Things about Doom you just found out

[LigH]

In the (german) walkthrough (or rather: log book) I wrote, you could meet Harris, get the bow with poisoned arrows -- and use it immediately (which makes leaving the tavern harder but not impossible, like in the governor's office if you stole the Chalice early).

And after visiting Warden Montag, the governor doesn't care about you anymore, he tells you, so you don't need to face him again after possibly stealing the Chalice now ... maybe ... but I wonder if that is the intended plot. I wish more people would have reported their experiences.

Maybe that is worth an own thread, not to pollute this one too much.

[scifista42]

I've just found out this:



The image on the left is actual BOSSBACK patch, a lump inside Doom2.wad, as seen in the ending of Doom 2. The image on the right is a collage of the Icon of Sin textures used in MAP30 of Doom 2. Click the pictures to view them in separate tabs of your browser, so that you can compare them easily while changing the tabs. They're very similar indeed, but the face seems to be brighter in the IOS textures and there's also a little change in pixels on the left.

[axdoomer]

I knew about this for a long time, but I saw this and it was very apparent. Looks like a bug that was never documented before. We should baptize it.

[40oz]

scifista42 said:

I've just found out this:



The image on the left is actual BOSSBACK patch, a lump inside Doom2.wad, as seen in the ending of Doom 2. The image on the right is a collage of the Icon of Sin textures used in MAP30 of Doom 2. Click the pictures to view them in separate tabs of your browser, so that you can compare them easily while changing the tabs. They're very similar indeed, but the face seems to be brighter in the IOS textures and there's also a little change in pixels on the left.

Maybe Adrian was asked to bump up the contrast on it for the textures because it was too hard to see in MAP30's dim lighting.

ALSO

In vanilla doom, there are linedef types:

S1 Red Door Open Stay (fast)
SR Red Door Open Stay (fast)
S1 Yellow Door Open Stay (fast)
SR Yellow Door Open Stay (fast)
S1 Blue Door Open Stay (fast)

But for whatever reason there is no SR Blue Door Open Stay (fast).

In order to make the map I'm working on not break in coop, I had to rotate all the keys in the map just to get around this.

[40oz]

In vanilla doom, there are linedef types:

S1 Red Door Open Stay (fast)
SR Red Door Open Stay (fast)
S1 Yellow Door Open Stay (fast)
SR Yellow Door Open Stay (fast)
S1 Blue Door Open Stay (fast)

But for whatever reason there is no SR Blue Door Open Stay (fast).

In order to make the map I'm working on not break in coop, I had to rotate all the keys in the map just to get around this.

[Da Werecat]

40oz said:

Maybe Adrian was asked to bump up the contrast on it for the textures because it was too hard to see in MAP30's dim lighting.

Judging by the browns and greys, the bright version was the first.

It was probably dimmed for the cast sequence to make the monsters in front of it "pop" more.

[Jartapran]

40oz said:

But for whatever reason there is no SR Blue Door Open Stay (fast).

Linedef type #99 seems to fill your criteria.

[scifista42]

40oz said:

But for whatever reason there is no SR Blue Door Open Stay (fast).

There is, it's just a little above the other 5 actions, making it easy to overlook. ;)

[The_MártonJános]

Jartapran said:

Linedef type #99 seems to fill your criteria.

Now I can't stop laughing at poor 40oz that he actually made all the ado with the keys for nothing.

[NuMetalManiak]

scifista42 said:

There is, it's just a little above the other 5 actions, making it easy to overlook. ;)

it seems pretty darn weird that the SR Blue Door Open Stay is way above the other S1 and SR key functions though. I always wondered why it was ordered that way when I first saw it.

also hello Jartapran. :D

[LigH]

Well, there is so little obvious order in the linedef effects, one may believe they were created in the order they were used in maps in early development, not planned before that much.

[scifista42]

LigH said:

Well, there is so little obvious order in the linedef effects, one may believe they were created in the order they were used in maps in early development, not planned before that much.

They were actually programmed in the order they were used in maps in early development. :)

[damerell]

sector666 said:

I found out from watching the Double Fine Dev Plays with Romero that in Mt. Erebus you're supposed to rocket jump to get to the secret exit. I had never done that nor even heard that mentioned before. It's possible to strafe jump to get to it which is what I had always done.

