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

[Codename_Delta]

Here's one, mid-texture doors!

 

Just like in TNT

[Stabbey]

4 hours ago, wallabra said:

 

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

 

Both the tricks I mentioned were used in my map Nukage Treatment Pools:

 

 

Spoilers for location:

 

Spoiler

Repeated Walkthrough Trigger used as a suddenly activating one-time trigger

The repeated walkthrough trigger is in the western wing of the map. There's a corridor passing by a blue door which goes down to stairs overlooking a vista where the red key is visible. There's a trigger: 98 - WR - Floor Lower to 8 above highest floor trigger. You can walk up and down it from early on and nothing happens. But after you get the red key, you need to press a switch which lowers a control sector adjacent to the sector, thus lowering the highest floor to match the lowest floors around. The next time the player passes the action 98 line, the floor will suddenly and very quickly lower, releasing monsters ahead and behind of the player.

 

Surprise Additional Door

In the south wing, there is a switch you need to press to open the door to get into the room which leads to the lower area of a nukage pool. It only seems to open that one door. You can press the switch on either side and it only seems to open that door. However, unknown to the player, there are hidden doors on either side, both of which are concealed behind thin sectors with the ceilings lowered to the ground. Those sectors are on BOTH sides of the hidden door, which is needed to make the door unopenable and thus silent. After you get the yellow key, however, you pass across a trigger 40 - W1 - Ceiling Raise to highest Ceiling, which raises those thin sectors on both sides of the door. The texturing behind is the same so nothing looks to have changed. As you hit the switch to exit the antechamber, doors ahead and behind you also suddenly open, releasing monsters.

 

The Repeated Walkthrough Trigger can also be used to create a combination switch which requires multiple switches pressed to activate, as seen in Epic 2, map 28 "Ogdoad", where each switch moves a control sector, and once all are down, a carefully placed repeatable walkthrough trigger the player is guaranteed to pass through on the way back to the target can then do something on the target.

 

****

 

One other trick I know of, but I haven't seen much of is the use of a wandering monster elsewhere to make things happen unexpectedly. Only a very few walk-over triggers can be activated by monsters in vanilla. I've seen that on Map 26 of Eternal Doom, "No Parking".  A monster which is alerted wanders towards the player in a control sector elsewhere. They cross over a line which lowers a lift, allowing the player to pass through a barrier.

 

This has limited applications, the only things monsters can activate in vanilla are:

 

1 – DR - Door Open, Wait, Close (the Standard Door Action)

4 – W1 - Door Open, Wait, Close

10 – W1 - Lift lower, wait, raise

88 – WR - Lift lower, wait, raise

 

There are some applications for this, but most would likely revolve around action 88.

 

One example is a sector elsewhere with a bunch of different action 88 lines tagged to different lifts, so in a room which has a bunch of those hidden lifts in it, a monster wandering through the control sector would pass over a random line and lower a random lift in a room. The one-time ones would likely require an already alerted monster ready to spring, usually passing over a teleport line once the tagged sector allows them to pass.

 

I haven't used that one yet, but I have some ideas to play with.

 

[zokum]

Vanilla effects are often problematic in many ports that claim they are vanilla compatible. They use a definition of vanilla that tends to mean "only the stuff from the four iwads". If I'm not mistaken, the RTX version barfed on plutonia's invisible floors. Several ports have problems with bullet holes on textures with maps that use the geometry simplification switch. Boom had a faulty blockmap optimization that broke when I optimized blockmaps a bit in zokumbsp. Tons of ports also broke due to having inherited this problem.

I have received a ton of backlash for vanilla-compatible stuff if it breaks in <insert favorite port here>. I saw a comment about AV and its use of deep water. The poster said that AV shouldn't have used deep water since it doesn't work well in gldoom.

I love it when people release maps with cool vanilla effects, but when one releases such maps, expect a shit storm of complaints from many of the users. The usual argument is that this effect reduces the audience, since some people refuse to play it in anything but a specific port, and that the effect could have been done in another way and worked in that port. That it wouldn't work in the original game is irrelevant, as their port of choice is the only standard that matters.

