, wire him some combat gear, and send him back into battle. No rest for the wicked, eh? You wish your missiles did what his can do.) to mean they could resurrect enemies like arch-viles. Then I thought they could only resurrect demons. Then I thought the game was glitched. 

3 hours ago, HAK3180 said:

 

When I read the manual as a kid, I misinterpreted the revenant's description (Apparently when a demon dies, they pick him up, dust him off, wire him some combat gear, and send him back into battle. No rest for the wicked, eh? You wish your missiles did what his can do.) to mean they could resurrect enemies like arch-viles. Then I thought they could only resurrect demons. Then I thought the game was glitched. 

Which brings back the age old question of what the Revenant was before it died.