Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
Hellbent

disappearing donuts

Recommended Posts

I never heard a discussion about the unrealistic donuts in doom (ie, chainsaw secret on e1m2, yellow key door chaingun secret on e2m2) where the slime rises and the pillar in the center lowers. Any thoughts? I guess it never really bothered me. I always thought it was pretty cool... but it is kinda odd that slime should rise and then... disappear. Only hobbits with magic rings can do more impressive disappearing feats.

Share this post


Link to post

It always kind of irked me. It'd make more sense if the flat of the rising sector changed to a solid floor at the beginning of the move, as though the floor was rising up from below the surface.

Share this post


Link to post
esselfortium said:

It always kind of irked me. It'd make more sense if the flat of the rising sector changed to a solid floor at the beginning of the move, as though the floor was rising up from below the surface.

Right. I think the reason they dind't do it like this, is because it's not as visually interesting..

Share this post


Link to post

It would be cool if the texture animated as the flat reached floor level, with a few frames of slime to slimey bricks to bricks texture. (and maybe a drain in the texture)

Share this post


Link to post

I've always found the donut a contrived feature of vanilla Doom mapping. One could achieve the same effect through two individual events, without the slime change anomaly.

Share this post


Link to post
phi108 said:

It would be cool if the texture animated as the flat reached floor level, with a few frames of slime to slimey bricks to bricks texture. (and maybe a drain in the texture)

There are some floor textures with drains in the alpha, so they may have thought about it. Raven's Shadowcaster featured a scripted sequence with a flooded level's floor lowering and then the texture animating in the way you describe.

Share this post


Link to post

Personally I wish they had made a similar "script" for the floor turning into nukage and the tunnel opening, in E2M6.

Instead they used two seperate triggers.

Share this post


Link to post

The lowering central pillar displaces the body of liquid around it such that rather than increasing in volume and flooding the room with toxic waste (as it might appear to do before it reaches level ground), the liquid merely retains its volume, rises up and disperses harmlessly over the drier surface. Far fetched, maybe, but that's how I always saw it.

Share this post


Link to post
st.alfonzo said:

The lowering central pillar displaces the body of liquid around it such that rather than increasing in volume and flooding the room with toxic waste (as it might appear to do before it reaches level ground), the liquid merely retains its volume, rises up and disperses harmlessly over the drier surface. Far fetched, maybe, but that's how I always saw it.

If I had to force a rational explanation onto it, this would be it.

Share this post


Link to post
st.alfonzo said:

The lowering central pillar displaces the body of liquid around it such that rather than increasing in volume and flooding the room with toxic waste (as it might appear to do before it reaches level ground), the liquid merely retains its volume, rises up and disperses harmlessly over the drier surface. Far fetched, maybe, but that's how I always saw it.

Or you could regard donuts as another of the game's reality-warping manifestations of hell.

Share this post


Link to post

Argh

esselfortium said:

It always kind of irked me. It'd make more sense if the flat of the rising sector changed to a solid floor at the beginning of the move, as though the floor was rising up from below the surface.

Date:   Fri Mar 7 11:28:05 2008 +0000

    LI_Donut: in rboom, transfer flat to rising moat at the start
    
    In rboom_compatibility the flat change of the moat to the surrounding
    ground happens at the start of the motion, not the end.
    
    A floor rising up through the slime makes more sense. If the slime
    itself rises, why doesn't it spill out all over the floor? This agrees
    with other regular/extended raise and change linedef specials, which are
    also trying to model a floor rising up through the slime.
    
    (Another inconsistency: generalised versions do the change at the end.
    It looks weird when a pool of blood rises out of a lake and suddenly
    changes into earth at the top of it, to say the least.)

Hellbent said:

Right. I think the reason they dind't do it like this, is because it's not as visually interesting..

Date:   Fri Feb 6 09:55:28 2009 +0000

    Add comp_donutrise to control when floor transfer is done
    
    Do transfer at end (original game behaviour) or at start.
    
    I can't decide which looks better - rising slime looks ominous but its
    sudden disappearance at the end seems rather lacking, but if the slime
    disappears at the start the whole thing looks dull...
Get out of my head, the both of you ;)

Here's a couple of comparison shots so this post isn't just self-indulgence.


where does the slime go?


