Things about Doom you still don't understand

[Sonikkumania]

As for my example, I really don't understand why level designers put shootable lines which execute a necessary function in order to progress. MAP18 of Doom 2 always was a mystery for me as a kid and I usually cheated my way out. It was just pure luck that I once started to shoot whole room with Chaingun and managing to open the door. At the time I didn't have a manual, so I had no idea that shootable lines are a thing.

 

The worse case scenario is when the shootable line has a texture that doesn't resemble a swich at all.

[Lucius Wooding]

It's an FPS. Shooting is the primary mechanic, it makes a lot of sense to make shooting trigger a line action.

 

Whether it's used well is pretty subjective depending on the case. In the case of Doom 2 I think it would have benefitted greatly by teaching this mechanic a bit more clearly, and a lot earlier on. Sigil, on the other hand, makes better use of it for example.

[Sonikkumania]

7 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

It's an FPS. Shooting is the primary mechanic, it makes a lot of sense to make shooting trigger a line action.

Yes, an FPS with doors and switches functioning with the use key. So I was very confused, especially when the texture resembled an ordinary switch.

[Lucius Wooding]

It's also necessary, in many cases, to alert monsters in certain areas at the start. In vanilla you need to use that mechanic sometimes, particularly where teleport ambushes are involved. 

 

For me personally, I played Doom 1 first and E1M2's chainsaw secret (which you can easily trigger by accident with enemies and barrels in the area) taught me the mechanic. In my own maps I try to either make the trigger redundant with a walkover or something, or place enemies in the vicinity. If I were using it heavily I'd probably use something like Valiant's dedicated switch texture and introduce it very early on.

 

As far as things I don't understand, how about why flats and wall textures aren't interchangeable?

[Stupid Bunny]

Maybe not entirely on topic but I’m not sure when else I’ll be able to talk about this lol

 

I’ve always had a special fascination for the donut-floor behavior, following my fascination of anything that’s extremely rare in the game—I think it’s used twice in all the IWADs, both in Doom 1. In some ways I can see why: 1. the donut’s behavior is weird, complicated, kind of hacky and difficult to adjust based on linedef indexes; and 2. when used as “intended” (high pillar in the middle of low pool) they’re kind of useless from a gameplay standpoint, since usually either a descending pillar or rising pool alone would be sufficient to make the goodies on the pillar inaccessible.

 

Still, though, I’ve always thought about how they can be made interesting, and experimented a bit with how, especially with dummy sector magic, there’s a lot of potential in an action that can both raise and lower floors with a single switch press. It was always curious to me that they just dropped out of their donuty existence after Doom 1.

 

Also strange to me that neither TNT nor Plutonia have any custom flats. Does anybody know any special reason why they wouldn’t?

[Lucius Wooding]

I suppose it makes a bit of sense, if a pillar goes down into liquid it'd displace some of it after all. I found it interesting but implementing it in maps definitely is beyond my pay grade last I looked at it. Though i wonder, what'd happen in vanilla if you made a 0 tagged donut special on an otherwise ordinary map?

[Stupid Bunny]

33 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

i wonder, what'd happen in vanilla if you made a 0 tagged donut special on an otherwise ordinary map?

Lol I tried this and the answer seemed to be “absolutely nothing”

 

I’m not 100% sure how they work but they’re clearly pretty persnickety. I’ve used them on 5 different maps and the most important thing, especially when dummy-sectoring them, is to plan ahead and draw in the dummy donuts before anything else. They are a pain to work with to be sure.

(Fun fact in vanilla you can make the donut floor rise faster the more tagged “hole” sectors you put in. A fun exploit that sadly doesn’t work in GZDoom as of yet)

 

[tatsu91]

I sometimes do not get the SSG damage output in multiplayer. Sometimes i pointblank shoot someone and they live other times its like they are half a mile away and i am killed one hit. Not sure what i am missing as i never seem to notice such damage discrepencies in single player.

[fai1025]

59 minutes ago, tatsu91 said:

I sometimes do not get the SSG damage output in multiplayer. Sometimes i pointblank shoot someone and they live other times its like they are half a mile away and i am killed one hit. Not sure what i am missing as i never seem to notice such damage discrepencies in single player.

I might be wrong but I think that's cause by blockmaps bugs(if you playing on zandru something nun ignore this reply) 

[Ozcar]

I still dont get, There are Zombieman, But there are marine corpse with doomguy skin. They are diferent soldier or what?. Same things with quake, there are Possesed soldier, and then there are ranger corpse.

