What's an old vanilla mapping trick that most mappers today don't know of?

[JadingTsunami]

17 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

how does this work btw?

 

It's a trick based on Doom's original flat (ceiling/floor) rendering. Without getting too in-depth, in certain cases where textures are missing, Doom will "bleed" the floor/ceiling texture over the missing texture. That room is constructed to ensure the floor and ceiling bleed in such a way to give the impression of a room on top of another room.

 

OpenGL renderers like PrBoom/GLBoom and GZDoom try to approximate this behavior to cover the most common "mapping tricks" that use this behavior, but it would be very hard to recreate the effect exactly just given the differences on how OpenGL graphical "worlds" are constructed.

[Ravendesk]

Just now, JadingTsunami said:

 

It's a trick based on Doom's original flat (ceiling/floor) rendering. Without getting too in-depth, in certain cases where textures are missing, Doom will "bleed" the floor/ceiling texture over the missing texture. That room is constructed to ensure the floor and ceiling bleed in such a way to give the impression of a room on top of another room.

 

OpenGL renderers like PrBoom/GLBoom and GZDoom try to approximate this behavior to cover the most common "mapping tricks" that use this behavior, but it would be very hard to recreate the effect exactly just given the differences on how OpenGL graphical "worlds" are constructed.

What happens if you try to walk on the top floor?

[JadingTsunami]

7 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

What happens if you try to walk on the top floor?

 

In that particular case? You can't (the room is constructed to not allow that), but if you could you would fall through. It isn't solid.

 

It's possible to make it solid using other tricks, but I don't want to thread-jack so it probably should become another thread at this point.

[magicsofa]

11 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

Basically it seems highly unlikely if impossible for an ambush monster to enter it's pain state from a barrel while it's "asleep".

 

All of the imps in my example were set to ambush. Hell knight has a pretty low pain chance so I think you're just getting lucky. Keep in mind that the RNG table resets every time you start a new game, so if you repeat the test with the same sequencing, you can hit it the same way every attempt. The RNG table only advances to the next element when a function needs a random number. In a normal map there's usually a few active monsters or blinking lights to push it along, but an empty test map has nothing to offset the table, making it pretty easy to repeat the same rolls.

 

11 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

You can easily set up a system that hardly damages the monster at all to just slightly push it into the teleporter. Whether it's ambush or not, it won't wake up if you have a good system set up since the damage inflicted would never be enough to force a pain state.

 

Pain is never inflicted based on damage. Even a 0 damage attack can induce pain - it's just a straight probability per attack (monster pain chance/256)

 

11 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

Even so, I kinda don't think the pain state is very relevant to the main topic of using barrel conveyors to push monsters into teleport lines.

 

It is though... anyone using this trick needs to take into account that idle monsters will have a chance of walking around equal to their pain chance.

[Ravendesk]

28 minutes ago, JadingTsunami said:

 

In that particular case? You can't (the room is constructed to not allow that), but if you could you would fall through. It isn't solid.

 

It's possible to make it solid using other tricks, but I don't want to thread-jack so it probably should become another thread at this point.

Thank you! Yes this quite a large topic :)

[Amiga Angel]

I wish someone would make a youtube tutorial series that shows and explains every single one of the vanilla doom mapping tricks 

[Dusty_Rhodes]

1 hour ago, Ravendesk said:

What happens if you try to walk on the top floor?

If it makes it easier to understand, that "floor" you see isn't a floor at all. The real floor is at the the bottom. When there's missing textures done in the "right" way, it will just add the ceiling in floor textures. Think of it like this: you can have a texture in the middle of a line, this has been used for fake walls in the IWADs. You can walk right through that wall despite it seeming like it's solid. This is an exploit of Doom's renderer, rather than a feature (like midtextures), but it is practically similar. Texture does not equal collision. Hope that helps!

 

Come to think of it, I think Map29: Citadel at the Edge of Eternity does this in Community Chest. I've only beaten it once but I remember Finnks pointing out this one room - over - room trick used in it. I'll have to open it up in the editor and see how it's done.

[zokum]

On 11/30/2022 at 9:56 PM, Capellan said:

Similarly, you could create shallow 'pools' of liquid (say 8-16 deep) that the player waded through simply by having a lower sector inside a higher one and not putting a lower texture in.  The distortion of the HOM was barely noticeable on 1994 tech.

I have never seen anyone do deep water like this. If you just use a self-referencing sector it plays nice and there are no rendering problems. Your solutions sound janky as it would render two different floor texture spans.

[Capellan]

3 hours ago, zokum said:

I have never seen anyone do deep water like this. If you just use a self-referencing sector it plays nice and there are no rendering problems. Your solutions sound janky as it would render two different floor texture spans.

 

It was janky.

