Things about Doom you just found out

[RjY]

Interesting though it is, may this discussion be split off into a different thread?

[Gez]

Graf Zahl said:

Only the door. AFAIK all projectiles in Heretic have MF2_NOTELEPORT set which excludes those lines.

The projectile will not teleport, but it will eat the W1 teleport activation nonetheless. P_CrossSpecialLine code:

		case 39: // TELEPORT!
			EV_Teleport( line, side, thing );
			line->special = 0;
			break;

Note how it doesn't check the return value of EV_Teleport(), and sets the line special to zero unconditionally.


In EV_Teleport() you have the MF2_NOTELEPORT check, but it's not the right place to save the special.

[Graf Zahl]

Ouch!

[printz]

I can avoid using -NOTELEPORT, because I'm neither interested about teleporting missiles nor wasting W1 teleporters (which should never be used anyway; they're evil). It's the WR lifts I'm interested about. Stop using the W1 lines as strawmen, damnit.

[Graf Zahl]

The W1 lines are not a strawman, they are what will first break in maps that are unaware of these effects.

The issue is, this is all-or-nothing. You get what you want but you have to take the baggage as well - not necessarily in the same map, but the likelihood of a W1 line unintentionally getting cleared is a lot higher than finding a non-contrived use case here.

[Gez]

printz said:

W1 teleporters (which should never be used anyway; they're evil).

Why? They're perfect for traps. Player moves through corridor, then is whisked away to a gauntlet. After defeating the monsters and getting out of the trap, the corridor is now safe to cross.

[scifista42]

Also, to teleport only one monster away from a place, while keeping all other monsters in.

[Arctangent]

printz said:

I can avoid using -NOTELEPORT

and completely accomplish nothing, because as the previous posts point out, W1 teleports expire even if the triggering actor didn't teleport

I think I've actually heard of cases where teleport traps were flat-out broken because something else occupied the space where the teleport destination stood, and the person used W1 teleport lines - since, y'know, monsters can't telefrag by default.

[Jon]

Gez said:

Why? They're perfect for traps. Player moves through corridor, then is whisked away to a gauntlet. After defeating the monsters and getting out of the trap, the corridor is now safe to cross.

Only in single player.

[Graf Zahl]

Stuff like that has been done in real-life maps, though.

[Linguica]

Gez said:

Therefore, playing it in a limit-removing port breaks the experience intended by the author

I know you're being sarcastic but in that case it really does. I remember watching some youtube video where the guy was talking about The Sky May Be and how there is a door that says "don't open me!" and when he opened it, nothing happened, and he went on about how that must mean that the author was messing with the player's expectations by making them thinking something bad would happen, but then nothing happens at all, which is like the literal opposite from what the author actually intended.

edit:

[scifista42]

Jon said:

Only in single player.

I can imagine a contraption that lets only one player enter, then cuts off a way for other players to follow him, and simultaneously opens another identical contraption for other players to go to. After separating players into different contraptions, each of these contraptions could utilize a W1 teleport to the same effect as in single player.

[Quagsire]

Linguica said:

I know you're being sarcastic but in that case it really does. I remember watching some youtube video where the guy was talking about The Sky May Be and how there is a door that says "don't open me!" and when he opened it, nothing happened, and he went on about how that must mean that the author was messing with the player's expectations by making them thinking something bad would happen, but then nothing happens at all, which is like the literal opposite from what the author actually intended.

edit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CaHKqAvrwg?t=6m14s

That was a pretty slick move honestly.

[Varis Alpha]

i found out by looking in the TNT IWAD that the animated spider on a cobweb texture is actually in the IWAD, and wasn't a new texture used for the THT tribute project. but, then i have to wonder, where exactly IS it used in the IWAD then? i've never seen it at all. O_o

[scifista42]

It's a part of a texture with several different patterns at different offsets. I've located all occurences of the texture in the whole IWAD (all of its 12 animation frames) and checked out all of them, and found no one aligned in a way that would make the spider visible.

[kb1]

MetroidJunkie said:

kb1, the fact that projectiles from Doom 1 don't do this means that it was a slip on id's part and the way it was originally intended was for projectiles to not trigger it, meaning that mappers that use it are going against id's intended design are they not?

Sure it was a slip on id's part. Of course it's a bug.