The two invulnerabilities on the level are well-positioned to make a run for the secret exit.

[scifista42]

sector666 said:

I found out from watching the Double Fine Dev Plays with Romero that in Mt. Erebus you're supposed to rocket jump to get to the secret exit. I had never done that nor even heard that mentioned before. It's possible to strafe jump to get to it which is what I had always done.

In fact, the Doom developers were not aware that straferunning existed while they were making the game!

wiki said:
According to John Romero, straferunning did not come about until almost a year after Doom's release, and was unanticipated in the design of the original levels. (See Doom Level History.)

There's a non-functional link to Doom Level History on the wiki, here is a correct one: Doom Level History. By the way, since I've already mentioned this interesting page, here are its higher-level pages, Planet ROME.RO, Lee Killough's Legendary DOOM archive, and Doom History.

[YellowRibbon]

An archvile will infight another archvile sometimes.

[scifista42]

YellowRibbon said:

An archvile will infight another archvile sometimes.

No, he won't. Archviles are hardcoded so that they cannot become a target of another monster. Not even other Archviles, of course.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Archvile#Combat_characteristics

Their blast attack, when successfully performed on the Archvile's target, can hurt other enemies (including Archviles) near this target - but they will never retaliate and infight against the Archvile.

[scifista42]

A thing about Heretic I've just found out: When I use the Tome of Power to upgrade my weapons, the Necromancer's Gloves (Heretic's equivalent of Doomguy's chainsaw) will drain health from enemies as they deal damage, and give this health to me. In combination with the high (chainsaw-like) fire rate, and relatively high pain chance of enemies, the weapon is extremely overpowered in this state. It consumes no ammo, and yet it allows me to safely kill all and any monsters in my way. Including the game's most powerful bosses Iron Liches and Malotaurs. Especially in ZDoom, where the melee attack is easier to perform, due to a fix to the way how melee hit check is performed. Only the final boss, D'Sparil, seems to be tough and powerful enough to kill me while I'm draining health from him.

I've always considered Heretic to be out of balance: All monsters have high HP while their reactions are slow, they move slowly and IF they have another attack than melee, it's just throwing slow projectiles with low damage. Which makes the game rather boring compared to Doom. But these powered-up Gloves are definitely overkill, more than anything else. You just run into enemies and watch them die, not having to care about your health, or even ammo - well, until the temporary powerup goes off. You can carry multiple ones and use them in a row. But I get it, it's how the powerup is supposed to work, and it's right in principle. Still, Malotaurs and Liches should have been immune to an easy win like that.

[Cupboard]

scifista42 yes the gauntlets are a little overpowered. But what you seem to assume is that the player is fighting one or three monsters at a time. What about a pack of sabreclaws or fighting several ghost axe warriors? Even e4m1, e4m8, e5m1, e5m8 will show you this is not an invincible weapon. Each of those maps contain a "boss" monster or multiples backed up by many smaller creatures.

Also, the tome'd gauntlets greatly reduce your killing power. Yes, you can kill one enemy at a time, one after another after another, or you could use the ethereal crossbow or even dragon claw to destroy enemies very very quickly. You can play safely or quickly, the choice is up to the player for 40 seconds... Also you should consider that using the tome'd gauntlets for 40 seconds will probably destroy whatever armor you are wearing. :p

In tight quarters with bottleneck hallways, the hellstaff with tome is very efficient at killing a horde or damaging large packs of enemies.

The phoenix rod is very good against a large number of melee monsters and the popcorn fire mace is definitely a room-clearing attack once you toss out a few of those big homing balls. And in DM/CTF the elvenwand is probably the best powered up weapon you can use against other fast-moving players.

[jmickle66666666]

I was messing around with PLAYPAL and COLORMAP information last night, and discovered that the duplicate colours in the palette are never even used in the colormap

This means that any graphic that is rendered using the colormap doesn't use those colours at all (i.e anything outside of HUD, menu, title and interpic graphics)

This means that theoretically you could replace those colours with new ones to improve other ranges in the colormap (for instance the lower orange range which is non existant), without affecting any of the in-game sprites. You just have to make sure to keep the duplicate colour's colormap ranges identical, et voila you have slightly better doom graphics :)

This can have a practical application if you are already replacing the fonts/titlepic/hud graphics. Combined with replacing the purple range (which is used so little and in very inconsequential places, causing almost no affect), you can add almost 16 new colors to the palette very easily without having to change /replaceany textures, flats or sprites.