 

OTOH, monsters can't see into self-referencing sectors if they  are outside them e.g. The aptly named "Cesspool" in Memento Mori where they mill around uselessly, wondering where you are. With the janky approach, they can.

 

 

[ViolentBeetle]

7 hours ago, Capellan said:

OTOH, monsters can't see into self-referencing sectors if they  are outside them e.g. The aptly named "Cesspool" in Memento Mori where they mill around uselessly, wondering where you are. With the janky approach, they can.

They can, sometimes. It's a nodebuilder problem, not a technique problem. Some nodebuilders put them into "reject" table because they misjudge relative position of the sectors.

[Walter confetti]

Sky Doors

Multiple patched animated wall (or even floors!), like the one from The Unholy Trinity

Multiple patched and animated switches, like the one used in TNT

(All shown here)

Using animations and line tricks to create some environmental stuff like Flags and http://spinning fans

Window over window and other fake 3D structures such as this type of 3D bridge and Multiple 3D bridges

3D ceiling like here (2nd paragraph)

Room above room effect

Linguica Portals

[Arsinikk]

On 11/29/2022 at 4:16 AM, Arsinikk said:

4. You can stack multiple sector effects on top of one another. For example, you can have a secret sector and then walk over a "sector start blinking" line and then that secret sector also has a lighting effect.

Just wanted to clarify that this is actually incorrect for complevel 2 actually. I'm pretty sure you can still stack certain sector effects, but it's actually not good to apply a "sector start blinking" line to a secret sector, in that it'll cause the secret sector to be untaggable.

 

What's even more interesting is that I thought this was the case cuz the current stable build of DSDA-Doom actually emulates this behaviour in complevel 2 incorrectly, in that it'll still tag the secret. That's what led me to believe that Vanilla supported it. What's even more interesting is that old versions of DSDA-Doom and PrBoom+ actually emulate this CL2 behaviour correctly... It's just the latest stable build of DSDA-Doom that is demo inaccurate in this regard.

Edited December 2, 2022 by Arsinikk

[zokum]

On 12/2/2022 at 5:20 PM, Arsinikk said:

Just wanted to clarify that this is actually incorrect for complevel 2 actually. I'm pretty sure you can still stack certain sector effects, but it's actually not good to apply a "sector start blinking" line to a secret sector, in that it'll cause the secret sector to be untaggable.

 

What's even more interesting is that I thought this was the case cuz the current stable build of DSDA-Doom actually emulates this behaviour in complevel 2 incorrectly, in that it'll still tag the secret. That's what led me to believe that Vanilla supported it. What's even more interesting is that old versions of DSDA-Doom and PrBoom+ actually emulate this CL2 behaviour correctly... It's just the latest stable build of DSDA-Doom that is demo inaccurate in this regard.

DSDA is fairly vanilla accurate, but I haven't tested it rigorously myself, so they'll hopefully fix this. I was wondering about this one since in Doom a floor can only be one type. You could have it as secret, trigger the secret, and then make it start blinking, but that's not quite the same.

Having secret floors with a second property is fairly redundant though, since you rarely have no way of placing another sector with a type in the secret area. I suppose you could use blink + an inner self referencing sector covering most of it as the secret, but that would only really matter in ports that report secrets immediately.

[Doomkid]

On 12/3/2022 at 3:20 AM, Arsinikk said:

Just wanted to clarify that this is actually incorrect for complevel 2 actually. I'm pretty sure you can still stack certain sector effects, but it's actually not good to apply a "sector start blinking" line to a secret sector, in that it'll cause the secret sector to be untaggable.

 

Well found.. Many years ago I had some maps that weren't 100%able because of having the secret effect applied to sectors that were also set to lower/change texture later in the map, breaking their ability to actually be counted toward the secret tally.

 

After that, I decided to never do anything close to "stacking effects" ever again, and I'd still urge other vanilla mappers to consider it bad practice and avoid it. In this case though, it was super useful in finding an issue with DSDA, so that's pretty cool!

[joepallai]

Wasn't there a trick to make reversed scrolling using 1 unit wide lines in vanilla?  I keep thinking I saw that somewhere

[JadingTsunami]

9 minutes ago, joepallai said:

Wasn't there a trick to make reversed scrolling using 1 unit wide lines in vanilla?  I keep thinking I saw that somewhere

 

You might be thinking of this trick where you can create general-purpose displays in vanilla using 1-unit wide lines. It was originally seen in TRUCK.WAD.