But, when the engine was released, people started making maps in this extremely strict environment. And how do mappers map? They build something, and then test it. Modify, test, modify, test. Most mappers probably never even knew this bug existed. And, on occasion, some maps only worked properly because of one or more of these bugs.

Finally, when the mapper is satisfied that the map plays nicely, he releases the map. Some of those maps were famous and well liked.

Now, later, a port dev decides: "I don't like how this works - it looks like a bug. It can't crash the game, but it's a code inconsistency." So, he "fixes" the code. This change may seem simple. But, in fact, it's a change that instantly alters the game play of tens of thousands of maps, without touching the maps at all. This leaves some of the maps "broken", when played in the "fixed" port.

This bug is particularly nasty, because the player will most likely not realize that they were fed this experience, and may be thinking "Why did the mapper make it like that? Why couldn't I kill all the monsters? Why do I have to noclip? Is it just a ZDoom thing?" The reverse can also be true, if the mapper tests his vanilla-esque map using ZDoom.

Upon realizing this, what is the engine dev's response? "Oh, it doesn't affect many maps, only those quirky crappy maps that I don't personally like." Essentially: "Fuck 'em."

Now, had said dev placed these types of far-reaching fixes behind a lump that was effectively invisible to vanilla, suddenly all of those vanilla maps are just as instantly "fixed", and off-the-hook, because they will again play "as tested by the author". Seems reasonable, right?

But, no, says the dev. Why not keep applying the fix unconditionally, and just shift the blame towards the maps, for being made by quirky people that cling to quirky behavior. In fact, the mappers are relying on vigorous testing, using the actual behavior of the real engine.

It's like the port devs take Grandma's Favorite Secret Barbecue Chicken recipe, pour fucking ketchup all over it, and serve it to everyone as Grandma's Secret Recipe. And when everyone says it sucks, just blame it on poor Grandma.

It's basically fraud.

Now, I'm the (currently most vocal) guy who remembers how good Grandma's Chicken was. I can, at least, remember how it tasted.
And, what do I get for caring about gameplay fidelity (maps playing as tested by the author)? What do I get for caring about the proper rendering of demos of people playing those carefully built maps?

So, what do I get? Swarms of crazed groupies, ready to pounce on anyone who dares question the scope of non-essential game play changes. Any politeness they might possess is absent from their wicked, unsubstantiated retorts, sarcastic personal comments, half-assed justifications. It's like trying to teach logic to children. At least the young ones are innocent.

You claim that I have a one-sided view, yet you have a port that actively discriminates against the bulk of the maps in the archives. Hell, Graf is trying to teach those dirty mappers a lesson:

Graf Zahl said:

If I can discourage their use by not supporting them I see that as a plus for everybody involved by forcing modders to map responsibly."

Wow. No shame.

On the one hand: Mild wonder: "Gee, that door opened when it was hit with a missile."
On the other hand: Sense of loss, frustration, wasted time:

"Damn, I've been playing for 45 minutes, and I cannot finish this map without cheating, because the door wouldn't open."

Or confusion, mistrust: "Did I miss a switch?" "This map sucks. This mapper sucks.".

A big price to pay for a change "no one reported as a bug for 15 years." Someone should feel some responsibility for causing that much negative emotion. So, how many years does it take for you to feel ok with disregarding a bug report? Because a bug has been reported.

Graf Zahl said:

No point to discuss such matters with people like kb1. They think in absolute terms of 'vanilla is always right' and then enter endless diatribes to justify it.

You don't know me, bitch. You don't know how I think. Besides, it has nothing to do with how I think. It's how it is. You are the one breaking the contract between the player and the maps, cause your port is disregarding the gameplay within. Stop narcissistically blaming Grandma, and take responsibility for your actions!

@All: I am not trying to derail. I got hit with a page of illogic from the Usual ZSuspects. I'm just trying to keep it honest.

But I am just one voice. Please, don't let the ZBullies keep you from being heard on this, and other matters. Let them know that you want to play maps as the author intended. Let them know that it is your right to decide which fixes to apply, and when. Let them know that the Original Start Wars trilogy was awesome, and it's ok (preferred by many) to like the original :)

[Gez]

As always, always, always you completely miss the point by a thousand billion miles that NO, A MAP AUTHOR DOES NOT NECESSARILY INTEND FOR HIS MAP TO BUG BECAUSE OF A MISTAKE IN THE CODE THAT THEY, THE MAP AUTHOR, NEVER KNEW ABOUT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

To you, every map author is magically 100% aware of every single bug and glitch that may happen, and desires for them to happen.

