Things about Doom you just found out

[Gez]

Bauul said:

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

The correct answer is 7 bullets (not 6) for the single-barrel shotgun, and 20 (not 21) for the double-barrel one.

rdwpa said:

*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.

The rocket launcher is better when there are crowds of densely-packed monsters; but the SSG can deal equivalent damage against single tough monsters -- and its ammo is more common and therefore more expendable.

[Da Werecat]

Bauul said:

And there's added damage to make up for the twice as long reload.

And really crappy range.

[scifista42]

Bauul said:

And there's added damage to make up for the twice as long reload.

If you keep holding the fire button, the shotgun's reload delay is 37 tics long, and the super shotgun's reload delay is 51 tics long, so it's just about 1.3 times slower.

Bauul said:

If it just did x2 the damage, it'd merely be a shotgun that did the same DPS,

I'm not sure if that'd really be worse (balance-wise) than what it actually is - the SSG deals about 2.9 times more damage per shot, and therefore about 2.2 times more damage-per-second than the shotgun, AND about 1.4 times more damage-per-ammo-unit. A bit too much of a difference in efficiency, IMO.

Da Werecat said:

And really crappy range.

True, the shotgun is at least still useful for longer ranges.

[baja blast rd.]

Gez said:

The correct answer is 7 bullets (not 6) for the single-barrel shotgun, and 20 (not 21) for the double-barrel one.

The rocket launcher is better when there are crowds of densely-packed monsters; but the SSG can deal equivalent damage against single tough monsters -- and its ammo is more common and therefore more expendable.

RL dps is 385 per second* to the SSG's 142, and the RL's dps goes up from there, even against just duos or trios, no crowds needed.


*Practical sustained dps as a % of total dps will be lower for the RL than SSG but not close to enough to bridge that gap.

[40oz]

The overpowered argument I think has more to do with the general abundance of shotgun shells everywhere all the time. The mapper can deny the usage of plasma and rockets by not putting the ammo in there, but if you want to deny too much super shotgun, you have to encourage a gameplay style that favors the chaingun or berserk or maybe the chainsaw, you can't really save the regular shotgun, or give the player more powerful weapons. You also cant use shotgun guys. The level designers of Doom 2 didn't think very hard about that so if you had a super shotgun, your ability to use it all day every day was never questioned.

[Bauul]

scifista42 said:

If you keep holding the fire button, the shotgun's reload delay is 37 tics long, and the super shotgun's reload delay is 51 tics long, so it's just about 1.3 times slower.

Hah, it feels much longer in game! Although looking at the Doom wiki, it lists the Shotgun as firing 56.8 times per minute (or a shot every 1.056 seconds), and the SSG at 36.8 times per minute (or a shot every 1.63 seconds). That's 1.54 times slower. Is the Wiki wrong?

I'm not sure if that'd really be worse (balance-wise) than what it actually is - the SSG deals about 2.9 times more damage per shot, and therefore about 2.2 times more damage-per-second than the shotgun, AND about 1.4 times more damage-per-ammo-unit. A bit too much of a difference in efficiency, IMO.

I just meant that the weapon as described by Trupiak would fire twice the bullets at half the rate. The resulting DPS and ammo consumption rate would be exactly the same as the regular shotgun, and therefore would be too similar to make it a worthwhile addition to Doom 2.

[baja blast rd.]

Better than the Wiki: https://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1415688

[Summer Deep]

Just done a quick run through of Ultimate Doom Episode 1 on HMP difficulty level, in order to check out the Doom64 Weapons Pack (Extended) mod, and noticed a few things for the first time:

There's a switch on the right hand pillar just inside the green armour room on the first level. Never spotted it before, and still have no idea what it does.

The wall concealing the passage to the chainsaw in level 2 only opens up after being shot. Must have achieved this by accident in the past and never realized why the passageway sometimes remained concealed.

The N64 machine gun gives off a purple haze when fired. Never noticed this when playing Doom64, perhaps because of its darker, murkier ambience.

Never realized just how unchallenging some parts of the original game's first episode are. No enemies whatsoever in the huge open courtyard on level 2, and no demons in the Barons of Hell arena in Phobos Anomaly (seem to remember the PSX version to be swarming with them, but that was on UV difficulty).

