*** The "ask a miscellaneous editing question" thread ***

[alowe]

1 hour ago, Gez said:

For altering level progression: MAPINFO. Specifically, you'll want one of the Next = EndGame.

 

Unfortunately, any MAPINFO solution will be port-specific since there aren't any universal standard. Originally it's a Hexen feature, so "purist" ports like PrBoom or Choco will never support it.

Thanks

[Matthias]

A question!

 

How to edit graphics in Vanilla? Let's say I export a TITLEPIC in Slade3 as .png, edit it in MS Paint, import it again to the wad via Slade3 and launch it in the modern ports, it looks ok... but in Vanilla/Chocolate/Crispy it does tuttifrutti.

 

Did I miss something?

[Edward850]

Sounds like you didn't convert it back into the Doom image format. Vanilla of course does not support PNGs. Right click the lump when imported and the option will be there. Also make sure it's still 320x200.

[Matthias]

I guess it works... I used "true color" insrtead of "doom gfx" something during the convert

 

 

[Matthias]

also do you know why it does the "lines" here

 

(I took a sky texture from TNT and put it into the Heretic

 

many thanks for all replies here and thank you Edward850

 

[Gez]

Heretic has a weird hack to its sky rendering code where the sky texture is defined to be 128 pixels tall, but rendered as if it were 200 pixels tall. It works in Heretic because the patch is 200 pixels tall. This extra height helps to support the up/down view, but they did it in a really weird way.

 

Anyways, if you use a 256x128 sky, what's happening is that it'll keep reading the columns past where they end, and that's why you've got these lines -- they're the sky texture patch column metadata that get read as part of the pixels of the previous column to get to 200 pixels in each column.

 

You need to make the patch at least 200 pixels tall.

[Matthias]

ok thanks a lot

 

Eventually I put there my own skype made in MS paint and it works :D

[Marscaleb]

Here's my  random question.
How does the hit detection work for the shotgun?

Since the shotgun spreads a collection of shot, it is hit-scanning multiple projectiles.  Do each of these individually count as a hit on the target, and thus each pellet does a small amount of damage?  Or is an object only capable of registering one hitscan damage on it in a frame, so even if an enemy only got hit by one pellet, it would count the same as getting hit by all of them?
How much damage does "one pellet" do?

[Edward850]

29 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

Since the shotgun spreads a collection of shot, it is hit-scanning multiple projectiles. 

You're mixing terminology there. Projectiles are not hitscans. A projectile is an actor that damages others on collision (i.e a rocket or plasma ball), and a hitscan is a line trace between points (it doesn't exist as an object and any action it takes is instant and has no persistence).

 

A shotgun fires 7 hitscans at a spread, going through a loop of trace->collide->damage for each hitscan. Each hitscan will deal 1d3*5 (one roll of 1-3 multiplied by 5), and while cumulatively this sounds like 105 total, you can't actually hit this number with the vanilla PRNG algorithm and playsim logic, as PRNG values are naturally scrambled and the order of operations with other tasks means that's not the only PRNG call each hitscan.

 

Since each hitscan has random spread is applied, damage will logically vary based on how many hitscans hit the actor, which you can already observe by seeing bullet puffs or blood spawn at the end of each shot. In fact the spawning and oberservation of these would have already given you most of this answer.

[Marscaleb]

4 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

You're mixing terminology there. Projectiles are not hitscans.

D'oh!  I should have caught that; I should have known better.

 

6 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

you can't actually hit this number with the vanilla PRNG algorithm and playsim logic, as PRNG values are naturally scrambled and the order of operations with other tasks means that's not the only PRNG call each hitscan.

 

I don't understand what this means.

Also, what about the super shotgun?

[Edward850]

16 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

I don't understand what this means.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

 

Basically Doom's PRNG table doesn't typically allow for two consecutive calls to be the same, and the damage isn't consecutive calls anyway due to other calculations such as spread and frame offsets, so the theoretical max damage is actually impossible with vanilla Doom.

 

16 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

Also, what about the super shotgun?

