Classic stuff vs Ports' features

Graf Zahl said:

wallrunning hate

i don't understand. i'm used to decide whether to use classic or more wallrunning (north<->south symmetrical), but i'd never turn it off entirely. what is your reasoning for this?

Wallrunning is caused by an engine bug. As all engine bugs it has other, more crippling effects than to cause wallrunning. ZDoom by default uses an actor movement logic that deals with this situation in a way that the bad side effects of this bug (namely, fast projectiles can move through walls) can not happen but as a result of this handling the code that triggers wallrunning no longer works because it depends on the incorrect movement code.

It's entirely a user option in ZDoom and can not be set through MAPINFO.

I thought that fast projectiles can move through walls because of their discrete movement nature.

printz said:

I thought that fast projectiles can move through walls because of their discrete movement nature.

Well, Doom has a half-assed physics code that tries to estimate movement validity for EVERY object before actually applying it, and most of the time it works, too.

But it's possible to defeat it in certain circumstances. Happens even in the best particle/ray simulators unless you get EXTREMELY anal about it.

Graf Zahl said:
If I remember correctly, several years ago many old levels were lost when cdrom.com shut down the old archive server and were not uploaded again afterward.

I don't think this is correct. Few WADs were lost when CDROM.COM died, not many. Most of the older stuff not on idgames simply never got to it. Tons of WADs were made in the mid 90s, and many of those went to other archives or compilations, and others were rejected from idgames because they didn't meet its requirements, such as WADs that contained stuff ripped from the IWAD levels. The bulk of the latter type were of rather low quality, made either with incipient tools or by noobs tweaking existing maps.

RjY said:
I think he's going with the letter of the author's wishes ("don't distribute this except via here" [where 'here' is a forum that's been dead for decades]) but against the spirit of the author's wishes ("I don't want my wads on any shovelware CDs")

The "letter" is all that's left: It says you can only get it (Odessa 14) from those places, and for some reason he did not release the others to CDROM.COM. We do not know what he may have thought or what he may think now. If anything, he seems to have been something of a ""copyright Nazi" and may still be one. Grazza takes what's available at face value, you are speculating and projecting. I sure wouldn't mind playing Bob Evans' WADs but at the same time, people using such restrictive conditions for their stuff are asking to have them become extinct. Accepting the loss of such releases is another way to acknowledge and respect what's been properly released for free distribution. If not, we take for granted every "you may distribute, you may use" when we also apply that to "you may not". Sharing is a gift, not an obligation. We can thank whoever placed "you may distribute" in their text file instead of grasping out for stuff released in a half-assed and paranoid way at every opportunity. As if we really had enough time to play all the good WADs out there, anyway.

myk said:
The "letter" is all that's left: It says you can only get it (Odessa 14) from those places, and for some reason he did not release the others to CDROM.COM.

I wonder why, maybe CDROM.COM wasn't a prominent repository when 1-13 were made and he didn't care to reupload a few hundred KB of wads on 14k dialup by the time it had come into use.

We do not know what he may have thought or what he may think now. If anything, he seems to have been something of a ""copyright Nazi" and may still be one.

If you say so, I'll take your word for it

Grazza takes what's available at face value, you are speculating and projecting.

I prefer to call it "trying to apply some common sense" but, same thing! :-)

I sure wouldn't mind playing Bob Evans' WADs but at the same time, people using such restrictive conditions for their stuff are asking to have them become extinct.

Or they just suffer from a lack of foresight - humans are not known for their ability to see the future

Accepting the loss of such releases is another way to acknowledge and respect what's been properly released for free distribution. If not, we take for granted every "you may distribute, you may use" when we also apply that to "you may not".

Can't have pleasure without pain, in other words? I'm not sure I agree, but okay...

Sharing is a gift, not an obligation. We can thank whoever placed "you may distribute" in their text file instead of grasping out for stuff released in a half-assed and paranoid way at every opportunity.

I agree sharing is a gift. However in this case, the gift has been given already, a teen's age ago. The wads have been shared with the world on a public forum.

Contrast this with those "rare" demos Opulent mentioned in the DSDA thread a few weeks ago. I asked him why he was keeping them to himself and he told me they'd been given to him privately and he'd been asked not to share them.

As if we really had enough time to play all the good WADs out there, anyway.

Well, I sure don't have anything else to do all day! ;-)

Maes said:

Well, Doom has a half-assed physics code that tries to estimate movement validity for EVERY object before actually applying it, and most of the time it works, too.

But it's possible to defeat it in certain circumstances. Happens even in the best particle/ray simulators unless you get EXTREMELY anal about it.

I think the issue is a phenomenon called "tunneling" - when an object in a physical simulation moves more than its width in one movement step, it sometimes passes through walls or even other objects, because it doesn't fail collision checks even when it should.

