Eye of the Beholder

[Grazza]

I did a couple of fairly rough Max demos on Eye of the Beholder by Jon Landis (he made !pipe! and several of the levels in STRAIN).

Map06 and Map07 in 1:48 and 1:42 respectively. Map07 is probably the better one to watch, and was also less annoying to record. It also has better music (which you might well recognize).

[Opulent]

Very solid. Looks like you did the hard maps and left the easy ones... :)
not a lot of room to move on 6. gj

[Grazza]

Opulent said:

Looks like you did the hard maps and left the easy ones... :)

Hmmm. I thought I did the opposite, but that was just based on initial impressions of the maps. Map04 is easy for a speedrun (or even pacifist, heh), but might be a pain for Max. And map05 just looks very difficult.

Edit: Map04 Max isn't too tough, as it turns out. I've updated the zip with Max (1:31), Speed (0:07), Pacifist (0:09) and NM (0:07) demos on Map04.

[myk]

Ah, another "Arachnophobia." I was playing that map and I got zombified in the yellow key room. Good work on the demos. The eob7-142 demo desynchs after you kill the Spiderdemon, for some reason.

[Grazza]

myk said:
Ah, another "Arachnophobia."

True, but this one predates the ones in the well-known megawads.

I was playing that map and I got zombified in the yellow key room.

Funny - I never got zombified. Either I survived or the voodoo doll got killed outright. I presume the berserk packs are there to avoid zombification (if you pick them up, that is).

The eob7-142 demo desynchs after you kill the Spiderdemon, for some reason.

That's odd. It plays back OK for me (edit: without the deh) with Doom2.exe v1.9. Edit: Ah, I see, the dehacked patch makes a difference in some exes (but not prboom). I haven't tried loading the deh with v1.9, given that it is for 1.666. I don't know if the desync is due to behaviour differences or due to some side-effect of it being a patch for a different version. Do monsters respond differently to semi-invisible monsters? That would explain the infighting working differently.

Incidentally, I loaded up ye olde 1.666 just to see what the dehacked patch is meant to do, and it makes the hell knights only semi-invisible (spectre-style), so no big gameplay differences (unless they are in dark areas). From the text-file I wasn't sure if it made them completely invisible.

[myk]

Oh, I see what was up... I had applied the patch, using v1.9... the patch itself works on the latest version, it seems; at least it does make the Hell Knights semi-invisible. Now I played it back using standard Doom2 and it was fine.

[Grazza]

It seems the semi-invisible Hell Knights are enough to cause the desync. I made a little deh patch for v1.9 that made just that change, and the same desync occurred with Eternity. In Prboom (both 2.2.4 and 2.3.0) the HKs remained visible, and the demo played back OK. Well, I said prboom still has deh issues - this is a clear demonstration, I guess.

Ho hum. I'll stick to not using the deh and amend the text-files.