What's your thought about monster pop-up?

Depends on how it's used and how frequently. Generally speaking though it feels like a dirty, hacky, cheap shitty way to add "difficulty" when a bunch of monsters just suddenly pop up in a neatly arranged block formation at only 5ft away.

I'm actually feeling that I'm in the right mood, so I'll try to explain my thoughts regarding the matter, especially seeing that my own work was mentioned as an offending case.

I personally admit that years of playing user-generated content with "hardcore mode on" have irreversibly changed my perception of the game. I mean, I still can appreciate the scenery and admire the atmospheric vibe created by various factors combined, yet at the same time the whole process for me is basically an arcade where I should proceed from point A to point B while surviving ambushes and dissipating squads/hordes/throngs of moving obstacles that have different endurance, attacks and are also capable to get distracted and killed by each other, to player's advantage. I assure you all that this view of the game is perfectly viable, as its speed is intentionally very fast and everything is quite arcade-y from the very beginning, so there's nothing wrong with this side of the game having a strong, even determining accent. I believe it actually becomes understandable that immersion and - more notably - realism in regards to how everything works and how said obstacles appear on said path between the said points is absolutely irrelevant, what really matters here is how fun and interesting the resulting encounters are, and how smartly they are put together. I also have absolutely nothing against foreknowledge and don't share the common notion of "fair" gameplay it seems, the arcades may be totally different, easy and boring or very fast and punishing, I understand that and can stand dick moves and vicious scenarios as long as they're an organic part of the overall experience. Obviously, it requires some taste to adjust properly, without going overboard anywhere (or at least too much), but I see no problems with any of these aspects per se, as long as the author has a clearly visible notion of what he's willing to achieve.

In this context, I don't care at all if the enemies rise up SUDDENLY in front of me, they're just another bunch of obstacles that are there to try and deter my progression. I want my adventure to be fun and interesting, not boring and half-baked, and as long as I'm satisfied in that regard - I don't care which means are being used to achieve these goals and how demanding they are.

It doesn't phase me while playing, but I don't like instant pop-ups. The effect of surprise only works on the very first playthrough. Beyond that, unless your memory fails you, it's just a hacky way to teleport monsters. It's less of a bother to set up than instant teleports, and in some situations, if you absolutely want to block a path, they're required... But I find myself questioning the "absolute" part of that supposed "need" to block off the player.

I can't recall having seen a map where action 19 couldn't be replaced by instant teleports or a normal, fast rise from floor action, without hurting the overall flow. It's a bit like sr50 jumps rather than sr40, player teleports to inconvenient locations, overuse of middle textures obscuring visibility, unescapable pits... I can see the point that refraining from using these tricks might mean less variety; but you can get so much depth out of baseline Doom, I just don't feel the benefit/cost ratio works in favor of hacky stuff.

Requiem pulls this trick at least once; it's rather frustrating, because it's entirely possible to fall into the pop-up pits before they've been triggered, and there isn't any way out, short of getting eaten by whatever's in them. (Okay, sure, that's not exactly a problem in vanilla, where the monsters are infinitely tall...)

Demonologist said:

I also have absolutely nothing against foreknowledge and don't share the common notion of "fair" gameplay it seems

I don't get peoples insistence that foreknowledge is bad. Tricks in a map that may kill you if you don't already know its coming? Sure, why not.

Depends on what kind of map you're going for. There are more ways to design a Doom level than just running and gunning all the time.

Mechazawa said:

I don't get peoples insistence that foreknowledge is bad. Tricks in a map that may kill you if you don't already know its coming? Sure, why not.

I've no comment on whether gameplay that requires foreknowledge is objectively good or bad, but as to why people might not like it?

• It diminishes the value of broadly applicable gameplay skills (situational awareness, fast and accurate reactions) by increasing the value of specific knowledge (survive trap x by doing thing y).
  
• It reduces the player's opportunities to find creative solutions and tackle traps and encounters in unexpected ways, since a trap that will kill any player without foreknowledge can generally only be avoided by specific actions.
  
• It inflates the required play time of a level without providing any additional content, by requiring the player to replay from their last save (or from the start of the level) up to the point where they died and gained the knowledge to avoid that death.

Consider musicians. One may have expert knowledge of a limited number of pieces and be able to play them flawlessly; another might be a fantastic sight-reader; a third may excel at improvisation and jam sessions. Doom's player base is similar.