BTSX were brave when they used some blockmap compression stuff that will break in some ports. By the time they released it, many ports had already fixed it, and it would give other ports an incentive to fix it now that it is in more widespread use.

Zdaemon is pretty broken when it comes to vanilla effects and vanilla behavior. It really changes how some maps play and often what they look like. I still like the port due to its good net code and overall ease of use, I just wish it had better vanilla compatibility. Play testing vanilla stuff can sometimes be a bit of a pain in the arse and one has to tell the tester to overlook bugs, due to this being caused by bugs in Zdaemon and not in the map.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

A small cosmetic one, a favorite of mine to throw out in vanilla levels I make.

 

Y'know what's nice about Boom? I can make the ceiling bright and the floor dark or vice versa! If only I could do that in something that runs with the original executable . . . .

But I actually can. Check out vanilla shadowcasting. It's a simple technique and I'm sure it's been used in wads, but I can't remember if I've ever seen it. Maybe (most likely, actually) in Eternal Doom. Anyway, onto the effect:

If I want a dark ceiling and bright floor, I'll make the bright sector and set its brightness level to 255. Then, make a self - referencing sector inside this. I try and just make them one unit apart. Make sure the ceiling has upper textures, or else this will HOM. Once textured, raise the ceiling nice and high. DON'T texture the the upper sides of the surrounding sector, only the part that's raised up. This will make the renderer fill in the missing texture with the surrounding flat and it's data; including light level. Just make sure the surrounding flats are the light level you desire on the ceiling.

 

Please tell me what wads have used this, I'm really curious.

[RDETalus]

2 hours ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

Please tell me what wads have used this

Lost Civilization does in MAP02, inside the cabin at the player start. The oven casts bright light on the floor in front of it, and Jaska raises the corresponding ceiling above the light so that the surrounding darker ceiling masks it

EDIT: He doesn't use the self-referencing sector though, he just raise the ceiling. Why is the self-referencing necessary?

Edited November 29, 2022 by RDETalus

[esselfortium]

3 hours ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

A small cosmetic one, a favorite of mine to throw out in vanilla levels I make.

 

Y'know what's nice about Boom? I can make the ceiling bright and the floor dark or vice versa! If only I could do that in something that runs with the original executable . . . .

But I actually can. Check out vanilla shadowcasting. It's a simple technique and I'm sure it's been used in wads, but I can't remember if I've ever seen it. Maybe (most likely, actually) in Eternal Doom. Anyway, onto the effect:

If I want a dark ceiling and bright floor, I'll make the bright sector and set its brightness level to 255. Then, make a self - referencing sector inside this. I try and just make them one unit apart. Make sure the ceiling has upper textures, or else this will HOM. Once textured, raise the ceiling nice and high. DON'T texture the the upper sides of the surrounding sector, only the part that's raised up. This will make the renderer fill in the missing texture with the surrounding flat and it's data; including light level. Just make sure the surrounding flats are the light level you desire on the ceiling.

 

Please tell me what wads have used this, I'm really curious.

I guess the self-referencing sector is used to ensure archvile-jumping players don't get launched into the hidden raised ceiling? I usually just leave that part out, especially in vanilla where even invisible self-ref sectors can contribute to drawseg and visplane counts...

 

A version of this setup is used in Z1M5 of KDiKDiZD, with a combination of floor and ceiling bleeding used to control how different surfaces are lit:

Spoiler

 

The glass-window trick mentioned elsewhere in this thread is also used elsewhere in KDiKDiZD, for the green forcefields.

 

I used a variation on the barrel-crusher teleport trick also, swapping out the crusher for a dehacked explosion generator because Doom's crushers have an unavoidable random chance of breaking the setup by turning barrels into gibs without exploding them.

 

The "damage multiple voodoo dolls to create a zombie player" trick shows up in there, too :)

 

 

12 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

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.

That's a smart idea! I've sometimes used a similar but more fragile setup for monster teleports that only happen when returning to a previously-visited area, by combining a walkover lift trigger in the affected area with a stay-open door trigger elsewhere. Using your approach instead would avoid the risk of monsters not getting through the lift before it closes back up (though I haven't seen that actually happen in practice).

