Things about Doom you just found out

[Maximum Matt]

That dude would haaaaate playing Maximum Doom then, what with all the doors that go up into ceilings that seem to be paper-thin against the sky :-)

[Finnisher]

4 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Pinkies are fat, and unless the stairs are fairly wide and straight, as well as being lined up in a non orthagonal direction, it can be difficult for pinkies and many other monsters to fit. 

 

Yep and non-straight stairs seem to be troublesome for pathing too.

 

Ofc you can also turn this around in level design; make a little more complex stairs if you want to mitigate monsters following the player etc but not outright prevent it.

[zokum]

12 hours ago, DoomGappy said:

 

I misunderstood your previous post as "where does this door lead to?", but now I understand what you meant. The door simply vanishes into thin air when it raises. That's a really interesting observation. This could be easily solved by using a lift as a door instead.

Once you know what to look for, you'll start noticing a lot more. There's a really bad one on e4m3. @Altima has a video where you see it really clearly.

 
The one on e1m1 is much more complex, but harder to notice. Both e1m5 and e1m7 have rooms that are taller on the inside.
 

[Maximum Matt]

^^Nah, they're collapsible skull-bars, bro!!

14 hours ago, zokum said:

The one on e1m1 is much more complex, but harder to notice. Both e1m5 and e1m7 have rooms that are taller on the inside.

Yeah, you start to notice these things more and more - check out the 'skylight' near the beginning of E2M1

[RjY]

The Doom source is part of the test suite for GCC's code analyser.

No wonder it's so easy to port to anything and everything under the sun, when the compiler is optimizing for it ;)

[Hellektronic]

On 10/22/2023 at 10:36 PM, Lucius Wooding said:

Pinkies are fat, and unless the stairs are fairly wide and straight, as well as being lined up in a non orthagonal direction, it can be difficult for pinkies and many other monsters to fit.

Most monsters don't handle heights so well, and some stairs in the original Doom seem to be impassable to monsters. Like the start of Phobos Labs, that early stairwell right off the bat. In general though, pinkies seem to be reluctant to go up stairs, especially because they're fat and move horizontally a lot... they just kinda run back and forth forever. Their poor little dinosaur feet just don't like the feeling of steps, kind of like that robot from the first Robocop, lol.
 

 

Edited October 24, 2023 by Hellektronic

[Chezza]

If pinkies began tripping over stairs in doom that would be hilarious. But if a horde falls downstairs towards you in a pink ball of angry teeth and horns, then not so much.

[Hellektronic]

5 minutes ago, Chezza said:

If pinkies began tripping over stairs in doom that would be hilarious. But if a horde falls downstairs towards you in a pink ball of angry teeth and horns, then not so much.

Ah, just keep moving every time they pause to bite, you'll be fine, lol.

[zokum]

Doom's original handling of height differences is fairly poor, both for monsters and the player. Since all objects in Doom are square boxes, lining up to shoot at a monster diagonally makes it much easier to hit it. You can hit with all the pellets of a shotgun from farther away and it is easier to snipe without tapping the chain gun. It's one of those things that probably matter more in deathmatch. It's a shame so many map editors render the monsters as circles, at least as default.

You could in theory make a room with two exits. One narrow where both you and large monsters can fit, and one diagonal and wider where monsters can't fit at all, despite it being wider. That would be a bit of an asshole move, but it's one of those factors one needs to take into account when making winding tunnels with linedefs that aren't axis-aligned.

Another asshole thing that can be done is to make stairs in tunnels that you can ascend but not descend. One thing I make sure to check for is that not only should it be possible to descend a set of stairs, but it should also be possible to do without banging your head into the ceiling and killing all forward momentum at every step. Such stairs slow down the player and are frustrating to use.

[DoomGappy]

One of the bevels in midgrate is missing some pixels to the right, which annoys me now that I've noticed.

 

[Melodic Spaceship]

A few days ago I found out that Doom 1's title screen music uses a tritone, which is interesting because another name for tritones is "the Devil's interval". Using a musical interval with a name like that seems rather fitting for a game like Doom, which of course prominently features demons and such.

[Maximum Matt]

A lot of the Doom music uses the tritone

[rita remton]

i found out that a boom map via dsda and prboom, conveyors could only move in cardinal directions. had used diagonal directions in my boom map in gzdoom before this :P

Edited October 30, 2023 by rita remton : found actual cause of problem :P

[zokum]

21 hours ago, rita remton said:

i found out that a boom map via dsda and prboom, conveyors could only move in cardinal directions. had used diagonal directions in my boom map in gzdoom before this :P

It's a fairly common thing to assume that a port has the exact same implementation as another port. What  annoys me is when a port is different and people insist on the other port being the correct implementation and that there is an error in the original executable or in the map. This most commonly happens if you make a vanilla map that works fine in say chocolate doom, but not in a port. Some people will put the blame on the map/mapper. In most cases, the port is the problem. There are of course grey areas, especially when it comes to undefined behavior like using uninitialized memory. doom2.exe does muck up that once in a while.

[rita remton]

made a simple boom event randomiser to make random rooms, etc. works in dsda-doom, prboom-plus, and gzdoom by utilising "layered" tracks for the boom conveyor to change the direction of the voodoo doll.

