Things about Doom you just found out

[RjY]

6 hours ago, zokum said:

I'll see what I can do in ZokumBSP. I haven't looked much at the Reject section. I have fixed another bug in it though, and this bug is interesting.

 

FWIW I sent you a patch on github. It is incomplete (it was enough for my use case so I did not pursue the problem further) but it may suffice as a starting point. If nothing else the notes may be useful.

[StrangerRanger]

 Invisibility sphere is not worth it.

[Dusty_Rhodes]

That ZDoom has been around since 1998. It always seemed like it was newer. I want around the community back then, so I had no knowledge of source ports. 

[Gibbon]

That E1M3 had a secret level exit..  all this time...  how I never found it in 28 years makes me slightly embarrassed :)

[KubaloBlackMT]

On 4/18/2021 at 6:08 PM, BunnyWithBeans said:

A lot of Doom 2's music using the same type of progression. Mostly it's the same rhythm throughout the whole track while the melody gets changed around a bit every now and then. Now that I think about it, it's probably one of the reasons I never really liked most of Doom 2's music compared to Ultimate Doom's.

Ultimate Doom also has a similar thing going on, maybe with some extra additions but it still is mostly the same rhythm with some changes. This might actually be the reason that custom midis feel so weird to me since they're definitely a lot more complex.

[Scypek2]

If you start a level in front of five shotgunners, they'll still need to reload at least once to kill you. I made a level that has you escape a firing squad, and it feels pretty badass to survive if you start running or fighting right away, but when you stand still it's just embarassing as half of them miss and start shooting each other. I ended up placing two hidden barrels next to the player start, which still doesn't guarantee a death, but at least makes it a lot more likely that you'll die as soon as they fire if you don't move.

[RjY]

While replaying E2M7: Spawning Vats, I was backtracking for the final secret, when the following thought occurred. Given that:

• E2M7 has an obscure chain of secrets that ends in a soulsphere. You must press two buttons in out-of-the-way places, one inside another secret area, and requiring a key which is not available until the end of the map. Then twice search the whole of the level to see what if anything the switches did.
• MAP31 also has an obscure chain of secrets which ends in a soulsphere. Requiring pushing on unmarked walls in the right places, and the presence of mind to carry on searching even when it seems like the chain would have ended ("I just found a secret exit, what more can there be?")

And that:

• MAP31 is a reasonable facsimile of Wolfenstein's first level
• E2M7 was initially to be Doom's first level
• Wolfenstein extra lives were initially brought into Doom before the concept of lives was removed and the items replaced with soulspheres

I infer that Doom was once intended to have the same initial level feature as its predecessor: a puzzle comprising an obscure chain of secrets where the reward is an extra life.

 

[Jello]

On 11/6/2021 at 1:25 PM, Scypek2 said:

If you start a level in front of five shotgunners, they'll still need to reload at least once to kill you. I made a level that has you escape a firing squad, and it feels pretty badass to survive if you start running or fighting right away, but when you stand still it's just embarassing as half of them miss and start shooting each other. I ended up placing two hidden barrels next to the player start, which still doesn't guarantee a death, but at least makes it a lot more likely that you'll die as soon as they fire if you don't move.

That really made me think of this scene from Monty Python's Flying Circus:

 

 

 

Couldn't really find a simple, single .gif of the whole sequence, but I really didn't want to put up a video unnecessarily.

[spd7693]

On 10/30/2021 at 10:39 PM, RjY said:

See also Doom2 map15, where the route through the final blue-locked building crosses over itself. It begins with a sector that acts like both a lift and a door. In Boom if you go round then jump off the side at the top, you can reactivative the lift part while the door part is still open. This allows the latter to close too far, and break the map. I thought for years this was a level bug, until I realised that in vanilla the lift won't reactivate until the door has fully come to rest.

 

So if you have this thing used - which is a trick that appears a lot of times on custom wads too - you always risk breaking the map or you only risk breaking it on the DOS EXE? I think source ports "fix" this issue. 

