Things about Doom you just found out

[Uni]

I recently found out that E3M5: Unholy Cathedral was not entirely Sandy according to him, and that Tom Hall started the concept/layout. Also E3M5 has a very, very similar area found in E2M9: Fortress of Mystery. Might be a case of Sandy reusing his ideas inside Doom 1 already.

 

Spoiler

E3M5 also has an unmarked secret room that requires a key which I never knew about before. Can't remember if there are other instances of secret unmarked doors in Doom 1 elsewhere.

 

[Faceman2000]

On 5/23/2022 at 11:49 AM, Uni said:

 

I recently found out that E3M5: Unholy Cathedral was not entirely Sandy according to him, and that Tom Hall started the concept/layout.

 

I found it funny when he talked about that in one of his videos: almost thirty years of people cursing his name for designing that teleport puzzle, and it turns out that he didn’t come up with it or even like it. I also think it’s kinda cool he decided to leave it in even though he didn’t like it, surmising that if Tom thought it was fun other people probably would too.

 

He was mostly wrong, apparently, because I’m the only person on earth who seems to like that level, but hey, still pretty cool.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

You have a door, right? And two switches to open it, right? One switch is 64 SR open door, and the other is 103 S1 open and stay, if you press the S1, the door opens and stays, then you press the SR switch, it'll close again after 4 seconds. I kinda expected the Open and stay action overrides any future changes but nope.

[zokum]

9 hours ago, HrnekBezucha said:

You have a door, right? And two switches to open it, right? One switch is 64 SR open door, and the other is 103 S1 open and stay, if you press the S1, the door opens and stays, then you press the SR switch, it'll close again after 4 seconds. I kinda expected the Open and stay action overrides any future changes but nope.

The SR and S1 work in the exact same manner, but S1 switches trigger a piece of code that sets the linedef action type to 0 once it has been used.

Doors have no special handling when they're done moving up or up/down. This is in contrast to things like crushing ceilings, platforms moving up and down etc. They have a different handling as far as I can remember. Internally the game differentiates between a moving platform or moving floor even if they happen to look the same.

On map15 you have an area inside the regular exit building where a sector is both a lift and a door, depending on where you come from you have to activate different actions in order to progress. They can't both be triggered at once, but once an action is completely done, it can be used for something else.

In general platforms have more complex handling and when the flat is changed the moving floors get the data from the surrounding sector and the moving platform from the switch frontside. I can't remember all the details, you could look it up in the source, it's been years since I looked at those parts of the code.

[peach freak]

On 5/23/2022 at 11:49 AM, Uni said:

I recently found out that E3M5: Unholy Cathedral was not entirely Sandy according to him, and that Tom Hall started the concept/layout. Also E3M5 has a very, very similar area found in E2M9: Fortress of Mystery. Might be a case of Sandy reusing his ideas inside Doom 1 already.

 

  Hide contents

E3M5 also has an unmarked secret room that requires a key which I never knew about before. Can't remember if there are other instances of secret unmarked doors in Doom 1 elsewhere.

 

 

The Yellow Door in E1M3, while not unmarked itself, is behind a secret area.

EDIT: There is also an unmarked (on one side, at least) secret Blue Door in E1M5, it's in the room that contains the exit door with the glowing lights. The doorway itself is actually marked as a secret, not the room behind it. It leads back to the room with the Invisibility Sphere and the star-shaped teleporter (I believe one of only two usable teleporters in E1). The door does have the Blue lights on the other side of it, and is used as more of a shortcut to get back to previous parts of the level.

 

In E1M6, the secret shortcut that you can use to get to the Yellow Key (instead of going through that mini-maze beyond the Blue Door) requires a Blue Key to get to the Yellow Key room. The secret door is unmarked on the Yellow Key room side, but has the blue lights on the secret room side, I'd imagine the Blue Key is required there, otherwise you could go right to that shortcut and skip the first half of the level.