 

 

details:

• the rooms after the door changes randomly every time the map is replayed.
• "randomness" is generated based on the time it takes for the player to cross between designated linedefs.
• the monsters add a more "randomness" factor. difficulty levels implemented. select itytd/hntr for no monsters.
• this is an updated version of my earlier boom event randomiser [here]. found that in dsda-boom and prboom-plus, conveyors could only have cardinal directions while gzdoom supports diagonal directions, effectively breaking the previous version. had to redo the whole thingy :P UPDATE: real cause were the walls that snagged objects moving on the conveyor, while in gzdoom the objects just glide following the face of the walls. this updated version unintentionally had no walls to snag any objects on the conveyor, enabling it to work in dsda and prboom. credit to @Ravendesk for helping :)

download the boom map [here]. iwad doom2. cheers!

Edited November 8, 2023 by rita remton

[BeachThunder]

I have no idea how I've never noticed this before, I guess I'm just unobservant. But I only just found out that E1M2 has computers on the ceiling...

 

 

At first, I was thinking I must have accidentally edited and saved over DOOM.WAD...but, no, it's actually there for real. It just looks so...wrong...

[Individualised]

9 minutes ago, BeachThunder said:

I have no idea how I've never noticed this before, I guess I'm just unobservant. But I only just found out that E1M2 has computers on the ceiling...

 

 

At first, I was thinking I must have accidentally edited and saved over DOOM.WAD...but, no, it's actually there for real. It just looks so...wrong...

It's a weird texture, I don't think it's used that often in the IWADs.

[Maximum Matt]

It's always a weird ceiling texture, doubly so when it's used as a floor one

[CacoKnight]

I'm older and remember when Doom came out but I only tried it a few times in the past, I started playing it like 4-5 months ago so I guess I'm discovering EVERYTHING about it. Damn masterpiece.

[RjY]

7 hours ago, BeachThunder said:

But I only just found out that E1M2 has computers on the ceiling...

E1M5 too, for the sake of completeness (and E2M6, E2M7, MAP24, and hidden in MAP16, for the sake of exhaustion; shout out to Scypek2)

[Ravendesk]

On 10/30/2023 at 4:12 PM, rita remton said:

i found out that a boom map via dsda and prboom, conveyors could only move in cardinal directions. had used diagonal directions in my boom map in gzdoom before this :P

I don't think it's true, I made diagonal conveyors in boom before and they worked fine in demo compatible ports (dsda). Unless you mean something else.

[DoomGappy]

On 10/23/2023 at 1:23 PM, zokum said:

Once you know what to look for, you'll start noticing a lot more. There's a really bad one on e4m3. @Altima has a video where you see it really clearly.

 
The one on e1m1 is much more complex, but harder to notice. Both e1m5 and e1m7 have rooms that are taller on the inside.
 

 

Just thought that you could actually imagine those as "retractable"? But yeah, a door is much harder to believe that.

[rita remton]

1 hour ago, Ravendesk said:

I don't think it's true, I made diagonal conveyors in boom before and they worked fine in demo compatible ports (dsda). Unless you mean something else.

 

you are right. i re-checked again. diagonal conveyors do work in dsda. however, any object moving on the conveyor that touches a wall even ones near parallel to the direction of movement, will get snagged and stop moving. compared to in gzdoom, objects continue to slide following the face of the wall. for the 2nd version of the boom event randomiser posted above, i unintentionally removed any walls that could snag any objects on the conveyor, making the setup work in dsda, gzdoom and prboom. many thanks for pointing that out! i really appreciate it :)

[Ravendesk]

25 minutes ago, rita remton said:

however, any object moving on the conveyor that touches a wall even ones near parallel to the direction of movement, will get snagged and stop moving.

Oh, right, the way momentum is stopped/preserved when touching monsters and walls is quite different in gzdoom compared to vanilla physics. Yeah, that's something to keep in mind with these setups, nice that you solved it, it's a neat setup idea.

[Individualised]

5 hours ago, RjY said:

E1M5 too, for the sake of completeness (and E2M6, E2M7, MAP24, and hidden in MAP16, for the sake of exhaustion; shout out to Scypek2)

 

I know Master Levels for Doom 2 CATWALK.WAD uses the computer flats.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

In E2M7, this hallway is partially crooked. Specifically, the right side from where I'm standing is slightly slanted.

[Maximum Matt]

Yeah, the first hallway to the right, the walls don't match up, so the hall beyond that is slightly wider. 

God, I could do this for like every IWAD map

[DoomGappy]

Not about Doom but about Doomworld. You can create subfolders for your messages like in an email account. This might help project leads become more organized. This is honestly very important and a gamechanger. Only thing I wish was to be able to reorder them.

Edited November 12, 2023 by DoomGappy

[Plerb]

The Cacowards have a Wikipedia article.

[plums]

(I didn't just find this out but a recent commit to chocolate doom's git repo reminded me and I don't remember posting this before)

 

In vanilla Heretic and Hexen, your flight and look speed can range from ±0-7, with 0 being "none", 1 being the minimum that isn't none, and 7 being the maximum. (I don't know if the values are actually more finely divided in game.) But there's no way to actually have this much control: look speed starts at 1 and then goes to 2 (similar to how when you turn with the keyboard, you turn a bit slower at the start), and flight AFAICT is set to speed 5. HOWEVER the full range of these values are supported in demos, if you hex-edit them.

 

Here's a vanilla compatible Heretic map and demo that has the player gently fly up for a bit, go back down to the ground, look down normally and then very quickly look up.

https://user.fm/files/v2-ef66260a687eeb869a73a897f09d05cb/hfly.zip

 

And for anyone wondering, this isn't possible in Strife, at least as far as demos go. Look up/down are just on/off states.