[Bauul]

rdwpa said:

Better than the Wiki: https://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1415688

ah I'd forgotten about that. Very useful table! I used it to create a spreadsheet for my last map counting up all the ammo and all the enemies to ensure there was exactly 33% more ammo on the map than necessary (i.e. the player could miss 1 in 4 times and be ok).

As an aside, mostly for my own learning I'm trying to get my head around the reload times for the shotguns. Looking at Whacked, it lists the following for the shotgun:

State    Dur     Action
22       7       FireShotgun
23       5
24       5
25       4
26       5
27       5
28       3
29       7       Refire

And for the SSG:

State    Dur     Action
36       7       FireShotgun2
37       7
38       7       CheckReload
39       7       OpenShotgun2
40       7
41       7       LoadShotgun2
42       6
43       6       CloseShotgun2
44       5       Refire

Excluding the Refire time (I just left that in to show the end of the sequence) am I right in counting that as 34 tics for the Shotgun and 54 for the SSG?

[Da Werecat]

CloseShotgun2 also calls Refire.

[42PercentHealth]

Just found out 2 things about damaging floors:

1) Damage is calculated every 32 tics from the start of the level. This is why sometimes a damaging sector will "hurt" right away, and sometimes you can cross an entire sector without being harmed.

2) The weapon sway while walking is on the same clock -- it reaches its uppermost point every 32 tics from the time the level was loaded. So a skilled player could avoid a lot of damage from lava, nukage, blood, etc. (dare I call it "substance abuse"? :-P) by timing his/her entering of the sector with the swaying of his weapon.

Kinda cool, I thought.

[scifista42]

Bauul said:

Excluding the Refire time (I just left that in to show the end of the sequence) am I right in counting that as 34 tics for the Shotgun and 54 for the SSG?

Da Werecat said:

CloseShotgun2 also calls Refire.

That, and you forgot to count the first frames of each animation.

Summer Deep said:

There's a switch on the right hand pillar just inside the green armour room on the first level [Doom E1M1]. Never spotted it before, and still have no idea what it does.

It opens a door from the start room to the armor courtyard, allowing to bypass the computer room and the zigzag room by going that way. More info here.

[TwinBeast]

Doomwiki still has the Super Shotgun firerate incorrect, since it counts the CloseShotgun2 state tics into the firerate. In Doom64 CloseShotgun2 doesn't include Refire... Also if you run out of ammo with the Super Shotgun, the weapon gets lowered at the CheckReload state, so you get to change to another weapon faster than with the regular Shotgun.

I made some comparison table about the firerates once... The Doom64 rates are from Doom64 EX source code.

Weapon Firerate		Doom		Doom64

Punch			17		17
Chainsaw		 4		 2	(tics per attack, 2 attacks)

Pistol			14		13
Shotgun			37		32
Super Shotgun		51		41
Chaingun		 4		 3	(tics per attack, 2 attacks)
Rocket Launcher		20		18
Plasma Rifle		 3		 4
BFG 9000		40		40

Unmaker			N/A		8, 5, 4, 4		(0, 1st, 2nd, 3rd demon artifact)

[damerell]

Summer Deep said:

Just done a quick run through of Ultimate Doom Episode 1 on HMP difficulty level, in order to check out the Doom64 Weapons Pack (Extended) mod, and noticed a few things for the first time:
There's a switch on the right hand pillar just inside the green armour room on the first level. Never spotted it before, and still have no idea what it does.

It was added later. It opens a door into the courtyard, mostly for deathmatch purposes.

[vita]

Berserk is the only powerup the duration of which (in the code) increases. It lasts for 2^32-1 tics, but its haze becomes very intense after 2^31-1 tics. chocolate-doom/src/doom/p_user.c:331—333:

    // Strength counts up to diminish fade.
    if (player->powers[pw_strength])
	player->powers[pw_strength]++;

[Tracer]

Gez said:

The correct answer is 7 bullets

Actually, the correct answer is seven pellets. Shotguns don't fire bullets.

[damerell]

TraceOfSpades said:

Actually, the correct answer is seven pellets. Shotguns don't fire bullets.