[fai1025]

16 hours ago, Sonikkumania said:

I really don't understand why level designers put shootable lines which execute a necessary function in order to progress

I use the shootable line special for secret, and for lowering a weapon and spawn monster since my teleporting closet require player make sound, and shootable switches prevent people just Pacifist the whole map

[Solmyr]

3 hours ago, Ozcar said:

I still dont get, There are Zombieman, But there are marine corpse with doomguy skin. They are diferent soldier or what?. Same things with quake, there are Possesed soldier, and then there are ranger corpse.

In general marine corpses represent fellow marines that weren't posessed and died in combat against the demons. 

 

Zombiemen like the other zombies are fellow space marines of different ranks, as the Shotgun Guy is also named "Former Sergeant" in the manual, maybe the Zombieman's rank is private or recruit, while Doomguy and their fellow marines are corporals. Or maybe the zombies are actually a local military police-like security force and not marines themselves.

 

In Quake likewise the former explanation "Ranger" corpses are regular marines that were killed by possesed soldiers that went mad by Shubb-Niggurath's influence through the base's Slipgates, although Grunts bear a closer resemblance to Ranger than Zombiemen to Doomguy.

[RHhe82]

On 9/8/2022 at 11:46 AM, Lucius Wooding said:

I played Doom 1 first and E1M2's chainsaw secret (which you can easily trigger by accident with enemies and barrels in the area) taught me the mechanic.

 

I have to say that I also started with Doom 1 back in the day, and the E1M2 chainsaw secret eluded me for the longest time. I don't think I ever shot the wall by accident, and I don't think it was until I got ahold of a level editor that I discovered there was such a thing as gun-triggered linedefs.

 

I must have learned my lesson, though, because I have absolutely no recollection of struggling in Doom 2 / MAP18.

[TheFocus]

to this day, i do not understand the Revenant's missile pattern. i've tried studying the RNG Decino style for hours at a time, but it just doesn't make any sense to me.

[Nefelibeta]

1 hour ago, map11has2names said:

to this day, i do not understand the Revenant's missile pattern. i've tried studying the RNG Decino style for hours at a time, but it just doesn't make any sense to me.

If you're playing on boom complevel(and complevels based on them)  or GzDoom, no those two use a different way to generate RNG.

 

Since revenants fire randomly and missiles will be homing depending on which tick when they're fired. (odd or even) No, you can't "predict" or "study" them, it's completely random.

[volbound1700]

The gun choice in the original Dooms always kind of puzzled me.  There was a standard assault rifle/machine gun.  Later Dooms include this item.  The chaingun was the closest thing to a machine gun.

[Aaron Blain]

42 minutes ago, volbound1700 said:

The gun choice in the original Dooms always kind of puzzled me.  There was a standard assault rifle/machine gun.  Later Dooms include this item.  The chaingun was the closest thing to a machine gun.

Distinctive silhouettes. One of the many things that puts me off modern fps games is that the weapons are a bunch of differently-chunky long rifles. By the same token, I don't prefer Doom mods that replace either the pistol or the chaingun with a rifle or some kind of smg. I know it's for variety's sake but I like the contrast of the vanilla weapons better.

[Lucius Wooding]

The chaingun makes sense for 3 reasons:

 

-It makes more sense being able to fire all your 200+ ammo continuously without using a magazine. Chainguns are generally belt-fed weapons compared to something like an AR. This mechanic could have been easily implemented but obviously Id wanted no part of it.

 

-It's a Wolfenstein tribute with the chaingun being the best weapon in that game. If the best bullet based weapon didn't feel as powerful as Wolfenstein's it'd be a travesty. It's much more of an over the top offensive weapon than any kind of standard issue gun.

 

-Terminator 2 had a chaingun wielded by Arnold and was a fairly iconic movie coming out in 1991. There are probably some other examples from action films of this era but this one came to mind.

[volbound1700]

On 9/11/2022 at 8:50 PM, Aaron Blain said:

Distinctive silhouettes. One of the many things that puts me off modern fps games is that the weapons are a bunch of differently-chunky long rifles. By the same token, I don't prefer Doom mods that replace either the pistol or the chaingun with a rifle or some kind of smg. I know it's for variety's sake but I like the contrast of the vanilla weapons better.

 

Although I love Doom, I actually like the way Halo forces you to only carry 2 guns.  

 

EDIT:  I probably should have clarified this more, I think it makes it more realistic.  

 

Playing Doom 3 on my Playstation 3 right now (first time I have touched it in 8 years) and it is a pain switching through all my guns sometimes and nearly got me killed once because I pulled wrong gun.

