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galileo31dos01

Sudden problem with Doom

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Shall I start by saying, I don't know what just happened, but I'll explain carefully.

 

So until yesterday I was playing a Doom pwad using Crispy Doom 3.5, everything was ok, all of the save/load states were working fine, and when I finnished my gameplay I turned off my laptop without any trouble. Ok, a few minutes ago I decided to turn on my laptop (didn't use it since yesterday) to keep playing the wad, so I entered the correct commands (crispy-doom 3.5 -iwad plutonia.wad -file urania.wad), run the game, load a state, and this is what I saw:

 

uranialvl18.png.85b5f9505e84594bb77614ed33f2f71e.png

This is the 18th map of Urania. There's supposed to be a beautiful scenario there, I saw that when I saved there previously, now it's this. Ok maybe I typed the wrong commands. So I tried again, as those are the commands I always used a nothing wrong happened. This time the game crashed instantly after selecting the same load state. It happened again when I selected another. Then, I reseted my laptop. Tried again, the same thing happened. Now take a look at map 32:

uranialvl32.png.9a5b672344a20a338a0b86543c18902e.png

No, it doesn't begin like this, the author can say. 

So, maybe it's something with the pwad. No it's not, take a look at this:

requiemlvl15.png.37ed84e3cd5a70eb61cee65177fd945a.png

Looks odd doesn't it? This is the 15th map of Requiem, loaded with the same savestate that never caused me any problems like this. 

So the problems are not in the wads, neither should be the port since I downloaded the updated version (4.0) and the same thing happens.

It only happens with save/load states, if I start a new game, the maps are fine. To clarify, all of the pwads are separated into their corresponding folders along with a copy of Crispy Doom in each folder.

 

I ask for help please, if it's something related to Crispy Doom which I severely doubt. If it happened to anyone of you... Or if you can just provide me a little help please :(

 

 

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You appear to have a coherent list of actors, but all spawned in the wrong location. How sure are you that you're loading the right save with the right PWAD?

 

In Doom, the original save system is fairly abstract. The only limitation to loading it is if the map at-least meets the requirements of the sidedef and sector indexes stored. It will otherwise happily load any save with technically any map, producing a similar result to what you see now with the actor list. Or crash from a memory overflow.

Edited by Edward850

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This might have been caused by Crispy Doom flipping the levels on april fool's day.

 

I did my own test of saving on doom 2 map01 non-flipped, then i relaunched crispy with -fliplevels, and loaded the save, and I was stuck in the void, rather than at the correct starting position of the map. The monsters and things were in the wrong positions, too

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38 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

You appear to have a coherent list of actors, but all spawned in the wrong location. How sure are you that you're loading the right save with the right PWAD?

 

In Doom, the original save system is fairly abstract. The only limitation to loading it is if the map at-least meets the requirements of the sidedef and sector indexes stored. It will otherwise happily load any save with technically any map, producing a similar result to what you see now with the actor list. Or crash from a memory overflow.

Every PWAD I have is in its own folder with its corresponding savestates. Now the problem seemed to solve by itself, meaning I can play now normally with my savestates. I really don't know what could have provoked this, nor what could have solved it. Maybe it's something with my laptop, it's running slower and slower every day...

 

Nevertheless, thank you for the information

 

Quote

This might have been caused by Crispy Doom flipping the levels on april fool's day.

 

I did my own test of saving on doom 2 map01 non-flipped, then i relaunched crispy with -fliplevels, and loaded the save, and I was stuck in the void, rather than at the correct starting position of the map. The monsters and things were in the wrong positions, too

Oh this makes me hate this day even more, and it doesn't even exist in my country!! ARGH!!

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45 minutes ago, Mason. said:

This might have been caused by Crispy Doom flipping the levels on april fool's day.

I would sure hope not. Disrupting expected operation of a program as "a joke" on a timer or other non-user conditions is one of the key do-nots of software development. Especially in this case as it would mean for a day your saves were useless, or will become useless (even if the saves worked properly, it's still fairly annoying to now have a save that doesn't fit standard operation anymore).