[SilverMiner]

2 hours ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

A small cosmetic one, a favorite of mine to throw out in vanilla levels I make.

 

Y'know what's nice about Boom? I can make the ceiling bright and the floor dark or vice versa! If only I could do that in something that runs with the original executable . . . .

But I actually can. Check out vanilla shadowcasting. It's a simple technique and I'm sure it's been used in wads, but I can't remember if I've ever seen it. Maybe (most likely, actually) in Eternal Doom. Anyway, onto the effect:

If I want a dark ceiling and bright floor, I'll make the bright sector and set its brightness level to 255. Then, make a self - referencing sector inside this. I try and just make them one unit apart. Make sure the ceiling has upper textures, or else this will HOM. Once textured, raise the ceiling nice and high. DON'T texture the the upper sides of the surrounding sector, only the part that's raised up. This will make the renderer fill in the missing texture with the surrounding flat and it's data; including light level. Just make sure the surrounding flats are the light level you desire on the ceiling.

 

You don't really need to make a self referencing sector to do the trick. Raising ceiling with untextured borders would be enough

 

2 hours ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

Please tell me what wads have used this, I'm really curious. 

 

Besides Eternal Doom I hardly remember vanilla wads that use the feature. (although there should be lots of limit removing ones that do)

 

> the first thing that comes to mind is 2002 doom odyssey e3m2's bright lava pit (I found an example in this wad not on the first try, it's hardly noticeable)

played with greyscale palette recently

Spoiler

 

> map03 of beta pl2

Spoiler

(get here if you want web.archive.org/web/20170205062226/http://www.doomworld.com/metabolist/ftp/ find pl2-03 in levels.zip)

> I used some in mine

Spoiler

 

> Also Infernew (Inferno styled vanilla Doom 2 megawad) has been in development since 2018 (now heavily stagnating) should have at least a map or two there using the trick.

[NiGHTMARE]

MAP07 of Endgame uses the lighting trick, as well as various other vanilla effects.

[CyberosLeopard]

I don't know if this helps much, but I stumbled across a Youtube video ('though I'm providing an Invidious link here) a few days ago that discusses creating a 3D floor in vanilla: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=AH7UWvNKRIg

 

Also, there is the 'deep floor' effect as seen in KDiKDiZD's z1m1. It's made by having a sector within another sector, with the former's midtextures being offset into the floor. However, I'm not sure how it was done without introducing the tutti-frutti error.

[Metal_Slayer]

3D bridges are cool effects, the only problem they have is that only a single entity can go above or below it, so there can't be combat close to the bridge or two players trying to cross it at the same time.

Also, shooting a wall in order to "destroy" it, it's possible to make it work only with the SSG or the Rocket Launcher.

[Uncle 80]

18 hours ago, esselfortium said:

 

  Hide contents

 

 

 

 

 

I used a variation on the barrel-crusher teleport trick also, swapping out the crusher for a dehacked explosion generator because Doom's crushers have an unavoidable random chance of breaking the setup by turning barrels into gibs without exploding them.

 

I've used a lot of barrel/crusher setups in my yet-to-be released maps, often with unpredictable results like you're describing here. But I eventually found a more reliable crusher setup - don't use the crushing ceilings or crushing floors. Use the turbo raising stairs instead! They also crush, and in my experience, these almost never gib the barrels instead of exploding them, as long as you are careful with the thing heights and remaining distance between the crushing step and the ceiling.

[esselfortium]

8 minutes ago, Uncle 80 said:

I've used a lot of barrel/crusher setups in my yet-to-be released maps, often with unpredictable results like you're describing here. But I eventually found a more reliable crusher setup - don't use the crushing ceilings or crushing floors. Use the turbo raising stairs instead! They also crush, and in my experience, these almost never gib the barrels instead of exploding them, as long as you are careful with the thing heights and remaining distance between the crushing step and the ceiling.

This is true, but "almost never" is still not "never". The explosion generator setup is the only way I know of that's 100% guaranteed to work.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

18 hours ago, RDETalus said:

Lost Civilization does in MAP02, inside the cabin at the player start. The oven casts bright light on the floor in front of it, and Jaska raises the corresponding ceiling above the light so that the surrounding darker ceiling masks it

EDIT: He doesn't use the self-referencing sector though, he just raise the ceiling. Why is the self-referencing necessary?