...but this doesn't look as creepy

Share this post


Link to post

I have always wondering where the slime gone. I think and think but still have no clue. I can say that science can't use to explain this phenomenon. In E2M2, the yellow key place also got similar case:



Where does the pillar comes from? Under the blood? Why the player doesn't hurts when stepping the rised pillar?

Share this post


Link to post
Daiyu_Xiaoxiang said:

Why the player doesn't hurts when stepping the rised pillar?

What? The player does get hurt if the raised pillar retains slime on its top, and doesn't get hurt if the pillar raises dry. Both cases can happen there.

Share this post


Link to post

I believe there are drains in the floor and walls that let the nukage flow out as the floor rises, then the drains in the floor close too fast to see when the nukage is finally gone. The floor has to rise faster than the nukage to drain it which doesn't exactly follow you dropping in and rising at a steady rate considering you'd be standing on the floor and not the nukage, but eh, it's a video game made in the 90s. Rule of cool and all that.

Share this post


Link to post

Hellbent finally found an awesome avatar. It's needs to live on in fish form.

Oh, also, I found the slime-raised-floor dilemma as bad design even as a child.

Share this post


Link to post

This has always bothered me in DOOM and that is what prompted me to develop and automatic blending feature for an upcoming Doomsday release. The way this works is by using some additional Material metadata and ties in with our environment stuff to determine which texture/flat changes result in a smooth transition. The actual transition works similarly to the existing "blended animations" for animated textures.

Share this post


Link to post

It's one reason I never use donut-sector equalizing in my maps. I realize Doom has an abstract aspect to it, but some things don't make sense in any context, and this is one of them.

Alternatively, the Hexen expansion pack had a level with a proper spill-over, where a script was used to have a sludge floor rise and then progressively flood some waterways leading from the original donut sector into smaller basins. I suppose a similar effect could be created in Doom ports that support scripting.

And actually, that would make a pretty good trick to play on somebody expecting a standard donut sector function; have the room flood with nukage instead.

Share this post


Link to post

I've always kind of wondered about that donut action. It's so specialized in comparison to most of the others in Doom, and in my time mapping I still haven't really found a practical use for it. Maybe I'll try to work one into my current map for the hell of it.

Share this post


Link to post
StupidBunny said:

and in my time mapping I still haven't really found a practical use for it.

Turning slime and island pairs into completely flat and dry terrain, I suppose. It hardly is useful nowadays, because the added detail makes it hard to handle.

Share this post


Link to post
printz said:

It hardly is useful nowadays, because the added detail makes it hard to handle.

How so? By that logic, we should have stopped putting lifts in maps ages ago. :-\

Share this post


Link to post
esselfortium said:

How so? By that logic, we should have stopped putting lifts in maps ages ago. :-\

Don't you need to use the high-end attach-surfaces features for any detailed Doom-lifts, for example?

Share this post


Link to post

Not in Boom, vanilla, or limit-removing maps... Map structures are built around both being cool-looking and necessity :P

(and, for that matter, if you're referring to ports where such features are available, you could just as easily use them for a donut setup)

Share this post


Link to post

Just because romero used a liquid at the bottom and techbase flooring on the top doesn't mean something else can't be used. I imagine it'd work particularly well for a hellish/skin themed section of map, though that may just be my hell-map bias. In fact, it would be possible to have the donut rising/falling in the middle of a holding vat or some sort of crevice, the falling floor of the donut a pillar of bodies/blood falling from the top of the ceiling, and a run-off could be connected to this so that it would 'overflow', also having a scroll floor activate on the run-off when the donut finishes raising.

Share this post


Link to post

how about this: make two dummy sectors (onse you can't see --outside the playing area) that make the classic donut trigger action. But inside the map you have a creative and intricate system of sectors not touching each other (the same two sectors in the dummy sectors) so that when the donut trigger happens, you get a result that is nothing like a donut--maybe 'doors' lower and a bridge rises... the amount of stuff one could do with it is pretty limitless.. I'm surprised no one (including myself) hasn't thought of this earlier. In fact, this would be an interesting addition to a limited sector contest such as 2 through 10 sector remakes....

Share this post


Link to post

I kinda enjoy the "oh snap it's gonna fill the room" feeling i get from time to time. I don't know why, I know it's not gonna do that in the original IWADs, but I can help but feel that.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×