Edited May 30, 2022 by peach freak

[zokum]

23 hours ago, peach freak said:

 

The Yellow Door in E1M3, while not unmarked itself, is behind a secret area.

EDIT: There is also an unmarked (on one side, at least) secret Blue Door in E1M5, it's in the room that contains the exit door with the glowing lights. The doorway itself is actually marked as a secret, not the room behind it. It leads back to the room with the Invisibility Sphere and the star-shaped teleporter (I believe one of only two usable teleporters in E1). The door does have the Blue lights on the other side of it, and is used as more of a shortcut to get back to previous parts of the level.

 

In E1M6, the secret shortcut that you can use to get to the Yellow Key (instead of going through that mini-maze beyond the Blue Door) requires a Blue Key to get to the Yellow Key room. The secret door is unmarked on the Yellow Key room side, but has the blue lights on the secret room side, I'd imagine the Blue Key is required there, otherwise you could go right to that shortcut and skip the first half of the level.

I think some of the passages in e1m5 were added in about version 1.2 to make the map more suitable for deathmatch. It gives two areas that have only one entry point two entry points, making it harder to camp. That is probably why they are a bit clumsy when it comes to keying. They were added to make it easier to get around on the map, but keyed not to ruin the progression in single player.

[Arsinikk]

I just recently found out the the "DSITMBK" sound effect, that is used in many ports as the "a secret is revealed" sfx, is actually half the bitrate and size in PLUTONIA.WAD and TNT.WAD (5kb) as opposed to the higher quality sounding version that is in DOOM2.WAD (10kb).

[Gez]

3 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

I just recently found out the the "DSITMBK" sound effect, that is used in many ports as the "a secret is revealed" sfx, is actually half the bitrate and size in PLUTONIA.WAD and TNT.WAD (5kb) as opposed to the higher quality sounding version that is in DOOM2.WAD (10kb).

Same for the SSG sounds. This is because they used DEU to create their IWAD, and while it correctly exported the SFX to WAV, it incorrectly assumed 22 khz WAVs had to be downsampled to 11 khz SFX.

 

Another consequence of Final Doom IWAD assets going through DEU is that the shotgun sprites are borked.

[Gibbon]

27 minutes ago, Gez said:

Same for the SSG sounds. This is because they used DEU to create their IWAD, and while it correctly exported the SFX to WAV, it incorrectly assumed 22 khz WAVs had to be downsampled to 11 khz SFX.

 

Another consequence of Final Doom IWAD assets going through DEU is that the shotgun sprites are borked.

They used Deutex not DEU (the map editor) to assemble the wadfile.

[NoWits]

On 4/26/2022 at 11:11 AM, Gez said:

Void for example used scripts to spawn monsters that it couldn't, back then (in the time before DECORATE), place directly on the map.

 

I'm curious, how were custom monsters etc. added in ZDoom before DECORATE came about? Was it just through use of DEHACKED like other source ports or was there something ZDoom-specific that was 'in between' the levels of DEHACKED and DECORATE in terms of advanced-ness?

[Gez]

You could use DEHACKED of course, and ZDoom even had some of its own specific enhancements for that, but in Void's case, the trick was that it used vanilla actors from other games. The dark imp from Void is actually an undead warrior from Heretic. The evil marine is actually Zedek, the fighter boss from Hexen. They've been disguised by having different sprites and sounds, but that's what they are. Then there are also Hexen afrits, reivers, dark bishops, and the Heresiarch, that are cosmetically untouched.

 

ZDoom never extended DEHACKED support to the Heretic/Hexen/Strife actors, so game-wise they are unchanged. Best you could do was change a select few of their properties using ACS functions such as SetActorProperty on the foreign actors that you had spawned, also with ACS (note that back in Void's time, there were a lot less properties you could change, too). But you could still use it to do things like having a green imp with more health than a regular imp, which is in fact a regular imp, just with ACS to apply a color translation to it and give it more health. That kind of things.

