Was Final Doom designed for the teleport bug?

[Doomkid]

Went and sourced it right after making the post, haha. I knew I wasn't making it up! Also, looks like they finally did get that "update from id", several years later and in a super limited form.. But at least it happened!

[Nikku4211]

8 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

To be fair though, it's not as obvious when people were only playing Doom for 3 years or so, and it's not easy to notice side by side as well. It's not like right now the -cl4 bugged teleporter has been written all over the place and so many people are speedrunning/making maps etc., which made this bug way more obvious than before.

 

Even then, I doubt noticing 'oh hey, the teleporters seem to teleport you in mid-air sometimes' is on the same level as, say, 'guys enemies are respawning in (0, 0) on Nightmare! difficulty.'.

 

Then again, maybe you can argue it's a 'hidden in plain sight' thing, but I definitely noticed it when playing TNT on Chocolate with -gameversion final. Yeah, I'm fine with playing in that mode because that's just how it was with the majority of Final Doom copies, it just made me curious.

 

22 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

There's literally a Final Doom text document lying around somewhere out there in the ether, where a member of Team TNT states in no uncertain terms that the teleport thing is a bug, and says something like "but it looks kinda cool".

 

Not exactly sure where to find the .txt file in question or which mapper specifically mentioned it, but yeah. I know most people are aware it was a bug, but it's actually stated definitively by a TNT alum... somewhere..

 

Edit: I knew I wasn't losing my marbles. https://web.archive.org/web/19981206162237/http://www.teamtnt.com/bugfixes.htm

 

So not only did they acknowledge it was a bug, but they also expected Id Software to fix it later, which I guess means they did not design the levels for the bug.

 

I wonder if by 'eventual update from Id', they were talking about the Id Anthology, a collector's edition of sorts that includes Final Doom.

 

Though that one introduces a bug in Ultimate Doom in Doom95 when you try to Read This! where the game crashes.

[GarrettChan]

5 minutes ago, Nikku4211 said:

Even then, I doubt noticing 'oh hey, the teleporters seem to teleport you in mid-air sometimes' is on the same level as, say, 'guys enemies are respawning in (0, 0) on Nightmare! difficulty.'.

 

Then again, maybe you can argue it's a 'hidden in plain sight' thing, but I definitely noticed it when playing TNT on Chocolate with -gameversion final. Yeah, I'm fine with playing in that mode because that's just how it was with the majority of Final Doom copies, it just made me curious.

 

Oh for sure, this also made me curious about why this happened as well. I mean, we're just guessing what happens back then, but probably even the playtesters themselves can't really remember what happened heh. Pretty appreciated about this thread being posted, as it definitely gave out quite a lot of information.

 

Haven't done any testing for "software issues", but from my testing experience for quite a lot of Doom maps, missing straightforward things happens from time to time.

 

Don't know whether I got the link Doomkid was talking about properly. It says 1998 on the top so I assume they discovered this after Final Doom is released?

[Doomkid]

19 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

Don't know whether I got the link Doomkid was talking about properly. It says 1998 on the top so I assume they discovered this after Final Doom is released?

What happens when you try to click the link, Garrett?

[GarrettChan]

58 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

What happens when you try to click the link, Garrett?

I assume that's the same archived page as JadingTsunami sent? It says 1998 Dec 06, so I assume that's the day of the post.

[Doomkid]

Whoops, I think I misunderstood your other post. When you said you didn’t get the link I posted, I interpreted that as “the page wouldn’t load” or something, but now I understand.

 

With the wording being that they had “gotten reports” of teleporters behaving weirdly, it strongly suggests that no one noticed the bug prior to shipping.

[SMG_Man]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

it strongly suggests that no one noticed the bug prior to shipping.

 

From the way Dario Casali talked about the process for making the Plutonia experiment during his gameplay videos, they (Dario/Milo/team TNT) weren't very involved with the more technical side of things over at id HQ. They basically made the levels and sent them in to id, who handled all the important details to make them into IWADs (for example: Dario mentioned that id Software were the ones who wrote the intermission screens for Plutonia.)

 

So with that in mind, it's very likely that all of the building and (more important for this subject) testing for the levels was done with whatever team TNT and the Casalis had available on hand - in other words, loading their levels as PWADs with the Doom II executable. So it's entirely possible that there wasn't extensive playtesting after the Final Doom exe was built, since the levels were already good to go at that point.

[ChopBlock223]

Makes me wonder, since some of the levels have visplane overflows in Vanilla (Mount Pain comes to mind), how did they build and playtest those? Just trying to avoid looking certain directions at times? Erecting temporary visplane blockers?

[Andromeda]

2 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

Makes me wonder, since some of the levels have visplane overflows in Vanilla (Mount Pain comes to mind), how did they build and playtest those? Just trying to avoid looking certain directions at times? Erecting temporary visplane blockers?

Probably the latter, I don't think they'd simply ignore a bug that would crash the game. The VPOs that remain were most likely not noticed during playtesting.

[ChopBlock223]

5 hours ago, Andromeda said:

Probably the latter, I don't think they'd simply ignore a bug that would crash the game. The VPOs that remain were most likely not noticed during playtesting.

Wait, so Final Doom actually still can get some VPOs even with Doom 95's raised static limits?

[Andromeda]

4 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

Wait, so Final Doom actually still can get some VPOs even with Doom 95's raised static limits?

Probably not, I thought you were talking about vanilla though :P

[ChopBlock223]

I'm thinking since Doom 95 didn't exist and wasn't available to them, it had to have been bothersome to skirt the visplane limits like that, erecting blockers, then tearing them down. Building nodes was a bitch in those days, imagine having no idea if they actually built like they should, because your target engine doesn't exist yet and the one you have to test it with crashes when you get to those parts.