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Why so serious? ;)

 

Sorry I messed up restoring savegames with flipped levels. I will fix this, so people will get less upset on April 1st 2018. ;)

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Now I just wish this forum had Discord-style emoji reactions, because I feel like that post deserves both a :thinking: and a :poop:.

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2 hours ago, bzzrak said:

Well I don't know, I had a good laugh. :]

Do some of you people even smile sometimes? It's not hard, try it, dammit.

If someone told you "when you smile, the world smiles with you," then they lied through their teeth.

 

As far as what actually happens, no, people only smile with you if what you're smiling at brings them joy, too. In fact, this may surprise you, but something that brings you joy could be someone someone else is either apathetic about or finds absolutely frustrating.

 

Yes, it turns out that different people are actually different. Shocking, I know.

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9 hours ago, fabian said:

Why so serious? ;)

The key problem here, as the thread itself demonstrates, is April Fool's is not an international holiday. It doesn't localise particularly well, and if your port doesn't follow expected operation during that day, some people will just think your port is busted and use another one.

 

Hell, some software engineers can very easily argue that it is busted. Any program that stops doing what the end user required it to do is a shitty program.

Edited by Edward850

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Honestly, after Fabian posted here, I just laughed a little bit. Yeah in my country there's no April's fool day, and this bug was totally unexpected for me. I'm not mad, sometimes Doom makes me laugh. I will keep using Crispy Doom for anything I can, so, no resentments.

 

 

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11 hours ago, fabian said:

Why so serious? ;)

 

Sorry I messed up restoring savegames with flipped levels. I will fix this, so people will get less upset on April 1st 2018. ;)

How about just don't flip levels? I personally don't find pranks to be funny, especially when they interfere with normal expected program behavior.

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I had a good laugh when someone posted about the maps being flipped in Crispy Doom's thread.

 

OK, inadvertently the savegames got screwed up for a day, oops. "Oh no, the professionalism of my hobby project is in doubt!"

 

Tsk tsk.

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12 hours ago, bzzrak said:

Do some of you people even smile sometimes? It's not hard, try it, dammit.

It's hard when you haven't been able to directly put a smile on your face for 5+ years.

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1 hour ago, VGA said:

stuff

I really have to wonder where the whole "it's just a prank" "oh okay carry on" without a second thought attitude comes from. Lack of empathy? Lack of critical thought over it? Both?

 

Passing something off as just a joke does not blunt any edges it has, as you can prove to yourself by "jokingly" stabbing someone with a steak knife. You can't say someone shouldn't be able to be hurt, or annoyed, or frustrated by your actions just because you said it was a "joke," and it just makes you look like a pompous asshole for trying it.

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This whole thread is hilarious and a perfect example of why April Fool's Day "pranks" in software are uniformly misguided.

 

Remember last year when Google added a "mic drop" thing to GMail and had to disable it after like one hour because it turned out to be an incredibly dumb idea to mess with people who were just trying to use the software normally?

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Funny bug. I don't think turning this on every April Fool's Day is a good idea, and the responses seen here are unsurprising to me. While it is of course all intended in good cheer, more and more people seem to be getting increasingly irritated by the April Fool's pranks that appear every year and you should bear in mind that that includes a segment of your user base. Most jokes have a limited shelf-life; I'd say people especially aren't going to find it funny if you pull the same thing again next year, and the next and the next and the next.

 

2 hours ago, Arctangent said:

I really have to wonder where the whole "it's just a prank" "oh okay carry on" without a second thought attitude comes from. Lack of empathy? Lack of critical thought over it? Both?

Your response seems a bit over the top and it's worth keeping some perspective and remembering that in the end, this is just a fan-made Doom source port. I do understand the frustration, though. But this bug does illustrate a more serious point that is a far more serious issue for software that is in wider use: when it's software that people use for work, jokes can have serious consequences.

