Port Compact: Doom Format Instadeath Floors

[Ralphis]

For too long has the Hexen (and later, UDMF) format been king of the instadeath floor. Boom should have implemented this decades ago, but it never happened. Now it's time for source port authors everywhere to remedy this by collectively adding an instadeath floor sector special compatible with the Doom map format. Join the compact.

 

This could possibly be accomplished by:

 

1) Adding it to a new sector special type range that the Doom (and Heretic/Strife) specials never come close to reaching (e.g. 100); or

 

2) adding it as a boom generalized sector special flag; or

 

3) EDIT: added this later after discord discussions. Doom sector special 15 looks like it was probably, originally 999% damage every tic. You can see this special carry over into Strife, but it is empty in Doom. Reinstating this is a possibility, but someone did mention that it could potentially cause undesired behavior with old wads that may have accidently assigned this to a sector. 

 

Air your grievances and pithy comments. Make Doom better.

Edited March 23, 2021 by Ralphis : small fix

[LexiMax]

I'm on board.  If one of the Boom forks will commit to adding it, I'll ensure Odamex follows suit.  If not, I'll do the legwork and figure out where a good place to put it would be.

[Altazimuth]

Shouldn't be too hard I don't think? EE doesn't mess with sector specials much for Doom format. Any instadeath floor code can come from Choco Strife which has its own instagib floors already.

[fraggle]

54 minutes ago, Ralphis said:

Now it's time for source port authors everywhere to remedy this by collectively adding an instadeath floor sector special compatible with the Doom map format. Join the compact.

no

[RottKing]

edit: ok turns out I got memed on, carry on

Edited March 23, 2021 by RottKing

[fraggle]

Only kidding :P  I couldn't help myself.

 

I support this feature, it seems like a simple and reasonable thing to add. It would be great to see the community build a consensus around something like this. Past efforts at building "cross source port standards" became grandiose and complex and collapsed under their own weight. Small, simple and hopefully uncontroversial suggestions like this seem like a much more effective way to do it.

 

A few thoughts: should there be different "kill anyone in sector"/"kill anyone standing in sector" types? And would it be useful to have different types that operate only in Deathmatch, only in single player/co-op, etc.? Finally what should the effect be on monsters? Should there be different types that kill only monsters, only players or both?

[Revenant]

Making it a Boom generalized sector flag would seem like the obvious choice, to be able to combine it with lighting effects and other stuff. You could perhaps then also repurpose the two existing damage flags to be able to further specify the insteadeath behavior (e.g. something like the things fraggle suggested w/r/t killing monsters, actors that are in midair, etc).

 

Naturally Heretic would need something different, but not having a generalized special system for that game means there are plenty of unused special numbers to poach instead.

[esselfortium]

This would be great to have.

[Never_Again]

Great poll options:

• Yes!
• I have no opinion on the matter, but adding them is probably a good idea.

or basically,

A. Heads - I win

B. Tails - you lose.

 

No, I don't have an opinion on the matter; after reading feedback on other games in the past I was under impression that players generally hated insta-death traps with passion. Perhaps the world has moved on since then, in which case you can ignore this post.

[Ralphis]

3 minutes ago, Never_Again said:

No, I don't have an opinion on the matter; after reading feedback on other games in the past I was under impression that players generally hated insta-death traps with passion. Perhaps the world has moved on since then, in which case you can ignore this post.

 

They're used a fair amount in multiplayer in zdoom/hexen format maps. They are useful for long lava pits, voids, etc that the player likely has the intuition that they should stay out of them. If it were available to doom format mapping, I believe we would likely see it used the same way.

[Alper002]

What's interesting is that there is a method of death floors in boom, it's just... not been shared to any good degree. It also requires dehacked, which may be a turn-off to some.

Have a look at this thing Ribbiks posted on his blog

 

Having death pits as a regular mapping feature could be interesting though!

[LexiMax]

Off the cuff, I would want to narrow the scope to something as small as possible - basically a slime floor except it kills you immediately on touch. I think that's the kind of table stakes everyone can agree would be useful.

 

Also off the cuff, I think making it a part of the generalized BOOM flags would probably be the best place for it as one of the damage floors. It currently seems like there are only two bits reserved for damage floors, and all four permutations are taken up. However, we could simply add a third bit to get eight possibilities, add a fifth bit pattern as instakill, and leave the other three bit patterns unimplemented until a consensus is formed on what else is worth adding.

 

15 hours ago, fraggle said:

A few thoughts: should there be different "kill anyone in sector"/"kill anyone standing in sector" types? And would it be useful to have different types that operate only in Deathmatch, only in single player/co-op, etc.? Finally what should the effect be on monsters? Should there be different types that kill only monsters, only players or both? 

 

These are just my opinions, and I would much rather get a subset of functionality that everyone can agree upon in quickly, as opposed to trying to plan out every possibility ahead of time only to realize we have a blind spot that we hadn't considered.

 

That being said, as someone who has done a fair bit of multiplayer mapping, I've never once wanted a single-player/coop/deathmatch sector effect like that.  Having the map behave fundamentally differently like that seems broken, and THINGS are much more obvious way to tailor a map.

 

Monster damage is an interesting case. On one hand, it's very much not something that the existing damage specials do, but given that the kinds of constructs that one might do with an instakill damage floor might be different than a mere damaging floor, I imagine that if through some weird bug a monster ended up in the instakill pit at the bottom of some gigantic ravine, they should probably be killed so the player can get their 100% kills.  Plus, having a sector damage type that damages monsters probably has loads of other cool tricks up its sleeve.

 

Having an "enters sector" variant in addition to "hits floor" variant has the potential for even more interesting possibilities, but is the kind of thing that I would want to be cautious about adding, since the other damage sector types don't behave that way and you could reasonably emulate it with an instakill teleport trap or something similar.

