more Silly Vanilla Tricks™ have been discovered

[roadworx]

so, there's an interesting quirk in the doom engine regarding how sector movement actions work: if a monster is stuck in a ceiling of a sector (which will happen if the height of the monster is greater than that of the sector), any sectors with bounding boxes that overlap with that monster will be unable to move until that monster is no longer stuck, which likely means that it's dead. this was pointed out by @Inuk in the hell on earth discord. @Mikolah, who has a very bad habit of being unable to take five steps without stumbling across some strange new vanilla mapping trick that allows for things previously thought to be impossible, saw this and immediately did the thing.

 

i present to you: MIKOSTAGGER! or...something like that. he calls it "staggered movement", so that's what i'm calling it in this op lol. feel free to come up with a better name.

 

as you can see, mikolah figured out that you can use this odd little quirk to create staged and/or timed sector movements in vanilla in a way that's far more discrete than vanilla conveyors. it's quite easy to set up, as well. as he explained it:

 

Quote

ok so, there are two lines - one uses "floor lower to lowest" on the four pillars, the second one activates crushers

the crushers crush the monsters, which stand on sectors that are joined with the pillars pairwise - imp with the first one, caco with the second one, mancubus with the third one and baron with the fourth

when something inside a sector clips into the ceiling, the floor won't lower until that thing stops clipping into the ceiling

killing off the monsters stops them from clipping into the ceiling, allowing the floor to lower monsters have different health, so they end up dying in a staggered way, thus allowing the sectors to lower in a staggered way

if you don't understand that, then here's a test wad he provided as demonstration

staggered.rar

 

and to demonstrate the potential of this discovery, i made a shitty three-stage arena. there's a ton of stuff that could be done with this, especially if you use dehacked to create custom actors in order to get more precise timing

demo.rar

 

mind you that this trick doesn't work in zdoom-based ports, but all boom/mbf-based and limit-removing ports should run it properly provided your complevel is cl2. it now works if you use the compat_floormove mapinfo flag

 

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in other news...mikolah also found out that you can create raising floors with much faster speeds than normal using the donut linedef action. a donutvator. apparently, the donut special is busted beyond belief, and while it has some other quirks about it that you could maybe exploit, this one is probably the most practical one.

 

in vanilla doom, if a sector is moving, then nothing else can apply movement to it until it's over with. there is, however, an exception - the donut's raising sector. if you have an absolute shitload of tagged donut sectors - the parts in the donut that lower - inside of the sector that the donut raises, then it seems that each one adds to the speed of the raising sector. you can use this to create rising floors that go stupidly fast, as you can see here:

because the gif format sucks ass, it's a lot slower than it appears in-game. so here's a demonstration wad that gives a much clearer picture of how fast this can really go

donuts.rar

 

while this trick is a lot more niche than mikostagger, it is more compatible; this works in zdoom-based ports if you use the compat_floormove mapinfo flag. it'd make for a great space elevator imo.

Edited September 14, 2023 by roadworx

[Mikolah]

Thanks for neatly documenting my disjointed discord ramblings! I hope to see those tricks used in future maps :P

[Xaser]

Quick tip for folks looking to use this in a vanilla map: you can force complevel 2 in modern boomy ports by adding a COMPLVL lump, so it'll Just Work(tm) in those.

[besus]

wow the donut thing looks really cool ngl

[volleyvalley]

Looks really cool. Makes me wonder what other vanilla mapping tricks are yet undiscovered, waiting to be uncovered - big or small.

Edited September 14, 2023 by volleyvalley

[Xaser]

Mischief of the day: I re-read the title of this thread and the phrase "Silli Vanilli" popped into my head, so now it's in your head too. Have fun.

[slowfade]

Thanks for sharing the information, new vanilla stuff like this is always amazing. I'm especially impressed by the donutvator. I'm sure we'll be seeing both of these in the wild soon.

[Jayextee]

 

5 hours ago, roadworx said:

MIKOSTAGGER

 

Imagine not calling them Mikoplatforms.