How does Room Over Room work in Raze?

[qweqioweuo123]

How does Raze achieve Room Over Room which is all over Duke 3d and other build engine games? how it is achieved? or does Gzdoom support true ror and I didn't know?

[-TDRR-]

GZDoom supporting true room over room is EXTREMELY old news. I'm pretty sure this was an ability of it 10+ years ago.

 

However, Raze does not have much to do with GZDoom in terms of what it can do. GZDoom is the Doom engine, and Raze is the Build engine, both almost completely different in how they work.

 

There's no such thing as "true ROR" in vanilla Duke 3D, it's only faked. Ever noticed how you can't look over and under the same floor at the same time, but you can get above and under it? It's kinda like teleporting but not quite, not really sure how it's handled though. You might say: "Oh but i saw some bridges you could see over and under, and still walk on it!" Well, those are sprite bridges, which might look convincing but aren't really true ROR. GZDoom does have 3D floors which work similar to the sprite bridges, but far less buggy, and with more features.

 

Blood and Shadow Warrior do have an implementation of "true ROR" (even though it's not really "true" still but you get the idea) which works by connecting a lower sector with a upper sector using portals. Shadow Warrior does an extremely good job of faking it, Blood... not so much. In SW, enemies can see you through the portal layer, but not in Blood. Also, IIRC some of the projectiles had super janky movement when going through portals in Blood, but not in SW.

[qweqioweuo123]

2 minutes ago, -TDRR- said:

GZDoom supporting true room over room is EXTREMELY old news. I'm pretty sure this was an ability of it 10+ years ago.

 

However, Raze does not have much to do with GZDoom in terms of what it can do. GZDoom is the Doom engine, and Raze is the Build engine, both almost completely different in how they work.

 

There's no such thing as "true ROR" in vanilla Duke 3D, it's only faked. Ever noticed how you can't look over and under the same floor at the same time, but you can get above and under it? It's kinda like teleporting but not quite, not really sure how it's handled though. You might say: "Oh but i saw some bridges you could see over and under, and still walk on it!" Well, those are sprite bridges, which might look convincing but aren't really true ROR. GZDoom does have 3D floors which work similar to the sprite bridges, but far less buggy, and with more features.

 

Blood and Shadow Warrior do have an implementation of "true ROR" (even though it's not really "true" still but you get the idea) which works by connecting a lower sector with a upper sector using portals. Shadow Warrior does an extremely good job of faking it, Blood... not so much. In SW, enemies can see you through the portal layer, but not in Blood. Also, IIRC some of the projectiles had super janky movement when going through portals in Blood, but not in SW.

 

I get it. What I was refering to with "True ROR" is being able to paint sectors on top of other sectors in the map editor and then the engine rendering it correctly, as you can do in build. I always found this so cool about the build editor that you werent able to do in Doom. Last time I checked you can't do that, you have to use portals.

[-TDRR-]

Just now, qweqioweuo123 said:

I get it. What I was refering to with "True ROR" is being able to paint sectors on top of other sectors in the map editor and then the engine rendering it correctly, as you can do in build. I always found this so cool about the build editor that you werent able to do in Doom. Last time I checked you can't do that, you have to use portals.

Oh okay. You should have been a little bit more specific.

 

IMHO, it is an absolutely awful, hard to mantain and just super gross way to make the effect of ROR work. It might be cool and everything but portals are 2000 times better and FAR easier to keep working with and extending. You probably haven't felt the pain of it until you try to make a full, serious map that works around it. In particular, keeping track of which floor is which in a complex map will be very headache-inducing, and adding more to one of either room won't be easy because you may end up placing the detail on the incorrect floor.

[qweqioweuo123]

17 minutes ago, -TDRR- said:

Oh okay. You should have been a little bit more specific.

 

IMHO, it is an absolutely awful, hard to mantain and just super gross way to make the effect of ROR work. It might be cool and everything but portals are 2000 times better and FAR easier to keep working with and extending. You probably haven't felt the pain of it until you try to make a full, serious map that works around it. In particular, keeping track of which floor is which in a complex map will be very headache-inducing, and adding more to one of either room won't be easy because you may end up placing the detail on the incorrect floor.

 

Yeah, i didnt used it to create actual buildings in build... i mostly used it to connect rooms with other rooms throught ventilation ducts, it was cool to connect them on the fly and overlap entire rooms with them, but yeah if you want to make a building with actual rooms stacked on top of each other good look with that. You could still do it by building the floor sectors and then move it all on top sightly off-grid so the vertices don't connect but its a mess. But I can see it having some use for like I said, ventilation duct crossing sectors and seamlesly connect with other rooms on the fly.

[Graf Zahl]

In Build games the ROR effects were mainly hacks by drawing two scenes on top of each other and exploiting the trait of the Build engine that it rendered nothing in places where there were holes, meaning you could see what the scene below contained. Needless to say, this is a rather volatile setup and especially in Shadow Warrior, some of these effects can glitch quite a bit when being looked at from the wrong place, the mappers had to make sure it wasn't possible to get into such a place - which wasn't always successful.

 

EDuke32 added a new feature called "true ROR", this actually places two sectors vertically on top of each other but on the rendering side it's still mostly hacks. On top of that, TDRR is absolutely right when saying it's hard to map. Despite being a 2.5D engine it is essential for these things to have a fully 3D editor to properly deal with "true ROR". The advantage of them obviously is that there is no physical discontinuity so gameplay glitches are greatly reduced.

 

[Redneckerz]

There is Eternity's linked portals and there is RORDoom.

[Graf Zahl]

Sadly there is no source for RORDoom. It's probably one of the most regrettable losses in Doom engine modding.

 

[Redneckerz]

49 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Sadly there is no source for RORDoom. It's probably one of the most regrettable losses in Doom engine modding.

 

Agreed. But since the real interesting bit is its ROR implementation, that's where the challenge lies. ;)

[seed]

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

EDuke32 added a new feature called "true ROR"

 

Which in itself was taken from Ken's Build 2 engine iirc, which introduced TROR.

[Graf Zahl]

Build 2 is a 3D engine, so it hardly qualifies as an inspiration. Quake did the same a lot earlier.

The innovation with True ROR was to render it in a 2.5D context.