Edited September 15, 2022 by volbound1700

[Mystic 256]

17 hours ago, Aaron Blain said:

Distinctive silhouettes. One of the many things that puts me off modern fps games is that the weapons are a bunch of differently-chunky long rifles. By the same token, I don't prefer Doom mods that replace either the pistol or the chaingun with a rifle or some kind of smg. I know it's for variety's sake but I like the contrast of the vanilla weapons better.

I have trouble remembering the looks and names of weapons in some modern fps games because they look similar to each other and have difficult names to remember

where as in retro fps games like doom, quake and blood, the weapons look and act unique from each other and have more simple but distinct memorable names

[jmpt16]

how DO you compile doom's source code?

[Doomkid]

Honestly, I would have way more entires on a list entitled “things about doom people don’t understand, that I can’t understand how they don’t understand”, hehe.
 

Maybe it’s just years of built up level designer frustration, but hearing that some people didn’t know to do things like pressing on the silver bars in Underhalls - thus causing them to be removed! - would have made me pull my hair out, were I the level designer. There’s exactly two ways to interact with the world in Doom: pressing things and shooting them. To try neither then declare the game too hard/too confusing is insanity to me, haha. Pressing anything that looks even remotely out of place or door-like is a fundamentally necessary Doom skill. If you don’t have that basic “try it out” instinct which is crucial to finding your way in later maps, you’re not yet ready for Map03 onward..

 

The lion switch in Map18 is admittedly arbitrary - it should have been done more often than just one time prior in E1M2 to reinforce the idea of shooting non-enemies to progress - but I gotta admit that even when I was like 7, I spent about 6 seconds pushing on every wall and when that didn’t work I shot the switch, and bam, mission accomplished. I honestly think typing in IDDQD+IDKFA+IDCLIP would have been more effort, lol.

 

I’ve made so many levels with moments I thought were ultra-dodeca-straightforward that somehow tripped people up that it’s gotten to the point that I almost always sympathise with the level designer more than the confused player, unless the progression really is a puzzle box. I get lost sometimes even on basic levels, but I feel like it takes hubris to call that a failing of the game. It’s not the designers fault if someone didn’t even take 10 seconds using the tools given to the player before they resorted to cheats.

 

(..sorry, 15 years on-and-off of seeing people get stuck in parts of my maps that are simpler to work out than 1+1 just needed an excuse to be vented!)

[Electro Rage]

Archvile movement is the most confusing thing in this whole game

[Alex S.]

34 minutes ago, jmpt16 said:

how DO you compile doom's source code?

As it comes, the DOS Doom source is not able to be compiled because of missing DMX sound middleware that was redacted for copyright reasons. That aside, it's easy enough to remove any dependencies on this library and compile anyway.

 

If I were to compile any of the original Id Tech 1 game source code, I'd probably bring the project in to Watcom C or Borland C on a DOS machine and build it that way.

[Alex S.]

Why does the word 'fuck' appear in HERETIC.EXE at 0x8A15C?

[Faceman2000]

49 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I’ve made so many levels with moments I thought were ultra-dodeca-straightforward that somehow tripped people up that it’s gotten to the point that I almost always sympathise with the level designer more than the confused player, unless the progression really is a puzzle box. I get lost sometimes even on basic levels, but I feel like it takes hubris to call that a failing of the game.

I’d argue this is especially true in Doom as well because for many of us exploring and wandering around the level is part of the fun. I love feeling lost in a massive complex - it’s one of the reason I love No End in Sight so much - and I appreciate not having every second of progression handed to me, which is what modern game design tends to prioritize. On the flip side, of course, bad progression IS bad progression and too many unlabeled switches opening obscure doors is eventually going to be frustrating (looking at you, TNT09). It’s a fine line to walk.

Edited September 12, 2022 by Faceman2000

[Suess]

Classic doom's bfg

[Suess]

and i also don't know why anyone plays doom in general, trash game

[xScavengerWolfx]

Why everyone thinks Brutal doom is such a great mod to play Doom and/or Doom 2 with. I hate brutal doom, it ruins the experience of classic old school FPS. 

 

 

Also why the hell did Sandy add a arrow in his maps? I don't remember which map it's in for Doom 2 but that always bugged me. I mean i put arrows in my maps but i don't make a huge one that shows were you need to go.

[Sonikkumania]

2 hours ago, xScavengerWolfx said:

Also why the hell did Sandy add a arrow in his maps? I don't remember which map it's in for Doom 2 but that always bugged me. I mean i put arrows in my maps but i don't make a huge one that shows were you need to go.

There's a huge arrow on MAP13 : Downtown in Doom 2. Now that I think of it there's also arrows in MAP05: The Waste Tunnels, in the dark room right from the spawn area. As a kid I always thought the latter was very cool, like a disco or something. It really fed my imagination.