Co-op "Bug" [ZDaemon]

[r_rr]

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I searched around and couldn't find anything about it.

When playing Plutonia Coop map28 (on ZDaemon), I sometimes spawn in an extremely small green brick textured room. The room contains a BFG, and uneven floors. This annoying "bug" also occurs on map06.

I opened the map with an editor and found that there are 4 of these rooms, and each one contains a player start numbered 1-4. There are already player starts 1-4 at the beginning of the map, so that means one of the rooms contains a player 1 "voodoo doll", which can be seen during gameplay using the noclip cheat.

Does this occur because Doom was originally designed to only support 4 players at a time or something?

[dew]

well, looking at the map in editor, i don't really understand the purpose of those voodoo doll starts. gives player bfg at some point? anyways, i think the problem is a mix of two things.

1- zdaemon's spawn behaviour. the first one to join a game in coop mode spawns at player 1 start, the rest is random. other modes are randomized completely.

2- zdaemon doesn't really support voodoo dolls. a recent version introduced a dmflag (dmflags2 33554432) that at least detects doll starts and should prevent those silly doll room spawns. their behaviour will probably be pretty buggy at this point, but it's a start.

i don't see any plutonia server using this flag, so the game probably tosses a coin for the 1st player (two player 1 starts) and the rest gets distributed at random among all the 8 spawns.

[GreyGhost]

Both maps use a voodoo doll trick to hand weapons to the player - makes Map06 much easier to play from a pistol start.

[EarthQuake]

Proper voodoo doll support is quite tricky in a source port that allows up to 16 players in a game. You have to figure out the best way of determining which voodoo doll belongs to which player. Better support is planned for ZDaemon, but right now the only thing available is the server flag that prevents the situation you encountered. Apparently server administrators either aren't aware that the flag is needed for Plutonia, or they just don't care.

Anyways, I made a thread on the ZDaemon forums to suggest that the flag's behavior be forced, and the flag removed. I can see no reason why a flag is needed anyway. People don't use redundant player starts unless they intend on creating voodoo dolls in the first place.

[Abyssalstudios1]

You should know that this also occurs in AV MAP25, as well as some HR maps. So be careful on zDaemon.

[r_rr]

EarthQuake said:

I made a thread on the ZDaemon forums to suggest that the flag's behavior be forced, and the flag removed. I can see no reason why a flag is needed anyway. People don't use redundant player starts unless they intend on creating voodoo dolls in the first place.

Very good point. I see players getting stranded all the time because of this "bug". I can see how easy it is to overlook this little dmflag detail, that can badly effect a good coop game.

[LexiMax]

Recent (as of build 2206) 97E versions of skulltag correctly emulates voodoo dolls for up to the maximum number of players Skulltag supports (32). Grab the latest beta and check through some of the changelogs for the variable names. At a glance, sv_coopspawnvoodoodolls looks like it will enable this feature.