Heretic and Hexen introduced special projectiles which have multiple steps per tic instead of just one, increasing the maximum allowed speed before this happens. Approaches to solve this problem in physics engines outside of Doom's include ray tracing of an object's movement.

If wads tried to restrict engine features, the players will make work arounds in no time. One of the first patches I made to DoomLegacy was "slow doors". There was a couple of places in FreeDoom where you had to push a switch, run to another switch and push that and then run to the door. Whoever made that level must play with some fast moving always-run engine modes. I do not, and could never get past that area.
I made an option that slowed down the door timers to x1.5 x2 etc.
so that us slow guys could get through these areas in less than 20 savegame restores.

The level designer may want it one way, but 1/2 the players will not be
happy with it and will seek to override it anyway.
Any engine that honors wad setup of options, might as well include overrides and graduated implementations (1/4, 1/2, 3/4 of wad intention) for the player to control.

wesleyjohnson said:

If wads tried to restrict engine features, the players will make work arounds in no time.

True. And I generally refuse to implement any feature suggestion in ZDoom that tries to take away control from the player over how he wants to play.

The only non-overridable options for such things are a few compatibility flags. And seeing some idiots abusing even those pisses me off somewhat.

Some mappers really need to learn that forcing the player to do stuff their way instead of granting them a bit of freedom is never going to work.

I generally avoid wads that restrict my freedoms, specially my God-given right to skip over stupid, lengthy text introductions with useless camera wanderings.

Still, if the author suggests certain features be disabled in order to "enhance" the gameplay, that should not be completely dismissed.

I think it would make sense for the mapper to put all these restrictions in an external (and entirely optional) file that ZDoom can load up like a regular .deh, that would make it painless for the user to choose if he actually wants to play the map the way the author intended, which may not necessarily be the "best" way.

Sometimes I like to edit the map a bit to make it easier. I am terrible at coding so I cant edit the binary to make it easier.

Catoptromancy said:

Sometimes I like to edit the map a bit to make it easier.

I occasionally do that, too. Most of the time when people think that fighting Cyberdemons in tight spaces is fun...

Or thinking that fighting a Baron of Hell with just a shotgun is a good idea. I don't find such fights challenging, just incredibly tedious.

What a bunch of lazy bastards you are. If you really want piss-easy user-friendly gameplay, go back to Knee-Deep in the Dead. The PWAD types you're mentioning are meant to be played in a certain way that has to be mastered. It means learning a skill, such as running very fast. If you consider that gameplay tedious, nothing's stopping you from playing something else. I understand that I said earlier that I don't want to learn to run very fast in Doom, due to sequence-breaking possibilities, but if the WAD is designed with it in mind, I can make an exception!

Restricting player's choice is how that challenge was designed, and any override is akin to cheating. I may understand that sometimes you may want to mod the gameplay, but the overrides that are on by default are grotesque. Even overrides that are available from the port menu are abominable. If you want to modify the gameplay, you'd be much better off learning some elementary wad editing skills and changing all those definition lumps around, not have it for granted from the game menu as a nerfing option.

I think several people in this thread are losing sight of the grand-order-of-things, so, in descending order from most to least important:

1) Player - the buck stops here. Ability to override any and all decisions, from the active gameplay mechanics to renderer options.
2) Mod Author - experience definer. Ability to hint at the preferred gameplay mechanics and renderer defaults.
3) Engine Author - ability to tweak and/or embellish mods as seen fit except when overruled by a precluding authority.

Providing each authority with features to overrule the decisions made by their predecessor(s) is not a "nerfing option", rather, a necessary feature required to uphold the grand-order-of-things.

Like it or not, thats just the way it has to be.

DaniJ said:

1) Player - the buck stops here. Ability to override any and all decisions, from the active gameplay mechanics to renderer options.

still, there should be a standard STRONGLY recommended for a particular wad, not just hinted. like with red letters and three confirmations you know what you are doing by changing something, NOT jumping and mouselook as the default behaviour. also there should be a note that playing a wad on modified settings disallows you to EVER utter a word judging the wad, because goddamit, you just ruined a wad with jumping.

Some people here really seem to miss the fun part of playing a game!

Doesn't the "playing a game" part of playing a game, by definition, involve abiding by a set of rules determined by the author of the game? i.e. the mapper?

It can be pretty fun to run through a map with iddqd and a key bound to MDK, but at that point you're not really "playing the game" anymore.

Altering or enabling entirely new player movement functions changes the rules of the game in significant, perceptible ways. I'm not sure why you seem to be claiming that it's totally unreasonable and detestable for a mapper to enforce the rules of their game while being the most normal thing in the world to completely ignore them and purposefully play by different rules. There's a double standard and it doesn't make the slightest lick of sense.

esselfortium said:

There's a double standard and it doesn't make the slightest lick of sense.

Frankly, I don't give a flying f*ck.

It's my fun, not yours and not the one of all the other people here who claim to have some wisdom so why should I even listen to your opinion.

