Can someone explain this to me? (Dummy-sector related)

[peach freak]

I was redesigning some of my rooms in a map. One of the rooms has a dummy sector to lower a pillar with the Yellow Key on it. It uses the action S1 Floor Lower to 8 Above Highest Floor. I use the dummy sector so that I can control how far the pillar lowers (instead of going all the way to the ground).

When I was redoing one of the rooms, I moved the dummy sector to another area so that I'd have more space to do what I wanted.

Afterwards, I tested it out in Chocolate Doom. I get to that room and find out hitting the switch to lower the pillar does nothing, making the Yellow Key inaccessible. Oddly enough, if I re-visited the level with -nomonsters, the switch and pillar worked as intended. It would only not work when there are monsters enabled in the map. I even double-checked to make sure the dummy sector was configured the right way, and to make sure no erroneous tags were applied elsewhere.

Moving the dummy sector to another location seemed to fix the problem.

What causes this? How come it worked without any monsters and didn't with monsters?

[mouldy]

Vanilla doom doesn't like to move any sectors if there is a monster stuck in a wall or floor somewhere, so that was possibly the issue. Check if your map has any monsters in spaces that aren't tall enough for them, and if you use doom builder make sure its set to show things as squares rather than circles and make sure none of the monster corners are inside walls. Don't think it matters with non-monster things.

[Never_Again]

Monsters stuck in walls are an error, of course, just not one that is relevant here.
Monsters stuck in floors are quite rare and indicate faulty nodes rather than a mapping error; at least I haven't seen a case where it was not a nodes error.

Neither error matters in the context of this thread. What matters is that if a sector has a monster that is taller than the sector's ceiling, that sector's floor won't lower, unless you can manage to kill the monster somehow.

Boom fixed this bug, so every now and then you run into a supposedly vanilla/limit-removing-compatible map that doesn't work as expected in target engines because it was tested with a source port that implicitly implements Boom changes, like Legacy or Zdoom. Hatred Removed is one recent example, although the instances of this bug go back as far back as 1994 (WATCH51).

Note that the sector's ceiling can still be raised, regardless of the monster's height. As you may expect, the ceiling won't lower, though, unless the monster is killed or the action is a crusher.

[peach freak]

Hm, this map doesn't appear to have any stuck monsters. But why would moving the little 16x16 dummy sector to the other side of the room (off the map) fix this?

EDIT: Here's an image of the map:

http://i.imgur.com/rxMAJqP.png

The areas circled in red are the Yellow Key pillar and the dummy sector. The Yellow Key pillar/dummy sector have a floor height of 2080 (and a ceiling height of 2128). Hitting the switch lowers the pillar to a height of 2032 (so the sector next to the dummy sector has a floor height of 2024).

The area circled in yellow is where the dummy sector was previously located when the switch wasn't working. Did the sector just need some "personal space" in order to work?

[Memfis]

This monster does seem to be too close to the surrounding walls: http://i.imgur.com/qA436MO.png
See if it will work if you delete him and move the dummy stuff back to the original position. Sometimes sectors refuse to move when some nearby monster is too close to a wall or another monster.

[Never_Again]

Walls and other monsters have nothing to do floors failing to lower. That is easy to verify, which is what I did this morning.

peach freak, PM me a link to both the working and the non-functional versions, it's a curious little puzzle.

[Memfis]

Example for -complevel 3.

neis-nomove.wad: linedef 666 doesn't make sector 51 move, linedef 59 doesn't close sector 44.
neis-move.wad: this is neis-nomove.wad with things 40, 41, 47, 48, 54, 55, 61 and 62 removed. Both actions work now.

[peach freak]

Memfis appears to be right. I moved the dummy sector back to its non-working spot, and it stopped working again. I then restarted the level and killed the Hell Knight in that tight closet before hitting the switch. With the Hell Knight dead, hitting the switch lowered the pillar.

Never_Again, I sent you the WADs if you want to screw around with it.

[tomatoKetchup]

I see you're using Doom Builder.

Have you tried to rebuild the nodes using the Node Viewer plugin, maybe that might fix the issue?

[Never_Again]

Rebuilding the nodes doesn't change anything.

Thank you for the link, PF. My screwing around with your WAD resulted in this thread: comp_floors voodoo in Source Ports. Let's see what the programmers have to say on the subject.

I posted the link to a slimmed-down version of your WAD in that thread, hope you don't mind. I'll remove it promptly if you do.

[peach freak]

It's alright, go ahead.