Pop-up enemy technique and concerns about sky texture

I was reviewing some stuff in the depths of my computer recently, and dug up a HTML doc I made a couple of years ago. I reviewed WADs on it (I didn't edit back then). I was reading one of my reviews of a UAC-like levelset (it's uac2.zip in the archives). I suddenly remembered that the author did this cool trick with enemies, usually Revenants. You'd be walking down a hall, and suddenly a Revenant would simply appear as if it came out of the floor. Not a floor which rose from a lower floor height; the Revenant just appeared out of thin air. I saw this trick done in several places, but now I can't find it anymore. Does anyone know this trick?

I'm also concerned about the sky textures. I'm working on level 11 in my wad right now, and in my last test, I finished the level and let it continue on to level 12. The sky texture I saw was the first one! I typed IDCLEV12 to restart the level, and the correct sky texture was displayed. There was an identical problem with level 20-21, where you go on to part 3 of the game; the second sky texture, not the third, was displayed. What's wrong?

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13220
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12776

Use Floor: W1 down to highest floor on a sector that is actually a pit with no lower textures (so it appears invisible) and when triggered the pit will rise up instantly.

The sky problem is a bug in doom2.exe - when you enter map 12, 21 and 31, save your game and load it in again, this resets the sky to the right one.

Heh, personally I think this "appearing monsters out of nowhere" effect is not cool, but lame. I'm more of a teleport-monsters person.

I must say I agree, teleporting monsters make more sense than monsters appearing out of thin air; then again, this is Doom, so that's not saying much :D

I like the monsters appearing out of nowhere and silently. However, you shouldn't be able to see them appear. Instead an enemy or two should appear somewhere behind you in a previous room. If done right, it can give someone quite the scare, especially in dark, spooky areas. Of course, I'd still use normal teleporting monsters for any that might appear near the you, like right after you grab something.

Oh, yeah. Of course I use those classic teleport surprises. I just wanted to try it. Level 12 I'm going to call "skylight central." If you approach the wrong light, well...

The bad thing, then, is that I'll get missing texture errors. Crap. That's going to be confusing. Maybe I'll just put some in and then take them out when I'm totally done.

Thanks!

Instantly appearing enemies are great. It's such a big surprise.

Heh, personally I think this "appearing monsters out of nowhere" effect is not cool, but lame. I'm more of a teleport-monsters person.

Same here. Is that sky bug fixed in any source ports?

ZDoom fixes it.

netnomad312 said:

Oh, yeah. Of course I use those classic teleport surprises. I just wanted to try it. Level 12 I'm going to call "skylight central." If you approach the wrong light, well...

The bad thing, then, is that I'll get missing texture errors. Crap. That's going to be confusing. Maybe I'll just put some in and then take them out when I'm totally done.

Thanks!

Use AASHITTY which is just a placeholder for index 0 so it doesn't get displayed at all! (In Doom I use AASTINKY)
I am doing this all the time to get rid of texture errors.

Oh! That's cool. And that also explains why using BADPATCH in Heretic also causes HOMs... again, thanks.