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

Things about Doom you just found out

Recommended Posts

Doom uses palette 0, 2-8 and 10-13. 1 and 9 are unused. There's also an error in the palette format. The format is 24 bpp, but vga only supports 18bpp so there could be some rounding down. The two unused ones should lower it by about 500. The rounding error is a bit harder to calculate properly.

Share this post


Link to post
On 1/20/2018 at 10:46 PM, zokum said:

Doom uses palette 0, 2-8 and 10-13. 1 and 9 are unused. There's also an error in the palette format. The format is 24 bpp, but vga only supports 18bpp so there could be some rounding down. The two unused ones should lower it by about 500. The rounding error is a bit harder to calculate properly.

After using a hex editor to delete the two unused palettes from the playpal file, the convert command gives: 2901

 

I wrote a script to skip the unused entries more easily and to truncate the colors' two least-significant bits, this produces:

$ ./playpal_total.php -d PLAYPAL.doom 
Doom uses 14 palettes with 3386 unique colors
$ ./playpal_total.php -u -d PLAYPAL.doom 
Doom uses 12 palettes with 2901 unique colors
$ ./playpal_total.php -u -t -d PLAYPAL.doom 
Doom uses 12 palettes with 2521 unique colors

$ ./playpal_total.php -u -t -h PLAYPAL.heretic 
Heretic uses 11 palettes with 2366 unique colors
$ ./playpal_total.php -u -t -s PLAYPAL.strife 
Strife uses 12 palettes with 2518 unique colors
$ ./playpal_total.php -u -t -x PLAYPAL.hexen 
Hexen uses 28 palettes with 5851 unique colors

So there are your answers, assuming there are no errors in the script.

Edited by Xymph : Switch link to gist

Share this post


Link to post

The Plutonia Experiment is 23.01% Chaingunners and 13.80% Revenants. Also, MAP11 of Plutonia, Hunted, is the only map in Final Doom that doesn't have at least one Chaingunner.

Share this post


Link to post
25 minutes ago, Archvile Hunter said:

The Plutonia Experiment is 23.01% Chaingunners and 13.80% Revenants. Also, MAP11 of Plutonia, Hunted, is the only map in Final Doom that doesn't have at least one Chaingunner.

I guess the Chaingunner% and Revenant% is a good standard for people looking for WADs that they're going to play. Sadly it's difficult to do these statistics.

Share this post


Link to post
11 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

I guess the Chaingunner% and Revenant% is a good standard for people looking for WADs that they're going to play. Sadly it's difficult to do these statistics.

I wonder if there is a utility that compiles these sort of statistics. I remember seeing a thread by @fraggle regarding the difficulty of Freedoom, with statistics about monster hit points and health and the like. Maybe it was something he wrote himself. Still, it would interesting if there was a utility for the kind of monster and related statistics you're talking about.

Share this post


Link to post

I just learned about the reload hack in vanilla Doom. Also when using the -file parameter, adding a tilde (~) character before the filename causes the WAD to be reloaded each time the level is restarted, allowing the level to be edited in parallel without restarting the game.

Share this post


Link to post
8 hours ago, Xyzzy01 said:

I just learned about the reload hack in vanilla Doom. Also when using the -file parameter, adding a tilde (~) character before the filename causes the WAD to be reloaded each time the level is restarted, allowing the level to be edited in parallel without restarting the game.

Oh, god, I wish we'd known about this in 1994. I'm not saying it would have magically made all our levels good but a lot of dodgy texture alignment and suchlike was just because the edit/test cycle was so slow...

Share this post


Link to post

Not "Just found out" ... but giving Memorial a playthrough, and was reminded as a kid (at least the first 3 years of playing Doom 2 at least) ... I ALWAYS used IDCLIP to get through the starting door of Map 18...Shootable doors weren't really common at ALL in these games, and they just kinda throw one at you randomly...

Share this post


Link to post
On 2/2/2018 at 0:21 PM, Resigned_34 said:

I just found out that Maximum Doom was a thing, and that it had SOOOOOOO many PWADs.

It's a real garbage heap, although pretty dang novel back in '96 when I lacked an Internet connection. I've sometimes thought about wading through it again, to see if there are any gems, but there's a couple thousand mods at least (many of which are literal 1994 wads) which doesn't sound like a very attractive proposition. Amusingly, it has a normal "M" rating for violence; I suppose id might have overlooked the infrequent erotic textures that occasionally adorned a wall texture or two, back when that sort of thing was, I suppose, in vogue.

Share this post


Link to post

maximum doom includes a few jim flynn levels so its not a total waste

 

my new realisation: You can make a doom level with new textures, and the world doesn't end EVEN IF none of those textures has the UAC logo stencilled on

stop repping for the corps guys, you don't benefit, they only respond to sabotage

Share this post


Link to post

Maximum Doom has a few hidden gems in it, you'd be surprised. Sometimes I load a random PWAD out of it just to get some inspiration and experimental vibe going.

 

 

Share this post


Link to post

The new lamp sprites in Doom2 seemed to be used very little too. Pretty much everywhere it's just the torches.

Share this post


Link to post

I found out the other day that you can zoom out to hide the HUD and - more importantly - see more of the weapon sprites.  The chaingun and plasma rifle look MUCH better this way.  I played through Doom II and probably used those weapons more than I ever have in my life.

