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Vorpal

How To: Fences That Are Passable

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Note: There may be more and better tutorials out there on this, but I'm making this one as much for others as I am for myself (making this is a way of forcing myself to remember how to do it). If there's a simpler way/redundant steps etc., please let me know... I am not much of a Doom trickster.

So, in your map you may want a mid-textured fence of some sort, but marking it as "impassable" will ruin your gameplay for that area for whatever reason. Here's one trick you can do: CLICKY CLICKY

Step 1 - Make your "fence" the usual way by putting a mid texture on both sides of a linedef (in this case MIDBARS3 with a y offset of -120, so it aligns to the floor of a 192 tall room).

Step 2 - Surround your linedef in a new sector.

Step 3 - Select the linedefs of the fence and the new sector, and make them "self referencing" by making the front and back reference the same sector (in this case, sector 1)

Step 4 - Now edit sector 1's floor height to be the height of the fence you want (MIDBARS3 is 72 units tall, so I made sector 1 72 units tall).

Step 5 - Sector 1 is defining the fence's boundaries and height, and we'd like it to be as close to the MIDBARS3 linedef as possible. I went down to a grid size of 1 and changed it to a diamond shape around the MIDBARS3 linedef, you could just as easily use a square or more complex shapes if it is a more complex fence.

Step 6 - At this point, the trick is basically functional. However, monster AI will behave strangely in the main room. My hamfisted solution is to just surround sector 1 with another 72 high sector (depending on your editing program, you may have to go in and revert the interior sector to self reference to 1 again).

There! Now we have a mid-textured fence that you or enemies can move over. The downsides however are that it will block bullets/projectiles, the close-together vertices may lead to rendering oddities like slimetrails, and your editor may complain about sector/linedef errors.

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Alternatively, one thin self-referencing sector with the MIDBARS3 texture aligned down into it would work.

Although I was sure bullets went through the thing (though not projectiles), but my last time doing this was a decade ago.

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With just one sector, enemies will just try and hump the player instead of attack... at least in chocolate doom :-/

Edit: Weird, I'm not sure why, but in a more complex map the single sector method doesn't cause wacky enemy behavior, and the double sector method causes a HOM. TO BE CONTINUED...

Edit 2: Agh, yeah as soon as the area this trick is used in gets more complex, all sorts of horrendous rendering and collision effects start happening. Cuck poop fart.

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Yeah, the downsides of this are a shame. It's really too bad there wasn't a built-in way to make midtex fences that behave normally but allow flying monsters to pass overhead.

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You can surround the self-referencing sector with linedefs instead of a new sector to stop it from bleeding outside of itself, that's what I prefer doing.

esselfortium said:

Yeah, the downsides of this are a shame. It's really too bad there wasn't a built-in way to make midtex fences that behave normally but allow flying monsters to pass overhead.

Make the fence impassible with a 25 unit high step on each side so that flying monsters will teleport to the other side of the fence. :)

I guess it makes sense that projectiles can't go through the fence, since they probably can't fit through the bars?

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TimeOfDeath said:

Make the fence impassible with a 25 unit high step on each side so that flying monsters will teleport to the other side of the fence. :)

Yea this works ok for the most part. But I ran into an issue where you can get a face full of rocket if you try to shoot through/over it and there are monsters below you. It's just high enough to keep the player from walking over it, but high enough that it can sometime trick a player into thinking that they can show projectile through it, but not if there are targets below.

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In old Doomsday versions making them was really simple. All that was needed was a sector raised from the floor, or lowered from the ceiling. This sector didn't need any self referencing tricks, just don't have any lower or upper textures depending if it was a floor or ceiling fence. Then make a line on some side of the sector and add the fence texture into this line both sides. This line should be just 1 unit away from the fence sector.

That trick may have worked in some other GL ports too.

I used to make deep water effect similarly, by lowering a sector and not have any lower textures. So it was pretty simple to do this sort of tricks. Actually I thought that was how it was done in software too..

Doing them this way allowed monsters to behave normally with the fences/deep water.

Don't know how well these tricks work in the current Doomsday versions. I haven't used any special tricks for a while...

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Strife has a "fence" linedef flag. Of course, nobody maps for Strife (except Khorus).

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Gez said:

Strife has a "fence" linedef flag. Of course, nobody maps for Strife (except Khorus).

It's also buggier than an entomology department's lab :P

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I did that exact same thing step by step to do something else. I made the self-referencing sector a sector that would lower to lowest floor, hoping that the lowering of the sector would bring the fence down with it, and then you'd be able to pass. The sector lowered, making it passable, but the fence did not. So what I wanted isn't possible I guess. :(

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Didn't think about the Lower Unpegged Setting. I tried it again, setting the fence line to Lower unpegged within the self-referencing sector, and the fence did lower, and I could pass through it.

However, the MIDBARS "impaled" through the floor, as you can see the MIDBARS underneath the floor. The self-referencing sector has different properties than its surrounding sector, as I gave it a different light level and floor texture just to make sure.

Is there just no way around this?

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I guess the midbars are on one of the lines making up the self-referencing sector, right? A different light level should work, unless there's some sort of weird behavior regarding self-referencing sectors and clipping mid textures. I've never actually tried this effect before though so I'm not sure. You might want to try closing the whole self-referencing sector in another sector and then change the light level of that sector.

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