Please do provide us an exhaustive list of maps in which an arachnotron, mancubus, or revenant fireball triggering one of the listed effects (4, 10, 39, 88, 97, 125, or 126) is required for normal play. I'll help you by starting it:

• Fonze's test map from this post

kb1 said:

Upon realizing this, what is the engine dev's response? "Oh, it doesn't affect many maps, only those quirky crappy maps that I don't personally like." Essentially: "Fuck 'em."

[...]

It's basically fraud.

[...]

So, what do I get? Swarms of crazed groupies, ready to pounce on anyone who dares question the scope of non-essential game play changes. Any politeness they might possess is absent from their wicked, unsubstantiated retorts, sarcastic personal comments, half-assed justifications. It's like trying to teach logic to children. At least the young ones are innocent.

"These crazed, irrational, half-assed fraud bullies just do not respect me! Why can't they see the perfect flawless logic that the Doom engine is just like Grandma's Chicken Recipe or the Original Start Wars?"

kb1 said:

On the one hand: Mild wonder: "Gee, that door opened when it was hit with a missile."
On the other hand: Sense of loss, frustration, wasted time:

"Damn, I've been playing for 45 minutes, and I cannot finish this map without cheating, because the door wouldn't open."

On the one hand: "Wow that door opened when the arachnotron shot me! And now it's not opening anymore! Even if the arachnotron shoots me again! I can't get in!"

On the other hand: "Well now that I've killed the arachnotron, let's see what's behind this door it was guarding. Hey it opens automatically as I move in. I can enter it now because I am at the right place to move inside when it opened."

[Fonze]

While I want to say:

How about instead of quotes like "map responsibly" being thrown around for something the dev doesn't like, we talk about tags of 0 in zDoom ports. Yeah; that encourages responsible mapping. Also, holding somebody's hand and forcing them to map responsibly while invisibly "fixing" anything "broken" will never actually teach "responsible mapping," as those mapping "irresponsibly" will never actually realize that they are not doing it right. I have alergies to bullshit and they go off whenever people talk about zDoom's "fixes" of things that were never broken in the first place.

And some other stuff, I'll point out that this is all really, really stupid and a direct product of taking hard stances on stupidly minute details. How about pretending to show some modicum of respect to your fellow member(s) of a relatively small community?

I wish the zDoom family showed more care (or at least pretended to; put forth some effort aside from what we see on a regular basis) towards those of us who have grown a great familiarity with Doom and its quirks over the years, but the rhetoric on both sides needs to be toned down. Have we learned nothing from MaxEd? He could be just as obtuse and set in his ways as the the zDoom devs, but are we better off now than we were with him before? That situation was caused by two sides being inconsiderate towards the other and only caused drama and lost productivity time for us as a community; this zDoom bullies vs DW Mafia isn't much different. Who cares who's right here; if there is a way to make more people happy with little extra work we prolly should do that if possible. But we're not that big when you stop to think about it; we shouldn't be drawing lines in the sand on each other and we should take the extra minute to reread/edit our posts before posting and be considerate that we are talking to real people here who happen to share our favorite hobby, which isn't exactly the most popular hobby in the world.

[kb1]

Gez said:

As always, always, always you completely miss the point by a thousand billion miles that NO, A MAP AUTHOR DOES NOT NECESSARILY INTEND FOR HIS MAP TO BUG BECAUSE OF A MISTAKE IN THE CODE THAT THEY, THE MAP AUTHOR, NEVER KNEW ABOUT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

To you, every map author is magically 100% aware of every single bug and glitch that may happen, and desires for them to happen.

You lie through your teeth. This is exactly opposite from what I said. You know, where I said that "Yes, it's a bug." And again where I said "Yes, it was unintentional." And, finally, where I said that the map author probably does not know about the bug. That's 3 lies you told, in 2 sentences. You know, people can see what everyone types, don't you? And, now you're screaming at me, as if you didn't just follow me through a handful of threads just to post misinformation and sarcasm.

