Things about Doom you just found out

The physical manual that I have (from the Depths of Doom Trilogy) erroneously states that the Berserk Pack's duration is "Time Based".

Edit: The digital manuals for The Collector's Edition (which I also own) and Steam releases also make the same mistake (this is mentioned on the Wiki).

In Brady Games' "Totally Unauthorized Guide to Doom II", the Berserk Pack description does not explicitly state the item's duration, but the book does correctly state that the IDBEHOLDS cheat (described as "Similar to Berzek") lasts 1 level.

I'm sure that by "time" they meant "the whole level".

printz said:

I knew the berserk lasts the entire level, from the very beginning, for two reasons:

This is the "Things about Doom you just found out" thread, not the "lord your superior doom knowledge over lesser mortals" thread. God knows there's enough of those already.

If DW ever had articles again a good one would be "Top X Misconceptions About Doom". Let's see:

5) Green and blue armor act the same except for their number value
4) The berserk pack wears off when the red tint does
3) Doom wasn't designed for mouse control
2) The BFG's functionality in general
1) Doom is 2D

Hah, that's a pretty accurate list!

I do slightly wonder about the mouse control one though. While mouse control was available from the very start, were the IWADs (especially Doom 1) really designed with it in mind?

I've always been of the suspicion that id knew most people would play with just the keyboard (especially given the default controls don't have strafe bound to any permanent keys, so are clearly keyboard only focused), and that's one of the reasons why the original campaigns seem so easy compared to modern maps.

So it's more that Doom was designed for keyboards, but supported mouse control. Unless there's some quote from Romero that completely contradicts everything I've just propositioned? :)

Keyboard-only controls in an action game coming out when Doom did (or when Wolf3D did, for that matter!) were a necessary/practical concession to what was at the time a rapidly-expanding market, not a matter of design focus around which the game was 'ideally' balanced. Official (id-sanctioned) strategy guides and similar contemporary documents on the game are pretty illustrative on this point, nearly unanimously citing mouse + keyboard controls as the most versatile/enjoyable way of controlling the action (particularly in deathmatch, to the relatively limited extent such documents covered that mode back then), while equally unanimously ruling that flight-style joysticks were cumbersome and 'less than ideal' at best.

A notable exception to this was Ed Dille in Prima's Doom II guide, though, who IIRC wrote the whole walkthrough/strategy portions of the book from a conspicuously keyboard-only perspective, no doubt indicative of his own personal preferences.

Bauul said:

So it's more that Doom was designed for keyboards, but supported mouse control. Unless there's some quote from Romero that completely contradicts everything I've just propositioned? :)

Linguica said:

http://i.imgur.com/AoIk1cP.png

You learn something new everyday.

Counterpoint: novert was a third-party program instead of a built-in feature.

Linguica said:

http://i.imgur.com/AoIk1cP.png

I bloody knew it!

There's always a Romero quote!

Gez said:

Counterpoint: novert was a third-party program instead of a built-in feature.

Countercounterpoint: Wolf3D and Doom were among the first FPSes. The first RTSes had godawful unit selection tools. Early Civ games had RNG in absolutely nonsensical places for a strategy game. Game designers of new genres tend to not have the foresight required to make the intended method of play actually seem like the intended method of play when compared to modern games.

Linguica said:

If DW ever had articles again a good one would be "Top X Misconceptions About Doom". Let's see:

5) Green and blue armor act the same except for their number value
4) The berserk pack wears off when the red tint does
3) Doom wasn't designed for mouse control
2) The BFG's functionality in general
1) Doom is 2D

shit... the only one i know is the 4th one...

Linguica said:

If DW ever had articles again a good one would be "Top X Misconceptions About Doom". Let's see:

5) Green and blue armor act the same except for their number value
4) The berserk pack wears off when the red tint does
3) Doom wasn't designed for mouse control
2) The BFG's functionality in general
1) Doom is 2D

Couple more, not quite as common but still come up often enough:

- Doom could not be played online until mods that came later allowed for it
- Doom was built from Wolf3D's engine
- Duke Nukem was built from Doom in some way
- Trent Reznor made sound effects for classic Doom (probably rumored due to his involvement with Quake and having made SFX for D3 that went unused)
- Doom caused Columbine! (everyone here knows that's bs, but loads of people out there still parrot this shit 18 years later)
- The SSG shoots twice the pellets of the single barrel

There's other commonly unknown shit too such as SR50 being possible since 0.99 (a surprising number of morons debate this shit in servers after they lose)

Bauul said:

Hah, that's a pretty accurate list!

I do slightly wonder about the mouse control one though. While mouse control was available from the very start, were the IWADs (especially Doom 1) really designed with it in mind?

I've always been of the suspicion that id knew most people would play with just the keyboard (especially given the default controls don't have strafe bound to any permanent keys, so are clearly keyboard only focused), and that's one of the reasons why the original campaigns seem so easy compared to modern maps.

So it's more that Doom was designed for keyboards, but supported mouse control. Unless there's some quote from Romero that completely contradicts everything I've just propositioned? :)

Haven't you watched the demos that play after Doom boots up? Certainly looks like mouse+Keyb action to me. No quoting the master to know it was designed for using the mouse.