Exactly the same, but with vertical spread as well as horizontal, and 20 pellets.

Edited March 19, 2018 by Edward850

[Marscaleb]

(That psuedorandom article was really interesting to read.  I wonder how long games continued to use a table like that.)

Oohhhh, you mean that it is actually impossible for each of those random values to all be 3, that is, for each pellet to deliver the full 15 points of damage possible.  I was thinking you were talking about just getting hit by each pellet, as if to say that if a thing got hit by all seven pellets they would only incur damage from a few of those pellets.

 

So to sum up, the shotgun does indeed fire seven shots of a relatively small amount of damage, and an enemy gets damage for each shot that connects with them.  A full shell could theoretically deliver anywhere from 35 to 105, but realistically the fringes of that are not going to happen.
And the super shotgun's full load delivers 100 to 300.  Holy cow, that's crazy!

[Edward850]

30 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

And the super shotgun's full load delivers 100 to 300.  Holy cow, that's crazy!

With vanilla's PRNG, that's 150-225, favoring ~185-195. This is usually why competitive players prefer vanilla prng behavior over ZDoom's, as the damage range is much tighter.

[alowe]

I've noticed that the pellets seem to behave independently. For example, if you shoot from a shotgun at a wall from a fixed distance you can see 4 pellet impacts with a roughly fixed spread. Then change the wall to block 3 of them and leave a slit for the 4th and if the 4th pellet goes through the slit whatever is behind it will get hit.

 

The damage done seems to decrease slightly with distance. So a point blank shotgun to the face does more damage than hitting a large target with 4 successful pellets from a distance.

 

I say seems. Doesn't really matter what really happens. Only what seems to happen. Cause you're not going to stand there in the game for 30 minutes debating and calculating what actually happened.

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, alowe said:

I've noticed that the pellets seem to behave independently. For example, if you shoot from a shotgun at a wall from a fixed distance you can see 4 pellet impacts with a roughly fixed spread. Then change the wall to block 3 of them and leave a slit for the 4th and if the 4th pellet goes through the slit whatever is behind it will get hit.

Yes. That was indeed what was explained. They don't seem to, they do, each hitscan is independent with its own spread.

 

1 hour ago, alowe said:

The damage done seems to decrease slightly with distance. So a point blank shotgun to the face does more damage than hitting a large target with 4 successful pellets from a distance.

Nope. None of this is true at all. Damage is the same regardless of distance. What changes over distance is, again, the spread, causing some pellets to miss. Doom doesn't have imaginary hit detection like Wolf3D did, a hitscan that misses or hits you did so because its path did not reach you (sans blockmap collision issues, but that's a rather different topic).

 

I feel like I've just repeated what I already posted.

Edited March 19, 2018 by Edward850

[alowe]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

Yes. That was indeed what was explained. They don't seem to, each hitscan is independent with its own spread.

 

Nope. None of this is true at all. Damage is the same regardless of distance. What changes over distance is, again, the spread, causing some pellets to miss. Doom doesn't have imaginary hit detection like Wolf3D did, a hitscan that misses or hits you did so because its path did not reach you (sans blockmap collision issues, but that's a rather different topic).

 

I feel like I've just repeated what I already posted.

Well, I kinda like not knowing. Like real life, if you pump someone with a shotgun it might floor them or just spray them with pellets that mostly miss. Reminds me of a dashcam video of a cop where he pointblank offloads 9 shots at a guy and every one misses. Pulp Fiction!

[Xyzzу]

What do I need to do to remove the slight delay after every second shot of the Wolfenstein SS enemy in dehacked? I'm sure it has something to do with the extra attack frame the nazi has that the zombies don't.

 

Nevermind :)

Edited March 24, 2018 by Xyzzy01

[whirledtsar]

Is there a horizontal length limit for skies in vanilla/Boom Doom? I have a 512x128 sky and in GZDoom it's displayed right but in PrBoom+ only half of it is displayed so it doesn't tile. The wiki only mentions the 128 tall restriction but not a horizontal restriction.

