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Sigvatr

Things about Doom you just found out

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I've always considered the room to be a cavern. The connection with fallen ceiling didn't strike me until this moment. It might be possible!

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Perhaps that was where John fought the demons...

Anyways, there's a secret in E2M4 where you see a computer map, ammo, and armor contained within a 'cage'. It was literally only last week that I figured out how to open it. I would usually walk away from it and forget about opening the cage until level completion. I think it's the last secret in Ultimate Doom that I hadn't conquered, too!

There's also the invulnerability trick with Sector Tag 11 (hurt and end level) that I found out about recently.

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You might know that DSFLAMST never actually gets played in the game. But do you know why?

DSFLAMST is supposed to play when the archvile starts the flame attack. Therefore, the first frame of the flame has the code pointer A_StartFire, which plays DSFLAMST. But A_StartFire never actually gets called!

This is because of the way the Doom engine handles its queue of things' actions. Every tic, the engine loops through all things on the map and decrements the counter on their current frame by one, or if the frame counter is already zero, moves the thing to its next frame. The code to actually run a code pointer - walk, fire, make a sound, whatever - is only called when the thing changes from one frame to the next. (This is why decreasing the frame length of an enemy's walking frames speeds it up, for instance - because it calls the walking code pointer every time it changes from one frame to the next.) So for the code pointer for the first frame of the archvile flame, there never WAS a preceding frame - it just popped into existence in that state. So there was never a time when the game actually tried to call the code pointer associated with that frame.

"But wait," you might say, "there are plenty of objects that make noise when they spawn into the game. What about fireballs?" Well, the sound effects for those aren't a code pointer on their initial spawn frame, they're handled differently in another part of the code. There's no other object that has a code pointer on its initial spawn frame where it's obvious that the code pointer doesn't get called - pretty much everything else is part of a loop, so its starts getting called a fraction of a second later anyway.

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Neat! Not calling the action function when spawning is a non-intuitive behavior that people have repeatedly asked the ZDoom developers to fix, demands that were always rejected on the ground it could break existing behavior, and it's nice to have a proof. Here's a vanilla behavior that would be noticeably changed.

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It's not such a big problem for a modder anyway. If you want to execute a codepointer on the very first frame of the object, just pad it with a 0-duration frame that does nothing.

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Are you 'sure' we never hear that sound? I could swear I here it sometimes if I get out of the archvile flame just before the fire starts. Are there source ports that fix this, maybe?

How many archvile fire sounds are there? There's the initial low pitched bass sound when the archvile initiates the attack, then there's a subtle whoosh sound, the fire crackle, then the barrel/rocket explosion at the end? Which one is dsflamest?

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Which port do you use that you hear barrel/rocket explosion at the end of archvile's attack?

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40oz said:

the initial low pitched bass sound when the archvile initiates the attack, then there's a subtle whoosh sound

Both are parts of DSVILATK.

the fire crackle

DSFLAME.

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The fire crackle is actually DSFLAME. But DSFLAMST is another whoosh sound, supposedly played from the flame actor itself when it spawns.

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Gez said:

Here's a vanilla behavior that would be noticeably changed.

For the better? Finally that sound will work.

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scifista42 said:

Which port do you use that you hear barrel/rocket explosion at the end of archvile's attack?


All of them I think? What you just hear fire crackle and randomly fly in the air after the fire burns out?

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scifista42 said:

The fire crackle is actually DSFLAME.

Jesus Christ. That mistake was up for, I dunno, 5 seconds?

Memfis said:

For the better? Finally that sound will work.

And any mod that replaces that sound (but retains the archvile behavior) will play out-of-place sounds whenever the flames spawn.

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@40oz: I was under an impression that yes, but it seems I was wrong. Only my own pain/dying sound has always occured to my consciousness, not the blast sound. Possibly because it partially howls it down, possibly it's just me, possibly the blast sound actually didn't play sometimes (?). Wait, does it sound from the flame actor or from the Archvile himself? Maybe I'm thinking about situation when I was too far from him to hear the sound.

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Memfis said:

For the better? Finally that sound will work.

I've did a test run with a modified zdoom.pk3 and the effect is really subtle anyway.

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E1M4, E1M5, E1M6 and E1M7 all include a secret which needs you to drop into nukage and releases you near the starting point after clearing it.

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I remember my mind was blown when, many years ago, I discovered the BFG 9000 secret in "Gotcha!". I always wondered why when I went into that particular room, sometimes it was open and sometimes it wasn't.



Until one day I accidentally discovered that you had to shoot at that distant red wall across (I didn't have any map editor by that time).

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Fernito said:

I remember my mind was blown when, many years ago, I discovered the BFG 9000 secret in "Gotcha!". I always wondered why when I went into that particular room, sometimes it was open and sometimes it wasn't.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57685940/Captura%20de%20pantalla%202015-06-06%2008.20.50.png

Until one day I accidentally discovered that you had to shoot at that distant red wall across (I didn't have any map editor by that time).

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57685940/Captura%20de%20pantalla%202015-06-06%2008.23.06.png

The sort of miserable, unintuitive 'dumb luck' secret I simply cannot stand.

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I always thought the song name "Kitchen Ace (And Taking Names)" was some random nonsense. I only now realized it's a pun on "kicking ass".

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JudgeDeadd said:

I always thought the song name "Kitchen Ace (And Taking Names)" was some random nonsense. I only now realized it's a pun on "kicking ass".

I still don't get it.

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If I say "Kitching Aes", what do you hear? The point is that "Kitchen Ace" sounds vaguely like "Kicking Ass".

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nxGangrel said:

I still don't get it.


"Kicking ass and taking names" is an older saying from the 60's or 50's. The "taking names" part possibly relating to dog tags, you'll kick their ass so bad that you'll be taking their dog tag. A lot of speculation behind it, but all you need to know it's a popular phrase.

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scifista42 said:

If I say "Kitching Aes", what do you hear? The point is that "Kitchen Ace" sounds vaguely like "Kicking Ass".

If you say "Kitching Aes", I hear... Kitching Aes. I guess to most people it kinda does sound like "kicking ass" but I don't hear it. (my accent probably).

@PRIMEVAL. Okay. I somewhat figured that's where the name came from (A saying, but not specifically the one you said). Though I still didn't get it till ya'll explained it to me.

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Node builders add additional vertices to VERTEXES, which are reguired for SEGS. Apparently all map editors discard them silently.

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BaronOfStuff said:

The sort of miserable, unintuitive 'dumb luck' secret I simply cannot stand.

And I always got it nevertheless, since I was always firing through the structure which holds that teleporter.

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boris said:

Node builders add additional vertices to VERTEXES, which are reguired for SEGS. Apparently all map editors discard them silently.

I remember some very early editors in 1994 didn't. They relied on the nodebuilder to do that.

And one DEU decedent editor sometimes deleted vertices which were still in use by linedefs, which totally screwed the map. Really annoying bug. I don't remember which one it was exactly.

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PRIMEVAL said:

"Kicking ass and taking names" is an older saying from the 60's or 50's. The "taking names" part possibly relating to dog tags, you'll kick their ass so bad that you'll be taking their dog tag. A lot of speculation behind it, but all you need to know it's a popular phrase.


Another popular quote (from "They Live!"):

I've come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass; and I'm all out of bubblegum.


But this was used rather by Duke Nukem later.

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