Things id got wrong

[Stupid Bunny]

pritch said:

* Night vision goggles underused (leading to massive under-use in pwads over the years...)

More to the point, I think the lite-amp goggles could've been implemented a lot better. I think they really could've used a filter of some kind, or maybe some algorithm that just raised the apparent brightness of each sector to a higher range while keeping the proportionate differences in brightnesses somewhat intact? I rarely ever use them myself, just because I don't think levels look any good when they're all fullbright.

[Lenswot]

You could look at it like with the invulnerability sphere, in that the visual downgrade is a side-effect of the benefit. Although why need temporary power-ups necessarily have side effects? I will agree that the implementation is cheapish in appearance.

[BaronOfStuff]

pritch said:

These days with zdoom in 1920x and a Logitech gaming mouse etc. it's necessary for me to use a .deh to make Doom 2 a little more challenging. I use the same .deh when I want to tone up the difficulty with pwads, too. Monsters changed include the Spider - up to 10k hitpoints - now we're talking - and doubling baron/hell knight hitpoints and making their fireballs faster and more damaging. Also gave imp, demon, mancubus and caco a bit more hp.

Holy shit, how much free time do you have to be able to afford to grind down so much HP?! I'd just make things faster and more damaging then just leave it at that!

[sector666]

pritch said:

* Sometimes you can be burned through a rad suit by the most damaging floors. Not fair.

* Night vision goggles underused (leading to massive under-use in pwads over the years...)

I never knew that about the rad suit issue.

Night vision goggles probably weren't used very often because all they do is make everything fullbright, and Doom loses so much of its atmosphere when you don't have any contrast to the lighting. A different effect which didn't remove all lighting contrast would've been so much better.

[Lenswot]

BaronOfStuff said:

Holy shit, how much free time do you have to be able to afford to grind down so much HP?! I'd just make things faster and more damaging then just leave it at that!

Keep in mind that most casual spider-demon usage in user made levels, and all three* of the Doom 2 implementations, has them surrounded by other things that will gang up on them almost immediately. And if you are a player who only uses the most efficient method for taking down any foe, this only amounts to two extra full force bfg blasts. I like fighting spiders with weaker weapons just because point-blank bfg feels too easy, most likely an oversight on the developers' part. I recently played something called faviae10.wad that had really good spiderdemon usage (but totally lame secrets prior to that encounter (but that is beside the point)).

*edit* I forgot about map06 in which you just crush the poor thing and it cannot even leave the area! And is reduced to a truly pathetic bloody lump 1/32 its size.

sector666 said:

I never knew that about the rad suit issue.

I think it only happens with the strongest level damage floor. I remember there was a discussion during zdoom development over whether that was a "bug" to be fixed or the game's way of telling you that a radiation shield is not designed to be a lava shield.

[BaronOfStuff]

The "Radsuit leak" is definitely a bullshit 'feature'. I fucking hate it.

[Lenswot]

I hate it too! Although I hate damage floors in general.
Its implementation is certainly more bug-like than feature-like.

[Gez]

Lenswot said:

Its implementation is certainly more bug-like than feature-like.

How so?

If you look at the code, it's quite clear it's very deliberate, and not the result of an oversight or typo. That "|| (P_Random()<5)" isn't there because a cat jumped on the keyboard while the programmer was looking for a fresh beer in the fridge.

//
// P_PlayerInSpecialSector
// Called every tic frame
//  that the player origin is in a special sector
//
void P_PlayerInSpecialSector (player_t* player)
{
    sector_t*	sector;
	
    sector = player->mo->subsector->sector;

    // Falling, not all the way down yet?
    if (player->mo->z != sector->floorheight)
	return;	

    // Has hitten ground.
    switch (sector->special)
    {
      case 5:
	// HELLSLIME DAMAGE
	if (!player->powers[pw_ironfeet])
	    if (!(leveltime&0x1f))
		P_DamageMobj (player->mo, NULL, NULL, 10);
	break;
	
      case 7:
	// NUKAGE DAMAGE
	if (!player->powers[pw_ironfeet])
	    if (!(leveltime&0x1f))
		P_DamageMobj (player->mo, NULL, NULL, 5);
	break;
	
      case 16:
	// SUPER HELLSLIME DAMAGE
      case 4:
	// STROBE HURT
	if (!player->powers[pw_ironfeet]
	    || (P_Random()<5) )
	{
	    if (!(leveltime&0x1f))
		P_DamageMobj (player->mo, NULL, NULL, 20);
	}
	break;
			
      case 9:
	// SECRET SECTOR
	player->secretcount++;
	sector->special = 0;
	break;
			
      case 11:
	// EXIT SUPER DAMAGE! (for E1M8 finale)
	player->cheats &= ~CF_GODMODE;

	if (!(leveltime&0x1f))
	    P_DamageMobj (player->mo, NULL, NULL, 20);

	if (player->health <= 10)
	    G_ExitLevel();
	break;
			
      default:
	I_Error ("P_PlayerInSpecialSector: "
		 "unknown special %i",
		 sector->special);
	break;
    };
}

[scifista42]

Gez said:

How so?