[Kappes Buur]

6 hours ago, whirledtsar said:

Is there a horizontal length limit for skies in vanilla/Boom Doom? I have a 512x128 sky and in GZDoom it's displayed right but in PrBoom+ only half of it is displayed so it doesn't tile. The wiki only mentions the 128 tall restriction but not a horizontal restriction.

 

Sky images in the original DOOM games are 256x128 and tile horizontally.

When you look closely at the sky in-game, you can see how the sky repeats 4 times.

Your sky image is 512x128, so it will repeat twice. If it is not tiled perfectly then you will see a seam where it repeats. You can take it a step further and make the sky image 1024x128, in which case it will display as a non-repeating sky. But, again, it must tile horizontally to have no seam.

 

So, 1024x would be the largest you can go. You could make it larger than 128x in height, for example 1024x256, which would stretch the sky vertically, but that also shifts the ground reference and looks horrible.

 

You could break a 1024x128 into 4 256x128 patches between P_ markers and bring them in as a continuous sky by editing SKY1 or RSKY1, depending on Doom or Doom2, in the TEXTURE1 editor of Slade3.

 

 

Spoiler

 

Edited April 1, 2018 by Kappes Buur : added screenshot

[whirledtsar]

38 minutes ago, Kappes Buur said:

 

 

Thanks for the info, but it didn't help me solve the problem. I know it repeats horizontally, and the image itself tiles perfectly (as shown in the left red circle). And I have defined SKY1 as 512px long in texture1. But in-game it jumps from the end of the image to half-way through, instead of repeating the whole thing, as shown in the right red circle.

 

[Edward850]

18 minutes ago, whirledtsar said:

And I have defined SKY1 as 512px long in texture1.

You can either have it be 1024 wide or 256. There's no defined support for 512 or 768.

[whirledtsar]

1 minute ago, Edward850 said:

It either needs to be 1024 wide or 256. There's no defined support for 512 or 768.

Thanks, but it still isn't working. I now made the patch 1024x128 (by repeating the 512 image twice) and defined the texture as 1024 units long, but it still is only displayed as 256 units long in-game. It doesn't seem to have 1024 support either.

[Edward850]

Is it made out of 4 patches (well two in this case) of 256 units each? If you look at Kappes Buur's screenshot, you will notice his sky is a texture assembled out of 4 patches, so in essence you can't have a patch width exceed 256 wide.

[whirledtsar]

1 minute ago, Edward850 said:

Is it made out of 4 patches (well two in this case) of 256 units each?

Nope, one single 1024 long patch.

[Edward850]

Well then you need to reassemble it into 2 256 wide patches tiled to 4 in the texture. Each patch can't exceed 256 units.

[whirledtsar]

Just now, Edward850 said:

Well then you need to reassemble it into 2 256 wide patches tiled to 4 in the texture. Each patch can't exceed 256 units.

Thanks, did not know that.

[alowe]

That's a nice looking sky though. Reminds me of the sky in the intro from the Amiga game, Shadow of the Beast 2.

[Gez]

10 hours ago, Edward850 said:

You can either have it be 1024 wide or 256. There's no defined support for 512 or 768.

512 is perfectly possible (it'll repeat twice). Plutonia's SKY3 is 512x128.

[whirledtsar]

14 hours ago, alowe said:

That's a nice looking sky though. Reminds me of the sky in the intro from the Amiga game, Shadow of the Beast 2.

Yeah, it's pretty good-looking. Kinda like Doom II's sky1 but more photorealistic. It's from a pack called Mek's Box O Skies, originally 1024x256.

 

13 hours ago, Gez said:

512 is perfectly possible (it'll repeat twice). Plutonia's SKY3 is 512x128.

Oh, cool.

[wheresthebeef]

Does Line_SetPortal no longer work?

I've looked at several different tutorials and example maps explaining it, and not only can I not get them to work in my own map, but the sample maps don't work either.

Did a fresh install of GZDoom, they now work perfect.

Edited April 4, 2018 by wheresthebeef