 

So between DEHACKED, ACS, and the ability to use actors from other games (potentially with new sprites and sounds), it was possible to achieve results not possible with just DEHACKED, yes.

[DavidN]

That’s incredible :) It never occurred to me that you could assign and place actors from a game other than the one you were playing… it must not have crossed my mind because there isn’t a need to any more

[Quill]

If you select MIDIs in SLADE 3 and press Sort, it automatically sorts in game order instead of alphabetical order.

Before

Spoiler

After

Spoiler

 

[Zero Master's Clone]

that the command "summon fatso" in DOOM 2 on ZDoom ports spawns a mancubus

Edited June 5, 2022 by Zero Master's Clone

[Gez]

1 hour ago, dotQLL said:

If you select MIDIs in SLADE 3 and press Sort, it automatically sorts in game order instead of alphabetical order.

Yep: https://github.com/sirjuddington/SLADE/blob/ae50fa4bea2c3bc722dd5e7a8b0e7a883c83381a/src/MainEditor/UI/ArchivePanel.cpp#L1509

 

The sort function had to get a lot of little hacks to work correctly without breaking everything, so one more didn't hurt!

https://github.com/sirjuddington/SLADE/blob/ae50fa4bea2c3bc722dd5e7a8b0e7a883c83381a/src/MainEditor/UI/ArchivePanel.cpp#L1388

[Doomkid]

1 hour ago, Zero Master's Clone said:

that the command "summon fatso" in DOOM 2 spawns a mancubus

 

"summon" is only possible in ZDoom-family ports (afaik).

[Zero Master's Clone]

7 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

 

"summon" is only possible in ZDoom-family ports (afaik).

oh yeah I ment to type that

[Gez]

19 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

 

"summon" is only possible in ZDoom-family ports (afaik).

Other ports with a console often also have a summon command (or something equivalent), however the class names are not necessarily the same. For example, Eternity also has a summon command, but the code for the mancubus is just "mancubus"; so you'd type "summon mancubus" instead of "summon fatso" in that port.

 

As for why the name "fatso" in ZDoom... it's simply because in the vanilla Doom source code, it got the identifier MT_FATSO. However, the arachnotron did not get the ZDoom class name "Baby" despite its MT_BABY identifier, and likewise there's Cyberdemon for MT_CYBORG, SpiderMastermind for MT_SPIDER, and you know, DoomImp for MT_TROOP, Demon for MT_SERGEANT, Revenant for MT_UNDEAD, LostSoul for MT_SKULL, and so on. There's a big ol' table over there: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DeHackEd

[Grimosaur]

That revenant missiles, mancubus fireballs, arachnotron plasma and icon of sin spawners all trigger monster walk-over linedefs.

 

Must be some fun stuff you can do with that, maybe you have to lure a revenant missile half-way across the map into a hole to open a secret... hmmmm...

Edited June 18, 2022 by Grimosaur

[Andromeda]

11 hours ago, Grimosaur said:

That revenant missiles, mancubus fireballs, archvile blasts and icon of sin spawners all trigger monster walk-over linedefs.

 

Must be some fun stuff you can do with that, maybe you have to lure a revenant missile half-way across the map into a hole to open a secret... hmmmm...

You may want to check out 1000 Lines 2 CP's MAP32 (Ephemeral).

[unraveler]

UP until a few years ago, I thought that SSG do exactly the same damage as 2 normal shotgun shots!

[Quill]

Jimmy - Vinefort is actually a remix of Jimmy - Great Hall

[nerdybunny]

All projectiles from enemies shoot at certain height. The revenant shoots his missiles higher because when he fires, his height is temporarily increased for the frame that he fires.

 

I have no idea why you wouldn't just specify the projectile to fire higher, but it works I guess?

[EANB]

In E1M7 there's a very useless armor bonus in the nukage here

 

[RjY]

On 6/10/2022 at 12:37 AM, Grimosaur said:

That revenant missiles, mancubus fireballs, archvile blasts and icon of sin spawners all trigger monster walk-over linedefs.