I'll rather pop player up/down to the monsters level, or have a wall pop away in front of player. Both can be used to open up the level more.. and both have usually been the results of no other line type can raise/lower the sectors to the right height, or the other slower effects are so slow that player would have to wait... and could almost just walk away without the monsters having any chance of hitting player.

It's okay but I don't like when the map has a bug where you can reach the popup monsters' illusiopit before one of the action lines is triggered.

TimeOfDeath said:

yup

btw, is the raising floor truly instant? Why can I see the monster through the floor when it raises? 19.wad

It's instant because the trick is that you lower a floor to a higher height, so the floor thinker will believe it has overshot its destination and immediately adjust.

In the reverse direction, you can raise a floor to a lower height and it'll be instant as well.

And yet sometimes the monster indeed can be seen through the floor when it raises, as if it is almost instant but not quite.

It can be redundant if overused, just like everything else.

TimeOfDeath said:

yup

btw, is the raising floor truly instant? Why can I see the monster through the floor when it raises? 19.wad

I'm not seeing it. Maybe it's because I have a super fast setup that's blatantly not designed for Doom or it's my 60hz monitor, but I don't see it raise through the floor.

Memfis said:

And yet sometimes the monster indeed can be seen through the floor when it raises, as if it is almost instant but not quite.

Maybe you're using a port that interpolates monster movement?

Suppose your floor is at height 64, you're lowering it at a speed of 16, to a height of 128.

Here's what happens in the code:

//
// Move a plane (floor or ceiling) and check for crushing
//
result_e
T_MovePlane
( sector_t*	sector,
  fixed_t	speed,
  fixed_t	dest,
  boolean	crush,
  int		floorOrCeiling,
  int		direction )
{
    boolean	flag;
    fixed_t	lastpos;
	
    switch(floorOrCeiling)
    {
      case 0:
	// FLOOR
	switch(direction)
	{
	  case -1:
	    // DOWN
	    if (sector->floorheight - speed < dest)
	    {
		lastpos = sector->floorheight;
		sector->floorheight = dest;
		flag = P_ChangeSector(sector,crush);
		if (flag == true)
		{
		    sector->floorheight =lastpos;
		    P_ChangeSector(sector,crush);
		    //return crushed;
		}
		return pastdest;

64 - 16 < 128, I think we will agree on that.
sector->floorheight is directly set to 128.
We look if there's some crushing that takes place (but there shouldn't be) and return that we've gone past the dest, which will remove the thinker from the sector. This means that this thinker will have only one tic to act: it'll adjust sector heights and be removed. It is not going to have an effect spread on two tics or more, it'll be fully and completely instant.

The only way in which you'd see a movement is if you're using a port with uncapped frame rate and interpolation, then the interpolation might spread the movement across sub-tic stretches of time. But play with capped 35 FPS and no interpolation, it'll be completely instant.

Ah, I see, that might be it. I recently switched to capped framerate, let's see if it happens again.

Ok thanks, after capping the framerate in prboom-plus you can't see the monster raise through the floor any more.

Do not like pop-up monsters.
Do not like teleporting monsters.
Do not like monster closets.
Some players seem to want to take Doom back to the older arcade play where your twitch response, and playing through over and over, make all the difference.

These things kill the experience for other styles of play.
It is hard to be a sniper, or sneaker, when the monster won't appear until you step
on its trigger line, and when it does appear you are FORCED to dance to the level mappers tricks. No thanks.

To me everything is how I attack the position. How I choose plans, conserve, position myself, explore, and execute the demolition of the monsters. Taking that away from me with tricks kills my play, and concentrates on the mapper having their fun instead.

Tricks "kill" the game for you? Come on, they enhance it in favor of good things like challenge, excitement, variety, interestingness. Sufficiently skilled players can still have the game relatively under their own control even if the mapper plays against them. Being a "sufficiently skilled player" may depend on his reflexes and knowledge of game mechanics, but it also heavily depends on the map itself, how much difficult it is for each playstyle. The point of the game is overcoming an opposition, and this opposition should better be a worthy opposition to the player, otherwise the game would become boring. "Good gameplay" is ultimately *not* about "tricks" or "game mechanics" themselves, but about their pairing with a particular player who enjoys dealing with them, no matter if he enjoys having control or if he enjoys being punished. I thought that you would agree at least with this. Being punished isn't up to your likings, and your skill doesn't allow you to feel like having the situation under control when you're ambushed by an unexpected group of enemies - but players whose skills are high-enough to handle surprise ambushes while keeping their cool, those would appreciate presence of said ambushes and "tricks" that make them interesting, because said tricks would *not* pose a punishment for them at all, but rather a fun exercise.

wesleyjohnson said:

Do not like pop-up monsters.
Do not like teleporting monsters.
Do not like monster closets.