Lenswot probably meant it like this:

Lenswot said:
Its implementation certainly seems more bug-like than feature-like for the player experiencing it, and it is annoying.

[Lenswot]

Yes, by "implementation," I just meant its appearance in the game. I never looked at the code! Not recently, anyhow. (although I have seen bits of code before and "ironfeet" always amuses me) In fact I assumed that function was an accident.

[Salt-Man Z]

I only found out about the rad suit leak just this year (either from this forum or the wiki); surely I'd seen it in action sometime over the past 20 years, but it never registered. Now that I know it's a bona fide "feature", I do notice it, and it really cheeses me off.

[Lenswot]

I assumed it was an accident because I could load a save and go through the same area and not take any damage. Tricky! I did not expect "random" likely because all other floor damage was consistent. I never got to a point where I stood in the sector while using ironfeet to see if the damage could be depended on to occur. How often is this code saying it should happen?

[BaronOfStuff]

1/256 chance or something, gametic dependent.

What fucks me off most about it is that for a so-called feature, there is absolutely zero mention of it in the manual. No matter which way you look at it though, it's a shitty piece of game design, especially considering how easy it is to mistake it for a bug.

[june gloom]

Gez said:

That "|| (P_Random()<5)" isn't there because a cat jumped on the keyboard while the programmer was looking for a fresh beer in the fridge.

I'm pretty sure Carmack gave his cat away at that point anyway.

[Gez]

It happens if a random number (between 0 and 255) is less than 5. So about 2% chance.

(The Doom RNG is actually a preset table of 256 values between 0 and 255. Not all values are found once: some values are duplicated, and logically others are missing. There are actually a total of six values that are below 5: 0, 0, 2, 2, 3, and 4. 6/256 = 2.34375%.)

[Ishtar's Gate]

The extent of the shotgun's modification. Is it a sawed-off or a full length? Does it have a muzzle break? Is the stock shortened in any way?

For that matter, the art is almost never consistent. Case in point: The CyberBaron.

[Lenswot]

You mean from the box art? I believe that was outsourced to a non-id artist, although there is no harm in adding some variety, even if for the sake of finishing in a timely manner the actual game lacks it (I say). What I wonder is why Doom2's box art is mirrored on the title screen. That and the sky graphics: why all the unexplained graphic reversing? The last thing that I thought was a mistake was not. Perhaps the game is treating it like a ceiling flat (which will always be backwards, matching up with the floor), even though it can be used on the ground, and is drawn like a wall texture.

[Foxpup]

StupidBunny said:

More to the point, I think the lite-amp goggles could've been implemented a lot better. I think they really could've used a filter of some kind,

They had a semi-realistic green filter in the press release beta. I've no idea why they dropped it.

Lenswot said:

That and the sky graphics: why all the unexplained graphic reversing?

That's actually easy to explain: in Doom, angles go anticlockwise, so if you just map angles (which go left from 0) to texture X coordinates (which go right from 0), you'll end up with a mirror image. Of course it would be trivial to correct, but like so many other things, nobody bothered.

Lenswot said:

Perhaps the game is treating it like a ceiling flat (which will always be backwards, matching up with the floor),

Implying flats are row major, oriented north. If you treat them as column major, oriented east, it's the floors that are backwards.

[Da Werecat]

Foxpup said:

They had a semi-realistic green filter in the press release beta. I've no idea why they dropped it.

Maybe because of the sky bug? It looks more or less okay with the invulnerability effect (because it doesn't have a real-life example to compare it to), but not with the night vision goggles.

The bug is trivial to fix, but it was even easier to just use colormap 1 as a quick and lazy solution.

[Gez]

FLOOR1_1 seen in row-major mode depicts the UAC logo in the right way.

[Lenswot]

Foxpup said:

Implying flats are row major, oriented north. If you treat them as column major, oriented east, it's the floors that are backwards.

That could have been the case but the graphics in the wad only come out forward on the floor. I first noticed when I played one of those alpha versions that had a flat which said "TOM IS KING" that looked messed up on the ceiling. Not that it looked "normal" on the floor but the letters were forward.

