Scripting for Doom 2

[Leon]

I know that doom with Hexen you can make some amazing things occur, but it there anything I can do just in doom that I can do a script of?

[hex11]

You mean plain old vanilla Doom? Other than simple stuff like walkover linedefs, the only fancy "scripting" is probably the kind you cobble together with a voodoo doll (second P1 start) that you somehow force over a linedef (for example, with creative use of barrel explosion blast). Of course, damage and thus the strength of the blast are variable (randomly generated) so the whole idea is a bit iffy. For example, in my Undeath '94 E1M3 map there is a room with a (static) conveyer belt that is "transporting" nukage barrels. If during the inevitable firefight one of the barrels explodes, it will cause a chain reaction that eventually reaches a voodoo doll in a recessed/hidden area that just happens to be at the top edge of a staircase. Each step linedef is tagged for and has type 36 (W1 Lower Turbo Floor to HEF+8), so the associated sectors will quickly drop while the player's screen is flashing red (voodoo doll's pain frames).

The effect is basically to make it look like all kinds of shit got blown up and oops, some monster closets just opened up too (they heard the noise and came to investigate). Anyway, this works fairly well, but I had to use several tagged linedefs because the randomness of the barrel blast means sometimes the voodoo doll ends up at different points on the staircase instead of being thrown all the way down. Also, sometimes the damage is too high and can kill a player with 100/0 health/armor, so that's something to consider too. I may stick a green armor and medikit somewhere immediately before that room, but no sure about that. The whole idea in my case was so that the player is very careful to guard the barrels by fighting strategically and not letting them be in the monsters' line of fire. :)

[Memfis]

hex11 said:

Of course, damage and thus the strength of the blast are variable (randomly generated)

Are you sure? Here is a test map that always works the same way for me: http://speedy.sh/b4zfU/barreltest1.zip
Try to add or remove monsters to change RNG - nothing will change.

[hex11]

Okay that's interesting... It looks like using a crusher to explode the barrel is very reliable, and consistently causes the exact same amount of damage. I assumed barrels were like weapons and had some random factor, but it seems like the engine only uses distance to determine their damage.

In my case though, there will be some randomness because the explosion is caused by player/monster fire, which has a tendency to displace barrels.

Btw, I didn't realize it was possible to place linedefs right under the voodoo doll like that. It's a bit confusing because it isn't obvious which exact part of a thing the engine tracks when dealing with linedefs, so I'm guessing it must be the exact center? So if you place the center of the voodoo doll just a few units behind the lindef, then it should work...

[Krispy]

There are LOTS of things to script in DOOM and DOOM 2- if you use zdoom or skulltag.
explore:
http://zdoom.org/wiki/ACS