I've got a bunch of numbers for color usage I need to post up at some time too

EDIT: I forgot that this doesn't work for ports that ignore the colormap, too, such as zdoom or and opengl port.

EDIT2: some numbers for you

colour usage across all graphics: http://pastebin.com/gMYKsPrd
(how many pixels in the entire game use each colour in it's data)

colour usage with colormap: http://pastebin.com/7sx4nkm4
(same as above, but checks if the color could be used in each graphics depending on the colormap. for example, a darker brown will have a higher number since it could be used in a lower light level etc. this is a much more accurate list of realistic color usages)

colour usage in the colormap: http://pastebin.com/2U4v13TZ
(how many times each color shows up in the colormap)

*for the first two lists, there was an anomaly with color 247, which should be ignored entirely (due to the method i was using to extract the information, all transparent pixels were reported as color 247)*

[40oz]

TheCupboard said:

scifista42 yes the gauntlets are a little overpowered. But what you seem to assume is that the player is fighting one or three monsters at a time.

Also making the assumption that the player is using the tome for health instead of massacring everything on screen. There are quartz flasks for that.

Edit: Nvm you already mentioned it.

[Doomkid]

jmickle66666666 said:

Combined with replacing the purple range (which is used so little and in very inconsequential places, causing almost no affect), you can add almost 16 new colors to the palette very easily without having to change /replaceany textures, flats or sprites.

Is there a chance you can provide a visual representation of exactly which colors are unused in the PLAYPAL lump? By that I mean, an actual screenshot of all the colors in the Doom palette which shows which ones can be replaced? It would be very helpful for someone like me who's an absolute newb when it comes to modding Doom without an interface for simpletons.

For example:


I would be much obliged, if that is indeed possible. I would probably use it to introduce more purple tones, so that it doesn't look like crap when a purple recolor is done.

[jmickle66666666]

I'll try and get a diagram up when I can, but the easiest way to check is opening up the PLAYPAL in slade and clicking the colours and checking the index of them.

[Doomkid]

D'oh, I didn't even think to do that... I need to lay off the drugs. Thankyou!

[Gez]

jmickle66666666 said:

This means that theoretically you could replace those colours with new ones to improve other ranges in the colormap (for instance the lower orange range which is non existant), without affecting any of the in-game sprites.

Beware: it's not safe to assume nothing uses these redundant colors. Here's the one I remember on the top of my head, but I think there's at least one other case.



(That's patch RW33_3, used in texture METAL4, if you want to check by yourself.)

[Doomkid]

That is very odd. What makes the engine decide to use the redundant color rather than it's identical counterpart?

[jmickle66666666]

ah but the point is, when the engine looks up colour 247 in the colormap, even at full bright, it won't return it. the duplicate colors /never/ show up in the colormap.

However, they are way too many issues for this to be used in any meaningful way. Essel pointed out that even in vanilla, the spectre fuzz effect won't work correctly using this technique

[Da Werecat]

Doomkid said:

That is very odd. What makes the engine decide to use the redundant color rather than it's identical counterpart?

Not the engine, but rather the graphics tool used by the artist.

[Doomkid]

jmickle66666666 said:

ah but the point is, when the engine looks up colour 247 in the colormap, even at full bright, it won't return it. the duplicate colors /never/ show up in the colormap.

So does this basically mean that, while an editor will display a "bung" color like what Gez posted, the actual engine will not display it this way in-game? (EDIT: Thanks Da Werecat for answering!)

jmickle66666666 said:

Essel pointed out that even in vanilla, the spectre fuzz effect won't work correctly using this technique

Now I'm really curious.. Does it mean that particular color only is not effected by the "fuzz" flag?

(Man I love this thread, learning so much about Doom's engine from it)

[Da Werecat]

Doomkid said:

So does this basically mean that, while an editor will display a "bung" color like what Gez posted, the actual engine will not display it this way in-game?

It won't, unless you alter the colormap to account for this new color.

[jmickle66666666]

Doomkid said:

Now I'm really curious.. Does it mean that particular color only is not effected by the "fuzz" flag?

I'm not entirely sure about the exact working of the fuzz effect, so maybe someone else could explain why it doesn't work correctly.