Icon of Sin Line 55

[BG213]

Examining some Doom II maps in Slade I came across something odd. There is a totally disconnected and inaccessible line out in the void called Line 55. It has no specials and doesn't seem to serve any purpose. Anyone with more experience than me with map design (basically nearly everyone on here) care to speculate what this thing is doing?

[Dark Pulse]

5 hours ago, BG213 said:

Examining some Doom II maps in Slade I came across something odd. There is a totally disconnected and inaccessible line out in the void called Line 55. It has no specials and doesn't seem to serve any purpose. Anyone with more experience than me with map design (basically nearly everyone on here) care to speculate what this thing is doing?

The community presumption is that it's a line that was part of an earlier iteration of the level and it was simply not deleted by mistake when the level was reworked.

 

As there's no Doom II betas (unlike Doom) though, we may never know.

[ChopBlock223]

We do actually have a beta build level set of Doom 2, as well as a couple of scrap individual levels, and it's pretty interesting to look at, with how earlier versions of Doom 2's levels looked, and some which were entirely replaced. Doomkid has a video where he plays through some of them with an old leaked beta .exe of Doom 2. I think he stopped as the game crashed, but I'm 99% sure it's because the maps had Doom 1 textures applied, and some beta ones, both which would be easy to add (I think it was Downtown, and it wss looking for those open brick window textures). Otherwise it was finalized Doom 2 assets, being basically a hypothetical piecemeal way of experiencing beta Doom 2.

 

Don't think that Icon Of Sin was in that version of the levelset yet though.

[Dark Pulse]

4 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

We do actually have a beta build level set of Doom 2, as well as a couple of scrap individual levels, and it's pretty interesting to look at, with how earlier versions of Doom 2's levels looked, and some which were entirely replaced. Doomkid has a video where he plays through some of them with an old leaked beta .exe of Doom 2. I think he stopped as the game crashed, but I'm 99% sure it's because the maps had Doom 1 textures applied, and some beta ones, both which would be easy to add (I think it was Downtown, and it wss looking for those open brick window textures). Otherwise it was finalized Doom 2 assets, being basically a hypothetical piecemeal way of experiencing beta Doom 2.

 

Don't think that Icon Of Sin was in that version of the levelset yet though.

This I did not know. Got any further info on this where I can look into it?

[ChopBlock223]

3 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

This I did not know. Got any further info on this where I can look into it?

https://www.wad-archive.com/wad/Doom-2-as-of-July-29th-1994-1

May or may not want to load doom.wad as a pwad, or something like that, to put back some flats and patches removed from doom2.wad.

There's also those missing brickwindow textures, go open beta Downtown to see what name they have, then add in the open ones from the beta dump with that name.

 

There's also some deleted linedef specials applied in a couple of places, ergo they don't correspond to anything in the actual final code, so if you try to interact with a few things like that, the vanilla .exe and probably some ports, will crash.

Edited January 16, 2022 by ChopBlock223

[Faceman2000]

On 1/16/2022 at 5:19 PM, ChopBlock223 said:

There's also some deleted linedef specials applied in a couple of places, ergo they don't correspond to anything in the actual final code, so if you try to interact with a few things like that, the vanilla .exe and probably some ports, will crash.

I didn’t know about this. Is there any guess as to what actions were deleted?

[ChopBlock223]

No clue. I think they were already gone by the time of the leaked beta .exe (which probably doesn't actually line up with d2temp.wad, possibly that build of levels predates that build of the .exe)

Maybe the .exe could be reverse engineered and perhaps there's some clues in there, but you'd have to ask someone who's an actual programmer about that. Optionally, ask John Romero on Twitter.