Things about Doom you just found out

[Da Werecat]

If the limit is the same, then maybe they fixed redundant activations. Like, the SSG assaults the linedef with a whole bunch of tracers in one tic, but they don't all have to count and fill the stack. The first one to be processed is about enough, and then the button stops receiving pwnage until it is reactivated.

Or something. There may be more than one way to fix such an overflow.

[scifista42]

MetroidJunkie said:

Isn't that more or less the same amount of damage as a direct hit from the Rocket Launcher? I noticed that enemies requiring multiple rockets (5 for a Baron) die in the same amount of direct SSG hits.

When all 20 SSG pellets hit a single target, the average damage the target receives is 200. When a rocket hits a single target that is vulnerable to splash damage, the average damage the target receives is 218. SSG damage has lower variation than rocket damage, though - in other words, the damage value tends to be close to the average in case of SSG (almost always between 180-220, probability rapidly decreases as the value goes away from the average), but tends to vary a lot in case of a rocket (it can be as low as 148 with probability of whole 12.5%, and as high as 288 with equal probability).

[axdoomer]

Maes said:

It's well-known that by the time of v1.9 Doom II, Doom and Ultimate Doom shared the same executable, but until then the codebases and the exes were pretty much separate, and certainly there weren't "hidden" Doom II functionalities in pre-v1.666, like implemented Doom II codepointers, linedef actions, weapons/attacks etc.

Doom II code was available as early as the Doom v1.3 shareware (bootleg). Back then, the Doom 2 IWAD was "DOOMR.WAD". There was already a lot of Doom 2 support, but most levels would still crash because of unknown "things" in the levels.

Da Werecat said:

If the limit is the same, then maybe they fixed redundant activations. Like, the SSG assaults the linedef with a whole bunch of tracers in one tic, but they don't all have to count and fill the stack. The first one to be processed is about enough, and then the button stops receiving pwnage until it is reactivated.

Or something. There may be more than one way to fix such an overflow.

Look at how it behaves. When the switch is hit by multiple bullets, it wants to keep up with the speed at which the bullets come but it's not fast enough.

It doesn't behave in such a way in later versions. The switch code was broken and accumulating the button events was what caused the overflow.

[Da Werecat]

axdoom1 said:

When the switch is hit by multiple bullets, it wants to keep up with the speed at which the bullets come but it's not fast enough.

I don't think "keeping up" has anything to do with it.

Repeatable switches are programmed to change their texture once, then change it back in about a second. The sound is also played twice. What we're seeing after the player stops attacking the switch is this second action - attempting to swap the texture back - repeated as many times as the switch was attacked.

But yeah, regardless of what exactly is going on, it's pretty clear that the switch code was accumulating the hits constantly, and in the later versions it doesn't.

[VGamingJunkie]

scifista42 said:

When all 20 SSG pellets hit a single target, the average damage the target receives is 200. When a rocket hits a single target that is vulnerable to splash damage, the average damage the target receives is 218. SSG damage has lower variation than rocket damage, though - in other words, the damage value tends to be close to the average in case of SSG (almost always between 180-220, probability rapidly decreases as the value goes away from the average), but tends to vary a lot in case of a rocket (it can be as low as 148 with probability of whole 12.5%, and as high as 288 with equal probability).

In other words, a rocket can potentially do more but it varies enough on average that the SSG and rocket generally take down enemies in a similar amount of hits, assuming the SSG hits are close enough for all of the pellets to hit.



@ Da Werecat, I remember in the beta shooting the SSG at a repeatable switch would cause the game to crash, guess it couldn't handle that many calculations at once.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Summer Deep said:

The Hell Knight seems to shout 'However' when he's killed. Someone has probably referred to this already, but I couldn't bring myself to read through all 175 pages of this thread....

I'm fairly certain this was pinned down as being from a sound clip of a jaguar. It appears in a few other games as well (Abuse comes to mind off the top of my head).

[VGamingJunkie]

Is the zombie death sound supposed to be a whale? I only ask because in that Super Friends episode of The Fairly Odd Parents, that same sound is heard when the Aquaman Parody shows up with his whales.

[Arctangent]

Pretty sure it's a camel.

