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Hellbent

id Doom map oddities

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I'm editing e3m8 for fun and I see that the hallway has block sound flag even though it's a 1 sided linedef. I wonder if this wasn't a two sided linedef at some point (to make a more detailed/interesting wall in that hallway) but for whatever reason was later simplified.

Are there other places in doom levels that have odd things like this that indicate a level originally had a different design than the final level? Does anyone care to notice these things? On e3m8 there are also rockets on the stairs that later were decided not to be included.

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I believe there's a map in Doom 2 where a monster is present in an editor, but had no skill levels set on it, so it was never seen in-game.

EDIT: It's a demon on Map04

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There are a few oddities, I noticed indeed.

E1M1: had a medikit outside in the west courtyard in v1.1 which can't be reached. Maybe they had extended plans for that part of the map at some point.

E1M5: the secret with the teleporter still feels somewhat out of place to me. In an early version, this particular secret wasn't there, indeed. There was no teleporter before the very end of E1M8, making it somewhat exclusive to hell creatures.

E2M5: There are a lot of dead Lost Souls in this map, eventhough they are invisible and have absolutely no influence on the game play. Maybe they had a different behavior in mind when they placed them in this map.

E2M7: line 1125 has action type 65535 which doesn't mean anything to the Doom engine. According to the Doom Bible and looking at the alpha versions, this map had a special place in Doom indeed. Though as the game headed into quite a different direction than the Doom Bible told, who knows what that line was meant to do? Could be anything. Or maybe it was just a typo.

E3M6: most of the tree stumps are flagged deaf. They did this when they were flagged to appear in all skill levels instead of none, which was in v1.1. So it probably doesn't mean anything at all.

E3M9: The main part of this map is obviously a copy of E3M1, except that the first hallway has a higher ceiling, which looks odd, as it is even higher then the sky above the shotgun bridge. I guess, they had this oddity in E3M1 also at some early point in development, noticed this and changed the ceiling heights, but forget to do the same change in E3M9. So not that spectacular, I guess.

MAP01 and MAP02: It seems rather strange and useless that they shifted the map around between Doom II versions for no obvious reason and totally messed with the placements of things as a side effect. No idea what they were smoking at this point.

MAP02: sector 21 is the door to the exit room. Both, the sector and the line action use tag 4, eventhough the Doom engine doesn't care, as the door uses a D1 trigger. Interestingly, in v1.666 there are quite some more sectors with tag 4 too. Maybe they had a different idea for this map and dropped it.

MAP30: sector 11 consists of only one line and is not connected to any part of the map. It doesn't seem to have any purpose.

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Well, the E1M5 Teleporter is a glowing red star, so one could assume that it wasn't human made.

Perhaps it was an early design for the hell teleporters before the teleporter flat's were added. The teleporter flat's are amongst the registered version flat's.

It may have also been a star because ID didn't want to put any obvious references to hell in EP1 (such as a teleporter flat with a pentagram on it). Hell isn't mentioned in the manual story* and, IIRC, I don't think is actually mentioned until the end of EP2.

*Though a couple of the bad guy descriptions does state that some of the bad guys come straight from hell.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

MAP30: sector 11 consists of only one line and is not connected to any part of the map. It doesn't seem to have any purpose.


There are a lot of things like that in Hexen. Though in Hexen, the purpose was apparently to manhandle the nodebuilder into making polyobjects glitch less by confusing the heck out of it... (Gee, that's what I'd call solid design right here!)

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If you mean the empty rooms scattered around the outsides of the Hexen maps, those are actually where the polyobjects are stored. If you look in the map editor, the actual structures are built in those rooms. It's only when the map is loaded in-game that those objects are then placed in the appropriate location in the maps, leaving those empty rooms outside the playing area.

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Lüt said:

If you mean the empty rooms scattered around the outsides of the Hexen maps, those are actually where the polyobjects are stored. If you look in the map editor, the actual structures are built in those rooms. It's only when the map is loaded in-game that those objects are then placed in the appropriate location in the maps, leaving those empty rooms outside the playing area.

Some Hexen maps actually have garbage sectors nearby where the polyobjects appear ingame, though, to get the nodebuilder to split the subsectors in a way that avoids showing the polyobject code's flaws.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

E2M5: There are a lot of dead Lost Souls in this map, eventhough they are invisible and have absolutely no influence on the game play. Maybe they had a different behavior in mind when they placed them in this map.

