What's an old vanilla mapping trick that most mappers today don't know of?

[Sasunil bhotos]

For me it was a door that instantly disappears after hitting a switch,it worked by using control sectors outside the playable area, saw it in some wads I played which dated back to 1997-1998.

 

Or, invinsible platforms like the one seen in doomsday of UAC (1994)

[Stabbey]

The instant disappearing door is very well known, and it was even used in some IWADs, such as E4M7 of Ultimate Doom. The invisible platforms are pretty well known by now, and repeated often, so I wouldn't call it a trick most mappers don't know of. It was also used in both IWADs of Final Doom.

 

There's a couple I can think of, based on the same general principle. It's placing a repeatable trigger in a place which will be visited by the player, but using control sectors adjacent to it to prevent it from being activated until a certain other condition is met, so that after that time, the unsuspecting player can be traveling through an already cleared area and then a trigger suddenly goes off, catching them off-guard.

 

I discovered that this can be applied to doors which are switch/walkthrough based by using thin sectors on either side with the ceiling set to the floor. The trigger elsewhere raises the ceilings, and thus the next time the player activates that door, they'll also be activating additional hidden doors they didn't know existed. That trick has the benefit of not producing the giveaway sound of an opening door from the hidden door, like some other tricks would.

[Herr Dethnout]

4 hours ago, Sasunil bhotos said:

door that instantly disappears after hitting a switch

 

4 hours ago, Sasunil bhotos said:

invinsible platforms like the one seen in doomsday of UAC (1994)

Both are well known and still used to this day (I used the first one a lot on my map).

About old vanilla mapping trick that nobody knows today I'd say that will be the Bullet-proof "glass", this one is made by making a sector inside the "window" sector and either raising the floor or lowering the ceil keeping a separation of 1 pixel to achieve the best effect (if you make the ciel and floor with the same height, it will lead a HOM), the downside is that if you are too low (in the case of lowering the ceil) or too high (case of high floor) you will a little HOM flat, so this effect best achieved in a room without tall platforms or low stairs.

I've seen this effect only on Eternal Doom III, so yeah, pretty rare.

Other trick is the Tutti-frutti effect, although this is more a rendering glitch than a map trick.
 

[Kinsie]

You can have monster counts below 500. Crazy, I know!

[NiGHTMARE]

2 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

I've seen this effect only on Eternal Doom III, so yeah, pretty rare.
 

 

Hell Revealed and Memento Mori 2 use this for transparent doors in their first maps IIRC. I think there are maps in Requiem and Dystopia 3 which do so as well.

[Lucius Wooding]

I know this one called the visplane overflow...

[Test Tickle]

Baron's Den from Plutonia uses a voodoo doll to give you weapons when you walk under a skull cube, done by lowering the doll onto the weapons. I don't see that too often.

[wallabra]

4 hours ago, Stabbey said:

[...] Placing a repeatable trigger in a place which will be visited by the player, but using control sectors adjacent to it to prevent it from being activated until a certain other condition is met, so that after that time, the unsuspecting player can be traveling through an already cleared area and then a trigger suddenly goes off, catching them off-guard.

 

I discovered that this can be applied to doors which are switch/walkthrough based by using thin sectors on either side with the ceiling set to the floor. The trigger elsewhere raises the ceilings, and thus the next time the player activates that door, they'll also be activating additional hidden doors they didn't know existed. That trick has the benefit of not producing the giveaway sound of an opening door from the hidden door, like some other tricks would.

 

Oo, I'd love to have a demonstration of this one!

[SilverMiner]

I know some, but am not telling

[wallabra]

Oh, you're such a party pooper!