How else would monsters be introduced? You literally cannot have any surprises unless you do one of those 3 things. Either the monsters are already on the map and you move them to the player somehow, you remove a barrier between them, or you use scripts to teleport them in.

If you can see and plan every encounter then what is the point?

Maybe you just don't like doom, doom is about traps.

wesleyjohnson has his "model universe" theory where any map that uses any non-"realistic" mechanic is automatically bad.

The irony is that his distinction is arbitrary as hell.

You could make a map that uses none of those things that is way more "fast-twitch"- and foreknowledge-dependent (and difficult in general) than a typical easygoing map with a few not-particularly-lethal surprise traps.

I like monster pop-up for many of the reasons rdwpa mentioned, but also for the fact that it allows the player to see the environment before the proverbial sh*t hits the fan. Also, it prevents players from sniping and door-camping to greatness.

Run in head first and forget how to retreat; this is the only way.

Also, I'm all for sneaking in Doom, but if the map isn't specifically built for sneaking with many sound-blocking lines (which many authors apparently don't use *scratches head*), good luck sneaking through the level. Sneaking for Doom only amounts to a better position to die in. First offensive action you take is gonna wake everything within hearing range up. This ain't fucking Call of Doody.

I didn't realize how annoying monster surprise parties were until I played my first oblige map yesterday. Used tastefully, and with careful moderation, I think they can add a certain "OH SHIT" quality to a map...but there's a not-so-fine line between what's ok and what oblige thinks is ok. I personally haven't even thought of adding any such monster closets to my map(s) because they'd detract from the feeling i'm going for...and I think they edge closer to a kind of knee-jerk gameplay I'm intentionally avoiding.

They're also not really too reliably good for gameplay in general I think....the player's health and ammo stats are practically always variable, and in regular combat, the player can overcome whatever condition they're in by carefully executing a strategic attack...but if there's a room full of barons of hell about to make friends with your insides at an arm's reach very suddenly, there's really not much you can do to deepen the gameplay...they're just...all up in your business all of a sudden and if you can't run anywhere, you're just going to die a rage-quitty death. On the other hand, if you execute monster closets too far away...as oblige sometimes does to keep things surprising, I guess...you can stand there and either see or hear a door open, and there's the group of angry snortly noises heading your way, then the player has as much freedom to run and dogfight with the monsters as they could otherwise, so why use a monster closet/warp-in at all?

Excepting the case you've had to double-back over some part of the map..and now need to repopulate with beasties (file under "tasteful use") I can't think of a ton of other great uses for this...though I'm sure there have to be some.

I find them annoying, and untasteful. If there is no foreshadowing whatsoever, to have a monster instantly pop up is crap. I'll play hard maps, I'm ok with that, but monster pop up doesn't give you a chance to be dynamic. it takes away from the game in a cheap way I find, I think it would be the same thing to have a lift that blends into the floor that smashes you into a ceiling, for what? When you use force like that as any kind of game dev/Dungeon Master you take away options, and less options most of the time(that arn't your fault) the less fun a game is(for me at least).

I prefer to see innovative and semirealistic ways to put the player in trouble, not just traps. For example lowering lifts to deliver monsters, or delivering the player to the monsters through a lift or a teleport.

What about monsters closets with action lineft 1, where the monsters wake up by sound and open the door themselves?

See, I like just about any set up where the monsters' arrival is delayed, so stuff like that, Deadwing, I think is a really sweet touch to add to a map. It breaks up the monotony and absolute worst-case scenario, it allows the player to see the terrain before being thrown head-first into a Hell of sorts.

Also, like VGA mentioned, basic lifts->ambushes are another cool, innovative way to present your monsters to the player.

Delivering the player through a port to monsters is another decent way to do it, it you want to disorient the player at the same time by thrusting him into a new landscape.

I think memorization is one of the worst gameplay mechanics ever conceived. It's the reason I gradually stopped playing 8- and 16-bit console games. All other elements of gameplay become subordinate to memorization. Megaman and Castlevania are the most heartbreaking examples of this for me.

Monster popups just exercise my F9 key.

Why do you think Muad'dib went crazy?

I dislike having demons pop-up out of nowhere in front of my face with no clues. Cheap BS.

Though I don't mind it if they pop-up somewhere else.