[printz]

It's useless and invites abusive mapper behaviour, where they just place instant death traps. Just use the 20% damage effect in an unescapable pit.

[Ralphis]

1 minute ago, printz said:

It's useless and invites abusive mapper behaviour, where they just place instant death traps. Just use the 20% damage effect in an unescapable pit.

 

As I mentioned, instadeath floors are used a fair amount in multiplayer in zdoom/hexen format maps. If mappers considered them useless, they wouldn't be used as often as they are. They are useful for long lava pits, voids, etc. Unlike a 20% damage floor, it instantly gets the player back into the action instead of making them wait to bleed out at the bottom of a pit.

 

As for abusive mapping, you will have to explain what you mean by this. Mappers do things that are subjectively "abusive" to players all the time (see: slaughtermaps with insta-drop walls full of monsters, conveyor belts to script "abusive" scenarios, etc). What makes a cliff leading to an instadeath floor more or less abusive than these scenarios if it's within the mapper's vision?

[fraggle]

15 hours ago, Revenant said:

Making it a Boom generalized sector flag would seem like the obvious choice, to be able to combine it with lighting effects and other stuff. You could perhaps then also repurpose the two existing damage flags to be able to further specify the insteadeath behavior (e.g. something like the things fraggle suggested w/r/t killing monsters, actors that are in midair, etc).

This seems like a good idea; however, taking a look at the different bits I think you only need the lighting bits. Everything else seems redundant because you end up dead (no point in collecting a secret for example if you're going to have to restart the level anyway).

 

47 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

Off the cuff, I would want to narrow the scope to something as small as possible - basically a slime floor except it kills you immediately on touch. I think that's the kind of table stakes everyone can agree would be useful.

Yep, me too. I definitely don't want to derail the discussion here by adding a bunch of useless feature requests. If feature requests come from anyone it should be mappers and not me.

 

I propose the following: there should be a new generalized sector type range. Bits 4-0 are lighting effects matching the existing generalized sector types. Bits 6-5 are the following:

• 00: Instakill any player or monster in this sector that is touching the floor
• 01: Future expansion
• 10: Future expansion
• 11: Future expansion

[Redneckerz]

Incredibly dumb suggestion, but would DEHEXTRA's extra states be of use here?

[Edward850]

21 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Incredibly dumb suggestion, but would DEHEXTRA's extra states be of use here?

Frame table doesn't have a single thing to do with sector effects. Not a one.

[Redneckerz]

37 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

Frame table doesn't have a single thing to do with sector effects. Not a one.

So i figured. A incredibly dumb suggestion it is then.

[LexiMax]

1 hour ago, printz said:

It's useless and invites abusive mapper behaviour, where they just place instant death traps. Just use the 20% damage effect in an unescapable pit.

 

This is a strange take to me.

 

There are countless other ways that mappers can already be abusive towards players if they so desire, and frankly if the goal was to abuse players, I would use 5% slime in an inescapable pit to draw out their death or just throw them in a dead-end where they either have to splash-damage themselves to death, load a save, or cheat.

[Dark Pulse]

20 hours ago, Ralphis said:

Doom sector special 15 looks like it was probably, originally 999% damage every tic. You can see this special carry over into Strife, but it is empty in Doom. Reinstating this is a possibility, but someone did mention that it could potentially cause undesired behavior with old wads that may have accidently assigned this to a sector. 

Is it even possible to assign Sector Type 15 to a WAD? Most editors simply skip over allowing it as an entry - certainly by the time we get to the Doom Builder or even WadAuthor era, I think.

 

I can't speak for stuff like DEU/DCK, but unless those editors allowed you to specifically assign unassigned sector types, there should be few, if any, WADs that have it. Especially since vanilla Doom will crash if it reads an unknown sector special - meaning any WAD that somehow DID have it should have been fixed by the mapper, as the game would have bombed with an unknown sector special.

 

Case in point: In the original Doom, there was a code change in 1.25 that changed a lowering sector (Type 37) to one that also copies the nearest neighboring texture. This revealed a bug: In E3M1, the room just past the starting arena (with the Cacodemon and Imps) also mistakenly had its ground floor area tagged with this type, and so when the player stepped into the area, it would try to read from a lower floor, fail, and cause overflow into the sector type field. The game would then try to read the sector effect, find a garbage number, and bomb out with an unknown sector type error (P_PlayerInSpecialSector: unknown special %i).

 

So in short: AFAIK, it should be pretty safe to assign 15 in theory. In practice, it might be confusing and make people think Doom supported that sector type "all along" when it really doesn't, and so there's still reasonable room to argue that this should be added as a clearly non-canonical sector number.

 

[Edward850]

2 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

So in short: AFAIK, it should be pretty safe to assign 15 in theory. In practice, it might be confusing and make people think Doom supported that sector type "all along" when it really doesn't, and so there's still reasonable room to argue that this should be added as a clearly non-canonical sector number.

We didn't seem to have this problem with Boom despite the map format remaining binary compatible, so I think we are good on that front.

[LexiMax]

I have no opinion on if we should start doling out standard sector specials.  I'm fine if there is, I'm fine if there isn't, and I'm fine if there isn't now but the right is reserved for later.

[Doomkid]

Listen, we're gonna Make Sector Type 15 Great Again. It'll be huge. Tremendous, in fact.

 

Having it deal 999 damage every tic when the marine makes contact with the floor seems like a good way to implement it, just IMO.

[Death Egg]

I'm putting my money in the pot for sector 18 since Caverns of Darkness/Risen3D already support it on that slot. (I also like their sector 19 that heals you)