I suppose it isn't. That's how I was always taught to do it. Also I love Lost Civ, forgot it was used there.

 

18 hours ago, esselfortium said:

guess the self-referencing sector is used to ensure archvile-jumping players don't get launched into the hidden raised ceiling?

heh

I guess it is kinda stupid. Maybe it was so hanging decorations still look normal?

18 hours ago, SilverMiner said:

Besides Eternal Doom I hardly remember vanilla wads that use the feature. (although there should be lots of limit removing ones that do)

 

> the first thing that comes to mind is 2002 doom odyssey e3m2's bright lava pit (I found an example in this wad not on the first try, it's hardly noticeable)

played with greyscale palette recently

Good finds!

 

18 hours ago, NiGHTMARE said:

MAP07 of Endgame uses the lighting trick, as well as various other vanilla effects.

Thanks! This wad is right up my alley and is full of mappers I enjoy. The Map07 opening room in particular looks great using that effect.

[JadingTsunami]

There's a rarely-used floor-over-floor vanilla trick that I always thought was kind of neat.

 

[Arsinikk]

37 minutes ago, JadingTsunami said:

There's a rarely-used floor-over-floor vanilla trick that I always thought was kind of neat.

  

I think one of the reasons this trick is rarely used is because GZDoom's OpenGL renderer doesn't know how to render it correctly. Similar to the underwater floor trick of Perdition's Gate MAP32.

 

On 11/29/2022 at 9:13 AM, zokum said:

I have received a ton of backlash for vanilla-compatible stuff if it breaks in <insert favorite port here>. I saw a comment about AV and its use of deep water. The poster said that AV shouldn't have used deep water since it doesn't work well in gldoom.

A lot of this can be avoided by forcing compatibility options via different ports. ZDoom ports tend to do a good job with physics and such if you just force Doom (Strict) compatibility options in the ZMAPINFO lump. For the Eternity Engine, you can use the MBF OPTIONS lump. I tend to do this with all my vanilla projects, and I haven't really run into issues regarding maps not working correctly cuz they were for Vanilla.

 

More Vanilla tricks (with DehackEd):

 

1. Speaking of interesting Vanilla hacks, you can do alot with DehackEd. One of my favourite DehackEd things is that Vanilla compatibility sets the effect of a thing based on the name of the sprite. So if you have a custom DehackEd thing with the red key sprite, and have the flag of "pickup", if the player walks over it, they will gain the red key regardless of if it is actually the red key thing.

 

I used this trick in MAP25 of 200 Line Massacre to have a colour shifting key that constantly changed from Red -> Yellow -> Blue, that would give the player whatever colour key is what the object was when it was picked up. This allowed for a bit of randomness and a 3-route map.

 

2. One trick that I've never seen done before in Vanilla is a looping conveyor. I was able to create a setup for MAP23 of 200 Line Massacre, which you can see my test video here:

 

 

One thing that this video demonstrates is that you can use a DehackEd constantly exploding barrel to push a voodoo doll, and at some point the voodoo doll will stop receiving damage. In this video, I was testing using the Cube spawner to constantly spawn cubes (which were changed to health bonuses through the sprite trick I mentioned earlier), to try and regain some of the health from the barrel. I ended up scrapping the health bonus spawner and instead hid the damage from the barrel with an Invulnerability pickup.

 

You can see the results of the looping conveyor in the final map here:

 

This is obviously a setup that can't be used for every scenario, but you can start a fight with an Invuln that starts the conveyor and mostly hide the damage to the voodoo doll until the damage stops. It's worth noting that I had to replace the barrel with an actor via DECORATE for ZDoom ports, since they use more accurate physics code that ended up with the voodoo doll never not receiving damage from the infinite barrel object.

Edited November 30, 2022 by Arsinikk

[Jacek Bourne]

Mazes.

[magicsofa]

On 11/29/2022 at 5:16 AM, Arsinikk said:

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.