Lost souls leave a corpse (floating bits of shattered skull) in the press release beta. It looks pretty stupid, but that's probably why they're there.

LogicDeLuxe said:

E3M9: The main part of this map is obviously a copy of E3M1, except that the first hallway has a higher ceiling, which looks odd, as it is even higher then the sky above the shotgun bridge. I guess, they had this oddity in E3M1 also at some early point in development, noticed this and changed the ceiling heights, but forget to do the same change in E3M9. So not that spectacular, I guess.

On the subject of E3M9, I always wondered if E2M9 and E3M9's music got mixed up somehow. E2M9 plays the same music as E3M1, which would make a lot more sense for E3M9.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

E1M5: the secret with the teleporter still feels somewhat out of place to me. In an early version, this particular secret wasn't there, indeed. There was no teleporter before the very end of E1M8, making it somewhat exclusive to hell creatures.

Depends how you count it I suppose, but did E1M9 not always have a Demon teleporter? OK, numerically it is after E1M8 but you visit it before e1M8. Or did you specifically mean no teleporter that the player can use until E1M8?

LogicDeLuxe said:

MAP01 and MAP02: It seems rather strange and useless that they shifted the map around between Doom II versions for no obvious reason and totally messed with the placements of things as a side effect. No idea what they were smoking at this point.

Maybe it was just a mistake. I know that I have accidentally selected something and moved it when editing, not noticed until I have changed other stuff then had difficulty putting things back as they were.

There are a bunch more oddities too, most of which will be documented somewhere, like the guys caught in barrels, barrels in walls, door tracks with door specials...

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LogicDeLuxe said:

There are a few oddities, I noticed indeed.

E2M7: line 1125 has action type 65535 which doesn't mean anything to the Doom engine. According to the Doom Bible and looking at the alpha versions, this map had a special place in Doom indeed. Though as the game headed into quite a different direction than the Doom Bible told, who knows what that line was meant to do? Could be anything. Or maybe it was just a typo.

E3M9: The main part of this map is obviously a copy of E3M1, except that the first hallway has a higher ceiling, which looks odd, as it is even higher then the sky above the shotgun bridge. I guess, they had this oddity in E3M1 also at some early point in development, noticed this and changed the ceiling heights, but forget to do the same change in E3M9. So not that spectacular, I guess.

MAP02: sector 21 is the door to the exit room. Both, the sector and the line action use tag 4, eventhough the Doom engine doesn't care, as the door uses a D1 trigger. Interestingly, in v1.666 there are quite some more sectors with tag 4 too. Maybe they had a different idea for this map and dropped it.


E2M7: the number 65535 isn't a random number. It shares a similar property as 255.

E3M9: I always liked to think the raised ceiling was a way to show that this place was strange... and only *appeared* to be Hell Keep when it was in fact some other place entirely (like a parallel universe or something) rather than being a mistake.

Some linedefs that are part of the raising bridge at the end of E2M4 have sector tag 16 but no linedef type.

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Hellbent said:

E3M9: I always liked to think the raised ceiling was a way to show that this place was strange... and only *appeared* to be Hell Keep when it was in fact some other place entirely (like a parallel universe or something) rather than being a mistake.

I never noticed that.
I'm considering it a mistake in editing the level as it is only one sector. (IIRC)

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Gez said:

There are a lot of things like that in Hexen. Though in Hexen, the purpose was apparently to manhandle the nodebuilder into making polyobjects glitch less by confusing the heck out of it... (Gee, that's what I'd call solid design right here!)

Interesting idea. Maybe we should check out what happens when using IDBSP with this sector removed. Could this actually reveal some sort of glitch?

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Doom 2 MAP06: do NOT press the left doortrack (as you go forth) from the red door!

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printz said:

Doom 2 MAP06: do NOT press the left doortrack (as you go forth) from the red door!

Yikes! I tried in Chocolate Doom and nothing happens. Both doortracks have a DR door, but they are one sided lines. I wonder if doom can potentially crash with this. I don't think that someone usually tries this, but monsters are also able to activate this line type.

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It crashes Chocolate Doom for me.

Edit: Chocolate Doom just exits back to windows, but Doom 2 via DOSBox seems to lock up. After a short time, though, you regain control and can go back to playing normally.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

but monsters are also able to activate this line type.

By Boom logic, theoretically no (via generalized switch linedefs which allow monsters, only two-sided lines are actually pressed by them). Hopefully Doom uses the same check.