[spd7693]

Memento Mori 2, map 14: 

 

 

In the room with the elevators and the teleporter to the red key you need to ride those elevators to shoot at the two switches that open up the stairs to the teleporter. If you take the lift on the right of the stairs you enter the room from, you shoot the switch on the opposite side. It opens a bigger gap than its counterpart. Interesting thing is is that you can glide through this gap. As shown on the screenshot, I'm on the inside already. I like first opening only this gap, punching the demons and then opening the other one. Well... I performed this glide while punching the demons. 

 

Also, earlier I spoke about a potential all ghosts bug in the first MM. Actually it's a blockmap noclip bug. It activates if you shoot at the corner next to the teleporter you come from from a very specific spot. 

Edited November 14, 2021 by spd7693

[DrJordo]

in hacx, i think the uzi looks way different between the idle and reload animations. like the first is hand-drawn (or at least heavily touched up) and the second is a digitized 3d model. what do you think?

Edited November 15, 2021 by DrJordo

[Faceman2000]

A heavily-distorted version of the Lost Soul screech is actually used as a kind of drum beat in the Halloween 2018 soundtrack.

 

(Skip to 0:32)

 

 

Edited November 15, 2021 by Faceman2000

[RjY]

On 11/14/2021 at 9:37 PM, spd7693 said:

 

So if you have this thing used - which is a trick that appears a lot of times on custom wads too - you always risk breaking the map or you only risk breaking it on the DOS EXE? I think source ports "fix" this issue. 

 

No, the other way round. Boom engine physics makes it possible to break the map, because they allow the floor to be activated when the ceiling is still active (or vice versa), whereas vanilla prohibits either plane being activated until the other has completed.

 

On 11/14/2021 at 9:44 PM, spd7693 said:

Memento Mori 2, map 14: [...] Interesting thing is is that you can glide through this gap. As shown on the screenshot, I'm on the inside already. I like first opening only this gap, punching the demons and then opening the other one. Well... I performed this glide while punching the demons.

 

Given the importance of facing precisely the correct angle for a successful glide, and the effect of performing melee attacks on that precision, that's quite impressive :).

 

On 11/14/2021 at 9:44 PM, spd7693 said:

Also, earlier I spoke about a potential all ghosts bug in the first MM. Actually it's a blockmap noclip bug. It activates if you shoot at the corner next to the teleporter you come from from a very specific spot. 

 

Wait, aren't those two different names for the same thing?

Also I can't seem to find the previous post about the first MM, could you link it? I only found one about MM2 map04.

[Edward850]

9 hours ago, Faceman2000 said:

A heavily-distorted version of the Lost Soul screech is actually used as a kind of drum beat in the Halloween 2018 soundtrack.

Doom's sound is actually the one that's distorted. It's a bat squawk played at 50% speed. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Origins_of_Doom_sounds

It's additionally pointless to report this, a large chunk of Doom's sounds come from a common use library, and outside of some specific edge cases aren't related to or in reference to Doom in any way.

Edited November 15, 2021 by Edward850

[Faceman2000]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

It's additionally pointless to report this, a large chunk of Doom's sounds come from a common use library, and outside of some specific edge cases aren't related to or in reference to Doom in any way.

Generally speaking I would agree with you, but I found this a creative and interesting enough use and I thought others might as well.

 

Evidently you did not.

[spd7693]

23 hours ago, RjY said:

No, the other way round. Boom engine physics makes it possible to break the map, because they allow the floor to be activated when the ceiling is still active (or vice versa), whereas vanilla prohibits either plane being activated until the other has completed.

 

Hm... Complevel 2 doesn't have that. I believe it's on complevel 9 when that happens. In map 16 of MM2 there is such a sector. I pressed on its lift side when the door side was open. The lift didn't activate before the door closed. Not sure if it can be done vice versa though. 

 

23 hours ago, RjY said:

Also I can't seem to find the previous post about the first MM, could you link it? I only found one about MM2 map04.

 

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/57270-things-about-doom-you-just-found-out/?page=227&tab=comments#comment-1920074

 

Here it is. The one in MM2 map 4 was a bit of weird though, because it didn't occur when I was shooting, but when I was trying to jump to the secret in the blood river. So it shouldn't be a blockmap bug, may have been an intercept overflow error? 

[RjY]

20 hours ago, spd7693 said:

Hm... Complevel 2 doesn't have that. I believe it's on complevel 9 when that happens.

