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Sigvatr

Things about Doom you just found out

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On 11/17/2020 at 1:58 AM, plums said:

The infamous Maulotaur in Heretic E4M1 is actually placed on the tower in that area, and he just falls down. I came across this when trying various Heretic to Doom conversions, and was worried I had somehow messed up my Heretic IWAD because why would you do this?

 

To let him see you right away, clearly! I like this positioning, though maybe it would be better to have him on the northern side of the tower, to make it more likely for the player to see him before he sees you. Or maybe even keep him up there, and then release him with the same switch that lowers the balcony railing.

 

Anyway, this is more like Things About Windows I Just Found Out, but for source ports with drag & drop support, I can also drag the files onto a shortcut rather than the .exe itself! Shortcuts can also be used instead of batch files to launch a program with -parameters.

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Yeah, it's pretty funny that the maulotaur will just drop down from higher heights without a care. Other monsters try to avoid it, but the maulotaur has no such compunction.

 

I remember playing a custom Heretic level and a maulotaur just dropped down in a lava pit where he could be safely ignored and was eventually killed by the volcano things at the bottom.

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9 hours ago, paturn said:

I learnt how to load PWADs through bat files. I'm a bit slow

 

Don't feel bad, it took me a while to finally create a batch file and then just make minor tweaks to it when I need to launch a PWAD. Definitely beats opening a command prompt and cding all the way to your Doom folder (which to me was a long ass path).

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Once a sector has been triggered as a crusher, you can't use any other ceiling effect, even if the crusher is stopped.  25 years of playing this game and making maps for it, and I never knew that until today.

 

Easy enough to workaround, but I was very perplexed about it for a while.

 

(then I checked the wiki)

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You can break glBSP if your map gets too much for it.  I kinda knew that on a theoretical level, but it wasn't practical knowledge until today. :)

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The skull from the Unity port used on the automap to denote kills is from the skull on short red pillar decoration. The only difference is the two transparent pixels near the jaw have been colored black (still appearing transparent on the automap). It can also be found in the unused resources Romero gifted to us a while back.

 

image.png.031291538361e5efddd79ba37ae4158f.pngimage.png.6f8aa53990877f166bbf29b0cdaf3719.png

image.png.0b562294f7532918c70588c6090ecc0c.png

 

Edited by NaturalTvventy

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Today I learned, thanks to the WAD Hardest Fight, that if you make a map with only one sector monsters will chase you, but won't attack.

 

The map has to be made in Doom format. Advanced formats like Boom and UDMF won't work. Surprisingly, this bug isn't fixed in modern source ports and even works in GZDoom.

 

 

 

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@Jewellds this is due to the way NODES was built with that map. if you will regenerate nodes with any modern nodes builder (including GL nodes), it will work.

 

basically, any port that respects original BSP quirks and logic will work the same here. GZDoom actually took a long way to make that map "not working" by adding alot of compatibility hacks.

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9 minutes ago, ketmar said:

@Jewellds this is due to the way NODES was built with that map.

 

It seems you're right. It's a bug with Zennode. When I rebuild with another node builder the monsters behave normally.

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6 hours ago, Jewellds said:

Today I learned, thanks to the WAD Hardest Fight, that if you make a map with only one sector monsters will chase you, but won't attack.

 

The map has to be made in Doom format. Advanced formats like Boom and UDMF won't work. Surprisingly, this bug isn't fixed in modern source ports and even works in GZDoom.

 

 

 

oh! that's why! 

 

I played this a couple of days ago - probably for the same reason you did - and wondered why the monsters were just following me around. I even looked at it in an editor, to no avail.  

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On 9/23/2011 at 8:32 AM, Nasesrtyhcfhk said:

The Berserk pack lasts the whole level.

Quality of life significantly improved.

nope. it lasts for about 12 years. literally. ;)
edit: bruh, i did not realize that this post was made 9 years ago

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Just because I'm new to the classic Doom community and don't know a lot of the trivia, that Sandy Freaking Petersen made most of the levels.

When most people talk about the talent behind Doom, it's almost always about Carmack and Romero, which is understandable, but as a result I had no idea that the co-creator of Call of Cthulhu also did a huge amount of work on two of the most influential computer games of all time.

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14 hours ago, The_Hyphenator said:

Just because I'm new to the classic Doom community and don't know a lot of the trivia, that Sandy Freaking Petersen made most of the levels.

When most people talk about the talent behind Doom, it's almost always about Carmack and Romero, which is understandable, but as a result I had no idea that the co-creator of Call of Cthulhu also did a huge amount of work on two of the most influential computer games of all time.

 

You'll soon discover that Sandy maps are among the most polarizing topics in the Doom community.

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28 minutes ago, StupidBunny said:

 

You'll soon discover that Sandy maps are among the most polarizing topics in the Doom community.


I can understand why. There are definitely some maps of his that I absolutely love (Tricks and Traps, anyone?) and others that are just unpleasant to play through. But I feel like that's to be expected when one person makes the majority of the maps; invariably the larger a person's body of work is, the more duds will crop up. It's just basic probability.

Though I feel like some of his maps become better with modern source ports and mods. Downtown, for instance, is a lot more fun with vertical mouselook enabled and running in Project Brutality than in vanilla Doom 2.

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8 minutes ago, The_Hyphenator said:

Tricks and Traps, anyone?

 

Oooooh, bud.