[Bauul]

Today I was disappointed to discover Doom's software renderer can't do absolute darkness.

Doesn't matter how low you set it, some pixels on enemies and sprites still seem to be rendered as a grey, meaning it's easy to spot them moving about.

I was hoping to create a kind of hide-and-seek Cyberdemon fight in absolute darkness for the Plain Ol' Doom 2 megawad. It works like an absolute treat in OpenGL renderers, but in software mode you can just see the Cyb wandering about, which totally spoils the effect.

Ah well, back to the drawing board.

[Da Werecat]

The renderer itself isn't at fault, the problem is in the lighting table. Which can be replaced.

[MinerOfWorlds]

I didn't know that the chaingun guy had two death animations.

[joe-ilya]

Would it surprise you if I told you that Wolfenstein nazis have two death animations as well?

[MinerOfWorlds]

It would.

[joe-ilya]

This bug :

[Xyzzу]

I just found out that if you go to a specific spot in the void when noclipping, monsters currently active will try to attack you even though you're nowhere near them. This is more noticeable with -fast. Sorry I don't have a video to show it happening. Is this a Doom 95 thing? I can't seem to get it to work with a modern source port yet.

[CapnClever]

Xyzzy01 said:

I just found out that if you go to a specific spot in the void when noclipping, monsters currently active will try to attack you even though you're nowhere near them. This is more noticeable with -fast. Sorry I don't have a video to show it happening. Is this a Doom 95 thing? I can't seem to get it to work with a modern source port yet.

I'm gonna guess you're referring to the (0,0) respawning bug.

[Xyzzу]

No, It happened on Tower of Babel. The lost souls in the map were all charging into a wall repeatedly while being able to hurt me from within the map.

[Maes]

Xyzzy01 said:

No, It happened on Tower of Babel. The lost souls in the map were all charging into a wall repeatedly while being able to hurt me from within the map.

It might have been a freak instance of telescratching -the melee range function uses the same approximate distance function as sound calculation, and that function "wraps around" every 14K units or so, so each monster with a melee attack can, theoretically, remotely hurt targets that are just at the right distance for it to happen.

This is rare, but often reported during void glides, extremely large maps etc. but it's poorly documented. It would be interesting to recreate it and test it somehow.

joe-ilya said:

This bug :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ74ffZBSo

Well TBH that doesn't really seem like a bug, unless death-exit floors are still required to function even when an already dead player somehow lands on them. Walk exits do still work with sliding corpses, but I never heard of damage-exit floors doing the same. It wouldn't make sense either, since the player is already dead and thus cannot take damage, so any checks that rely on that ability would simply not be performed.

Now, if we threw a voodoo doll/zombie player into the equation...

[Koko Ricky]

I realized the other day that Doom 2 has a very crude room-over-room effect in the yellow key building in the east end of Industrial Zone. There's a sector that's simultaneously an elevator (for going under) and a door (for going over). It's obviously not as elegant as a self-referencing suspension bridge, but it is an example of an over/under effect and is actually pretty damn clever.

[Gez]

Yeah, that's what I was alluding to in this wiki article.

[damerell]

GoatLord said:

I realized the other day that Doom 2 has a very crude room-over-room effect in the yellow key building in the east end of Industrial Zone. There's a sector that's simultaneously an elevator (for going under) and a door (for going over). It's obviously not as elegant as a self-referencing suspension bridge, but it is an example of an over/under effect and is actually pretty damn clever.

Years ago (before seeing it in Doom 2) I tried to do this in a level for Aliens-TC with both an 82 WR Lower Floor and a 107 WR Door Close, and a 106 WR Door Open and 129 WR Floor Raise when the player goes the other way - giving an effect where both floor and ceiling have changed and the player can't see the corridor at the other level.

This doesn't really work because although the door effects are fast, the floor moves are not, and the necessary spacing between the linedefs to stop a fast-moving player triggering the door part while the floor move is in progress means every route the player can take from up to down really has to be quite long, and the constant noise is a poor fit with the intended illusion that it's a true-3D level and nothing is happening.

These days, of course, it could be done more easily with Boom elevators.

[Xyzzу]

Maes said:

It might have been a freak instance of telescratching -the melee range function uses the same approximate distance function as sound calculation, and that function "wraps around" every 14K units or so, so each monster with a melee attack can, theoretically, remotely hurt targets that are just at the right distance for it to happen.