 

That's why most April Fools "pranks" pulled by big tech companies nowadays tend to be really mild, silly and not particularly funny - they have to be because there's a chance of serious consequences otherwise. The GMail mic drop is a good example of how poorly-considered jokes can go badly wrong (people literally got fired because they clicked the wrong button). An analogous example exists in how Microsoft software doesn't have Easter Eggs in it any more.

 

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Honestly, as far as the actual Crispy Doom thing, it seems like something that would be far better handled as an actual game mode that only affects new games. That way, even if it's automatically turned on on April Fools, save files won't be affected - loading a game that was made on another day will end up with normal maps, whereas loading a flipped map after April Fools will keep it flipped.

 

19 minutes ago, fraggle said:

Your response seems a bit over the top and it's worth keeping some perspective and remembering that in the end, this is just a fan-made Doom source port.

This doesn't really change anything, considering it has nothing to do with the software itself and more the "sweaty ... :) its jess joke, be laugh not med :)" attitude used to completely deflect the criticism.

Edited by Arctangent

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The reactions in this thread are depressive. The worst part? Comparing playing Doom in a Saturday to sending a mail to some customer in an office day.

 

Probably the joke could have been handled better (such as revealing the day eventually and letting the player escape the issue) just so you would not panic or delete Doom.

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It's the principle of the thing. Imagine if you woke up one day and suddenly Doomworld looked and acted bizarre for no apparent reason and things weren't working correctly and you weren't sure if something had gone wrong or if the developer had decided to purposely screw everything up just because of some marginally important calendar date... wait, scratch that...

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19 hours ago, fabian said:

Why so serious? ;)

 

Sorry I messed up restoring savegames with flipped levels. I will fix this, so people will get less upset on April 1st 2018. ;)

Aw. :(

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I think comparing Crispy Doom to a Microsoft professional product is a slightly harsh comparison. Easter eggs are fine as long as they don't cause any issues. For every Mic Drop debacle, Google has a hundred successful little Easter Eggs (Do A Barrel Roll never ceases to amuse). Just don't have them go wrong!

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Maybe both sides could be made happy by making it an optional holiday mode, set off by default? Perhaps other holidays could have special things too, Halloween could automatically set all lighting to be much darker, St Patricks Day could replace some of the enemies with that old Leprechaun skin from Legacy (Unless a DEHACKED patch is loaded), etc. I'm sure a bunch of creative ideas could be come up with.

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What some people here do not seem to understand is what constitutes a prank and what not.

Pranks need to be harmless, without any consequences.

 

Altering the behavior of a product - be it something serious or 'just' a game - is not harmless because you never know what people are doing with a program. Even if farfetched, imagine someone wants to use Crispy Doom to run some critical presentation (or, say, just demo some speedruns or stuff) and suddendly, without warning, everything is in the wrong place and nothing works. Such ill-conceived 'jokes' can do a lot of harm.

 

On the other side, in one of the games I had worked on, there was one character that got dressed as Santa Claus when the game was launched in the week around Christmas. It was purely visual and completely harmless and did not affect overall behavior at all. If you want to have a good laugh, that's the way to go, but not altering how content is presented without consent of either the user or the content creator. Such a "prank" is plain and simply out of place because it is far too broad and genuinely affects proper operation of the program for an entire day.

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I'm reminded of a thing Gears of War 2 decided to do at one point, where it changed its "horde mode" to only ever spawn one enemy type. Not for any specific day, just a couple of weeks long event they decided to do. There was no possible way to opt out or shut-off the change (without disconnecting the network), effectively forcing you to play the mode restricted to one enemy type.

 

I was quite cheesed off, to say the least. I cannot fathom any possible reason why they thought it was a good idea.

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5 hours ago, printz said:

The reactions in this thread are depressive. The worst part? Comparing playing Doom in a Saturday to sending a mail to some customer in an office day.

 

They also compared it to stabbing someone with a steak knife :D

 

 

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I do appreciate you mocking my personal experience with someone getting a free pass with a "joke" that went too far, I truly do.

 

Edit: Oh, and doing so while also proving you only read half of my post, anyway. ΩGJ, gov. >>b

Edited by Arctangent

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