Yes, they do, in Doom. The projectiles from the shotguns are entirely identical to those from the pistol.

[SFoZ911]

When you're being shot while under the effect of the invulnerability sphere, you'll produce bullet puffs instead of blood marks.

[kb1]

38_ViTa_38 said:

Berserk is the only powerup the duration of which (in the code) increases. It lasts for 2^32-1 tics, but its haze becomes very intense after 2^31-1 tics. chocolate-doom/src/doom/p_user.c:331—333:

    // Strength counts up to diminish fade.
    if (player->powers[pw_strength])
	player->powers[pw_strength]++;

It lasts about 4 years before rolling over :)

[Arctangent]

damerell said:

Yes, they do, in Doom. The projectiles from the shotguns are entirely identical to those from the pistol.

Technically, they're not; pistol and chaingun bullets don't suffer from inaccuracy unless the Fire state is entered through A_ReFire, while the shotgun pellets always do.

[Da Werecat]

If you count the spread subtleties, then SG and SSG fire different pellets as well.

[Bauul]

Arctangent said:

Technically, they're not; pistol and chaingun bullets don't suffer from inaccuracy unless the Fire state is entered through A_ReFire, while the shotgun pellets always do.

I always presumed the accuracy difference was a programming function of the weapon, not the damage type.

So the first bullet perfect accuracy of the pistol and chaingun, the horizontal spread of the shotgun, and the horizontal and vertical spread of the SSG, are functions of the projectile type, not the gun?

Huh, you really do learn something new about Doom every day!

[Arctangent]

Well, putting the chaingun attack function onto the shotgun will still have it accurate on the first shot and inaccurate on refire, and vice-versa. You could argue it's still weapon-based, but really only as much as projectiles are - you can put the BFG function on the rocket launcher, or give the imp the revenant attack function, and they'd work exactly like they would on their source actor.

[BigDickBzzrak]

About Doomworld:

You can change the number of posts per page in your user options and even replace all images with links to them!
I hope the new forum software will keep those.

edit: heh I guess

[Linguica]

bzzrak said:

About Doomworld:

You can change the number of posts per page in your user options and even replace all images with links to them!
I hope the new forum software will keep those.

No and no!

[RjY]

SFoZ911 said:

When you're being shot while under the effect of the invulnerability sphere, you'll produce bullet puffs instead of blood marks.

I can neither reproduce this (in prboom+) nor find any evidence for it (in linuxdoom-1.10). May I ask you to recheck, or explain how you arrived at this conclusion (what you were doing at the time, which mods were loaded, which source port you were using, etc.)

[Da Werecat]

Arctangent said:

You could argue it's still weapon-based, but really only as much as projectiles are - you can put the BFG function on the rocket launcher, or give the imp the revenant attack function, and they'd work exactly like they would on their source actor.

Attack function is the weapon, pretty much. But there's also a separate function P_GunShot that sets up the hitscan properties - it's being called by all hitscan attack functions of the original Doom. It has its own hardcoded damage formula. The vertical angle is set from inside P_GunShot, and it can't be randomized there, so the SSG attack function does everything on its own. But the damage is exactly the same. If you compare the hitscans by their damage formulas, then they're the same.

Enemies use a different formula. Which confirms that whatever weapon you're getting from them must be different from the one they were discharging at you?? Videogames are confusing.

[SFoZ911]

RjY said:

I can neither reproduce this (in prboom+) nor find any evidence for it (in linuxdoom-1.10). May I ask you to recheck, or explain how you arrived at this conclusion (what you were doing at the time, which mods were loaded, which source port you were using, etc.)

Yea I actually forgot to mention that I used Zdoom since I'm so used to it. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

[RjY]

SFoZ911 said:

Yea I actually forgot to mention that I used Zdoom since I'm so used to it. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

Fair enough, I wasn't aware it was a change zdoom had made. So we both learned something. :)

[DMPhobos]

This is more of a Doom 3 thing, but there isn't a thread for that in the d3 forum, so whatever.
I just noticed that through most of the game, most terminals use the new UAC logo, but when you reach the caverns(that are mentioned to be the original mars base), all terminals start using the old classic UAC logo... Uh, small details