Tags 666 and 667 Questions

[peach freak]

Tag 666 is the tag applied to when you kill all the Mancubi in a map. What is the sector action on the tagged sectors? Floor lower to lowest floor?

And for Tag 667, which is the Arachnotron one, what is this one supposed to do? Raise the floor by X? Or raise the floor to the next higher floor? In Doom II Map07, killing all of the Arachnotrons creates a step to the exit. However, in Alien Vendetta Map07, killing all of the Arachnotrons raises the floor a lot more (to the next floor). Is there a certain value or something? Thanks.

[Quasar]

The tag 667 action is to raise the sector by the shortest lower texture on any line around the sector.

Note that in vanilla DOOM, any blank texture around the sector will cause the sector to rise by the height of AASTINKY/AASHITTY if that height is the shortest. This is due to "-" being mapped blindly to texture index 0.

[peach freak]

Which part of the texture? The length or the height? So if the height of a texture is 64, that's how much a tagged 667 sector would raise by?

And is it the front or the back side of the lower texture that it measures by?

[Quasar]

Height, naturally, since vertical movement is involved.

I do not remember for certain which textures are considered, but I want to say it is all lower textures on all lines around the sector. So for safety purposes I would set all of them to the appropriate texture. If any are left blank you run the risk of hitty the AASHITTY bug.

[peach freak]

Alright, I checked AV Map07 in Doom Builder and looked at the sector that raises once all of the Arachnotrons are killed:

The sector is 60 below the two surrounding sectors (which are the same sector numbers). On this sector, there are front and back lower textures. The front lower textures on both sides of the sector have a height of 128. The back side lower textures have a height of 64. It raises by 64, however, when the Arachnotrons are killed, putting the sector 4 units above its surrounding sectors. Take note that the front sides of the textures are facing inward, not facing the surrounding sectors.

In Doom II Map07, the STEP texture is 16 units high, and that's how much it raises by. The STEP texture is facing outwards towards the rest of the map, and there is no back lower texture.

So does it go by the side that is facing the surrounding textures? Sorry if this sounds confusing.

[Graf Zahl]

No, it checks all textures on both sides. In Doom2 the STEP texture is less high than AASHITTY so its height is used.

Alien Vendetta has no proper lower textures so in Doom2.exe AASHITTY's height is used but now it becomes nasty: Most source port have fixed this bug so they don't use AASHITTY's height but the one of the really existing textures - which happens to be 128. In most Boom compatible ports there is a compatibility option to re-enable the original behavior.

[peach freak]

When you play Alien Vendetta on ZDoom, the sector I was talking about raises all the way up to the exit sign posts, making it impossible to cross over (and thus exit the level) without using IDCLIP. I have not seen this problem in Zdaemon, Doomsday, or Doom95, where the bridge rises 4 above the surrounding sectors. So which one is the normal behavior? And what do you mean by improver lower textures?

[Graf Zahl]

peach freak said:

When you play Alien Vendetta on ZDoom, the sector I was talking about raises all the way up to the exit sign posts, making it impossible to cross over (and thus exit the level) without using IDCLIP. I have not seen this problem in Zdaemon, Doomsday, or Doom95, where the bridge rises 4 above the surrounding sectors. So which one is the normal behavior? And what do you mean by improver lower textures?

None is 'correct', to be precise. Doom's original was a bug and the fixed version ZDoom uses causes problems in some maps. That's why there's an option in ZDoom's menu that can switch back to Doom's original behavior.

What I find interesting is that ZDaemon, which is based on an older ZDoom version does not work like ZDoom. So they probably changed their code and make it incompatible with Boom.

[printz]

Normally the AASHITTY/AASTINKY texture raising 'bug' is to be considered a Doom behaviour to be preserved all the time. Boom 'fixed' it because I think their concern wasn't backward compatibilty but added flexibility. However as of now Boom is confused by many as vanilla-compatible, because of its interface simplicity. It is not, but PrBoom is and Eternity too.

I suggest that if you want your running vanilla map to work, load configuration files (if needed) with compatibility settings.