The PLATFORM lump

[The Ultimate DooMer]

I've noticed this in some older wads, what is it and what does it do?

[Grazza]

Can you give an example of a wad that contains it?

[Graf Zahl]

It is some maintenance data of an old editor (no idea which.) Feel free to delete it if it bothers you. It has no function anymore.

[EarthQuake]

I looked at a few wads on the Master Levels CD that had a PLATFORM lump, and their corresponding text file says DoomEd 2.6 (amongst earlier versions). Strangely though, only a select percentage of wads made with DoomEd have a PLATFORM lump.

Here's what I pulled out of one:

0000: ..1.............
0010: ..undefined.....
0020: ................

...

0100: ................
0110: ....2...........
0120: ....undefined...
0130: ................

...etc

[Enjay]

Pretty sure this was a lump created by DoomEd aka DMReal. An early Windows editor by Goeff Allan (I think). As to what it did - dunno.

I used to quite often do quite a lot of my basic map drawing with DMReal but I found it really hard to do texturing and tags with it so I used to do the more interesting stuff with DEU. At some time during that process, the PLATFORM lump would disappear.

[Graf Zahl]

I think it had something to do with assigning descriptions to tags but I never verified that because I never used that editor.

[Enjay]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was something to do with tagged sectors. I never really got into that aspect of DMReal though. Hang on, lets do this the sensible way...

REALMOD.TXT said:

Platforms in DoomED is the term used to describe all the trick
things that DOOM can do. Such as tripwires, crushing ceilings,
key doors, the end level switch, making elevators go up and
down, etc. Basically, what you do is, tag a line with one of the
line specials, such as cross and door(s) open, then you
associate that line with the door sector, for example. There's
about 100 things that you can do, I haven't tried them all. I
will tell you how to setup tripwires, elevators, transporters
and the end level switch. You'll have to experiment some with
all the specials. They're all setup in a similar fashion.

Ahhh, the good old days of trying to work out how doom actually did stuff... The platforms section of the text is quite a bit longer than that and it doesn't clearly state what the PLATFORM lump does, but it looks like Graf's idea is probably correct. It describes using the Platforms dialogue to set up various tagged line/sector effects.

If anyone really wants to dig further, DMReal can be found here:

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=13629

[EarthQuake]

It makes sense now, looking at the wad I pulled that info from, it only had two linedef/sector tags.