Raising and lowering floors

I was trying to create an elevator (instead of a lift) in WinDEU that has switches to raise and lower it. I used "Raise floor to nearest floor" to make it go up and that works ok, but then I tried "Lower floor to nearest floor" to lower it and that didn't work at all - it just sat there. Instead I ended up using "Lower floor to lowest floor" to get the elevator to lower (and that works).
So it seems that raising and lowering floors actually work differently. I'm guessing that "Lower floor to nearest floor" actually means "Move floor to nearest floor, which may or may not be lower"...since my floor didn't move at all (there was another sector next to it with equal height when the switch was activated).
Also, if I want to get the elevator to move down quickly, there's no tag for "Turbo lower floor to lowest floor", and "...nearest floor" runs into the same problem as above, not to mention there's this seemingly random +8 for lowering floors quickly.
Anyone know how this stuff works? Thanks in advance.

Lavarn said:

I was trying to create an elevator (instead of a lift) in WinDEU that has switches to raise and lower it. I used "Raise floor to nearest floor" to make it go up and that works ok, but then I tried "Lower floor to nearest floor" to lower it and that didn't work at all - it just sat there. Instead I ended up using "Lower floor to lowest floor" to get the elevator to lower (and that works).
So it seems that raising and lowering floors actually work differently. I'm guessing that "Lower floor to nearest floor" actually means "Move floor to nearest floor, which may or may not be lower"...since my floor didn't move at all (there was another sector next to it with equal height when the switch was activated).
Also, if I want to get the elevator to move down quickly, there's no tag for "Turbo lower floor to lowest floor", and "...nearest floor" runs into the same problem as above, not to mention there's this seemingly random +8 for lowering floors quickly.
Anyone know how this stuff works? Thanks in advance.

The 'Lower floor to next' type doesn't exist in regular Doom. (The type you were using is probably 'Lower floor to highest') If you absolutely need that you will have to use Boom extensions where it is defined. Id apparently only defined those types they really needed (and some of them weren't even used!)

Lavarn said:

I was trying to create an elevator (instead of a lift) in WinDEU that has switches to raise and lower it. I used "Raise floor to nearest floor" to make it go up and that works ok, but then I tried "Lower floor to nearest floor" to lower it and that didn't work at all - it just sat there. Instead I ended up using "Lower floor to lowest floor" to get the elevator to lower (and that works).
So it seems that raising and lowering floors actually work differently. I'm guessing that "Lower floor to nearest floor" actually means "Move floor to nearest floor, which may or may not be lower"...since my floor didn't move at all (there was another sector next to it with equal height when the switch was activated).
Also, if I want to get the elevator to move down quickly, there's no tag for "Turbo lower floor to lowest floor", and "...nearest floor" runs into the same problem as above, not to mention there's this seemingly random +8 for lowering floors quickly.
Anyone know how this stuff works? Thanks in advance.

I don't know how it's done in WinDEU, but I know your problem. There should be two "Lower floor" classes. "Nearest floor," in this case, probably means the nearest floor to itself in height - in your case, the top floor of the elevator. I use WadAuthor and things are a bit simpler there, IMO: There are two "lower" classes:

Down to highest floor
Down to lowest floor
The first one is what you have; the second one is what you need.

I've done the exact same thing in level 9 of my wad. Say you have 3 sectors, A, B, and C:

A B C

A has floor/ceiling heights of (0,128). B has (0,256), and C has (128, 256). In this case, the tag you use includes both switches and sector B. One of them makes the floor rise ("raise floor to nearest floor"), the other makes it fall. But you can't use "lower floor to nearest floor," because the nearest floor (you're comparing floor height, BTW) is C, not A. You need something like (I'm guessing here) "lower floor to lowest floor" or whatever else it is in WinDEU. That'll fix the problem.

netnomad312 said:

I don't know how it's done in WinDEU, but I know your problem. There should be two "Lower floor" classes. "Nearest floor," in this case, probably means the nearest floor to itself in height - in your case, the top floor of the elevator. I use WadAuthor and things are a bit simpler there, IMO: There are two "lower" classes:

Down to highest floor
Down to lowest floor
The first one is what you have; the second one is what you need.

I've done the exact same thing in level 9 of my wad. Say you have 3 sectors, A, B, and C:

A B C

A has floor/ceiling heights of (0,128). B has (0,256), and C has (128, 256). In this case, the tag you use includes both switches and sector B. One of them makes the floor rise ("raise floor to nearest floor"), the other makes it fall. But you can't use "lower floor to nearest floor," because the nearest floor (you're comparing floor height, BTW) is C, not A. You need something like (I'm guessing here) "lower floor to lowest floor" or whatever else it is in WinDEU. That'll fix the problem.

Yeah...that's what I eventually had to use, and I was able to create an elevator with two floors (except I can't get it to move downward at turbo speed). But it seems like using this would make it impossible to create an elevator with 3 floors. You could get it to go from 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3...and then lowering it would bring it all the way back down to 1 again. You couldn't go from 3 to 2...I guess it's not a big deal, but it seems like a weird limitation. But maybe there's a tricky way around it I'm not seeing?

Lavarn said:

Yeah...that's what I eventually had to use, and I was able to create an elevator with two floors (except I can't get it to move downward at turbo speed). But it seems like using this would make it impossible to create an elevator with 3 floors. You could get it to go from 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3...and then lowering it would bring it all the way back down to 1 again. You couldn't go from 3 to 2...I guess it's not a big deal, but it seems like a weird limitation. But maybe there's a tricky way around it I'm not seeing?

As Graf Zahl said, you'd need a source port with more linedef classes. There simply is no "turbo down to lowest floor" or "down to next lowest floor" in vanilla Doom. In vanilla Doom, a multi-floored elevator does exactly what you said there: one switch is "up to next highest floor," and the other is "down to lowest floor."

Now, I don't edit in source ports myself, but I do know that they have more linedef classes.