You're not going to bully me, or anyone else, into believing that I should just blindly endorse behind-the-scenes, possible-map-breaking alteration of gameplay. I, for one, value the map archive, and want to play the maps in the manner the author expected them to be received.

I have no idea what your values are. So, I'll ask again (though I doubt I get a response this time): What is your goal with the following and bashing? I let you have your feelings (though I don't appreciate you putting words into my mouth). I don't go around bashing you randomly.

Please stop trolling. I grow weary.

[Arctangent]

kb1 said:

You're not going to bully me, or anyone else, into believing that I should just blindly endorse behind-the-scenes, possible-map-breaking alteration of gameplay.

See, here's the thing. There a very easy way to not have to do that.

Use the ports that actually emulate all the random errors from vanilla.

Are you trapped in an hostage situation in your own home? Is someone keeping you in your house, putting a gun to your head whenever you try to play Doom with anything but GZDoom?

Because you keep walking into a candy store and asking for a shot of vodka. You keep advocating for 100% vanilla accuracy in a port that doesn't even have the same movement code. Ling's big ol' movement bible he wrote up a while back? Almost completely irrelevant for the sake of ZDoom and its children, because a lot of the wonky stuff those tricks relied on were ironed out, usually for the sake of advanced features that wouldn't be difficult to manage without doing so.

And yet, there's still a ton of code in there for the sake of backwards compatibility, even for ZDoom stuff that exploited something dumb and forced some of the internal code to be dumb to make sure that stuff wouldn't break. There's a ton of a compatibility flags built into the engine to bring back old behaviors, and there's an internal lump file made for the very purpose of automatically enabling these compatflags on certain levels of certain wads. Hell, in this very thread, there was discussion about how there wasn't anything that relied on this behavior, so that it wouldn't have to be tracked down and a compatflag developed for a single obscure case.

ZDoom does prefer doing its own thing and trying to make things less wonky for the majority of the userbase, but it's still completely wrong to say it does not care about backwards compatibility in the slightest. That does not mean any new oversight in the vanilla engine is going to be supported if people start exploiting it, though - anyone who'd expect something like GZDoom with its entirely different renderer and large amount of gameplay differences to break its code to support Linguortals after going undiscovered for literal decades is an utter loon.

You're basically going up to some guy's house and yelling at them for painting it blue instead of red. Not only that, but you're doing that when like two or three other people do the same thing constantly and have done so for a long while, despite the majority of the neighborhood being ambivalent at best.

Is it any wonder that your words all carry the tone of a Vanilla's Witness?

[Gez]

kb1 said:

You lie through your teeth. This is exactly opposite from what I said. You know, where I said that "Yes, it's a bug." And again where I said "Yes, it was unintentional." And, finally, where I said that the map author probably does not know about the bug. That's 3 lies you told, in 2 sentences. You know, people can see what everyone types, don't you? And, now you're screaming at me, as if you didn't just follow me through a handful of threads just to post misinformation and sarcasm.

Yes, everyone can read what everyone wrote.

So you wrote:
1. It's a bug.
2. Map authors don't know about the bug.
3. Fixing the bug is disrespecting the map authors' wishes.

kb1 said:

I have no idea what your values are. So, I'll ask again (though I doubt I get a response this time): What is your goal with the following and bashing? I let you have your feelings (though I don't appreciate you putting words into my mouth). I don't go around bashing you randomly.

And I'm not following you. I've been posting in this thread since the first page. You're the one who jumped on a discussion between Printz and me.

So here we are, in the "Things about Doom you just found out", discussing a weird quirk of the engine, and explaining why it doesn't work in ZDoom, and here you are, suddenly jumping in, with your typical wake up zsheeple lunatic rantings and insisting that it's everyone else who is a big meanie.

[Dragonfly]

I honestly couldn't care for this bug/feature that's only just been discovered but holy shit guys, how did you all get into such a heated debate over something so incredibly unknown and minuscule?

