Good Gravy

[AndrewB]

GG Incorporated has updated with three new reviews, and a bit of news concerning some projects:

Chris has sent me some updates to his Caverns of Darkness levels. As soon as James sends me the new Eternity codebase, we should finally be able to release it. Gaston should be uploading the Mordeth beta any moment now. As soon as it's up I'll be sure to report back on what I find, and as promised I'll try to get Gaston to slap some more screenshots up on the Mordeth site.

He also talks a bit about "Z-clipping," the Hexen-like feature that allows you to walk over and under objects, and the plans to implement it in Eternity and other projects.

[Guest NunoC]

Heretic already had Z-clipping...

[Guest jmurdoch]

Good Gravy

Sorry Andrew, you don't win the "Guess what the hell the GG in GG Inc. stands for" competition. And no, there are no conselation prizes.

Heretic already had Z-clipping...

Yep, Heretic was the first Doom engine based game or port to feature z-clipping. The Wings of Wrath would've been pretty useless otherwise :-)

[Quasar]

Interestingly enough though, about the only place in Heretic where the feature was really needed was in one of the episode 5 levels where you have to run on top of a row of barrels to get into two alcoves on the wall. Just about everywhere else, it was never really necessary to go over things :->

[Metabolist]

I get it! It's something to do with horses... or maybe not. ;-)

[Lüt]

Bah, Heretic needed Zclipping as much as Doom, and even moreso with it's Wings of Wrath.

[Doom]

Lüt, he obviously refers to how the maps are designed

as for DOOM; it clearly doesn't need it; as a matter of fact, it works quite well without it (engine mods, and their maps, being another matter)

[Quasar]

You're correct; I meant that the design of the maps never really took advantage of it with that one exception, in stark contrast to Hexen, for instance, which used things to make bridges, required you to jump on top of tree stumps and statues, etc.

Joel and I are negotiating on the extent to which Eternity will have z clipping. We've pretty much singled out two things that it should *not* have:

1. Only players should be able to initiate over/under movements -- enemies will still be clipped with infinite z height with respect to each other. This avoids problems like cacodemons flying up/down into each other and getting stuck, and keeps the gameplay from changing significantly.

2. Blast radius damage should not be z-clipped. In all except the tallest of rooms, DOOM's blast radius is already fairly modest IMO. In reality, a rocket blowing up anywhere in a room with you is going to hurt you pretty badly. Adding z-clipping to blast radius makes rockets vastly less effective.

Those are some ideas I have to improve it.