*edit* apparently I took so long to answer that I did not see Gez doing it more succinctly, though I wonder if I would have noticed the UAC logo being wrong in-game; it has vertical symmetry! But there are definitely flats based on patches that look the same. Hey what is going on with that distorted skull, upper-right-middle, in flat5_6?

[sector666]

Lenswot said:

I hate it too! Although I hate damage floors in general.
Its implementation is certainly more bug-like than feature-like.

Even though the damage with a rad suit on is intentional, it seems weird that they would have it do full damage. You'd think if some damage did get through it would at least be reduced to 10 or even 5. Having it be the full 20 does make it seem like a bug if you haven't seen the code, and either poorly thought out or dick move if you have seen it.

That doesn't even compare to inescapable damage pits though. You stepped in the wrong place, now start over. Instant death just doesn't fit in with Doom's gameplay style at all. Besides that, probably the worst kind of game you could put inescapable pits in is one where there's so much of a focus on dodging.

[BlueFeena]

Ishtar's Gate said:

The extent of the shotgun's modification. Is it a sawed-off or a full length? Does it have a muzzle break? Is the stock shortened in any way?

For that matter, the art is almost never consistent. Case in point: The CyberBaron.

The shotgun is a toy; it's a Tootsie Toy Cap Gun. I still have mine from when I was a child. Adrian or Kevin simply edited out the stock with the in-game version; the toy itself is basically a miniaturized shotgun with otherwise realistic detailing. The scale on the pump is off though; this is very apparent if you look at the shotgun on the title pic; the pump is almost as long as the barrel and is in the down position. Tootsie Toy Cap Guns had a very flimsy pump and would break after some time, the pump on mine won't stay closed. Also, the title pic version has a red cap on the end of the barrel -- look closely at it. Check it in Photoshop if you don't believe me.

Lenswot said:

You mean from the box art? I believe that was outsourced to a non-id artist, although there is no harm in adding some variety, even if for the sake of finishing in a timely manner the actual game lacks it (I say).

The cover art was painted by Don Ivan Punchatz. I remember reading somewhere that Doomguy's pose is actually based off something John Romero did, but I can't remember where I read that. As for the monsters, I suspect Punchatz didn't have any references for them, maybe only a description of what the game was. It's fairly obvious that they're based off of common depictions of demons in Christianity; slobbering tongues, horns, brimstone, etc. As a Catholic, I think it's very well done. :)

[Xegethra]

Quite a lot of games don't have matching box art...or any other sort of matching art.

One example would be Streets of Rage, on the box there are snipers and masked Jason figures....no such things show up in the game. Not even the Empire State Building that is shown on the box shows in game....it leads you to think it is set in New York but nothing in game says this.

Box art does that all the time....it looks cool, that's the point. A bit missleading, but it does it's job by making people look at it.

[Varis Alpha]

i like the Doom box-art. sure, it's not perfectly accurate, but you can't deny that it's definitely an iconic piece of art.

[Clonehunter]

Another example of mis-matching boxart would be Operation: Bodycount. THe art depicts future soldiers driving on some desert with a tank while dramatically shooting at something, while Jupiter rests behind them. The game itself takes place in the World Trade Centers and has a Die Hard theme. I read somewhere that the art was actually named "Warlord" and was commissioned for a novel of the same name. When the book fell through or got a different cover, Capstone bought the art for their game and reportedly modify the soldiers to bear the UN uniform. I actually can't spot this difference, and the box art really just has a bluer hue than the original book art.

[Lenswot]

Box art for Japanese games tends, or at least tended to be less accurate since western marketers would try to "west" the games up so to, they thought, appeal to potential buyers better, without any input from the original developers (this is most often brought up with regard to the Megaman series). Id Software was in direct contact with Punchatz and so the game's character is accurately reflected.

I always thought there was something fishy about that shotgun, based on its size appearing to change in the uncropped versions of the sprites, but oddly enough I did not get to looking up its model.

BlueFeena said:

Also, the title pic version has a red cap on the end of the barrel -- look closely at it. Check it in Photoshop if you don't believe me.

I do not see the red cap on the title screen, though it looks as if the exact same picture of the shotgun was used for episode 4's end screen, just mirrored (again!) which has some orange light on it.

[BaronOfStuff]

If the red cap is there, it's been recoloured to look like the rest of the barrel.

[DeathevokatioN]

The plasma sound could have been less loud or tweaked a bit IMO.

[BaronOfStuff]

^ Definitely. It's incredibly grating during prolonged bursts of fire.