Things about Doom you just found out

[The_MártonJános]

Hitscan pellets of both the player and hitscan monsters have a vertical spread range in later engines (ZDoom, Skulltag, etc.), but in the base game and earlier ports, they only spread horizontally.

Spoiler

This f*cker feature actually made one of my contributions unable to legitimately 3x100% if played on the earliest port it was intended for, because I only tested it on a later one.

 

[Bauul]

14 minutes ago, Cell said:

Hitscan pellets of both the player and hitscan monsters have a vertical spread range in later engines (ZDoom, Skulltag, etc.), but in the base game and earlier ports, they only spread horizontally.

  Hide contents

This f*cker feature actually made one of my contributions unable to legitimately 3x100% if played on the earliest port it was intended for, because I only tested it on a later one.

 

Are you saying that weapons like the chaingun and shotgun have vertical spread in ports like GZDoom?

 

I'm almost 100% sure they don't. The only hitscan weapon that has vertical spread is the SSG, surely?

[Da Werecat]

Eh? SSG always had vertical spread. SG and CG still don't have it in ZDoom. What am I missing?

[Arctangent]

I mean, ZDoom mods can replace the shotgun and chaingun with clones that do have vertical spread, but there's no built-in feature to add vertical spread to the unaltered guns.

[SaladBadger]

I believe ZD does increase the range of player bullet weapons though, so that is something to keep in mind if you're finding something's only possible in zd and its children.

[The_MártonJános]

34 minutes ago, Da Werecat said:

SSG always had vertical spread.

It did?

Spoiler

So perhaps only Lingyan203 didn't think he could've used the SSG (instead of the CG) to trigger that switch?
Though the point is that, nevertheless, the alcove still should've been moved a bit lower, or some higher subsectors could've been installed.

I do believe (though didn't test to confirm it for myself), that SG has vertical spread later, and only horizontal earlier. The CG I'm mostly not sure of if, unless it's the one attached to Mother Spidy.

[SaladBadger]

SG and CG never had vertical spread and they never had it in any version of ZD either. If someone's experiencing vertical spread on these weapons, they have something else autoloaded. They do not spread vertically at all in ZD as is

[Bauul]

@Cell The Spidermind's chaingun also doesn't have vertical spread, in any port I've ever seen anyway.

 

As far as I'm aware the only hitscan weapon, whether belonging to the player or any enemy, that has ever had vertical spread is the SSG. This was true in v1.666 and it's still true today in all major source port as far as I know.

[The_MártonJános]

'Kay, point taken, I was wrong. Happens.
(On poor defense, in the original comment, instead of "hitscan weapons" I was gonna type SSG first.)

Spoiler

It just made me curious whether Lingyan203's long minutes of struggling finding that one secret were actually justified or not.

 

[Slimz]

I found out  heres no rifle in DOOM And DOOM2.

That makes me sad.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

well it has the plasma "rifle" if that counts.

[everennui]

23 minutes ago, Pegg said:

well it has the plasma "rifle" if that counts.

It's too late. He's long gone.

[Barons O' Fun]

Brutal Doom

[The_MártonJános]

For quite long, I was in the belief that the Cyberdemon's exposed belly is a huge horrendous wound, but, as the well-known comic has already hinted it, they were actually cables which are thick and rock solid. (I guess?)

[Quasar]

The greatest irony of all is that the Cyberdemon's guts weren't actually so huge after all ;)

[The_MártonJános]

The player sprite is 32x32 in mappixels. However, one can't fit into a 32px-wide hallway...
... unless they are facing it squarely in the perfect orthogonal angle.
One of these examples is the start of Requiem MAP15 - you're supposed to shoot linedefs in order to get out a cage, but if you're just running forward without the slightest turn, you'll "slip" past the grates.

Not sure if this is also port-based, though - I only tested it with ZDoom, and AFAIK earlier ports actually tend to make the player sprite's X and Y attributes a bit higher ingame.

[scifista42]

^ https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Glide

 

Also, the player's hitbox size is the same in all ports.

 

Also, "sprite" is the graphic of a map thing. Where you said "sprite", you meant the map thing itself, not its sprite.

Edited June 27, 2017 by scifista42

[Neurosis]

American McGee having a hand in Doom II.

[SaladBadger]

I just found out that the fist and chainsaw in the Jaguar version of doom are a bit more powerful per-hit (I haven't tested if the fire rates are significantly different than the PC versions). In jaguar doom they hit for 3 * random(1, 8), resulting in a higher peak damage (24) and a slightly higher minimum damage, which should bump up the per-hit average. Gunshots also do different damage, 4 * random(1, 4), resulting in the peak being 1 point higher and and the minimum being one point lower.

 

I wonder why they tweaked all these values for the jaguar version, and if they made it to the later jaguar-derived ports. I presume so.

[The_MártonJános]

10 hours ago, scifista42 said:

^ https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Glide

 

Also, the player's hitbox size is the same in all ports.

 

Also, "sprite" is the graphic of a map thing. Where you said "sprite", you meant the map thing itself, not its sprite.

