Things about Doom you just found out

[snapshot]

Edit : nvm

[Gurlugon]

Might not be in the spirit of the thread as it's not an engine quirk or insight into monster behaviour or whatever, just a fun thing I thought I'd share.

So, pinkies take 7 plasma shots to down. The exact amount of time necessary to hold the fire button down to fire 7 shots is exactly equivalent to one bar of the double-bass drum breakdown in Metallica's "One".

A Cacodemon takes 20/21 plasma shots to down and that lasts exactly two bars of holding down fire. :V

Fun little 'mental metronome' for you ammo conservationists out there. Try it yourself.

[CodeBunny]

Realised the other day that using ZDoom's crouch, one can duck under a Revenant's rocket. It comes in very handy when you just want to run past the bastards.

[Tritnew]

BaronOfStuff said:

This isn't a change in hitbox size (or Thing radius) at all, but rather down to ZDoom fixing the Blockmap Bug that made slapping the shit out of those fat bastards (and any other reasonably large monster) so difficult and awkward in the DOS days. Same bug was also why a SSG blast would occasionally fail to one-shot a Demon/Spectre despite being at point-blank range.

Right, I just researched It a bit, It Is due to the fact that It was a blockmap bug.

Thanks for the clearer explaination.

[antares031]

Not only the Creatoy or Royal Condor were the manufacturers of original model of BFG9000, it seems like the company called SRM Co. Inc. was also making the "Roargun" considering the item which is currently available on eBay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/111807911631

P.S.: $40 for unused vintage gun, while the previously available items on the market were around $5~10. I'll pass this one.

[damerell]

Gurlugon said:

So, pinkies take 7 plasma shots to down.

A plasma shot does 5-40 damage, and a pinkbeast has 150 HP. If Doom had a perfect RNG (which it doesn't) you might require from 4 to 30 shots (but you'd have to be horrendously unlucky to hit the higher numbers there). With the RNG Doom actually has, it may take between 5 and 11 shots.

I suspect you've found an average damage per shot of 22.5 and compared that to the pinkbeast's 150HP.

The good news is... early on, playing Doom, you form a mental model of how many shots it takes to kill a given enemy, and then you get annoyed when you need more. But now you know, it's not that your aim was crap (unless it was) or that you hit some crazy engine bug (unless you did) but that it's not totally predictable.

This is, of course, a bit of a nuisance if you are using the plasma gun with its interminable wait before refiring... but really, if you're facing a single pinkbeast and not a horde, why are you using the plasma gun anyway?

[Hoodie]

3 shotgun blasts :D

[scifista42]

damerell said:

With the RNG Doom actually has, it may take between 5 and 11 shots.

That's only if you assume that all 7 plasma shots will hit the target at the exact same moment, taking 7 immediately-consequent values from the PRNG table. Unlike with SSG pellets (which are instant hitscans), there can be other events calling P_Random and "consuming" PRNG values in between impacts of individual plasma missiles. In fact, it happens surely, because P_Random is called at least one additional time every time a missile impacts. So in theory, any combination of PRNG values is possible (although improbable), so the "4 to 30 shots" observation is valid with Doom's actual PRNG too.

[Angry Saint]

CodeBunny said:

Realised the other day that using ZDoom's crouch, one can duck under a Revenant's rocket. It comes in very handy when you just want to run past the bastards.

I realised this years ago and still have a lot of fun in passing under revenant's rockets. They just sometimes fly around and take me in the back...

And someone call this cheating...

[Gurlugon]

damerell said:

I suspect you've found an average damage per shot of 22.5 and compared that to the pinkbeast's 150HP.

...

This is, of course, a bit of a nuisance if you are using the plasma gun with its interminable wait before refiring... but really, if you're facing a single pinkbeast and not a horde, why are you using the plasma gun anyway?

No, this was noticed in practice and tested time and time again for consistency.

I tested it for about half in hour in a variety of situations* and was getting 7 shots for Pinkies and 20 shots for Cacos consistently across the board, occasionally 8 and 21 respectively. I use Chocolate Doom for reference. I don't know if its' damage calls behave differently from other ports. Again, feel free to try it yourself and return any interesting results you get to the contrary. The same figures were also true for me in PrBoom.

And to the answer the second part: Because when I first noticed this, it was during a speedrun attempt in which it was most preferable to use plasma against Cacos and Pinkies to conserve cells for the BFG later, hence the conservation aspect. I know this and that side of the forum don't really mix much.

*from saves, fresh start, idclev'ing, skill levels, .bat launch and so on, just in case for whatever reason the RNG pulls were based on how the game/level was launched.

[scifista42]

Gurlugon said:

a variety of situations*

*from saves, fresh start, idclev'ing, skill levels, .bat launch and so on, just in case for whatever reason the RNG pulls were based on how the game/level was launched.

In fact, most of these "situations" will initialize the RNG into the base state, which is always the very same. :)

The proper testing method would be to make a map with hundreds of pinkies, encountered one by one, and take note how many shots each of them soaks up. Not to repeatedly test the same small map with one pinky.

Bonus points for occasionally randomly shooting in vain during the process, and/or filling the map with other "thinkers" (active monsters, specially if made infighting, random light flickering sector effects...) that influence the RNG by taking values from it during runtime, in order to better "randomize" things up.