[Roofi]

Replacing sound effects with quotes from your favourite movie 

 

Making a realistic replica of your workplace/school

 

 

[Uncle 80]

44 minutes ago, joepallai said:

Wasn't there a trick to make reversed scrolling using 1 unit wide lines in vanilla?  I keep thinking I saw that somewhere

 

Yeah, Ling made a demo wad of a reversed vanilla scroller about 10 years ago, as far as I can recall. Can't remember what it was called. It involved a heck of a lot of sidedefs and trickery for 1 reversed scrolling 64-unit wide wall :D

[Grain of Salt]

Hopefully no one's mentioned these already

- ghost PEs (you crush them fast enough that they become a blood splatter iirc)

- rev missiles deactivating one-time action lines

- picking up a key curtails an excessively long item pickup screen tint (but only once per key, lol)

- (this is a classic) outside of map15 and 31, secret exit action takes you to the last level you entered via the intermission screen (ie not loading or newgame) or map01 by default. You can do weird fun stuff with this but the fact that its affected by saving and loading makes it a bit untidy.

- I have a bug in a current map where a lift won't activate because doom apparently thinks a nearby monster is stuck in its ceiling, but if you kill this monster later the lift suddenly activates without any other interaction from the player... which you could probably use for something.

- bug I saw in prb cl2 in 2012 and have never been able to replicate, where exiting the level while doing other weird stuff makes you permanently invuln (but with no tint) on the next level :(

[Chainie]

Making voodoo doll pickup things after events. Like in begining of Plutonia map06, where you can grab ssg by walking under the skull cube.

[zokum]

On 12/2/2022 at 9:10 AM, ViolentBeetle said:

They can, sometimes. It's a nodebuilder problem, not a technique problem. Some nodebuilders put them into "reject" table because they misjudge relative position of the sectors.

The reason this most likely happens is that the sector is not neighbor any other sectors, and thus 'cannot' see into other sectors. This information is then used for the reject map generation.

Turning off the graph optimization in ZokumBSP and ZenNode should fix this edge case. A more intelligent fix would be to turn it off only on sectors that need it off. Shouldn't be too hard to code a simple detection algorithm. Use -rg- or something like that, look it up in the docs.

[Optimus]

I like to see the deep water effect, pretty nostalgic. But will break in some modern ports, and you can have real underwater in some ports, however nothing beats that feeling when I've first played some 90s WADs that did the trick, knowing how limited the engine was. Also bridges above bridges.

[Optimus]

On 11/29/2022 at 8:05 PM, Dusty_Rhodes said:

A small cosmetic one, a favorite of mine to throw out in vanilla levels I make.

 

Y'know what's nice about Boom? I can make the ceiling bright and the floor dark or vice versa! If only I could do that in something that runs with the original executable . . . .

But I actually can. Check out vanilla shadowcasting. It's a simple technique and I'm sure it's been used in wads, but I can't remember if I've ever seen it. Maybe (most likely, actually) in Eternal Doom. Anyway, onto the effect:

If I want a dark ceiling and bright floor, I'll make the bright sector and set its brightness level to 255. Then, make a self - referencing sector inside this. I try and just make them one unit apart. Make sure the ceiling has upper textures, or else this will HOM. Once textured, raise the ceiling nice and high. DON'T texture the the upper sides of the surrounding sector, only the part that's raised up. This will make the renderer fill in the missing texture with the surrounding flat and it's data; including light level. Just make sure the surrounding flats are the light level you desire on the ceiling.

 

Please tell me what wads have used this, I'm really curious.

 

I have tried something similar or almost,. when I have a pillar that I want to cast shadows from, I draw a sector that is the shadow projected on the floor and darken. But that will make the ceiling also dark. Which is fine if it's a complete pillar. But there were cases where I wanted to make a broken pillar where only the lower part is there, so I wanted the same shadow sector to be dark floor but bright ceiling. I think what I did was move the ceiling height of the shadow sector much much higher, then used a sky texture or maybe made the upper textures inside that ceiling hole invalid to have it fill with the nearby bright ceiling texture. It worked as I remember but recently I downloaded my map and played in gzdoom and I saw missing checkerboard textures there, damn!

[Sasunil bhotos]

21 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

Hopefully no one's mentioned these already

- ghost PEs (you crush them fast enough that they become a blood splatter iirc)

- rev missiles deactivating one-time action lines

- picking up a key curtails an excessively long item pickup screen tint (but only once per key, lol)

- (this is a classic) outside of map15 and 31, secret exit action takes you to the last level you entered via the intermission screen (ie not loading or newgame) or map01 by default. You can do weird fun stuff with this but the fact that its affected by saving and loading makes it a bit untidy.

- I have a bug in a current map where a lift won't activate because doom apparently thinks a nearby monster is stuck in its ceiling, but if you kill this monster later the lift suddenly activates without any other interaction from the player... which you could probably use for something.

- bug I saw in prb cl2 in 2012 and have never been able to replicate, where exiting the level while doing other weird stuff makes you permanently invuln (but with no tint) on the next level :(

Some of these stuff I already knew thanks to the excellent videos by decino.

