Sliding gate in vanilla Heretic

[thebiomage]

Something I experimented on while working on a Heretic map. This emulates the sliding doors from Hexen using self referencing sectors and voodoo dolls. I used 4 "frames" for the opening animation, if you used more sectors it could be made smoother. It still has a small problem, if you don't run across the opened gate, you can fall into the invisible self referencing sectors. I've gotten rid of this problem before by surrounding each self referencing sector with another sector, I don't know if theres another better way to achieve it. Putting those extra sectors around these sectors makes the area very crowded and can make it hard to position the gate frames.

 

I don't have any proper means to capture footage of the opening, if someone could upload that it would be great. I've attached some pics and the test map itself below.

 

 

heretic_gate.rar

Edited December 21, 2022 by thebiomage
Updated map file

[ramon.dexter]

Umm, this effect is called swinging. Because, it, well, swings. The term 'sliding' is applied to movement from one side to other side on a linear path.

[thebiomage]

Fair enough, I just looked up doomwiki on Hexen and it mentioned sliding and rotating doors. I tried doing an actual sliding door in Heretic with a similar trick (doesn't have to make use of self referencing sectors). It would need some further adjustments as it looks a little borked from the other side, and would need a failsafe to close the door if you stand on top of it when it closes (you can return it to correct behavior by opening it again if its glitched open forever). I've updated the map file in the first post with the sliding door.

 

 

[Gothic]

Try enclosing the self referencing sectors inside a very narrow sector

If you intend this to work with vanilla heretic, try using Chocolate Heretic, because I tried it there and neither the wind or the scroll floor effects move the voodoo dolls, and there's a giant HOM at the door.

[thebiomage]

I edited the map by removing the 2nd voodoo doll and tying all the linedef actions into 1 voodoo doll. Now the sliding door is always synchronized on both sides. But if voodoo dolls are unaffected by wind effects in the original Heretic as Gothic said,  then this isn't worth any more looking into as both the gate and door 100% rely on wind effects moving voodoo dolls.

 

That's actually quite a big bummer, the wind effect + voodoo dolls allow for so many things and tricks you can do in maps. Knowing none of this is possible in the original sucks. I checked the compatibility options and couldn't find anything relating to this so I assumed this is how it worked in the original too.

[Gothic]

Actually, the voodoo dolls can move if they're damaged. Basically you can make a  Mikoportal but without exploiting the floor bug.

[thebiomage]

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Voodoo_doll

 

In Boom compatible source ports and Doomsday, as well as in Heretic, Hexen and Strife, voodoo dolls can be placed on conveyor belts and used to trigger walk linedefs. Through this, a limited form of scripting is possible, as the doll can trigger various actions in sequence. counter.wad demonstrates how this can be used to simulate the effects of electronic circuits by implementing a binary ripple counter composed of conveyor belts and voodoo dolls.

 

This information has to be incorrect then, that's where I first recall reading about voodoo dolls being able to be used to trigger linedefs in Heretic. I'm not very familiar with all the source ports, but voodoo dolls + wind effect should work in pretty much everything beyond vanilla / chocolate?