[yakfak]

things I learnt about Doom today: BTSX E2M4 "Dirty Water", a level with over 300 monsters, particularly revenants, and which demands you habitually fire the view-occluding plasma rifle, has less health on it than some stock Doom 2 levels =P I play the level a lot and typically die on the path you're locked in to which raises the second half of the bridge to the throne, or the part just beyond that which leads back the starting area, but releases a horde of imps if you fire... I dearly wish that the Berserk pack was in THAT wing rather than in the sad place it actually lives. The level is wonderful with saves but if you go without it really demands a mediocre player like me plays carefully, and me playing carefully is this miserable, glacially progressing wall-hug affair lol

another reason to get better at Doom is to be able to record a demo on this map, I guess

[damerell]

scifista42 said:

In fact, it happens surely, because P_Random is called at least one additional time every time a missile impacts. So in theory, any combination of PRNG values is possible (although improbable), so the "4 to 30 shots" observation is valid with Doom's actual PRNG too.

Thank you, I had not considered that.

[Azuruish]

- If monster stuck by lift (is flying over a ground) It will shoots at enemy without delaying like on Nightmare skill.
- No matter how high or low monster is located - Projectile's speed depends from distance between you and monster, not from Z axis. //reference to Z axis again
It's hilarious if Cyberdemon or Cacodemon are above you and their shit reach you faster than you can blink.

[Cynical]

I just learned that Arch-Viles aren't immune to the splash damage from their own attack; if they infight with another monster that's close enough to them, they can potentially kill themselves with their own blast.

[Rayziik]

A cacodemons bite attack only does 10-60 damage in multiples of 10.

Also, the demon/spectre's bite attack does 4-40 damage, in multiples of 4.

Before that I had assumed that every damaging non-hitscan attack from a monster was multiplied by a random value between 1-8, and they all had a static base damage. Obviously I was wrong!

[scifista42]

Rayzik said:

I had assumed that every damaging non-hitscan attack from a monster was multiplied by a random value between 1-8, and they all had a static base damage.

Replace "every non-hitscan attack" with "every projectile attack", and the statement will be correct.

[antares031]

If a tagged sector has a monster which is taller than the current floor height, i.e. A monster is stuck at ceiling, any linedef actions related to "Floor lower to 8 above highest floor" will not work to the tagged sector in PrBoom -complevel 2.

[SavageCorona]

Mapping in Vanilla is ridiculously limited to the point of annoyance and slowing down speedmapping. I should probably learn Boom at some point. Another time.

[scifista42]

antares031 said:

If a tagged sector has a monster which is taller than the current floor height, i.e. A monster is stuck at ceiling, any linedef actions related to "Floor lower to 8 above highest floor" will not work to the tagged sector in PrBoom -complevel 2.

It's even worse. If there is a monster stuck in the ceiling anywhere in the map, any sector with a bounding box touching this monster might be prevented from movement. Sector's "bounding box" is an orthogonal rectangle fully containing the sector (helping with collision detection), and note that, if you join a sector with a dummy one outside the map, the area of its bounding box might overlap a significant part of the map.

[antares031]

scifista42 said:

It's even worse. If there is a monster stuck in the ceiling anywhere in the map, any sector with a bounding box touching this monster might be prevented from movement. Sector's "bounding box" is an orthogonal rectangle fully containing the sector (helping with collision detection), and note that, if you join a sector with a dummy one outside the map, the area of its bounding box might overlap a significant part of the map.

Great. Now I have one more reason to stay with my limit removing level design. Thanks for the info, scifista :)

[NuMetalManiak]

I just found out it ZDoom's console if you type a letter and then the tab key it gives you a list of commands starting with that letter.

also there's a command called crashout.

[scifista42]

antares031 said:

Now I have one more reason to stay with my limit removing level design.

The standard convention to play limit-removing maps (for demo-recording/speedrunning purposes etc) is precisely to use PrBoom-plus -complevel 2, though.

[wallabra]

UDMF don't have the good old Lift special!
And sectors don't have specials triggered when someone enters them.

[Graf Zahl]

Gustavo6046 said:

UDMF don't have the good old Lift special!
And sectors don't have specials triggered when someone enters them.

What makes you think THAT?

[wallabra]

I never found UDMF's lift specials, always resorting to ACS, however the "triggerable sector special" thing was a joke; it's much better W1/WR lines surrounding the sector. :P

[scifista42]

Gustavo6046 said:

I never found UDMF's lift specials,

They're under section "Platform" instead of "Lift" as in Doom format.

[antares031]

A single blast of Super Shotgun shoots 20 pellets. And I've thought it was 21 pellets since early 2000s when I counted pellet holes manually in ZDoom. Appearently I miscounted back in that time.

[damerell]

SavageCorona said:

Mapping in Vanilla is ridiculously limited to the point of annoyance and slowing down speedmapping. I should probably learn Boom at some point. Another time.

Boom extensions don't take much learning - some of the new stuff does, but generalised linedef types are just easier.

[RaphaelMode]

the Harmony TC is even more of a mess underneath than I thought. I'm glad I'm in the era of more sane modding now.