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schwerpunk

Thread #2 of Vanilla Mapping Tricks (it's just the one trick, actually...)

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Link to the original thread, because I know how the mods feel about resurrecting old threads to make one point. :P

I was just fooling around in vanilla again, and found a really useful trick through pure experimentation, and since there isn't really a central location to post this kind of stuff (that I could find), I thought I'd make a thread. If only so someone could correct me, and point out what a nub I am. Hopefully I'm not the only one, and at least one or two newbie mappers find this elucidating.

Ideally, someone else would start a thread, get it stickied, and we'd have an easily searchable, central location for these tricks - which really should be common knowledge.
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Make Action24* (G1 Floor Raise to Lowest Ceiling) lower a floor.
Tested with: Chocolate Doom & ZDoom (Doom 2)
Example: EXAMPLE1.wad
How-to:
(1) 'Join' the sector you want lowered with another sector,
(2) give that second sector one adjacent sector (unJoined, but directly touching), and
(3) make that touching sector's ceiling the same height you want your floor to lower to (the first sector).

ISSUE #1: This lowers the floor instantly, so unless you're alright with that, you should probably make the floor lower 'off camera.'
ISSUE #2: A prolonged 'shifting' sound can be heard for several seconds, so unless you want that sound heard, you should probably put the conjoined sector outside of the player's hearing range. Only occurs if one nubbily applies the same tag to the adjacent sector.

* This may also apply to other lower/raise actions. But I haven't tested it out yet.

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Well, that's pretty much the same trick as "Instant Raising Lift" described in the original thread you linked to. When to lower/raise to some height the floor or ceiling actually has to raise/lower, it happens instantly.
And that prolonged sound occurs because you've also tagged sector 2 for no reason.

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Memfis said:

Well, that's pretty much the same trick as "Instant Raising Lift" described in the original thread you linked to. When to lower/raise to some height the floor or ceiling actually has to raise/lower, it happens instantly.

Oh, I see.

Memfis said:

And that prolonged sound occurs because you've also tagged sector 2 for no reason.

Derp. Fixed.

tl;dr im a nub

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It's not exactly a trick, more a feature, as it was first used in DOOM E2M4.

In the early years, there were a few mappers who experimented with linedefs and sectors
to achieve not-thought-of effects. Jens Hykkelbjerg published them in spcial_12.zip

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I use backtracking-only teleport ambushes. You have to set two obstacles in the closet monster between the monster and the teleport, the nearest to the teleport can be a lift of a door-open-wait-close activated via a WR linedef so it can be opened and closed indefinitely and the nearest to the monster must be a W1 door-open-stay or another one-time releasing obstacle. You can cross a ambush-triggerer linedef many times but the monsters won't teleport until the permanent obstacle is unset by another event, like getting a key, then only when you're going back the trap will work. this is not easy to explain and I'm doing it in a foreign language but you can check what I mean in my reticula.wad, like the teleporting revenants when you're backtracking after collecting the last key at map05.

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nicolas monti said:

I use backtracking-only teleport ambushes. You have to set two obstacles in the closet monster between the monster and the teleport, the nearest to the teleport can be a lift of a door-open-wait-close activated via a WR linedef so it can be opened and closed indefinitely and the nearest to the monster must be a W1 door-open-stay or another one-time releasing obstacle. You can cross a ambush-triggerer linedef many times but the monsters won't teleport until the permanent obstacle is unset by another event, like getting a key, then only when you're going back the trap will work. this is not easy to explain and I'm doing it in a foreign language but you can check what I mean in my reticula.wad, like the teleporting revenants when you're backtracking after collecting the last key at map05.


I understood that perfectly. Very useful tip!

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You might be interested in this one:

Player-Only Teleport

When you place a teleport destination, place a Lost Soul in the same place: monsters won't teleport when they cross the line, the Lost Soul doesn't count towards the kill count and the death sound is barely audible over the teleport sound. Obviously this doesn't work on MAP30.

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Obsidian said:

You might be interested in this one:

Player-Only Teleport

When you place a teleport destination, place a Lost Soul in the same place: monsters won't teleport when they cross the line, the Lost Soul doesn't count towards the kill count and the death sound is barely audible over the teleport sound. Obviously this doesn't work on MAP30.

Or just mark the line with "block monster" flag. Most of teleports must be repeatable, so single lost soul isn't going to help you a lot.
But this is kind of intersting trick. It may be helpful sometimes.

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Yeah, I wanted some way for monsters to walk over the lines so it doesn't look awkward. :) On a side note, Suspended in Dusk has some absolutely brilliant vanilla tricks that are worth looking at.