Here, grab a fireproof coat... :)

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51 minutes ago, The_Hyphenator said:

There are definitely some maps of his that I absolutely love (Tricks and Traps, anyone?)

oh, how i HAET this map... and hove i LOVE it. before this map i couldn't believe that loving and hating something in the same time is real feeling, and not something from fuction books.

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23 minutes ago, ketmar said:

fuction

Not sure if typo or deliberate, but if typo it should become a popularized label anyway.

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22 minutes ago, wrkq said:

Not sure if typo or deliberate

ah... i'm usually not reading that kind of books! honestly! definitly not a lot...

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John Carmack hardcoded a workaround for that known issue of E3M8 in that old source port for iOS based on PrBoom. Said hardcoded workaround merges sector 2, the open sector, into sector 1.


https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-iOS/blob/3bf2af22f381441faccb13652bcf992a43bb8eb5/code/prboom/gl_main.c#L1764

 

Now I do understand why Gameception, based on that port, had serious issues when playing E3M8 of dtwid.wad, neis.wad, ddamn0.9.wad...

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On 8/3/2019 at 4:14 AM, wrkq said:

Yeah, the way to do equivalent of this in vanilla would have to be, like, have a global variable (eg spawnfly_teleport)

then have A_SpawnFly() do { spawnfly_teleport = 1; P_TeleportMove(blah); spawnfly_teleport = 0 }
and have PIT_StompThing() look for that variable instead of map number.

But that's already edits in multiple places (and probably like five or more because you also need to initialize that gvar on game start, map start, load savegame, etc).

 

Alternatively you'd have to change calling convention for multiple common functions to pass a special parameter to allow stomping, or "manually" implement the whole "scan and kill" routine inside A_SpawnFly() or something.

 

 

So a talk with @P41R47 in the Doom Zero topic led us to finding out that MBF decided to do a bit of both for the extra spice.

 

P_TeleportMove now has an extra boolean parameter from A_SpawnFly and other callers to decide whether to always telefrag or not.

But P_TeleportMove signals this situation down to PIT_StompThing via a global variable instead of changing the P_BlockThingsIterator calling convention.

 

Code reference here:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/109216-doom-zero-launch-and-celebrating-25-years-of-doom-ii/?do=findComment&comment=2238290

 

End result: the comp_telefrag flag, displayed in menu only as "Any monster can telefrag on MAP30", also secretly means "Boss spawn cube can telefrag only on MAP30".

If set to off, boss cube can telefrag on any map. FUN!

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On 12/26/2020 at 2:57 PM, Diabolución said:

John Carmack hardcoded a workaround for that known issue of E3M8 in that old source port for iOS based on PrBoom. Said hardcoded workaround merges sector 2, the open sector, into sector 1.


https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-iOS/blob/3bf2af22f381441faccb13652bcf992a43bb8eb5/code/prboom/gl_main.c#L1764

 

Now I do understand why Gameception, based on that port, had serious issues when playing E3M8 of dtwid.wad, neis.wad, ddamn0.9.wad...

I don't understand this. What's the known issue on e3m8? Which old source port? What was hard coded?

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Some of the lines in the upper loop are mistakenly assigned to sector 2 rather than sector 1, like the rest of the loop. This tends to mess with some algorithms to build floor/ceiling polygons, as can be observed in this SLADE screen shot:

aVZfGfO.png

 

So far as I can tell, the mapper accidentally assigned a sector tag on those two lines, causing the DoomBSP sector making algorithm to think they belong to different sectors. A good GL renderer can work around this problem, since there's a lot of tricks mappers do that have such artifacts, but the iOS GL renderer was written for speed rather than compatibility, abandoning most of these fan-developed tricks, so the map needed to be fixed. (the current Doom Classic ports use the software renderer, so they have full compatibility with them)

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1 hour ago, NaturalTvventy said:

I don't understand this. What's the known issue on e3m8? Which old source port? What was hard coded?

The known issue is as explained above. The old source port is Doom Classic for iOS, probably still available on iTunes or whatever, and its derivatives such as Gameception. What is hardcoded (in these obscure old iOS ports) is merging sector 2 and sector 1 together on every map that is in the E3M8 slot, even when playing a non-IWAD map, and you can imagine how much breakage that can cause...

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broken_e3m8s.zip

 

These edited maps reproduce more or less the bad experience I had years ago...

 

e3m8_DDAMN0.9.wad: non-flying monsters will not teleport to the arena. And I would swear that the game actually used to crash.

 

e3m8_DTWID.wad: due to that unexpected solid wall, I had to use IDCLIP to elude it, open the door, enter the sector with the plasma gun, and disable for good IDCLIP.

 

e3m8_NEIS.wad: the spider mastermind is entirely paralysed and defenceless.

 

P.S.: these old and clearly broken ports do not support at all the sky on floor effect, either. Doing so generates hall of mirrors artifacts.

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On 8/20/2013 at 2:20 PM, scifista42 said:

THREE, actually.

  Hide contents

Two opposite torches by the blue key (really both!), and the wall itself, which is certainly the best.
Of course, you may argue that the 2 torches could be considered one way only, but one of them lets you see in the direction of the secret, while the other the opposite direction while pressing it, making it much less obvious.

 

 

I'm sure this is well known by now (and I hate to quote a 7+ year old post, even while the overall thread is still alive. I apologize if doing this isn't kosher), but correct me if I'm wrong... isn't the plasma elevator triggered when you open & cross the secret wall in the sergeant's room facing the plasma elevator in Waste Tunnels? That's always worked for me. I've never had to click any torches to trigger the plasma elevator.. 

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