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Sigvatr

Things about Doom you just found out

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On 8/29/2020 at 6:52 PM, SaladBadger said:

I suppose this finally answers the question of why cool guys don't look at explosions. It's for their own safety

 

(okay I know the line of sight check doesn't consider FOV but it makes perfect sense now anyways)

Gotta give props to the Doom engine for the realism there.

frontofdestroyed.jpg

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On 8/30/2020 at 12:13 AM, Edward850 said:

That's not the case. Sound propagation doesn't care about line of sight at all, it only checks/is stopped by sound blocking lines and 0 height sectors. It's a very basic flooding algorithm that traverses though the lines of sectors to other connected sectors.

I'm probably mistaken then. But I recall having that issue when I made a trap once where I had the sound canal by the floor. The issue I had was probably something else like the floor in the other section being on a higher level. 

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On 8/31/2020 at 6:58 AM, axdoomer said:

 

Screenshot_2020-08-30_16-35-00.png.c5ffd634c37022b36b29a887cfb02ce7.png

 

This is awesome! Reminds me of when you try to open a Doom in Hexen format map in Vanilla format... it creates a similar garbled up map!

 

MAP02.PNG

 

EDIT: Right click that "MAP02" and click view if you can't see it

Edited by Doomkid

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I learned that revenants try to punch you if you get close, allowing you to take advantage of their dumbassery.

 

You know, skeletons aren't smart lol. Just cybernetics and bone.

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I just got the original Xbox version of Resurrection of Evil, mainly to see how it handled Master Levels, because there isn't much documentation on that particular version. The biggest surprise is what level names are displayed on the automap.

 

Everything seemed normal when I checked it in the first level and it said "Level 1 - Attack". Then I beat it and it said "Entryway finished/entering Underhalls" which is understandable, but made it a little surprising when Black Tower turned out to have Map25's sky and music anyway. But its name on the automap was "Level 5 - Ghost Town" of all things. The next intermission screen said "Bloodfalls finished/entering The Abandoned Mines" before sending me to Bloodsea Keep, or as it's called in the automap, "Level 7 - Fistula". I finally figured it out, and you may have too.

 

Apparently the game's doing this thing where it warps to you whatever level the original Master Level replaced (while somehow letting you keep whatever items you finished the level with), but the automap names were written with a system more like the PSN version's in mind. When it gets to a level number higher than the total number of Master Levels, it uses a name from Plutonia, which is nowhere else to be found in the port.

 

So if 25 is Ghost Town, 31 is Hunted, and 32 is Speed, that means Congo would be 21, suggesting there are 20 strings for the names of the Master Levels when only 18 made it into the game and the original had 21. Maybe if they included them all like they'd (seemingly) intended, Express Elevator and Bad Dream would share a string, since they're referred to as "Express Elevator I" and "Express Elevator II" by the save files and multiplayer menu.

 

Speaking of those levels, getting either exit in Express Elevator still takes you to Bad Dream, but taking the secret exit shows the "you'd better blaze through this one!" message. None of the levels that had a starry sky have it in this version, and beating Virgil's Lead loops back to Attack.

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incredibly boring and "why the fuck did I spend any amount of thought and effort on this at all" thing I noticed while I was trying to figure out the identities of some objects in doom alpha 0.5 which had valid editor numbers but didn't actually spawn anything:

 

The editor numbers in the range 2000-2999 seem like they were picked solely based on how the sprites were ordered in the source sprite sheets, as released by john romero. The first sheet, in order from left to right, top to bottom, is the shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, plasma gun, bfg9000, then the clip, shells, a unused cell (no idea why...), rocket ammo, stimpack, and medikit. This seems to correspond with the ordering of the game's editor numbers starting at 2000. There's some places where tweaks later down the line violated this ordering, but for the most part its how those numbers came about.

 

edit: Doom 0.4/0.5 things you just found out about: IDs <= 3000 all seem to implicitly defined, and won't error out if placed. It seems like id was still in wolfenstein mode with regards to coding at the time, and I'm assuming that the 2000 range is some sort of implicit static decoration, which has its sprite number set from the editor number set. All objects in the range 2001-2149 work, but anything else crashes when the sprite tries to render with an undefined sprite number error. But hey, at least some decorations work, even if they can't animate:image.png.f82790e931c4e5faae230d7a343f553d.png

 

edit 2: voodoo dolls exist in Doom 0.5 and you can actually shoot and kill them (and yourself as usual). I didn't think the rifle actually did any real damage, it just removed actors, but apparently the minimum of combat is actually implemented.