Today guess what I found out about Doom. I found that I don't care about this bug/feature. Go run a poll, I'm sure most won't care. :P

[Graf Zahl]

Fonze said:

I wish the zDoom family showed more care (or at least pretended to; put forth some effort aside from what we see on a regular basis) towards those of us who have grown a great familiarity with Doom and its quirks over the years,

I think I have made this statement multiple times in the past.
ZDoom is not about preserving quirks. If all those little quirks are so important to you, use another engine.
ZDoom does try to keep all available old maps playable, that's what the compatibility options are there for, in case that some engine-side fix requires special treatment for old maps.

These are two entirely diffrent concepts of compatibility, and you cannot expect an engine that subscribes to one of them to adhere to the other as well - this going both ways, of course. That would be a huge disservice to all those people who value ZDoom for precisely this attitude towards all those little quirks and glitches that ultimately do not decide whether a map is playable or not.

This also means that I won't consider dealing with a bug by adding a compatibility option unless it is proven to be required. As long as it is merely hypothetic I choose to do nothing about these things.

[Jon]

Mom, Dad, stop fighting, it's so unfair!

[Cacowad]

After seeing this kind of debate over and over, i'm starting to think that (G)zdoom should grow as an independent game engine which also happen to support doom. And my reasoning is the same as other have expressed: we already have plenty of ports that aim for pure and crude vanilla emulation (including weird tricks and "features", that while being situationally cool and all, aren't really worth messing around), so why just not let (G)zdoom be the experimental and weird engine it's always been?

[Graf Zahl]

Cacowad said:

so why just not let (G)zdoom be the experimental and weird engine it's always been?

That would be the ideal solution. But apparently some people here seem to see things somewhat distorted: They discover 'this cool vanilla quirk' and immediately think about how to abuse it. Then they discover that ZDoom does not support it, because it cleaned up the mess responsible and immediately get angry because due to ZDoom's high user count it appears that nobody can afford maps that exploit these quirks.

What they forget is that outside their own small numbers, no mapper out there knows or even cares about these things in any other way than to consider them bugs that need to be avoided to be triggered, should their maps happen to be played on one of these engines - that is if they know about it to begin with!

What should also be obvious is that apparently many users value the changes ZDoom made over the years - how else can it have become so popular? Most players simply do not care about this stuff, they get annoyed when the player gets stuck in a railing instead of sliding along (simply becaus id forgot to consider blocking two-sided lines in their sliding code) and see that in ZDoom the player behaves as they'd expect it to do, just to name one of the more obvious examples.

We have a large number of source ports, some with vastly different design goals, but a surprisingly large amount with a large overlap. For some reason that seems to instill the belief that if, say, 5 ports do mostly the same thing, the two or three outliers have to follow the same rules, screw that their maintainers to not buy into the exact same philosophy.

[roadworx]

hey, guys? i have a question for all of you.

who cares?

it's a stupid, obscure little quirk of the doom engine that pretty much nobody knows about. even the people that do know about it probably don't care. if you're gonna obsess over each individual line of code this much, why don't you play chocolate doom? or, if you like the zdoom features, mod the quirks and bugs back into the game. and if you don't care about this single, tiny quirk (like most normal people), carry on as usual. it's really that simple. i mean, come on, how do you guys even get into arguments like this? it's retarded, it's like arguing about whether or not a fish can talk. it really is, and by getting heated by each others dumb opinions, you're making the problem even worse. so shut up, and have a civil discussion instead of acting like rabid raccoons.

[Maes]

Yeah, what the Hell is wrong with you people? In the good old times people would be all like "Ohh" and "Ahh" and "I want you to have my babies" whenever a new bug or feature was discovered in Vanilla Doom, and everybody would worship The One True Doom, whimpering "We're not worthy!" and marvel at how much we still have to learn about It...

[Bauul]

Talking of ports doing stuff differently, I discovered today that Risen appears to give you more air control than other ports. If you jump off a high ledge, you'll land a little further away from the ledge than you would using anything else.

[Graf Zahl]

Bauul said:

Talking of ports doing stuff differently, I discovered today that Risen appears to give you more air control than other ports. If you jump off a high ledge, you'll land a little further away from the ledge than you would using anything else.

Doom Legacy does that, too, which got me puzzled a bit when I was unable to get a certain secret in Hi-Tech Hell 2 with GZDoom until I found out about it. Only after setting higher air control through MAPINFO I got into that particular room. I believe, Skulltag once had this, too, I cannot say if Zandronum keeps it this way or has reverted to the original, lower value.