 

Begging your pardon but could you explain how archvile blasts can trigger lines? My understanding of the code suggests it is impossible, but perhaps I missed something (I have long since learned never to say anything in Doom is impossible, because someone will always go to enormous trouble to prove you wrong).

 

Alternatively perhaps you meant something else, like arachnotron plasma, which was otherwise conspicuously absent from your list.

 

This is of course all possible because P_CrossSpecialLine does not test for the MF_MISSILE flag but instead ignores a hard-coded list of missile types that only includes those in Doom1. I can only assume the flag did not exist when the function was written, and they forgot to go back and update it.

 

On 6/14/2022 at 8:44 AM, nerdybunny said:

All projectiles from enemies shoot at certain height. The revenant shoots his missiles higher because when he fires, his height is temporarily increased for the frame that he fires.

 

I have no idea why you wouldn't just specify the projectile to fire higher, but it works I guess?

 

Of course by "his height is temporarily increased" you mean he is temporarily moved up above the floor, not that he becomes taller :). Indeed, I am led to believe there was a bug in early Doom2 versions that made him visibly jump when attacking.

 

As for why it works that way, I guess they felt it best/simplest/easiest to add a couple of lines to adjust the actor's height in A_SkelMissile, rather than a special case inside P_SpawnMissile, or a new parameter (necessitating updates to its callers, all of which would be passing in the previous default), or even a new actor property (which would have the same value for every actor except one).

[Grimosaur]

2 hours ago, RjY said:

 

Begging your pardon but could you explain how archvile blasts can trigger lines? My understanding of the code suggests it is impossible, but perhaps I missed something (I have long since learned never to say anything in Doom is impossible, because someone will always go to enormous trouble to prove you wrong).

 

Alternatively perhaps you meant something else, like arachnotron plasma, which was otherwise conspicuously absent from your list.

 

Ah sorry yeah, I did mean to say arachnotron plasma, not archvile blasts. I noticed in the map I'm making that revenant missiles were setting off these automatic walk-on lifts I'd made, so I searched it up and found this post listing the other projectiles which also trigger walk over lines, and I misread "arach projectiles" as "arch projectiles", and THEN I kinda autocorrected that to "archvile blasts" in my post. So yeah, archvile blasts can't trigger lines on their own.

 

EDIT: wtf why is my title "Dank Marine" oh 420 posts WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[peach freak]

On 6/14/2022 at 4:40 AM, EANB said:

In E1M7 there's a very useless armor bonus in the nukage here

 

 

And since Armor Bonuses count towards your Item%, if you're someone like me who likes to 100% complete every map, you have to go out of your way to get it...

[Vermil]

On 10/30/2021 at 1:54 PM, Ashley_Pomeroy said:

 

It's probably there to make players run out to get it, then turn around and see the secret ledge.

[lunatic01]

In regards to making/editing maps, today I learned that this entire time I didn't have to give door linedefs a tag if the sector acting as the door uses said linedefs. Specifically "switch" doors (SR/S1 functions).

 

Before this accidental discovery, I would assign the "door" sector (and the two "switch" linedefs that sandwich the sector) a tag but as it turns out, this is unnecessary in this case. I thought all functions (except for texture scrolling) NEEDED a tag in order to function. I'm still a bit of a newbie but I'm getting better!  

[URROVA]

Just now, lunatic01 said:

In regards to making/editing maps, today I learned that this entire time I didn't have to give door linedefs a tag if the sector acting as the door uses said linedefs. Specifically "switch" doors (SR/S1 functions).

 

Before this accidental discovery, I would assign the "door" sector (and the two "switch" linedefs that sandwich the sector) a tag but as it turns out, this is unnecessary in this case. I thought all functions (except for texture scrolling) NEEDED a tag in order to function. I'm still a bit of a newbie but I'm getting better!  

this is only on ZDoom based ports. On vanilla you have to use D1/DR line actions, or use S1/SR actions with tags.