Opinions on "Toss-Drop"

[Alex S.]

I was thinking a bit about the various things that source ports change in terms of appearance and gameplay, then the thought of toss-drop came to mind. In the official engine releases, toss-drop was first introduced with Heretic and later Hexen and Quake also used this animation style. I'm pretty sure it was a design choice intended to accomplish two things: First, it makes it obvious to the player that a fallen enemy has dropped some goody. Second, it serves to separate the fallen loot from the dead enemy making it easier to pick up. That said, I'm a bit of a vanilla purist. While I don't mind this effect being in ports like GZDoom, I personally don't feel like it belongs in Doom as it was not original. No biggie, I normally turn it off when I play GZDoom. Just curious what the rest of the community thinks. What are your opinions on toss-drop and various other Heretic-specific engine tweaks being backported to Doom?

[holaareola]

Always liked this ZDoomism. Toss-drop is a great coinage, I may nick this for an insult. YOU ABSOLUTE TOSS-DROP. Nice!

[Alex S.]

1 hour ago, holaareola said:

Toss-drop is a great coinage

I always called it that because that's what it is called in the engine. It would indeed make for a useful response in certain situations ;)

[Jayextee]

Thread not about post-nut depression. 0/10

[Nefelibeta]

It would be actually pretty cool to be able to implement stuff like that through dehacked.  the original one is... I don't know, a chaingun appears out of nowhere?

[Alex S.]

2 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

Thread not about post-nut depression. 0/10

While I appreciate the sarcasm and its resulting chuckles, it would be awesome if I could get some legitimate discussion going here. A lot of the things we take for granted in Doom or things we see as "it's just that way" have some really interesting histories and backstories that rarely get covered in forum discussions.

[Alex S.]

Just now, Nefelibeta said:

It would be actually pretty cool to be able to implement stuff like that through dehacked.  the original one is... I don't know, a chaingun appears out of nowhere?

You cannot implement that via DeHackEd. DeHackEd only changes certain parameters that are already in the engine. Toss-drop was not in the original Doom executables so therefore there's nothing we can edit. Think of DeHackEd as a front-end to a hex editor.

 

That aside, it would be cool, I agree.

[Jayextee]

In which case, I like the effect. Visual communication is important to me as both an artist and game developer, and this little animation conveys a dropped item so much better than it merely appearing at the feet of a corpse.

[Alex S.]

1 minute ago, Jayextee said:

In which case, I like the effect. Visual communication is important to me as both an artist and game developer, and this little animation conveys a dropped item so much better than it merely appearing at the feet of a corpse.

I completely agree with that. The animation makes the loot drop be obvious in a smooth yet unobtrusive way. Helpful in heavy combat situations where you may only glance. It just seems more polished and a bit "classier" if I had to put a label on it.

[Nefelibeta]

1 minute ago, Alex S. said:

You cannot implement that via DeHackEd. DeHackEd only changes certain parameters that are already in the engine. Toss-drop was not in the original Doom executables so therefore there's nothing we can edit. Think of DeHackEd as a front-end to a hex editor.

 

That aside, it would be cool, I agree.

No, I mean MBF21 by that, there are new features there. I guess you can cast a fake arch-vile blast and make the weapons fly when the monsters died? That would be pretty difficult to implement I'd imagine.

[Alex S.]

1 minute ago, Nefelibeta said:

No, I mean MBF21 by that, there are new features there. I guess you can cast a fake arch-vile blast and make the weapons fly when the monsters died? That would be pretty difficult to implement I'd imagine.

Oh, well that's certainly not DeHackEd by any stretch. I understand you now.

[Solmyr]

I only like this mechanic on Shotgun Guys, as it's fitting for its death animation, aside from that, i feel the same about toss-drops they have no place in Doom, now on other Idtech 1 games like Heretic and Hexen, i wouldn't mind for the most part, except bosses, but only because it would look weird for a Maulotaur to toss-drop an Inferno Orb in the air because of their size, and their violent death animation.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Solmyr

[Alex S.]

6 minutes ago, Solmyr said:

it would look weird for a Maulotaur to toss-drop an Inferno Orb

Ok, I agree with everything you said but I had to go test that in vanilla Heretic 1.3 on DOS. The "toss" begins at the bottom of the enemy sprite so it doesn't look bad imho.

[Solmyr]

4 minutes ago, Alex S. said:

Ok, I agree with everything you said but I had to go test that in vanilla Heretic 1.3 on DOS. The "toss" begins at the bottom of the enemy sprite so it doesn't look bad imho.

Fair enough, imho it looks weird, but i was kinda hypocritical about that statement because i ignored the Golem which has a violent death animation as well.

[Ludi]

I personally prefer my weapons static, thank you >:)

 

In all seriousness, I prefer the vanilla way. The, admittedly, very cute ZDoom weapon drop animation just kinda feels like feature creep to me. I use Zandronum for deathmatch all the time, and it feels jarring considering how I normally use DSDA-Doom.

 

Regardless, you get the weapon either way, right? ;)

Edited August 2, 2022 by Sr_Ludicolo

[Ludi]

2 hours ago, holaareola said:

Always liked this ZDoomism. Toss-drop is a great coinage, I may nick this for an insult. YOU ABSOLUTE TOSS-DROP. Nice!

 

I'm gonna use this in deathmatch trash-talk, and no one can stop me!

[Alex S.]

