Creating Null Space Effect?

[CoeB]

Hi all,

Really what the title says. I've played a few levels which had the appearance of being suspended in a black void (like the nullspace wad), and was just wondering how to go about creating the effect?

[printz]

Create black textures and flats and use them as void.

With actual space skies it's somewhat more complicated.

[Quasar]

You either have to do an all-around sky effect, which in vanilla requires a bit of a hack due to the fact you'll get HOM if you put sky on both the floor and the ceiling of a single sector. An alternative is to make completely black flats and textures and use a low light level, or in BOOM or ZDoom maps, use sector lighting transfer specials.

[CoeB]

Many thanks for the help. Being a noob the more complicated method would be lost on me anyway, so I'll opt for the simpler one!

[EarthQuake]

The special effect here is black. It's the only color that doesn't change brightness when used in Doom, so you can put it on any wall (at any angle), in any sector with any light level, and it will blend seamlessly into other walls, floors, and ceilings that use black as well.

[CoeB]

Thanks again, I just made some black flats and textures in mspaint and imported them into the wad. Gives the effect I was looking for. ALso thanks Earthquake, tidbits about how doom handles black may prove to be useful.

Could anyone tell me how it's done using sky textures? I'm using Doom Builder Boom configuration for the wad, so any pointers on how to do it under this configuration would be much appreciated.

[EarthQuake]

Quasar mentioned the bug using sky on both floor and ceiling of a sector, but if you're doing this in Boom, you need not worry about this bug at all. Put a 256 x 128 solid black graphic into your wad names "rsky1". Then use F_SKY1 on all floors and ceilings in your map where you want the void to be. I find this method a bit easier and better, as you don't need to include black wall textures and flats, and bullet puffs will not appear on "sky walls" or ceilings.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with this or not, but there is an effect in the Doom engine called the "sky paradox". Basically, whenever you lower the ceiling of an outside area in relation to other ceilings adjacent to this area, it creates an area of sky that comes down further than the surrounding areas. This is useful for making perimeter walls or making some buildings and such taller or shorter than others. A "sky wall" is simply the same effect, but the ceiling comes down to the floor creating something like an "edge of the world" effect.

You can see this effect in both outside areas of map01 of Doom II.

You have to be careful with stuff like this tough, because if the player can view certain perspectives of the architecture, the illusion might be ruined. You'll have to restrict where the player can go and how you build your null-space-style platforms and such.

[CoeB]

I tried that and it worked. I'm just fiddling around to understand the method but the effect is there. Mucho gracias indeed!

[esselfortium]

EarthQuake said:

Quasar mentioned the bug using sky on both floor and ceiling of a sector, but if you're doing this in Boom, you need not worry about this bug at all.

Actually, that's unfortunately incorrect. Boom still merges all sky visplanes into one, so putting sky on both the floor and ceiling of one sector will cause HOM. It's fixed in most modern ports (I know ZDoom and Eternity do, and I assume PrBoom does as well), but it's not strictly Boom-compatible behavior.

The Vrack series makes use of a bunch of flat-bleeding and other odd tricks to create the appearance of double-sky.

Nowadays, since the ports that most people will be using support it, you can generally get away with just using sky on both the floor and ceiling, but you might want to specify in your textfile that it requires a Boom-compatible port with the double-sky fix.

[EarthQuake]

Guess I stand corrected. Essel knows his stuff more than I do.

[z34chris]

I have four sectors located inside of each other to create a courtyard with a sky and a mid-air floating box. The far outside sector ceiling is 128, the second is 256 with f_sky, the third sector is 128 with f_sky and the fourth is 96 with ceiling texture. Inside doom I have high walls surrounding the short floating box, but above the box is a sky bleed. The 3d-mode of slade presents this differently and I was wondering if there is a workaround in doom for this using any of the null space effects?

[Enjay]

Another thing worth considering/remembering, especially if you are likely to be able to fire upwards and jit the sky in your level, skies "absorb" shots (at least they do in Zdoom, I forget about the original behaviour) whereas other ceilings can be hit.

So, if you make your void ceiling from a normal ceiling that simply has a black flat on it, rockets and plasma will explode on it and hitscan weapons will puff on it. If, however, you make it using F_Sky and have a black sky texture, then all shots will simply vanish when they hit the sky.