 

You can also use the barrel explosion to push monsters into the teleport without dying, if you're careful. If they enter pain state they will also start chasing the player regardless of shots being fired (I think?).

[Arsinikk]

8 minutes ago, magicsofa said:

You can also use the barrel explosion to push monsters into the teleport without dying, if you're careful.

This is correct. It is similar to how I build Vanilla Barrel Conveyors, setting them up specifically so that it only hurts the player 1% of health (with Easy difficulty using a different barrel placement to avoid the barrel not hurting/pushing the player on ITYTD - because since ITYTD halves damage, and since Vanilla Doom doesn't consider half of a percent, the 1 HP becomes 0 HP in ITYTD... Basically ending up not pushing the voodoo doll at all, because the player / voodoo doll must take damage in order to be affected by the barrel explosion's momentum).

 

12 minutes ago, magicsofa said:

If they enter pain state they will also start chasing the player regardless of shots being fired (I think?).

I'd have to check, but I think this statement is incorrect. Just because a monster enters a pain state doesn't mean they chase the player. Think of it in terms of monster infighting, especially with enemies set to "ambush". After an ambush monster has fought a monster and killed it, in complevel 2, they will "fall back asleep" and will only wake up if they see you or hear you fire a shot.

[Capellan]

Some old techniques have fallen out of use because of tech improvements.

 

For instance, things like using non-sky textures for sky, which worked okay on an old, dark CRT monitor at 320x200 do not translate to today's brighter, much higher-resolution monitors.

 

Similarly, you could create shallow 'pools' of liquid (say 8-16 deep) that the player waded through simply by having a lower sector inside a higher one and not putting a lower texture in.  The distortion of the HOM was barely noticeable on 1994 tech.

 

I did both of these in Demonfear (map03 and 05 respectively), but I would not do either, today.  They don't look good at all.

[slugger]

Sector types 10 and 14, "close after 30 seconds" and "open after 5 minutes". They work against normal play

[slugger]

2 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

1. Speaking of interesting Vanilla hacks, you can do alot with DehackEd. One of my favourite DehackEd things is that Vanilla compatibility sets the effect of a thing based on the name of the sprite. So if you have a custom DehackEd thing with the red key sprite, and have the flag of "pickup", if the player walks over it, they will gain the red key regardless of if it is actually the red key thing.

 

I used this trick in MAP25 of 200 Line Massacre to have a colour shifting key that constantly changed from Red -> Yellow -> Blue, that would give the player whatever colour key is what the object was when it was picked up. This allowed for a bit of randomness and a 3-route map.

 

That's ingenious. Could you have weapon pickups become other weapons? e.g. you forgo picking up an obvious chainsaw, come back 2 minutes later and it's "evolved" into a hidden BFG?

[Arsinikk]

10 minutes ago, slugger said:

That's ingenious. Could you have weapon pickups become other weapons? e.g. you forgo picking up an obvious chainsaw, come back 2 minutes later and it's "evolved" into a BFG?

Yes, though you are still subject to the DehackEd state/frame system. So you can't do something very script-based like ZDoom ports.

 

Examples I could think of is that you could have a weapon looking thing that constantly has a look codepointer, that when it sees the player it would change to another weapon. So basically the thing would have a spawn state and a chase state.

 

I'm unsure of how Vanilla would deal with item frames when saving and loading. Like for example what if you had a thing that had a super long duration of a chainsaw frame, and then it would change to BFG frame with a duration of -1. If you saved and loaded, would the frames reset, or would it remember the frame the item was on?

[slugger]

17 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

I'm unsure of how Vanilla would deal with item frames when saving and loading. Like for example what if you had a thing that had a super long duration of a chainsaw frame, and then it would change to BFG frame with a duration of -1. If you saved and loaded, would the frames reset, or would it remember the frame the item was on?

 

The longest vanilla state is 181 tics (state 785, monster spawner waking up and saying its piece). Tic duration is stored as an int so I guess you could make a state pretty dang long. AFAIK you can save while Romero is speaking and it won't reset the boss, implying frames are preserved in savefiles.

