Why does "light blinks 1 sec" blink every 0,5 seconds?

[Gregor]

Can someone tell me why "Light blinks 1 sec" actually blink twice a second while "light blinks 0,5 sec" blinks exactly one per second? This is probably a dumb question. Bu shouldn't it be the other way around? Makes no sense to me.

 

My original question has been pretty much answered:

(So i want to understand why synchronized lights in vanilla Doom can still desync. I made a facsimile of E1M3 and i gave both the platform on which the blue key sits as well as the opening monster closet containing the imps sector type 12 (light blinks 0,5 sec synchronized). I also added an extra light sector on the eastern wall for comparison. At first the light sector on the eastern wall and the blue key platform blink in sync. However, when i grab the key and the monster closet opens, while the closet and the eastern wall blink in sync, the blinking of the blue key platform isn't synchronized with the other two sectors anymore. In a way it is, but it is on the off-beat to the other two, so to speak. Why does this happen and how do you get them synchronized (like it says on the box)?)

 

Edited August 26, 2022 by Gregor

[bofu]

This is just my guess, but: when a sector uses the blink or light glows effect, they use the light level of the lowest adjacent sector to dictate how they blink. If two sectors are adjacent to a sector of the same brightness level and themselves have the same brightness level, they should stay in sync. If the light level changes of one of those adjacent sectors, however, the blinking pattern will be different. If you want them to stay synchronized, you'll also need to make sure that each blinking sector's darkest adjacent sector has the same brightness level before the darkness level is changed, as well as after the darkness level is changed.

 

The lighting will really only be synchronized when both the original brightness level (the blinking sector's light level) and the destination brightness (the light level of the darkest adjacent sector) is the same for all the blinking sectors.

[Gregor]

32 minutes ago, bofu said:

The lighting will really only be synchronized when both the original brightness level (the blinking sector's light level) and the destination brightness (the light level of the darkest adjacent sector) is the same for all the blinking sectors.

 That's probably it. I forgot that the blue key platform is also tagged, along with most of the room, to switch brightness to 35. Still a bit of a strange behavior, especially since this condition for proper synchronization isn't mentioned in any documentation about sector types i could find.

Thanks a lot for the answer!

 

What about my second question? Any ideas?

[Jayextee]

2 hours ago, Gregor said:

could someone tell me why 0,5 blink lights actually blink slower than 1 sec blink lights?

If I had to hazard a guess, would this be due to the game logic running at 35 tics per second; a number not divisible by 2, so the resulting number would likely be rounded-up to the nearest integer number of tics per on/off state for the lighting, thus making it ever so slightly slower than the 1-second variant?

I don't know the source at all, so I could be a mile off here though.

[Gregor]

1 hour ago, Jayextee said:

If I had to hazard a guess, would this be due to the game logic running at 35 tics per second; a number not divisible by 2, so the resulting number would likely be rounded-up to the nearest integer number of tics per on/off state for the lighting, thus making it ever so slightly slower than the 1-second variant?

I don't know the source at all, so I could be a mile off here though.

 

Yeah, i don't know. Could be. What i find the most puzzling is that i can't find any info about this anywhere. The wiki doesn't go into any detail about it and searching on DW also didn't bring up any threads where this was previously clarified. As with all things Doom, i surely can't be the first one asking this.

[Gregor]

@Jayextee The thing is, "Blink 0,5 sec" blinks exactly once per second and "Blink 1 sec" exactly every 0,5 seconds. As you would expect, just the wrong way around.

[Gez]

21 hours ago, Gregor said:

Can someone tell me why "Light blinks 1 sec" actually blink twice a second while "light blinks 0,5 sec" blinks exactly one per second? This is probably a dumb question. Bu shouldn't it be the other way around? Makes no sense to me.

The simplest explanation is that the editor configuration accidentally got the two swapped...

[Gregor]

26 minutes ago, Gez said:

The simplest explanation is that the editor configuration accidentally got the two swapped...

Do u mean this "bug" is specific to UDB? Or just my version of it?

[Doomy__Doom]

22 minutes ago, Gregor said:

Do u mean this "bug" is specific to UDB? Or just my version of it?

The texts you see are mostly defined in plain text files under ...\Ultimate Doom Builder\Configurations\Includes\... that are shipped as part of installation. So for vanilla sector effects it'd be ...\Ultimate Doom Builder\Configurations\Includes\Doom_sectors.cfg

 

It's probably worth making a bug report on github or something, but in the meantime you can fix it by renaming the effects however you want to reflect actual behavior.

Edited August 27, 2022 by Doomy__Doom

[Gregor]

Thanks a lot. I don't have a github account but i checked with another more recent of version UDB and it also has the sector types mixed up. Whoopsie.

[Gez]

I created an issue for this: https://github.com/jewalky/UltimateDoomBuilder/issues/772

@boris