Really weird bug in Doom map

[thebiomage]

I've been working on this experimental map for Doom 2 which tries to implement some RPG elements into the original game (friendly demons, quests, stores, etc) while sticking to the original map format. I've used sectors to simulate NPCs talking, and I've been kind of worried if there's a limit on number of sectors where the engine craps itself, because the file size for the map has been growing steadily and doom builder is starting to take a while to save the map.

 

Now I just noticed that an area of the map in the southwest corner that I hadn't edited in a while has somehow become corrupted. It appears the game thinks the sectors height is 0 as you can't pass through an area you should be able to, and if you noclip you get pushed into the ground. I thought maybe it was a glitched out self-refencing sector in the area, but even removing all of those doesn't seem to fix it. As a quick test I tried removing some of the text in the map (to reduce number of sectors) and that seemed to fix the issue as far as I could tell. I've attached the work-in-progress map here if anyone with more knowledge on this kind of stuff knows what's going on and if I'm reaching some sort of limit on sectors or something else here. I've also attached a pic that shows the path to the problematic area.

 

Edited February 8, 2024 by thebiomage

[boris]

What nodebuilder are you using? Seems to work fine if the nodes are rebuilt with ZDBSP.

 

The text is wreaking havoc on your sidedef count. You're close to the soft limit of 65, which is very high for the size and perceived complexity of the map. I'd recommend to convert the geometry to textures and use those instead.

[Naarok0fkor]

Divide the offending sector in smaller areas. It usually works for me. Use the linedef flag "Not shown on map" to keep the illusion of a single big sector...

[thebiomage]

2 hours ago, boris said:

What nodebuilder are you using? Seems to work fine if the nodes are rebuilt with ZDBSP.

 

The text is wreaking havoc on your sidedef count. You're close to the soft limit of 65, which is very high for the size and perceived complexity of the map. I'd recommend to convert the geometry to textures and use those instead.

Huh, I'll be honest I never even noticed the nodebuilder settings in doom builder before. I tried saving the map with ZDBSP (normal, no reject) and not only did the problem disappear, the map size shrunk from 7.5mb to 4.5mb. That's kinda crazy. I was using ZenNode (normal) before. There must be some really big difference in how they handle these types of situations with a lot of small sectors / linedefs bunched up together like that.

 

But yeah I'm thinking the idea of just baking the texts into the floor textures is probably a good idea, even if this nodebuilder change resolved the issue for now. With more text added this way who knows if it would return even in ZDBSP.

 

I wonder if the issue had something to do with blockmap, I recall reading on doomwiki that "The blockmap is also not static, having an origin point on the southwest corner of the map." This problem happened in the southwest area of the map, I had not been working on that section for a long time and it was just suddenly appearing there. When I removed some sectors the affected area seemed to shrink too, and if I removed a lot of the text (anywhere on the map, I tested multiple locations) it just went away.

Edited January 26, 2024 by thebiomage

[Stabbey]

If you need letters and numbers for signs, how about this and this? Just give credit for their use in the readme file.