A Tiny Detail in E1M2

[Ashley_Pomeroy]

Digging through my hard drive I found my old copy of the first shareware release of Doom, so I decided to fire up DOSBox and check out all the things that were altered in later releases of the game (e.g. the lonesome medkit on the ground outside the yellow armour in E1M1). Exploring E1M2 I noticed something that's actually still present in the game even today:

 

 

It's in the dark maze in E1M2, opposite the shoot-wall secret. There's a little rectangular sector embedded in the wall. It doesn't have any function and you can't enter it.

 

My hunch is that it was supposed to lower when you entered the secret, but I'm none the wiser. It's consistently present in all the maps I can find of the level over the years, perhaps because people simply ported them without having the authorisation to change the layout. Obviously at least some people at Id or Activision or Bethseda etc must have glanced at once and thought "what does that do? I have no idea, but let's leave it in just in case".

 

It's in the version of the WAD that comes with the Doom 3 BFG edition; I can't tell if it's in the recreated version for Doom (2016) - you can't edit the maps, and , but the wall textures are slightly misaligned. It sticks out because I can't remember anything like it in the other classic maps.

[Impboy4]

That sector is there to give the room the proper light glow effect from 255 to 0 brightness actually.

[Empyre]

I guess they forgot to flag those linedefs Hidden.

[geo]

A tiny detail.... I never even noticed the big detail of red lights!

[rodster]

2 hours ago, Impboy4 said:

That sector is there to give the room the proper light glow effect from 255 to 0 brightness actually.

is this true? Tbh, I still don't quite understand how the "light glow" effect works :D The only light effect that works for me is the "flickering". :D I mean, when I map something and try out different light effects, the "flickering" is the only one that seems to work for me.

[BigDickBzzrak]

3 hours ago, rodster said:

is this true? Tbh, I still don't quite understand how the "light glow" effect works :D The only light effect that works for me is the "flickering". :D I mean, when I map something and try out different light effects, the "flickering" is the only one that seems to work for me.

so if you give type 8 to a sector, its brighness will glow between its set brightness and the lowest brightness of all the adjacent sectors. You're welcome :]

 

EDIT: forgot to mention one more discovery that I made: the brighness can be over 255 and even negative, and that can be used to manipulate the glowing effect.

Edited August 26, 2017 by bzzrak

[rodster]

@bzzrak Thank you! :)

[Nevander]

7 hours ago, Impboy4 said:

That sector is there to give the room the proper light glow effect from 255 to 0 brightness actually.

Cool. I was wondering what that sector was for.