Edited by SaladBadger

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When player gets hit by a crusher, camera will assume the height of the crushing ceiling. So, when player, that's standing in a sector with floor higher than floor of the crusher sector, gets crushed - the camera will continue descending with crushing ceiling (under the floor if player isn't that hanging that far). At the same time, player thing will not move at all.

If player is stuck (e.g. player starts in 16x16 box) and one of the sectors within player's collision box gets activated - the player thing will instantly transport to the highest available floor, while camera will assume the height of the lowest ceiling instead.

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Help I can't stop hacking the alpha versions.

 

This time I turned to 0.2. 0.2 is tiny enough I think it could be reverse engineered easily, but I haven't any idea where to start, so i've taken to exploring other avenues, and found just like alpha 0.5, there's complete structure dumps in the executable's symbol tables. A few things I've learned from this:

  • Even though they aren't used in the alpha, the game already supports multipatch textures, but texture 0 (the only defined texture) is simply overridden by the renderer. Its actual contents are just a bunch of patches placed 112 units away from each other, and it's 80 units tall (don't have the precise width atm), which fits that computer "grille" texture in the alpha. Textures beyond 0 are not overridden, and will be drawn as specified. The format is close to the nameless 0.4 format, but with some extra bits that got cut, evidenced by the structure dumps.
  • Sectors are "areas", which define a floor and ceiling height and which lines are associated with them. I need to pull a Jeffery Bird and see if multi-area maps are possible. I suspect the renderer actually supports them.
  • Lines are interesting. Looking at the structure dumps, lines are like the DoomED DWD files where they define their own flats, but the heights come from the associated area. I tried changing the flat nums but it didn't seem to do anything, I wonder if the code overrides the flat nums on all lines in area 0, or all lines entirely. There's also only one texture defined, so if windows are actually possible in this alpha, they need to have the same texture on the top and bottom, and there's no masked textures (but I assume those didn't come in until way later) Oh yeah, in addition to "firstcollumn", there's also "lastcollumn" which allows for some really primitive texture scaling:

image.png.85e6c2ada4e91d04bfd45ea4f2300651.png

 

Edit: I created some tools to emit workable 0.2 format levels, and I've gotten some levels like a basic cube working, but any attempt to make a level with more than one area, no matter what lines the area is referencing, causes the game to immediately crash upon rendering the world without any fanfare whatsoever. Even when referencing a completely closed loop of lines, with (presumably) absolutely no way for rendering to progress into it, it still crashes. I don't know if this is some limitation of the engine (only allocates space for one area, crashes if any more are loaded) or if I have my data defined wrong. (ed2: even an area with 0 lines in it causes immediate crashes)

 

Edit 3: I took a look at viewinfo and I think I understand its format (its defining spans of places which aren't drawn to on screen), but in my usual "I'm probably missing vital information", I can't change it in any meaningful way without inducing crash city again. Whee. I also have no idea how it interacts with HIGHBLIT, but it seems there's also supposed to be MEDBLIT and LOWBLITs. The alpha 0.3 format looks simpler.

Edited by SaladBadger

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This isn’t really something I just found out, but it is something that maybe some might find interesting. Doomguy uses his pistol left handed and punches with his left hand, but uses his other guns right handed. 
 

While we could say Doomguy is a southpaw, there was something I was told by a Game Warden during my hunter safety course when I was a teen. He said that he is a right handed person but is left eye dominant. With rifles and shotguns, he just has to squint one eye, but with handguns, the weapon he will have on him all the time, he keeps both eyes open, and by having it on the left side, where his left eye can naturally line up with the sights, he is able to make accurate shots and feels more accurate this way than with the right hand. Having both eyes open allows you to see better, you don’t lose your peripheral vision. 
 

not saying that Doomguy isn’t left handed, but I found what the warden said to be interesting. Maybe Doomguy is left handed and left eye dominant, uses the other guns right handed because they aren’t lefty friendly weapons. 

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I already knew that grabbing a chainsaw in the vanilla game makes you unable to switch back to the fist.