[Stupid Bunny]

I've mentioned it before like a lot of times but my favorite that I stumbled onto is the fact that you can make the rising floor in a donut sector raise faster if you put multiple tagged "hole" sectors inside it.  If you build all your donut sectors ahead of time then you can use both the raising and lowering floors as dummies and have a single switch that starts moving a bunch of floors both up and down at different speeds.  Fun stuff

 

There's also the thing where you can make a ghost player by causing nonlethal damage to several separate voodoo dolls, which sum to over 100 damage and therefore has the weird effect of giving the player 0% health and no weapons while also being completely invisible to monsters.  Unfortunately, neither this nor the donut thing work in ZDoom-type ports, but I've still considered making vanilla-only maps that exploit both.

[Codename_Delta]

3 hours ago, Kinsie said:

You can have monster counts below 500. Crazy, I know!

I always do mate!

 

Highest is 296 or something.

[RDETalus]

The Illusio-pit certainly doesn't see much use these days

[RDETalus]

4 hours ago, Stabbey said:

That trick has the benefit of not producing the giveaway sound of an opening door from the hidden door, like some other tricks would.

 

Another way to remove sound from moving sectors is to join it with a sector that is very far away from the play area. The sound will be emitted at a location between the two joined sectors, and if the player is far away from the midpoint of the two joined sectors, he won't hear it move

[Arsinikk]

Ok, time to bring out some of my Vanilla bag of tricks! :D

 

1. Always remember that monsters can interact with certain lift and door lines. You can do interesting tricks with monsters opening doors / lowering lifts from out-of-bounds sectors. Examples include Eternal Doom MAP26 with an imp randomly opening up a sector over and over out-of-bounds. More modern examples would include Three's A Crowd MAP05, with a chaingunner lowering platforms to a switch and Going Down MAP17, with revenants out-of-bounds lowering a lift.

 

2. You can having constantly moving ceilings and floors by using a barrel in an out-of-bounds sector. Basically the barrel stops the door or lift from ever reaching it's final destination, so the sector just constantly moves up and down. An example of this can be seen in Suspended In Dusk MAP01 with some tech sectors on the ceiling constantly moving up and down. I can't think of any examples of a lift constantly moving up and down besides maps I've made. This technique is slightly different than the "sector start moving up and down" line since it's initiated by a "W1 lift lower" line and/or a "W1 door close" line that never resolves. So the sectors move quicker and you have a little bit more control on them. Usually I move the out-of-bounds sector with the barrel stopping the sectors from resolving far away so the sound of the door/lift can't be heard by the player.

 

3. In all maps except for MAP30, you can use other monsters to block monsters from teleporting. Only the player can telefrag other monsters. You can use this for interesting situations / traps. Three's A Crowd uses this also in MAP05 by using a Mastermind to block a pain elemental from teleporting in; which also that pain elemental blocks the chaingunner from running over the lowering platform line in the point 1 I mentioned earlier.

 

4. You can stack multiple sector effects on top of one another. For example, you can have a secret sector and then walk over a "sector start blinking" line and then that secret sector also has a lighting effect.

 

5. You can have a multiple switch door in Vanilla by having a bunch of switches instantly lower certain sectors around the main door sector. And then have "WR floor lower to highest floor" lines around each of the switches, that when all the switches are flipped, the door sector lowers down. An example of this can be seen in the final door in Epic 2 MAP31.

 

6. You use the barrel explosion momentum to teleport other barrels and/or enemy corpses into teleport lines. Should also be mentioned that barrels can cross teleport lines. You can explode enemy zombiemen and only have their exploding corpses teleport in. An example of this can be seen in the final section Memento Mori MAP22.

 

Most of these tricks I used in my 100 Line Massacre megawad since one of the goals of that mapset for me was to use a Vanilla trick on every one of my maps.

Edited November 29, 2022 by Arsinikk

[whybmonotacrab]

3 hours ago, Kinsie said:

You can have monster counts below 500. Crazy, I know!

You can also not be super judgmental about other player/mapper preferences just because they aren't to your tastes. What a wild world we live in.