 

[TheMightyWhoosh]

15 hours ago, Optimus said:

I like to see the deep water effect, pretty nostalgic. But will break in some modern ports, and you can have real underwater in some ports, however nothing beats that feeling when I've first played some 90s WADs that did the trick, knowing how limited the engine was. Also bridges above bridges.

I’ve used the vanilla deep water trick in a new map… Do you know which ports this effect breaks in? 

[Optimus]

13 hours ago, TheMightyWhoosh said:

I’ve used the vanilla deep water trick in a new map… Do you know which ports this effect breaks in? 

 

It failed in GZDoom for me. I also remember other WADs with that effect that sometimes work and sometimes fail. But could be other 3D accelerated ports also as they don't use visplanes like the software rendering. The effect is based on missing textures and bleeding floor filling over visplanes. GPU based ports like GZDoom or possibly others don't use visplanes so they have to kinda predict it.

 

Recently I tried to implement it in my wad for Maximum Doomworld project 2021, Valmanic Dreams

And initially I was testing on GZDoom and had to move or flip linedefs in certain ways to make it work (but to be honest, I still don't know completely the mechanics, so I would try random things till I get it). Then I realized it broke on vanilla Doom, so I tried to make it work in vanilla. Then I broke it again in GZDoom, and vice versa, I was trying different things till I got it working on both. But too much trial and error and not enough knowledge of how to do it right. The final version works on everything I tested thought, from vanilla and chocolate to GZDoom. Although there is still a bit of difference of how sprites are clipped against the water when they die.

 

[Stabbey]

On 12/7/2022 at 2:19 PM, Optimus said:

 

It failed in GZDoom for me. I also remember other WADs with that effect that sometimes work and sometimes fail. But could be other 3D accelerated ports also as they don't use visplanes like the software rendering. The effect is based on missing textures and bleeding floor filling over visplanes. GPU based ports like GZDoom or possibly others don't use visplanes so they have to kinda predict it.

 

Recently I tried to implement it in my wad for Maximum Doomworld project 2021, Valmanic Dreams

And initially I was testing on GZDoom and had to move or flip linedefs in certain ways to make it work (but to be honest, I still don't know completely the mechanics, so I would try random things till I get it). Then I realized it broke on vanilla Doom, so I tried to make it work in vanilla. Then I broke it again in GZDoom, and vice versa, I was trying different things till I got it working on both. But too much trial and error and not enough knowledge of how to do it right. The final version works on everything I tested thought, from vanilla and chocolate to GZDoom. Although there is still a bit of difference of how sprites are clipped against the water when they die.

 

 

I recently released a map which used the deep water trick - across multiple sectors, even - and it worked on GZDoom. It took me a bit of time to get it to work, I had some issues along the way, but I managed it - even pulling off a part where there was apparently no water at first. Something I learned was that you couldn't have blockades which were of the lowering-floor variety, as that would glitch out the deep water. The raising ceiling type of block did work.

 

On 11/29/2022 at 5:03 AM, RDETalus said:

 

Another way to remove sound from moving sectors is to join it with a sector that is very far away from the play area. The sound will be emitted at a location between the two joined sectors, and if the player is far away from the midpoint of the two joined sectors, he won't hear it move

I just tried that on my sandbox map, to test a lift which doesn't move until a sector beside it gets lowered. On the GZDoom port, I can still hear the sound even with the lift joined with a sector on the far side of the map. Is there a guideline on how far away it needs to be before it's silent, or is the silent sector thing something altered by GZDoom?

Edited December 9, 2022 by Stabbey
deep water stuff

[Shepardus]

5 hours ago, Stabbey said:

I just tried that on my sandbox map, to test a lift which doesn't move until a sector beside it gets lowered. On the GZDoom port, I can still hear the sound even with the lift joined with a sector on the far side of the map. Is there a guideline on how far away it needs to be before it's silent, or is the silent sector thing something altered by GZDoom?

GZDoom changes where the origin of the sound is for a moving sector. You can read this post for a more in-depth explanation:

 

[Stabbey]

38 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

GZDoom changes where the origin of the sound is for a moving sector. You can read this post for a more in-depth explanation:

 

 

I figured that was the case. It's fine, I just wanted to see if it worked the same way in GZDoom, and it does not. It's fine, I can use a different effect for the trap, which is probably a better idea anyway.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Stabbey

[Gradius]

20 hours ago, Stabbey said:

I figured that was the case. It's fine, I just wanted to see if it worked the same way in GZDoom, and it does not. It's fine, I can use a different effect for the trap, which is probably a better idea anyway.

 

I would just throw a mapinfo in there with the 'compat_sectorsounds' flag set to 1. No need to abandon the effect when you can just tell GZDoom to disable that behaviour.