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Checked MAP30 with that line removed and rebuilt with IDBSP. I didn't notice any difference. I didn't try too hard, though. Just normal playing.

Dragonsbrethren said:

It crashes Chocolate Doom for me.

Edit: Chocolate Doom just exits back to windows, but Doom 2 via DOSBox seems to lock up. After a short time, though, you regain control and can go back to playing normally.

This is reasonable, I think, as the resources use -1 as the sidedef number, which has to point somewhere in memory interpreted as a sector number. So it could trigger some random sector which actually might exist. If it doesn't, it would mess with some random bytes which might trigger a protection violation error or result in another unpredictable behavior.

printz said:

By Boom logic, theoretically no (via generalized switch linedefs which allow monsters, only two-sided lines are actually pressed by them). Hopefully Doom uses the same check.

W and D triggers are not meant to be placed on a 1-sided wall to begin with, G triggers are tag based only, and S triggers are not used by monsters at all. Thus there is not really a need for such a check in Vanilla Doom.

One mistake in my thinking, though: Only the door type 1 can be triggered by monsters, but the trigger in question is 117. So no harm after all (unless you hunt for secrets the Wolfenstein way).

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E2M4: Shooting a certain wall near the blue crusher room causes it to open and reveal a secret. However, the same thing happens if you shoot the inside of the crusher. Well, unless you shoot the wide part of the southern side; if you do that, the floor beneath the crusher rises up for no thought-provoking reason.

E2M7: Where you find the blue key, there are corpses hanging from the ceiling... except the "ceiling" is open sky. The sky "ceiling" is also lower than that of the indoor rooms to the north and southwest.

E3M4: One of the secrets has nothing inside of it. Many people would likely know this already, but it's still worth mentioning.

MAP02: Near the switch behind the red key bars, linedef 491 extends past the vertex it's supposed to end on, creating a paper-thin wall to one side of the computer monitor. The square pools you land on to get to the blue key also have no lower textures (on linedefs 327, 328, 338, 339.)

MAP05: If you're playing with -nomonsters, activating linedef 133 (first southern door from the west in the multi-door passage) prevents you from entering the nearby megaarmor room or the secret area around the exit, as both of them have tag 9 for some reason, and their ceilings will shoot down 4 map units under the adjacent doors.

MAP21: Linedefs 114 and 134 reference their own sector on the front instead of sector 49, creating a HOM which is visible on the ceiling if you look northwest after building and climbing the angular stairs.

MAP25: On Ultra-Violence, one of the secrets has nothing inside of it. Same deal as with E3M4.

MAP31: The texture alignment is imperfect even in the Wolfenstein parts of the level; if you look closely, many of the "decorative" texture linedefs (the eagle, Hitler portraits, etc.) are either 120 map units wide instead of 128, are shifted a few map units to the left or right, or start and end outside the 128×128 grid. When you can't properly align textures in areas based on a game which used a grid-based engine...

MAP32: In the original Wolfenstein 3D E1M9, there's a secret area near the end of the level (and episode) which yields an extra life and is easily missed by most players. So easily missed, in fact, that Sandy Petersen forgot to include it in this level. Whoops!

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Enjay said:

Maybe it was just a mistake. I know that I have accidentally selected something and moved it when editing, not noticed until I have changed other stuff then had difficulty putting things back as they were.

A pity in your case, I suppose. In this case however, they could just have picked a copy of v1.666 which certainly weren't hard to come by. Especially in MAP01 were they didn't change anything else, as far as I can see. MAP02 had the bars door removed, which also could be redone much more quickly than checking all the things for correct positions and even failing at it. Also they did it a bit too frequently to be believable as a simple mistake, I'd say. And if their editor were that prone to such operating errors, this mistake likely would have happened to more maps.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

Yikes! I tried in Chocolate Doom and nothing happens. Both doortracks have a DR door, but they are one sided lines. I wonder if doom can potentially crash with this. I don't think that someone usually tries this, but monsters are also able to activate this line type.

In the new Zdoom monsters can activate switches! They hit switches on lifts and ride them up and come after me! Kinda cool.

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The Green Herring said:

E2M4: Shooting a certain wall near the blue crusher room causes it to open and reveal a secret. However, the same thing happens if you shoot the inside of the crusher. Well, unless you shoot the wide part of the southern side; if you do that, the floor beneath the crusher rises up for no thought-provoking reason.

