Useless Doom Trivia

Doom's menus have keyboard "hotkeys" that jump you straight to a menu's option without arrows or mouse/joystick. Dunno how well known that is, I only discovered it after I practically reimplemented the menus for my source port in the workds...oh well.

E.g. for Doom shareware they are "n", "l", "s", "o", "r" and "q" for New Game, Load Game, Save Game etc.

Hmm. Didn't know that one.

I recently discovered that you can type in cheats when the game is paused (not the main menu but actually pressing the Pause key). In case you find yourself in a quite literally 'impossible' to survive situation, you can quick pause the game and type iddqdiddqd for free 100% health before those revenant missiles hit you in the face if you can pause the game just before that happens.

Actually... that's not very useless is it?

40oz said:

Actually... that's not very useless is it?

Nah, i'd say thats pretty useful. Especially if your about to get dominated by a Revenant Missile.

Maes said:

Doom's menus have keyboard "hotkeys" that jump you straight to a menu's option without arrows or mouse/joystick. Dunno how well known that is, I only discovered it after I practically reimplemented the menus for my source port in the workds...oh well.

E.g. for Doom shareware they are "n", "l", "s", "o", "r" and "q" for New Game, Load Game, Save Game etc.

I found out that by RTFM.

Interesting, just like hotkeys in a window menu... hadn't noticed this before, at least not very consciously, as I may have triggered some by accident without really noticing, from what I recall.

printz said:
I found out that by RTFM.

Where? I just checked and didn't find anything in any version. The manuals do mention function keys, but not this feature, and they say you can navigate the menus up and down with the arrow keys or the joystick/mouse (but only the arrow keys really work) and they don't mention the keyboard otherwise, in that respect.

myk said:

Where? I just checked and didn't find anything in any version. The manuals do mention function keys, but not this feature, and they say you can navigate the menus up and down with the arrow keys or the joystick/mouse (but only the arrow keys really work) and they don't mention the keyboard otherwise, in that respect.

Huh? Must be the WOlf3d documentation instead, which carried over into the future.

I thought this was common knowledge.

Me, too.

Amazing that some people still 'discover' such things...

Does anyone actually use it? I just recently got in the habit of pressing F10 + Y to ragequit.

40oz said:

Does anyone actually use it? I just recently got in the habit of pressing F10 + Y to ragequit.

In zdoom I usually hit ~ and type exit :D

I think yours is faster

Alt + F4 ragequit ftw

I toss my laptop out the window when ragequitting.

Expensive :(

40oz said:

Does anyone actually use it? I just recently got in the habit of pressing F10 + Y to ragequit.

Heh, Esc+Up+Enter+Y is so commonplace for me, it's instinct now. I think quitting the game any other way, however shorter/faster would just slow me down.

EarthQuake said:

Heh, Esc+Up+Enter+Y is so commonplace for me, it's instinct now. I think quitting the game any other way, however shorter/faster would just slow me down.

grazza has shown me the way - f10 rebinded to y, so it's y-y for me. alt+f4 in mp ports, of course.

dew said:

alt+f4 in mp ports, of course.

Heh, I used to have q bound to "exit" in ZDaemon. But it got to be a problem as I occasionally hit it by accident.

EarthQuake said:

Heh, I used to have q bound to "exit" in ZDaemon. But it got to be a problem as I occasionally hit it by accident.

I had a kill bind in Skulltag (quite useful in CTF if you need to return to your base quickly). But I would frequently mash the wrong key and die in any game mode. No kill bind for me now.

kristus said:

I thought this was common knowledge.

New to me. I'm sure I triggered some by accident, never registered I guess.

Well, for one they are hard to activate normally (who uses alphanumeric keys in the main menus?), and then again they only "jump" the skull cursor to a selection, they don't actually activate the menu.

They are also hardcoded in the game's code and can only be changed by recompiling (normally). They are a vestigial feature just like the automap strobing code, which is fully implemented but normally unaccessible (I'll allow for selecting it in Mocha Doom though).

I disagree they're vestigial. They still have a use, as helpful hotkeys. Anyway, the automap can blink? How? And why don't I see it in ports? At least, give UDMF support for a linedef, to blink on the map when visible.

It's more a pulse than a blink. I can't remember where but I've seen it in action and it's pretty distracting as the map 'fades' in and out. Slightly OT: I quite like the idea of blinking things on the map such as doors or even secrets when the cheat is enabled...

I'm surprised people didn't know this, I discovered in the shareware days.
Many times I toyed with this typing these hot keys in the menu when the menu was edited and changed the words to something else.

printz said:

Anyway, the automap can blink?

Yes.

How?

Like this.

And why don't I see it in ports?

Because they obviously aren't as awesome as my port :-p

I wonder about that too, because the code to do that is there
and is correctly implemented (hell, it worked even in Java).

It looks even more impressive with IDDT on, and I included it as a cheat in Mocha Doom -for now ... if you are curious try testers/AWTAutoMapTester from the CVS ;-)

Maes said:

Doom's menus have keyboard "hotkeys" that jump you straight to a menu's option without arrows or mouse/joystick. Dunno how well known that is, I only discovered it after I practically reimplemented the menus for my source port in the workds...oh well.

E.g. for Doom shareware they are "n", "l", "s", "o", "r" and "q" for New Game, Load Game, Save Game etc.

thats funny, I just noticed this code yesterday or day before as well, looking through the menu source code.