Heretic bugs & version differences

[ASD]

While Doom has its comprehensive list of reported bugs and version differences, how many bugs there are hidden in Heretic and how the current bugs are explained?

I'd like to know, what causes these rare bugs in vanilla Heretic:
- Dragon Claw making the sound of Elven Wand when firing it once. This happened during the shareware days when I had the habit of collecting all ammo, most notably in the waterfall area of E1M5 with the series of claw orbs.
- Gargoyle death animation interrupted.
- Wing of Wrath carrying over levels in the inventory.

Some version differences I noticed:
- Beta
* Undead Warriors have golden belts instead of silver.
* The E1M2 crusher has different textures.
- v1.3
* Tomed Firemace no longer 1-hit kills Iron Liches.

I know Doom Wiki mentioned bugs like the failing Maulotaur attack (which looks like a feature to me) and the removed enemies in the possible firemace spawns in v1.3. Does there exist a full list of bugs and version differences? Are there any changes in the level design I haven't noticed between the versions?

[plums]

Huh, I thought I remembered being able to carry the wings over to another level.

There's a tiny bit more info at http://tcrf.net/Heretic and http://tcrf.net/Proto:Heretic . Nothing as thorough as has been done for Doom, that I know of, but that's not too surprising really. Sounds like it might be a fun project sometime...

[ASD]

The SAINT1 differences is a cool find for a start. Commonly, you can't carry the wings over levels because that would be too easy to sequence break. I wonder what was the level design score for the expansion. Did Eric Biessman and Tim Moore create individual levels or assisted Michael Raymond-Judy? Some of the levels don't look like Michael's work.

[Gez]

According to interviews with him, MRJ didn't make all levels in Heretic or its expansion, but he did some touch up on every single level. Sometimes it was just aligning a few textures, other times it was also adding new areas.

[Wagi]

I know there is a bug that is not necessarily unique to Heretic, because it carried over from Doom, but is made more noticeable by Heretic's ability to look up and down. Hitscan shots do not collide with the floor or ceiling, and will instead continue to travel "through" the floor and the instantly snap back up through the floor or ceiling after hitting a wall.

• The reason that scrolling floors appear to be choppy is that the math behind the offset is rounding far more than it actually has to.
  
  
• The code that merges similar visplanes together forget to take not of whether a surface is scrolling in a certain direction, causing them to be merged when they shouldn't, and causing a bleeding effect. This is visible when lowering the "waterfall" in E2M5.
  
  
• Respawning instantly after being gibbed in mutliplayer actually causes A_SkullPop to do NULL pointer access. Whether or not this crashes the game in DOS, I do not know.
  
  
• There's also the oddity that the demos in HERETIC.WAD were never updated with Shadow of the Serpent riders. Because of changes in the game behavior, demos 1 and 3 go out of sync.
  
  
• Because lava deals the same damage type as the powered phoenix rod, which stuns you for a brief period of time, moving through lava is jittery as a side effect.
  
  
• Inheriting from Doom v1.2 (I think) the sky does not vertically scale properly with the view window, making it appear vertically taller than it is supposed to when the view window is shrunk.
  
  
• Turning a disciple into a chicken while they are attacking may leave them as a partially shadowed chicken, for obvious reasons.
  
  
• Invisible sprites are still cut off when being drawn at the bottom of the view window, which is inherited from Doom's partial invisibility effect, even though because Heretic doesn't move pixels around there is no logical reason to do so.
  
  
• Flying monsters frequently get stuck on top of other things as they fly down from on top of them. This can create hilarious situations where monsters get stuck together, or deadly ones where an imp traps and claws you to death.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

[BlueFeena]

In Heretic 1.0 (version number according to the startup screen), the game always crashes after the victory text at the end of Episode 1.

Also, Heretic apparently locks up entirely when trying to load a Doom PWAD. Heh.

[plums]

Wagi said:

I know there is a bug that is not necessarily unique to Heretic, because it carried over from Doom, but is made more noticeable by Heretic's ability to look up and down. Hitscan shots do not collide with the floor or ceiling, and will instead continue to travel "through" the floor and the instantly snap back up through the floor or ceiling after hitting a wall.

Yeah, this is an interesting one I noticed too when there was a thread about differences between ZDoom and vanilla Doom. One could make secrets that are impossible to get in ZDoom but possible in Heretic (though I don't recommend doing so) by having a shot-activated switch down a tunnel, making it look like you need to shoot the floor or ceiling.

Here are the MRJ interviews if anyone is having trouble finding them:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021031152500/http://www.ravengames.com/heretic/insider.php

http://web.archive.org/web/20021023012754/http://www.ravengames.com/heretic/heretic-shadow/insider.php

[ASD]

Wagi said:

Because lava deals the same damage type as the powered phoenix rod, which stuns you for a breif period of time, moving through lava is jittery as a side effect.

Also happens when a Maulotaur dashes the player. The stuns are annoying and thought my mouse was running out of battery when that happened the first time.

[Wagi]

Also happens when a Maulotaur dashes the player.

I think that one may be intentional.

Oh, I just remembered another quirk. When standing over a ledge that has water on the bottom, your feet are clipped and your view height is lowered as if you're standing on the water.

[Quasar]

Wagi said:

I think that one may be intentional.

Oh, I just remembered another quirk. When standing over a ledge that has water on the bottom, your feet are clipped and your view height is lowered as if you're standing on the water.

The former is a feature. Maulotaur charges are intended to stun you.

The latter is a glitch and is due to insufficiently robust coding in the game's terrain types engine. It uses the sector your midpoint is in to determine your terrain, rather than the highest contacted floor height. We fix this in Eternity and ZDoom.

[Cupboard]

This was a positively fascinating read, thanks! Gotta love the Heretic always. :>