[/b]

Yeah, I noticed this once while playing. I was totally like, what the hell? I then had to go into the editor to see why it happened and only once or twice in all my doomin years! I actually just edited that level recently taking this rising floor into account....


E2M7: Where you find the blue key, there are corpses hanging from the ceiling... except the "ceiling" is open sky. The sky "ceiling" is also lower than that of the indoor rooms to the north and southwest.

E3M4: One of the secrets has nothing inside of it. Many people would likely know this already, but it's still worth mentioning.



Huh? I play this map all the time and yet I know not of what you speak. Map 25 has a secret with nothing inside of it, which you point out below.


MAP32: In the original Wolfenstein 3D E1M9, there's a secret area near the end of the level (and episode) which yields an extra life and is easily missed by most players. So easily missed, in fact, that Sandy Petersen forgot to include it in this level. Whoops!


That's right!! I remember realizing this many years ago but had since forgotten! Ahh.. the memories... finding secrets in Wolf3d was always the most fun thing about the game. I remember the countless hours 'wasted' getting to all those crowns and extra lives on E4M2.

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Hellbent said:

Huh? I play this map all the time and yet I know not of what you speak.

I'm referring to sector 91, accessed through a teleport pad in the blood pool room near the start of the level, which contains two spectres... and nothing else. No items or anything...

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The Green Herring said:

I'm referring to sector 91, accessed through a teleport pad in the blood pool room near the start of the level, which contains two spectres... and nothing else. No items or anything...

Oh right! of course. I was just noticing that like a week ago too, and yet I didn't know what you were on about... O_O

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The Green Herring said:

MAP32: In the original Wolfenstein 3D E1M9, there's a secret area near the end of the level (and episode) which yields an extra life and is easily missed by most players. So easily missed, in fact, that Sandy Petersen forgot to include it in this level. Whoops!


However, Sandy Petersen added an extra secret down the right side of the main room, containing an invulnerability sphere, that wasn't in the original map. Not to mention there’s the Keen room instead of a walk over exit trigger. Me thinks that he could have intentionally altered the map a little.

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Vermil said:

However, Sandy Petersen added an extra secret down the right side of the main room, containing an invulnerability sphere, that wasn't in the original map. Not to mention there’s the Keen room instead of a walk over exit trigger. Me thinks that he could have intentionally altered the map a little.

I think the Vermil has a point.

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I also think the E3M4 secret with nothing in it was intentional considering it'sthe small room with the window through to back of the Demon and Lost Soul monster pen that opens when you pick up the berserk.

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Vermil said:

I also think the E3M4 secret with nothing in it was intentional considering it'sthe small room with the window through to back of the Demon and Lost Soul monster pen that opens when you pick up the berserk.

yeah, i agree. I think in the map25 secret, there should have at least been a small bloody bone or maybe a candle in the secret. Heh, maybe a dead marine.

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LogicDeLuxe said:

Interesting idea. Maybe we should check out what happens when using IDBSP with this sector removed. Could this actually reveal some sort of glitch?


Not a glitch, just a consequence of the incomplete and mathematically incorrect implementation of polyobjects as they were coded by Ben Gokey of Raven Software.

If a node line causes a split through the area where the polyobject resides, then part of the polyobject will be in the wrong subsector. Since the Raven implementation can only attach polyobjects to a single subsector, and in fact never updates the subsector to which the object is attached regardless of how far the object has moved from that subsector, or its relationship to any of its boundaries for that matter, this means that all bets on drawing order are effectively off.

See the Eternity Engine's r_dynseg.c source file for what has to be done to actually render polyobjects in a manner which is fully consistent with BSP theory. In short, the objects must be split through the BSP tree and rendered in fragments which are attached to the individual subsectors in which they are entirely contained. Nothing else is sufficient :)

It's worth noting that the computers back when Hexen was released probably could not have kept up with this approach, particularly since it more or less requires the use of floating-point math. So you can only criticize the Raven implementation so much; it really was quite impressive for the day IMO, overcoming the second largest fundamental limitation of DOOM - the idea that walls had to be strictly static.

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The Green Herring said:

E2M4: Shooting a certain wall near the blue crusher room causes it to open and reveal a secret. However, the same thing happens if you shoot the inside of the crusher. Well, unless you shoot the wide part of the southern side; if you do that, the floor beneath the crusher rises up for no thought-provoking reason.


I noticed that. I've always thought of it as a way of deactivating the crusher, at least when I found out it did that for the first time.

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