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Using lifts and open-close-doors isn't the best idea for ambushes imo, the player might have to cross some line a few times to "help" all monsters teleport in case the door closes or the lift goes back.
Something like this would be better I think: ambush-triggering linedef is "wr floor lower to highest". At first it does nothing because there is another sector of the same floor height near the targeted sector but at some point that another sector lowers and then crossing that linedef will lower the targeted sector.

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Memfis said:

Using lifts and open-close-doors isn't the best idea for ambushes imo, the player might have to cross some line a few times to "help" all monsters teleport in case the door closes or the lift goes back.
Something like this would be better I think: ambush-triggering linedef is "wr floor lower to highest". At first it does nothing because there is another sector of the same floor height near the targeted sector but at some point that another sector lowers and then crossing that linedef will lower the targeted sector.

That would be the refined method, clever!. I was aware of the trapped monster's possibility so I used my traps with one or two monsters per teleport. I'll implement this new way for more massive backtracking ambushes.

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Obsidian said:

You might be interested in this one:

Player-Only Teleport

When you place a teleport destination, place a Lost Soul in the same place: monsters won't teleport when they cross the line, the Lost Soul doesn't count towards the kill count and the death sound is barely audible over the teleport sound. Obviously this doesn't work on MAP30.


While I like the execution, a box surrounding it made of monster block lines also works...

...After thinking about it further, I guess it could work as a teleport that doesn't allow for monsters to go in until after it was used by the player, then monsters can use it.

Also I think the Doom wiki would make an awesome resource for this stuff.

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I was messing with donut action recently. It can be used for some complex special effects, but is quite unreliable. It also depends on linedef numbers. The main pain in the aft with this particular map was that there are sectors with different tags in the donut effect area. More sector tags = more complex donut magick.

http://www.solidfiles.com/d/2f83e71a83/

It's a Doom 64 map adaptation. It also has silent sector movement trick implemented in a few places, and probably some other simple tricks.

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I've been dying to make something really complex with building stairs but I haven't really used the effect enough to know quite exactly how it works. I mean, I understand enough to have done it before, but if I took a couple hours to just sit down and play with it and memorize exactly how to make it do stuff, I could make giant complex structures out of flat ground appear right before the players eyes.

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I think it would be easier with a simple raise action and a bunch of dummy sectors. More control this way.

Although there are potential problems with sound sources.

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I'm never more impressed with the stair special than when I forget to give it a tag. Particularly in outdoor areas.

It's actually lead me to redesign one or two maps because of how interesting the resultant height variations can be.

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40oz said:

I've been dying to make something really complex with building stairs but I haven't really used the effect enough to know quite exactly how it works. I mean, I understand enough to have done it before, but if I took a couple hours to just sit down and play with it and memorize exactly how to make it do stuff, I could make giant complex structures out of flat ground appear right before the players eyes.

I'm afraid to design anything but the most simple stair builders because Boom felt the need to "fix" them and can break compatibility with vanilla. I can't trust everyone to play in vanilla, Chocolate, or PrBoom+ with -complevel 2/3/4.

For all the shit ZDoom gets, Boom was really no better about not screwing with established behavior. Granted not to the same extent, but Team TNT even broke their own IWAD with that stair builder fix. At least in ZDoom I can force the vanilla behavior to be used in MAPINFO, there was no such option in Boom, it was up to the player there.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

For all the shit ZDoom gets, Boom was really no better about not screwing with established behavior.

Well, at least it preserved demo compatibility. There were worse examples in the DOS era. You'd think that a source port called DOSDoom would remain faithful, but noo.

In fact, I had a hard time finding any DOS source port that was complete, stable, and not bloated with kewl new features. Early years, ambitious years.

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Heck, the original source-release of Linux Doom had a bunch of changes that broke compatibility and had more planned bugfixes, an OpenGL renderer, etc.

Obsidian said:

You might be interested in this one:

Player-Only Teleport

When you place a teleport destination, place a Lost Soul in the same place: monsters won't teleport when they cross the line, the Lost Soul doesn't count towards the kill count and the death sound is barely audible over the teleport sound. Obviously this doesn't work on MAP30.


This is a nice and clean trick. Sometimes having "block monsters" on lines really gets in the way of your layout.


Here's my contribution: shorter closing-door traps. Sometimes you want to trap the player in an area for some time, but the 30s delay from the normal close-wait-open doors is too much. Easy, just make the floor of the door sector quite a lot lower than the surrounding floors, and make sure it's not wide enough for the player to fall through. You need some other linedef to open the door (recommended to have it open and stay), but it won't do anything until the door has finished closing.

Example: http://www.mediafire.com/download/51v78ogbed5p1kk/doortrap.wad

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