Share this post


Link to post

I recently found out that you can break GZDooM a little by having your HP overflow, causing you to become a zombie and completely messing with the game's logic. In fact, you literally can't shoot if you do overflow your HP XD

Share this post


Link to post

just found a nerve.wad that runs properly in prboom+, plays the right music & plays the end sequence when you beat map08 all perfectly swimmingly

(don't look at me like that, i bought it on xbox 360 already) :P

 

if prboom+ has a pseudo-IWAD def for running nrftl why isn't there also a way of making your own pseudo-IWAD def?

(if you haven't played it, NRFTL is NOT an IWAD - it contains nine maps and some graphical map names, that's all)

i hate to stoke the fires of MAPINFO once more but if we can basically already do it surely making this existing feature transparent would be a work of moments by anyone who cares to fork boom

Share this post


Link to post

The tip of the chaingun sprite being fullbright is because of the "muzzle flash". At least I think so. I always assumed it was a bug but it just occurred to me that it was on purpose - correct me if I'm wrong.

Share this post


Link to post

I recently made a switch from ZDoom to Prboom plus and because I made some sound modifications as part of my own gameplay mod, I noticed that whenever I try to open a locked key door, the sound that is being used is "DSOOF" which is the sound the player make when they're falling from great height instead of "DSNOWAY" which suppose to be used on wall surfaces. I'm not sure if it's a vanilla behavior but I never noticed that especially since the original sound bits for these actions are practically the same.

Share this post


Link to post

The chaingunner has a shotgun sound for firing instead of a chaingun sound on the PC version of doom 2, but playstation and gba versions of DOOM 2 fixed it to be the proper chaingun sound

Share this post


Link to post
On 2/19/2018 at 9:04 PM, cyan0s1s said:

The SSG and rocket launcher do the same thing.

Not quite. The power is similar, but the rocket launcher also has splash damage, which the SSG doesn't have, and you can use it to assist your jumps. But, as a general "damage at close range" type weapon, they are very similar in the amount of damage they can deal.
 

Per the Doom Wiki:

 

The super shotgun takes the same ammunition as the shotgun, but uses two shells per shot. However, whereas the shotgun fires 7 pellets in each shot, a super shotgun blast has 20 pellets. Each pellet still does 5-15 points of damage (for a total of 100-250 points of damage per shot, provided that all pellets hit the target). The super shotgun is thus nearly three times as damaging as the standard shotgun per shot, a good bargain since it only uses twice as much ammo each time. (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Super_shotgun)

 

Each rocket does 20-160 points of damage, in round multiples of 20, plus a blast radius of 128 units (taking a direct hit automatically incurs the full 128 additional points). Thus the rocket launcher is approximately as powerful as the super shotgun, but equally effective at long range and with a more rapid rate of fire.

It can be used for rocket jumping in some areas, for example to reach the secret exit of E3M6: Mt. Erebus. (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Rocket_launcher)

 

...

 

This all being said, I do remember playing Doom 2 and taking down a Cacodemon in 2 shots with the SSG and thinking, "This gun is as strong as the rocket launcher."

Share this post


Link to post

The RL's DPS is much higher than the SSG thanks to its faster rate of fire. The splash damage doesn't diminish with multiple enemies too, so when faced with a hoard of imps for example, the RL can do 20 times the damage than the SSG.

Share this post


Link to post
3 hours ago, Bauul said:

The RL's DPS is much higher than the SSG thanks to its faster rate of fire. The splash damage doesn't diminish with multiple enemies too, so when faced with a hoard of imps for example, the RL can do 20 times the damage than the SSG.

However, the SSG does have one outright advantage ( aside from ammo, but that's a map thing ) in that the rocket launcher only does two instances of damage - the collision damage and the radius damage. Meanwhile, the SSG's 20 hitscans all damage individually. This is a pretty big deal due to the fact that it doesn't matter how much damage you do, a monster recoiling in pain is rolled the same way each time a damage instance is dealt to it. So while the rate of fire of the SSG is significantly lower than the rocket launcher's, it actually ends up being better for interrupting monster attacks just through the sheer amount of pain rolls they have to make when you get a meatshot with it.

Share this post


Link to post
Just now, Arctangent said:

However, the SSG does have one outright advantage ( aside from ammo, but that's a map thing ) in that the rocket launcher only does two instances of damage - the collision damage and the radius damage. Meanwhile, the SSG's 20 hitscans all damage individually. This is a pretty big deal due to the fact that it doesn't matter how much damage you do, a monster recoiling in pain is rolled the same way each time a damage instance is dealt to it. So while the rate of fire of the SSG is significantly lower than the rocket launcher's, it actually ends up being better for interrupting monster attacks just through the sheer amount of pain rolls they have to make when you get a meatshot with it.

Oh absolutely!  SSG is about the only weapon I'd risk to try to interrupt a nearly finished AV attack for instance.  Having 20 individual attacks also means it'll go through monsters the way a RL won't - an SSG can take out 5 imps in a line, but a RL will likely only hurt the front couple.

 

Also, being a hitscanner makes it much more effective for fast moving monsters - I've a flying boss monster in an upcomming megawad that moves quickly in a circle around the player.  Trying to hit that thing by leading RL shots is damn near impossible, so the SSG is far more use.

 

So really the conclusion is yes, technically, at point blank range the SSG and the RL do similar damage to a non-boss singular monster, but beyond that they are wildly different weapons with wildly different uses.

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
×