Realistic building

Imagine this: doom guy walks into the bottom level of a large warehouse. Fights ensue, then he finds that the only way through is an elevator. The lights are out in the elevator, and as he goes in the door closes behind him. In the darkness, an imp rips a new breathing hole into his back. After dealing with that, doomguy sees the elevator door open, with an office level that appears to be resting on top of the first floor!

See, the map I'm making includes a very large room with walkways suspended high up on the ceiling. The player is unable to see the walkways, since the are imbedded into a very large moving platform(the ceiling). When the player steps into the elevator(dark to hide any obvious evidence of movement), the platforms rise from the empty first floor to merge with the walkways-- effectively having the same floor as the first, only with walls scattered about to solidify the illusion of being in a different room. Of course, this second floor leads to a connecting building which was previously unreachable. A couple problems I'm having include synchronizing the moving ceiling and the floor, as well as the elevator and cramming all these triggers into the space of a single door. I'm hoping that I can create an entire vanilla Doom level based around this trick.

My great goal in life at this moment is to make this idea work under DoomBuilder.

Or you could use Zdoom and make it easy for yourself! :P

Numbermind said:

Imagine this: doom guy walks into the bottom level of a large warehouse. Fights ensue, then he finds that the only way through is an elevator. The lights are out in the elevator, and as he goes in the door closes behind him. In the darkness, an imp rips a new breathing hole into his back. After dealing with that, doomguy sees the elevator door open, with an office level that appears to be resting on top of the first floor!

See, the map I'm making includes a very large room with walkways suspended high up on the ceiling. The player is unable to see the walkways, since the are imbedded into a very large moving platform(the ceiling). When the player steps into the elevator(dark to hide any obvious evidence of movement), the platforms rise from the empty first floor to merge with the walkways-- effectively having the same floor as the first, only with walls scattered about to solidify the illusion of being in a different room. Of course, this second floor leads to a connecting building which was previously unreachable. A couple problems I'm having include synchronizing the moving ceiling and the floor, as well as the elevator and cramming all these triggers into the space of a single door. I'm hoping that I can create an entire vanilla Doom level based around this trick.

My great goal in life at this moment is to make this idea work under DoomBuilder.

I used to have all sorts of ideas like this. Scripting, and Zdoom-Hexen mode, however, can easily make this dream a reality. It's not that difficult to learn either.

Numbermind said:

Imagine this: doom guy walks into the bottom level of a large warehouse. Fights ensue, then he finds that the only way through is an elevator. The lights are out in the elevator, and as he goes in the door closes behind him. In the darkness, an imp rips a new breathing hole into his back. After dealing with that, doomguy sees the elevator door open, with an office level that appears to be resting on top of the first floor!

See, the map I'm making includes a very large room with walkways suspended high up on the ceiling. The player is unable to see the walkways, since the are imbedded into a very large moving platform(the ceiling). When the player steps into the elevator(dark to hide any obvious evidence of movement), the platforms rise from the empty first floor to merge with the walkways-- effectively having the same floor as the first, only with walls scattered about to solidify the illusion of being in a different room. Of course, this second floor leads to a connecting building which was previously unreachable. A couple problems I'm having include synchronizing the moving ceiling and the floor, as well as the elevator and cramming all these triggers into the space of a single door. I'm hoping that I can create an entire vanilla Doom level based around this trick.

My great goal in life at this moment is to make this idea work under DoomBuilder.

One way you could get the elevator thing to work is to make the door open, and make it so that once the player steps into the elevator it teleports him into another place, but inside an elevator that looks exactly like it, so it is like you have just stepped on an elevator, then you can make a switch in the elevator you teleport to, and make that raise the floor up, then once it gets to the top, there is a door u can open, then you can kind of "recreate" the floor below to look similar to what it looked like before you teleported to the "fake" elevator.

chubberz said:

One way you could get the elevator thing to work is to make the door open, and make it so that once the player steps into the elevator it teleports him into another place, but inside an elevator that looks exactly like it, so it is like you have just stepped on an elevator, then you can make a switch in the elevator you teleport to, and make that raise the floor up, then once it gets to the top, there is a door u can open, then you can kind of "recreate" the floor below to look similar to what it looked like before you teleported to the "fake" elevator.

Which looks totally fake and obvious. But if you absolutely must make this vanilla compatible, then you are not left with many options that make it work and look very elegant.

Or you could use Doomsday's mimic_sector and do it all in one line tag.

Mimic_sector not only moves both planes but it copys all textures light levels etc from one sector to another. So simply create a dummy sector outside the map and when you step into the elevator shut the door then mimic this dummy sector. Raise your lift then open the door and it will really look like you've gone up a floor.