[Stabbey]

38 minutes ago, slugger said:

Sector types 10 and 14, "close after 30 seconds" and "open after 5 minutes". They work against normal play

 

 

I use "Open after 5 minutes" in my experimental map "Dead in Five Minutes". I even put in a working timer.

 

I also have an idea to use a "close after 30 seconds" sector in a map which starts out with a gigantic horde pouring from a door, and the player needs to hold out until it seals. I also have an idea to use "close after 30 seconds" for a map where the player has to run or die, and if they don't get through a certain opening, the door closes. (If they do get through, they cross a trigger line to block the barrel explosion which would kill them)

[Dusty_Rhodes]

1 hour ago, Capellan said:

They don't look good at all.

I find that really funny because I always loved the slimy "sky" in Map03. It struck me interesting when I saw it and I always found it intriguing. Eye of the beholder, I guess.

[Sasunil bhotos]

2 hours ago, slugger said:

Sector types 10 and 14, "close after 30 seconds" and "open after 5 minutes". They work against normal play

They both are my favourite sector effects, just for messing with players...

[magicsofa]

5 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

Just because a monster enters a pain state doesn't mean they chase the player.

 

All of the original pain sequences lead directly back to an A_Chase frame. A pained monster will attack you even if it didn't see you or hear your gun (regardless of ambush flag)

 

Here's an example wad: wakeup.zip

The imps will chase you if they hit their pain chance... if not, they just stay idle.

[Arsinikk]

3 hours ago, magicsofa said:

All of the original pain sequences lead directly back to an A_Chase frame. A pained monster will attack you even if it didn't see you or hear your gun (regardless of ambush flag)

This is correct. I did forget that Pain directly leads to the Chase frame. However in Vanilla Doom there is still a way for a pained monster to not attack you after being hit by a barrel explosion. Keep in mind that when I say "pained monster" it doesn't necessarily mean that it's pain state is triggered. You can hurt a monster a little amount and it not go into a pain state. Even so in my experiment, a barrel will never force a pain state if it's set to ambush and doesn't see you.

 

I have done an experiment to show some interesting Vanilla Doom monster behaviour. The setup I have includes a crusher that blows up a barrel to hurt a hell knight, a shotgunner, and a wall.

 

 

Scenario 1: Hell Knight (set to ambush) + shotgunner

In this scenario, we can see that the hell knight never wakes up / enters a pain state due to the barrel explosion. If he is hit by the shotgunner, he will proceed to infight. If the player is in the view of the hell knight when he is done infighting, the hell knight will then attack the player. However, if the player is behind a wall when the shotgunner dies, the hell knight will go "back to sleep".

 

Scenario 2: Hell Knight (no ambush) + shotgunner

In this scenario, we can see that the hell knight can actually wake up due to the barrel explosion, only if it is hit during the correct idle frame (or honestly it could just be that it enters it's pain state). If he is hit by the shotgunner, he will still infight. If the player is in the view of the hell knight when he is done infighting, the hell knight will then attack the player. However if the player hides behind a wall during the death of the shotgunner, the hell knight will also go "back to sleep" like when it is set to ambush.

 

Scenario 3: Hell Knight (no ambush) only (no shotgunner)

In this scenario, we can see that the hell knight never wakes up / enters a pain state due to the barrel explosion, even when the monster isn't set to ambush. This is because it will never enter it's pain state unless another monster fires in that sector.

 

Here's a WAD with all 3 scenarios (MAP01-MAP03) in the video:

Vanilla Monster Barrel Wake Test.zip

 

 

Okay, So What?

Basically it seems highly unlikely if impossible for an ambush monster to enter it's pain state from a barrel while it's "asleep".

 

Even so, I kinda don't think the pain state is very relevant to the main topic of using barrel conveyors to push monsters into teleport lines.

 

You can easily set up a system that hardly damages the monster at all to just slightly push it into the teleporter. Whether it's ambush or not, it won't wake up if you have a good system set up since the damage inflicted would never be enough to force a pain state.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Arsinikk

[Ravendesk]

23 hours ago, JadingTsunami said:

There's a rarely-used floor-over-floor vanilla trick that I always thought was kind of neat.

how does this work btw?

[Sonikkumania]

That level design don't need to be so detailed, lol.