However, I just found out that you can actually swap between the fist and chainsaw when you have berserk on!

I(and possibly many others) thought that the chainsaw prevented switching to the berserked fist as well.

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Even after learning about this game for like 30 years, and even after watching channels that really research Doom, such as Decino for example, I still find that at least half of the things posted on this thread are totally new to me.

 

So things about Doom I just found out?

 

That number is either a lot, or zero, depending on whether you count reading this thread or not...

 

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I recently found out that people have very strong opinions about how others choose to play the game. Apparently some people judge others depending on what sourceports they use, whether they use mouselook or not, gamepad or mouse and keyboard etc etc. 

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If you're not having fun in the exact same way I am having fun, you're being bad and wrong. The fun police will be there shortly to arrest you for badwrongfun.

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3 hours ago, Old-Doomguy said:

I recently found out that people have very strong opinions about how others choose to play the game. Apparently some people judge others depending on what sourceports they use, whether they use mouselook or not, gamepad or mouse and keyboard etc etc. 

 

You’re right. I see this quite often, but to be fair this happens in just about any hobby in my experience. There’s people that think you have to play Golf a certain way. There’s people that think you have to load a certain shell into your hunting rifle to be accurate. There are people that think you can only drive a Chevy, and there’s others that will say Ford. 
 

Most of it is harmless opinions that often lead to interesting conversations, but there are people that can’t take other opinions without their ego feeling attacked, and sadly, there are people like that in gaming communities, too, and Doom is no exception. 

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On 6/15/2020 at 6:47 AM, jval said:

DoomBuilder is developed in C#, not C++.

Yep, but the original DB1 was written in VB.

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On 9/15/2020 at 5:27 AM, Old-Doomguy said:

I recently found out that people have very strong opinions about how others choose to play the game.

 

One of the most irritating things in the history of everything ever is the phrase "the way it was meant to be played".

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23 minutes ago, Megalyth said:

One of the most irritating things in the history of everything ever is the phrase "the way it was meant to be played".

Spoiler

rsz-maxresdefault.png

I guess you don't like it when games have this in their opening scenes lol

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1 minute ago, sluggard said:
  Hide contents

rsz-maxresdefault.png

I guess you don't like it when games have this in their opening scenes lol

 

Heh, I actually forgot about that slogan. I haven't played any games newer than 25 years old in a while.

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I only just found out about Doom's weird, broken hit detection at close range. Explains some weirdness I've encountered before.

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I just found out the Plasma Rifle is the best weapon in the game. I'm not saying this as opinion, but fact. It stuns enemies, and takes down small-tier enemies in a matter of seconds. Of course, the best one is really the BFG, but I feel like since Plasma Shots are so fast on the rifle, it is easier to use in slaughter maps. 

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I just found that is pretty common for a lot of project to pass way under the radar, even when they are amazing, becoming something like hidden gems.

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On 9/17/2020 at 6:31 AM, Megalyth said:

 

 I haven't played any games newer than 25 years old in a while.

 

My man.

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I may have taken my current interest in the alphas to a new level, and have been working on a reverse engineering project for 0.5, which is a good compromise of being older enough to be really different, but still have a lot of potentially "interesting" things to see. It's been productive so far, I have most of the game and playsim code mapped out. Some things I've found.

 

  • There are debugging keys available. Hold the letter and then hit ~ to activate one. L takes a LBM screenshot, P takes a PCX screenshot, C finishes the level, D restarts the level, and S opens up a weird sprite viewer thing.
  • Monsters have HP. Zombiemen have 10, imps have 20, demons have 40, cacodemons have 100, and barons have 250. It looks like these all got bumped up when the weapon damage got randomized, at the moment the prototype rifle does just five damage (but things respond to damage by vanishing, so...)
  • The state table is fairly complete, and has prototype sequences for most monsters and stub AI functions (sadly they have no implementation at all..). Interestingly misc1 and misc2 are actually fairly heavily used.
  • Soul jars give you "soul ammo", which would be used by the dark claw.

I've updated the alpha's TCRF page with some of these findings.

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Map26 from Plutonia Experiment contains this bug right at the start
PRBoom-Plus
WI4CJY1.png
GLBoom-Plus
ghWclBj.png

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The map can be marked

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Really, i dont knowed until now xD

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