27 minutes ago, Sr_Ludicolo said:

 

I'm gonna use this in deathmatch trash-talk, and no one can stop me!

This should be a thing. I love it!

[idbeholdME]

15 hours ago, Jayextee said:

In which case, I like the effect. Visual communication is important to me as both an artist and game developer, and this little animation conveys a dropped item so much better than it merely appearing at the feet of a corpse.

I'd argue that it's not necessary in Doom. Because it would take a brand new player maybe like 30 minutes tops to realize that "these three guys always drop this stuff". And from then on, the enemy simply dying is communication enough. If it was a chance, maybe I'd agree, but as it's guaranteed 100% of the time, it feels like a mostly pointless feature to me in Doom.

 

Thet being said, I play with it disabled. Didn't like it the moment I first saw it in ZDoom and disabled it immediately. Mostly just visual clutter.

Edited August 3, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Shepardus]

I must say, I had no idea what this thread was about until reading the replies.

 

I like it when playing gameplay mods that have random item drops, as it makes it clearer what's dropped, but prefer it off for vanilla gameplay.

 

Something I've wondered but never got around to testing: Under vanilla behavior, if a flying monster drops an item, does it appear immediately on the ground, or does it appear at the monster's height and drop to the ground?

Edited August 2, 2022 by Shepardus

[Alex S.]

2 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

Under vanilla behavior, if a flying monster drops an item, does it appear immediately on the ground, or does it appear at the monster's height and drop to the ground?

I always disable this in Doom. In vanilla Heretic, the "drop" happens at the last frame of an enemy's death animation. So, if a flying enemy were to drop items, the enemy would die, fall to the ground, play the rest of its death frames, then the loot would spawn at zero height with its little toss animation.

[nolongeramnion]

[blanked]

Edited November 29, 2023 by amnion

[heliumlamb]

it's welcome but not totally necessary visual feedback? not unnecessary either. it is definitely is something that is distinctly zdoom to me, which was how i played the dooms the most when i was young. i keep it on when using zdoom so i can remember that i am playing on zdoom.

Edited August 3, 2022 by heliumlamb

[Lippeth]

I turn it off because there's no chance of grunts not dropping their weapon/ammo, so I don't need or want any extra visual feedback for something that consistent, I already know they're going to drop it. It works for Heretic and mods that have a random drop chance because it's more of an event when monsters drop anything at all. Plus I guess I'm a purist in that regard and like the look of it just appearing at their corpse. It's part of the look that keeps me coming back to the game.

[out_of_service]

I like to keep the drop-toss on for that little extra pizazz.

[OniriA]

I've grown so accustomed to it since the Skulltag era (also being the first introduction into source ports with the longest time spent playing), that I don't even realize it's a source port thing anymore. 

 

It also made sense in a multiplayer setting, as Skulltag replicated alot of Quake style multiplayer features aswell. I guess the 'pinata' effect originated in Quake / Quake 3 Arena, something which the source ports added in as a feature as they strived to make Doom more advanced and feature rich in general. Especially in the 2000's

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

8 hours ago, Sr_Ludicolo said:

The, admittedly, very cute ZDoom weapon drop animation just kinda feels like feature creep to me.

I like it as well, but this is true. ZDoom in general has a lot of these small little features that don't change much on their own, but when combined alter a lot of things to change the feeling of the game. Then again, the point of ZDoom isn't to replicate the original game. I just wish some of the settings were disabled by default, as every time I've done a fresh install of GZ, I have to remember (and find) each of those little things in the settings menu.

[Ludi]

2 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

I like it as well, but this is true. ZDoom in general has a lot of these small little features that don't change much on their own, but when combined alter a lot of things to change the feeling of the game. Then again, the point of ZDoom isn't to replicate the original game. I just wish some of the settings were disabled by default, as every time I've done a fresh install of GZ, I have to remember (and find) each of those little things in the settings menu.

 

I agree. Considering how GZDoom is the most popular Doom port, I suppose most (sane) people don't give a shit haha

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

1 minute ago, Sr_Ludicolo said:

 

I agree. Considering how GZDoom is the most popular Doom port, I suppose most (sane) people don't give a shit haha

I just think it's funny that most tutorials on how to make games look better involve enabling/turning on a bunch of things, but every tutorial on how to make ZDoom look better mainly consists of a list of things to turn off. Then you have things that are mostly down to preference, like toss-drop here. I like it, but I don't understand why it's on by default. I feel like most extra/unnecessary features should be disabled by default.

[Ludi]

2 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

I just think it's funny that most tutorials on how to make games look better involve enabling/turning on a bunch of things, but every tutorial on how to make ZDoom look better mainly consists of a list of things to turn off. Then you have things that are mostly down to preference, like toss-drop here. I like it, but I don't understand why it's on by default. I feel like most extra/unnecessary features should be disabled by default.

 

I wish things like Trilinear filtering were turned off by default.

 

@Graf Zahl is there a specific reason for that? I feel like most people turn it off to begin with. I'm curious :)

[Blzut3]

1 hour ago, Sr_Ludicolo said:

I feel like most people turn it off to begin with.

Possibly the case here, but I'm fairly certain most people (as in from the entire pool of people who use GZDoom) by a wide margin never open the options menu and thus leave it on.

 

Your question gets asked a lot, the answer is some people find the lack of texture filtering just as distasteful as you find texture filtering.  One of those people is in the position to decide the defaults.