Graf Zahl said:

Frankly, I don't give a flying f*ck.

It's my fun, not yours and not the one of all the other people here who claim to have some wisdom so why should I even listen to your opinion.

LOL

How do you prevent people from jumping in an Eternity map?

Ugh I should have been keeping up with this thread.

Okay. I reread everything I said about jumping crouching and looking up and down and its all true. I know Strife and Hexen both feature jumping and it is a requirement to complete some obstacles, but I was under the impression that the topic in question is Doom. Not to mention that Hexen and Strife's maps could easily have been made compatible without jumping with the slightest adjustments, like making some gaps closer together, or some ledges a little lower. These games feature jumping because they could, not because they needed it. This is a very small example of another argument I made of the evolution of video games becoming needlessly complex, but that's a different story.

Heretic featured looking up and down but I've yet to encounter a monster in Doom that my autoaim couldn't detect. I understand even with more spacious maps some monsters are out of the autoaim range, but that doesn't make the monster at all invincible. You may have to do some things that are unrealistic to human nature and common sense, like find a way to get close enough to it to autoaim to it, or find a ledge that is the same height value as the one the monster is standing on. It may seem stupid to you but I respect the rules of the doom universe even though they are significantly different to how i would handle it in real life. If I was opposed to how the Doom fantasy world operates, then I'd find a different game to play that had a more gameplay structure that I could agree with and have fun with. I only play the game because I love it.

@Gez: At the moment, I don't believe there's an option for it. Maybe with OPTIONS lump? I'm not totally sure if you can. I haven't run into it because my EE maps either allow or require jumping :P

Given that the OPTIONS lump was an MBF feature, and MBF didn't feature jumping, it's unlikely to include an option to disable it. Of course, Quasar may have extended the format.

dew said:

still, there should be a standard STRONGLY recommended for a particular wad, not just hinted. like with red letters and three confirmations you know what you are doing by changing something, NOT jumping and mouselook as the default behaviour. also there should be a note that playing a wad on modified settings disallows you to EVER utter a word judging the wad, because goddamit, you just ruined a wad with jumping.

Are you saying there are DOOM ports which have jumping/crouching/back-flipping/whatever on by default? If so then yes I completely agree that there is a problem - the port author has defied the grand-order-of-things by making it the default.

In the outline in my previous post I neglected to add the one missing authority - the mechanics of the original game(s), which should be #4.

So as to uphold the grand order, a port should not enable things like jumping if not granted authority by it's superiors - i.e., mod authors and ultimately players.

If a port wishes to provide new features (like jumping) then it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

40oz said:

I was under the impression that the topic in question is Doom.

When talking about source ports that use a single, unified engine for several different games, the engine needs to support all needed features from all games. If jumping and view panning are needed by some of the games, then so be it, they'll necessarily be available in Doom too.

Crouching, though, wasn't needed for game support.

esselfortium said:

@Gez: At the moment, I don't believe there's an option for it. Maybe with OPTIONS lump? I'm not totally sure if you can. I haven't run into it because my EE maps either allow or require jumping :P

It's a bit of a problem. I know you can skip a good chunk of OPF by jumping to get the yellow key.

DaniJ said:

If a port wishes to provide new features (like jumping) then it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

Does not binding it to any key by default (and thus requiring people who want to jump to first change something in the configuration options) constitute a sufficient opt-in step?

40oz said:

Heretic featured looking up and down but I've yet to encounter a monster in Doom that my autoaim couldn't detect.

I've yet to find the barrel that wasn't stealing the autoaim from the monster I'd like to shoot - especially problematic when you use the rocket launcher.

Gez said:

Does not binding it to any key by default (and thus requiring people who want to jump to first change something in the configuration options) constitute a sufficient opt-in step?

But of course, yes. However one should note the scope of that decision. Each time an authority change occurs then rightly-speaking that decision is no longer valid. In which case, the engine should work back up the list of authorities and ask them again (which in this case would be the player).

Obviously this would end up annoying the hell out of the player, so give them the ability to expressly grant permission. One solution would be using a set of reasonable options that grant each authority the deciding vote; favour player/favour mod/always ask

Gez said:

When talking about source ports that use a single, unified engine for several different games, the engine needs to support all needed features from all games. If jumping and view panning are needed by some of the games, then so be it, they'll necessarily be available in Doom too.

But that engine is well aware of what game is being played, and can apply different defaults depending on that information, so I don't really see that this is a strong argument.

especially problematic when you realise you can fire directly up and hit monsters on ledges with your radius damage and they can't do a damn thing about it.

lets face it, everything newschool is going to break something vanilla.

Gez said:

Does not binding it to any key by default (and thus requiring people who want to jump to first change something in the configuration options) constitute a sufficient opt-in step?

i'm not convinced. rebinding keys is one of the first things a player does with a fresh install. i would bind jump unwittingly just because it was empty.