Doom's keyboard controls weren't all that different from Wolf3Ds. Same mechanics, same limitations (just with a more realistic acceleration/momentum system). They were perfect for the kind of action/freedom of movement the player was supposed to have anyway (move freely on the XY plane, pivot in place, no direct height control, not even jumping). And no freeview or camera slanting/rotation around the X or Y axis.

Compared to the controls found in earlier 3D titles, especially those 3D construction kit games, they were the epitome of perfection and efficiency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HueBfvy_f8

Doomkid said:

- The SSG shoots twice the pellets of the single barrel

Also false:
- The SSG shoots thrice the pellets of the single barrel

It's a close approximation, but the real deal is one short from that. (Single shotty: 7 pellets; supershotty: 20 pellets.)

Gez said:

Also false:
- The SSG shoots thrice the pellets of the single barrel

It's a close approximation, but the real deal is one short from that. (Single shotty: 7 pellets; supershotty: 20 pellets.)

so...why does it shoot 3x the amount of pellets the single-barrel? did anyone on the dev team ever say why?

roadworx said:

so...why does it shoot 3x the amount of pellets the single-barrel? did anyone on the dev team ever say why?

Probably gameplay balancing.

At 1:35 a whole bunch of doom sound effects can be heard.

roadworx said:

so...why does it shoot 3x the amount of pellets the single-barrel? did anyone on the dev team ever say why?

Probably because the brutal, sawed off barrels also propel the wadding and/or pieces of the cartridge so hard that they do as much damage as a pelled. Yeah, been watching too many TAOFLEDERMAUS vids.

Found two things:

1- When you when no clipping in Doom v1.2, momentum would still be applied to the player (explosions, projects, hitscans). In Doom v1.9, when you are no clipping, stuff that would normally apply a momentum to you don't.

2- Before Doom2 v1.6, you could trigger this error message when shoting at a gun activated switch with the SSG.

Gez said:

Also false:
- The SSG shoots thrice the pellets of the single barrel

It's a close approximation, but the real deal is one short from that. (Single shotty: 7 pellets; supershotty: 20 pellets.)

Isn't that more or less the same amount of damage as a direct hit from the Rocket Launcher? I noticed that enemies requiring multiple rockets (5 for a Baron) die in the same amount of direct SSG hits.

Yes, it's 0—128 (blast damage) + 20*random(1,8).

axdoom1 said:

2- Before Doom2 v1.6, you could trigger this error message when shooting at a gun activated switch with the SSG.

How could you though, since the first released version of Doom II was v1.666?

There still would be ways of overflowing the button array, just not with the (non-existent) SSG. FWIW, the value of the MAXBUTTONS constant is 16... so not an awful lot, if you consider that buttons take 35 tics to expire and release the array slot they occupy. So you could obtain an overflow even with e.g. 3 players shooting at the same switch with the regular SG, or with a DEHACKED modified shotgun that shoots faster, or with the chainsaw even.

Also, exactly what did Doom II past v1.666 do to prevent this situation? There's no indication the value of MAXBUTTONS was any different in the past, and since the source code is based off the v1.9 version, and presumably fixes it, I don't see anything special in place to prevent it, at least not in P_StartButton.

Maes said:

How could you though, since the first released version of Doom II was v1.666?

with some work, I think versions 1.3 - 1.5 are all able to run Doom II to varying degrees (the earliest ones have lots of trouble though since most of the new actors haven't been implemented yet). Of course, this is pretty meaningless for the average user, and I guess this is just a case where they caught that bug before release and fixed it up.

InsanityBringer said:

with some work, I think versions 1.3 - 1.5 are all able to run Doom II to varying degrees (the earliest ones have lots of trouble though since most of the new actors haven't been implemented yet).

Any data backing these claims? That's the first time I ever heard of that. It's well-known that by the time of v1.9 Doom II, Doom and Ultimate Doom shared the same executable, but until then the codebases and the exes were pretty much separate, and certainly there weren't "hidden" Doom II functionalities in pre-v1.666, like implemented Doom II codepointers, linedef actions, weapons/attacks etc.

There ARE unused Doom II codepointers in Ultimate Doom (e.g. SSG) that can be accessed by DEHAckED, but we're talking about v1.9 at that point, not v1.3 or v1.5.

InsanityBringer said:

Of course, this is pretty meaningless for the average user, and I guess this is just a case where they caught that bug before release and fixed it up.

Only that judging by the only evidence that we have -the source code-, they didn't fix anything: having more than 16 buttons activated at the same time (not necessarily triggered on the same tic) would still trigger that error, so a SSG blast from a single player in a single tic would still trigger it. Unless the actual limit for MAXBUTTONS was higher in the released doom2.exe at some point. As it stands, it's another static limit which should be properly removed by other means.

The Cutting Room Floor has a lot of documentation on running Doom Ii on earlier versions

Doom 1.4 Beta
Doom 1.6 Beta

axdoom1 said:

Before Doom2 v1.6, you could trigger this error message when shoting at a gun activated switch with the SSG.

I gave this a go myself, and got the 1.6 beta working with a modified Doom2.wad. Just to confirm, I SSG'd the shootable switch on MAP08 and it crashed with "P_StartButton: no button slots left!"

Still, there's no evidence that the button slot limit was "fixed" in the released source code/linuxdoom v1.10. Is that yet another difference between it and the DOS executables?