Ahh, so THAT'S what was happening. I forgot to mention that I also suddenly heard every monster on the map as if they were right next to me, so that just confirms it. Such a rare and weird effect, that!

[Cynicism]

a random bug where i have gotten caught on a wall then permanently could not move from it and since I was on nightmare i could not cheat to get myself unstuck from the wall in the ultimate doom e2 m3 (i think since i erased the run a month back). while this does not seem like a normal thing to put in this column it is the first time it has happened to me since owning the ultimate doom

[VGamingJunkie]

GoatLord said:

I realized the other day that Doom 2 has a very crude room-over-room effect in the yellow key building in the east end of Industrial Zone. There's a sector that's simultaneously an elevator (for going under) and a door (for going over). It's obviously not as elegant as a self-referencing suspension bridge, but it is an example of an over/under effect and is actually pretty damn clever.

It's not so much a convincing room over room effect as it is a testament to how much having a lot of moving sectors really adds a lot to a level design.

[BigDickBzzrak]

If you give a sector a brightness value of over 255 and a sector type of 8 (Glows), then it will indeed kinda cycle all the way until that big value, but you won't be able to see it.

I can't express it more elegantly. Basically, the interval between glows will be bigger, proportionally to the brightness you gave it.

(I found it out when I gave a brightness of 1337 to a sector that says "BZZRAK", heh.)

[Trupiak]

If you count the number of the gunholes after firing the basic shotgun there will be 6 gunholes ( from one shell )

But after firing the super shotgun there will be 20 gunholes ( from 2 shells )
and that doesn't make any sense, you're using the same shells, the super shotgun should only fire 12 shots instead of 20... 6 x 2 = 12... i often think about it when i use the shotgun

[SFoZ911]

Trupiak said:

If you count the number of the gunholes after firing the basic shotgun there will be 6 gunholes ( from one shell )

But after firing the super shotgun there will be 20 gunholes ( from 2 shells )
and that doesn't make any sense, you're using the same shells, the super shotgun should only fire 12 shots instead of 20... 6 x 2 = 12... i often think about it when i use the shotgun

The player's shotgun fires 7 pellets, not 6.

The SSG was made to deal with mainly mid-tier monsters, making it fire 14 pellets would make it as strong as a shotgun.

[Bauul]

Trupiak said:

If you count the number of the gunholes after firing the basic shotgun there will be 6 gunholes ( from one shell )

But after firing the super shotgun there will be 20 gunholes ( from 2 shells )
and that doesn't make any sense, you're using the same shells, the super shotgun should only fire 12 shots instead of 20... 6 x 2 = 12... i often think about it when i use the shotgun

Pretty sure the shotgun fires 7 bullets, and the SSG fires 21.

And there's added damage to make up for the twice as long reload. If it just did x2 the damage, it'd merely be a shotgun that did the same DPS, just fired twice as slow.

bzzrak said:

If you give a sector a brightness value of over 255 and a sector type of 8 (Glows), then it will indeed kinda cycle all the way until that big value, but you won't be able to see it.

I can't express it more elegantly. Basically, the interval between glows will be bigger, proportionally to the brightness you gave it.

(I found it out when I gave a brightness of 1337 to a sector that says "BZZRAK", heh.)

Woah is this true? I've got some outdoor teleporters that flash far too fast due to the low delta between the outdoor brightness and full brightness. This would make a big difference!

[Maes]

Bauul said:

Pretty sure the shotgun fires 7 bullets, and the SSG fires 21

That'd be neat, but nope. On the bright side, the SSG is balanced versus the Shotgun according to the Golden Ratio.

[baja blast rd.]

I never really understood why some people think the SSG is overpowered; the next two weapons -- the RL and PR -- are a clear tier stronger*. The chaingun is also better than the SSG as a 'ready weapon'. For all-purpose fighting, the SSG is a solid bridge between the SG/CG and the RL/PR, and closer to the SG/CG.


*Even in tight spaces, the one place the SSG might conceivably hold an edge over one of these, the RL is nearly always a clear notch above the SSG if you are good enough at close-quarters combat.