Also you can repeat it for as many different floors as you want all accessed from the same elevator (but that's a little trickier).

I've looked into how ZDoom scripting makes it easy-- that's actually where I got thinking about it. The most obvious routine would be using Hexen's cue-less teleporting. But it does seem doable having different wall structures at different heights and having the floor/ceiling "scroll" to meet the player on whichever floor he is on. Right now I can only get one of the two to move. Of course, if I do get it to work there's still the business of building a LEVEL around it.

Back to work, then...

EarthQuake said:

Which looks totally fake and obvious. But if you absolutely must make this vanilla compatible, then you are not left with many options that make it work and look very elegant.

]

ya, true :/

Look for "fenexam". It has a prime example of double floors, for both vanilla Doom and Boom-compatible ports. For more info, see second page of this thread.

With fenexam only the zdoom version will allow you to walk over the second (fake) floor. Scripting can achieve the same effect.

A cheap way of making a room over room effect is to make the first room a boom elevator (both ceiling and floor move), when you enter the second elevator make both of them move up. With the walkways as you describe the second room would look bigger, giving the illusion of a new floor.

The boom instant teleport does work well, but you need to pay attention to monster placement or they'll appear/dissapear as you move around.

It's difficlt with the standard doom2.exe because you can't move the ceiling quickly, and you can't move both the floor and ceiling at the same time.

You might be able to sort of do this in vanilla doom actually. Instead of moving the floor and ceiling up, keep them at the same height, but lower down some new walls so it looks like a new room. Simply close the elevator door so the player won't see what's going on. Then you just need triggers to lower down a second wall(which is right against the original wall), with it's own texture. You can also add in a "Lower floor and change texture/type" to put a new texture on the floor. Monster corpses will still remain, but I suppose you could cheat by confining monsters to specific spaces, and having those spaces be filled in by the lowering walls. Now you just need to figure out how to keep the player in the elevator long enough for the effect to finish. Perhaps a switch behind a thin lowering wall that finishes once the room is done changing. By using dummy sectors, you could also add in pedestals and other details. You'd only need 4 walkthrough lines, 1 to close the door, 1 to lower the fake walls, 1 to change the floor texture, and 1 to raise the floor to make a pedestal or something. The only problem may be that you could catch the room changing if you turned around really quick while the door was closing.

Duh! Having the walls move instead. Good idea. I was having a hell of a time with the coincidental floor/ceiling elevator. Now I have to try for a convincing 2-room layout without coinciding THOSE walls.

Thats a nice idea. Maybe have the elevator door close fast behind the player using a trigger line, and with another trigger line lower some thin walls using the 'instant lift' trick. Make the door reopen with a switch and you wont see any movement.

I suppose you could scroll the wall textures of the elevator to give the illusion of movement...

Szymanski said:

I suppose you could scroll the wall textures of the elevator to give the illusion of movement...

I thought we were talking vanilla Doom here?
Well unless you want to give the impression that the elevator is spinning clockwise O_o

I think the best way to go about this is making it Boom compatible, because you'll have so many more options. Since nearly every source port has boom support, it shouldn't be much of an issue to convert.

EarthQuake said:

I thought we were talking vanilla Doom here?
Well unless you want to give the impression that the elevator is spinning clockwise O_o

I was thinking having a moving sector and reference the walls of the 'elevator' to it so they move up and down with it. It might work...

Anyway the basic idea works, I tried it with 'Wr open door fast stay open 2' to open the door and 'Wr close door fast' to close the door behind the player. I set the switch in the elevator to 'Sr raise floor to lowest adjacent ceing' and tagged the moving walls to it. The moving walls had dummy control sectors so they immediately fell to floor level.

You would still see the edge of the sector stop and therefor ruin the effect.

EarthQuake said:

You would still see the edge of the sector stop and therefor ruin the effect.

the basic effect works, the scrolling texture in the elevator itself doesn't so far.

The scrolling thing would work - if you raise and lower the floor or ceiling of a sector (whichever you prefer) where one side is facing the lift, but the other sides are connected to unseen sectors at certain heights. Use specials to move the sector to these heights and you get the scrolling effect, just like with pistons etc.

Make sure that the heights of the unseen sectors are way above/below the lift itself (depending on whether you're moving floor or ceiling) so you can see the scrolling.

Szymanski said:

the basic effect works, the scrolling texture in the elevator itself doesn't so far.

There's no need to have any moving sectors inside the elevator. I said that for one the elevator would be dark for the surprise imp attack-- and secondly the entire point of closing off the view of the room is to have the room switch setup.

The only thing that gives away the illusion is the elevator sound-- but you're in an elevator, so...

You could do it with Boom too, would be a nice hard task.