[Codename_Delta]

6 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

lift constantly moving up and down

I'm doing that in finer Doom map 31, with these chemical pipes, where an archie constantly moves up and down, (using w1 floor move up and down) you're gonna crush them don't worry 

[Arsinikk]

1 minute ago, Codename_Delta said:

I'm doing that in finer Doom map 31, with these chemical pipes, where an archie constantly moves up and down, (using w1 floor move up and down) you're gonna crush them don't worry 

This technique is slightly different since it's a "W1 lift lower" line and/or a "W1 door close" line that never resolves. So the sectors move quicker. Usually I move the out-of-bounds sector with the barrel stopping the sectors from resolving far away so the sound of the door/lift can't be heard by the player.

[Codename_Delta]

29 minutes ago, RDETalus said:

The Illusio-pit certainly doesn't see much use these days

Like floor bleeding? Beaten ya to it, also finer Doom 31, combined with insta raising floors, and you've got combat.

 

Vanilla is so epic to hack around.

 

I also wanna learn how to get trick 3d birdges working.

[Codename_Delta]

2 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

This technique is slightly different since it's a "W1 lift lower" line and/or a "W1 door close" line that never resolves. So the sectors move quicker. Usually I move the out-of-bounds sector with the barrel stopping the sectors from resolving far away so the sound of the door/lift can't be heard by the player.

Ah, same effect, but hackier and quicker.

 

Sounds exactly like something I'd like!

 

Speaking of, I need to learn more vanilla hacks.

[Lucius Wooding]

10 minutes ago, whybmonotacrab said:

You can also not be super judgmental about other player/mapper preferences just because they aren't to your tastes. What a wild world we live in.

Yeah seriously, every one of those 501 enemies has a purpose. To inflate the monster count.

[RDETalus]

3 minutes ago, Codename_Delta said:

combined with insta raising floors

The illusio-pit never raises though, the lore says that it's a UAC technology designed to trap monsters in illusions they can't escape from

[Codename_Delta]

16 minutes ago, RDETalus said:

The illusio-pit never raises though, the lore says that it's a UAC technology designed to trap monsters in illusions they can't escape from

Oh, that one..

 

WOW (.WAD)

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

I'm bookmarking this thread for sure. 

You know what would be awesome? A vanilla map of tricks like boomedit.wad. 

[SiFi270]

Here's something I don't see mappers doing today:

Spoiler

Even back then, this was more likely to be seen in the .txt file.

 

[Gez]

4 hours ago, Kinsie said:

You can have monster counts below 500. Crazy, I know!

Well, true, if you're only talking about the revenants in the starting room.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

5 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

keeping a separation of 1 pixel to achieve the best effect (if you make the ciel and floor with the same height, it will lead a HOM)

Oooh, that's how you do it! I was getting a HOM but only sometimes, and that drove me nuts. 

[Capellan]

6 hours ago, Stabbey said:

It's placing a repeatable trigger in a place which will be visited by the player, but using control sectors adjacent to it to prevent it from being activated until a certain other condition is met

 

Do modern mappers really not know this one?  I would expect many would - it's a good way for ensuring separated waves of enemies for multiple re-stocks of areas as a player backtracks.

 

One cute trick that rarely gets used is that you can lower a lift by pushing a barrel over the trigger line.  I used this in Doom404 to give the player an early shot at getting a secret in one map.  There's also another way to get it, but that's not available until later.

[Arsinikk]

21 minutes ago, Capellan said:

One cute trick that rarely gets used is that you can lower a lift by pushing a barrel over the trigger line.  I used this in Doom404 to give the player an early shot at getting a secret in one map.  There's also another way to get it, but that's not available until later.

I didn't realise that barrels could also trigger lift lines. That's super cool! Time to make a map using that technique :D

[Lucius Wooding]

You could use chains of barrel explosions like a timer maybe, and script some cool stuff. I wasn't aware of this one but I mainly tried to build this kind of timing in Boom with conveyors and lowering walls of various heights instead. However this could make some rube goldberg shit in vanilla, I like it. Plus anything that increases the overall barrel count in the community's maps is fine by me.