Heh. Coming to all a'dis (including older posts), the only thing I truly found out about Doom is that general knowledge about how the base engine's several assets work ingame is still a yet-to-find-out (or, to be more precise, learn) for me. :D

[SaladBadger]

Another dumb thing: while idly browsing the steam news for Doom IV, wondering why the developers didn't put any update news on steam (its all on the bethblog instead, it seems), I came across a PC Gamer article about video game shotguns. Romero gives some information about the doom shotgun

 

Quote

Doom's shotgun wasn't originally in the plans for the game at all. The small team at id had the pistol, and plans for a rocket launcher, but they needed something in between. So they designed a rifle with a bayonet. The only problem: it wasn't cool enough. "We didn't like the fact that when you jabbed, it just didn't look good. It looked lame," Romero said. "We'd already had lameness issues with Catacomb 3D earlier, when you're using your hand to throw fireballs and stuff. That didn't look or feel cool. With Doom, we did have the bayonet in there, and I believe we even had it working, and it was just like, you know what? No amount of frames will make this look good."

As they started brainstorming sci-fi weapons like the BFG, their thoughts turned to Evil Dead 2. And voila: a shotgun and a chainsaw appeared. "We basically went, 'a shotgun would totally blow away that stupid rifle.' We made the shotgun, we made the chainsaw. It totally felt right in the game. We put it in, and it was just perfect. The gun cocking animation, the sound, it was perfect. The shotgun blast was great and did a good amount of damage. So that's what happened."

The Doom faithful may know that the shotgun was a Tootsietoy Dakota cap gun model bought at Toys R Us and scanned into the game using a video camera, then edited and animated in a Carmack piece of software called Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop. It was named after a Play Doh toy. What's surprising about Romero's story is how little tuning it took to get Doom's shotgun just right. They added a spread and randomness to the firing, but treated the shotgun pellets as if they were bullets, making the gun easy to implement. And because they "wanted every gun to be effective at super far distances," handicapping the shotgun's range wasn't an issue.

"It was important that whenever we added any gun to the game, it never nullified a previous weapon. There had to be a reason for keeping the pistol around and everything else," Romero said. "The shotgun, I believe used the pistol randomness, and also added some to the spread, but not too much. So you could kill stuff at a distance. It was not like a sawed-off shotgun that would have a massive spread."

 

 

While interesting, it seems Romero's memories aren't 100% accurate. I do suspect the details about letting the shotgun be okay at long range killing are fairly accurate to their original thoughts, however, since it does fit how the shotgun works in the release game. Also while I'm not sure the details about the rifle originally intending to fit between the pistol and RL are quite right (the early weapons were laid out in the doom bible and the shotgun made it into the first known alpha release), it does give a view into why it was cut in favor of the fist and pistol.

 

EDIT: Oh right, "Things about Daikatana you just found out:" The Shotcycler's weird 6-fire burst thing was apparently intended as a mobility feature, since they liked the idea of rocket jumping, but the Sidewinder shot two rockets so it hurt a lot. So they made the Shotcycler that fires a big burst and pushes you back (or up!) some as an alternate way to move. heh.

[Koko Ricky]

That's neat to know that we can officially cite Evil Dead 2 as one of several films that influenced Doom, along with James Cameron's "Aliens."

[kb1]

8 hours ago, GoatLord said:

That's neat to know that we can officially cite Evil Dead 2 as one of several films that influenced Doom, along with James Cameron's "Aliens."

Evil Dead 2: Best "horror" flick ever :)

[The_MártonJános]

Certain liquid flats (FWATER* and NUKAGE*, respectively) when used in a small amount and/or a somewhat confined pool look like they're just "waving" back and forth, but when out in the huge open, you'd see them "drift" in a diagonal angle, 'specially when looking at them from the direction they "do" it from.

[Gez]

On mardi 27 juin 2017 at 9:26 AM, Cell said:

The player sprite is 32x32 in mappixels. However, one can't fit into a 32px-wide hallway...
... unless they are facing it squarely in the perfect orthogonal angle.
One of these examples is the start of Requiem MAP15 - you're supposed to shoot linedefs in order to get out a cage, but if you're just running forward without the slightest turn, you'll "slip" past the grates.

Not sure if this is also port-based, though - I only tested it with ZDoom, and AFAIK earlier ports actually tend to make the player sprite's X and Y attributes a bit higher ingame.

It's not possible to move perfectly orthogonally in Doom because of minor imprecision in the "fineangle" stuff.

[The_MártonJános]

^ Back then I made a notice of this, too.

I could just press my forward button without anything happening in both Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D whilst facing a wall in ninety degrees. However, in Doom, even if the player start was set to be perfectly orthogonally facing a single wall, I could still see my weapon bouncing and very minor pixel-crawling on my screen running against it.

But, I don't know whether it's a corrupt memory or not that I could actually trigger a "perfect runblock" on ZDoom.

[Da Werecat]

You can move orthogonally in ZDoom. Should make it very easy to squeeze through when the player start is perfectly aligned with the gap.

 

It's the vanilla engine and those that preserve its behavior that make it hard.

 

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

The "II" on the DOOM II box cover is embossed.

Edit:  This is true for the US IBM CD-ROM version; not sure about the other versions.

Edited September 30, 2017 by TheUltimateDoomer666

[Graf Zahl]

On 1.7.2017 at 0:46 AM, Da Werecat said:

perfectly aligned

The real issue is that 'perfectly' really means 'no margin for error'. In other words, if the player is right at the start or a teleport exit and properly aligned it may be possible - otherwise the chance to be at such a precise position is virtually impossible.

 

[Maes]

On 6/27/2017 at 8:22 PM, InsanityBringer said:

I wonder why they tweaked all these values for the jaguar version, and if they made it to the later jaguar-derived ports. I presume so.

Probably to compensate for the lower ticrate (15) and different/coarser timing. The effective DPS (damage per second) is probably about the same. This is also one of the few common points between all those Jaguar-derived source ports.