 

Yes, you are absolutely right.

 

In vanilla (complevel 2) you cannot break the end of Doom2 map15.
In Boom (complevel 9) you can.

 

This is the point I was trying to make. I had previously believed being able to break the end of map15 was a bug in the map. This was incorrect. In fact being able to break the end of map15 was an unfortunate side-effect of Boom's removal of vanilla's restriction of only one active thinker per sector. It illustrates why one must always play a map in the engine / compatibility mode in which it was designed.*

Sorry, I feel we are misunderstanding each other, and are really in violent agreement. So let us move on.

Also, thank you for finding the link. Honestly you can get an intercept overflow / all-ghosts bug anywhere, even on Doom2 map04 as Ancalagon found. P_PathTraverse can get stuck in a blockmap square due to numerical inaccuracy. If that happens in an occupied square, the things in the square can get added as intercepts up to 64 times each. In such a situation, it is easy to overrun the limit of 128 -- you only need two or three.

 

____
* A rule that I nevertheless violate constantly. More of a guideline :).

[Endless]

On 11/5/2021 at 1:50 PM, Dusty_Rhodes said:

That ZDoom has been around since 1998. It always seemed like it was newer. I want around the community back then, so I had no knowledge of source ports. 

ZDoom is actually slightly older than even Boom by a few months, and then PrBoom came also only a few months after Boom original release, which pretty much made Boom irrelevant, to an extent. But I wasn't alive back then, so I'm not exactly sure as to what the reception was really like.

[spd7693]

Memento Mori 2, map 27: 

 

 

This is the room with the blue switch, the sludge and the three circular pools where the pain elementals reside. (Screenshot done in -nomonsters mode.) It is possible to accidentally jump into one from the soulsphere above in the room. If that happens, you're softlocked and can never come out. 

[zokum]

On 11/17/2021 at 7:56 PM, Endless said:

ZDoom is actually slightly older than even Boom by a few months, and then PrBoom came also only a few months after Boom original release, which pretty much made Boom irrelevant, to an extent. But I wasn't alive back then, so I'm not exactly sure as to what the reception was really like.

Boom was closed source and VERY controversial. The lack of openness and Team TNT's handling of the whole issue was probably one of the reasons that led to its demise.

[NoWits]

OK, this is something I've known about Doom for a while now, but it's something YOU just found out:

 

The 4th demo of Ultimate Doom, DEMO4, isn't preceded by a credits roll or any other sort of intermission text. It just goes straight from DEMO3 to DEMO4. In previous versions of Doom, after the final demo (DEMO3), it would go straight back to the title screen before cycling the demo sequence again. They didn't bother to add in an extra credits screen after DEMO3. - In other words:

 

Title screen

DEMO1 (e1m5)

Credits screen

DEMO2 (e2m2)

Credits screen

DEMO3 (e3m5)

DEMO4 (e4m2)

Title screen

 

This just adds to the whole feeling that Episode 4 was a hastily tacked-on afterthought.

[thiccyosh]

In vanilla Doom 2, the string "You need a blue key to use this object" is never used, as in, this line cannot be found in any of the vanilla maps.

 

That is your Doom 2 fun fact of the day.

[NoWits]

Ooh, that reminds me of another fun fact:

 

In Doom v0.99 at least, it's 'you need a red keycard to open this door'.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UBFrbBnU1

[Gibbon]

I always thought the secret door with the imps on MAP01 in DOOM2 was a linedef (I never bothered to open the map in an editor).  But today I saw this

Spoiler

So it really just agitates the imps inside the secret door and they will open it the moment the imp in the cage sees you..  funny thing is, I did this exact trick in one of my maps for Community Trunk and I thought it was pretty neat xD

 

Damn you Sandy :P

[Jewellds]

17 hours ago, NoWits said:

In Doom v0.99 at least, it's 'you need a red keycard to open this door'.

 

Just loaded the 1.1 registered wad into 0.99, and the skull doors say "You need a (colour) skull to open this door". By 1.1 the separate messages are gone and they all say "key".

[nicolas monti]

On 9/12/2021 at 6:53 PM, RjY said:

@Uni Thank you for reading all the way to the end. ;) You mention Sandy's penchant for adding lore: I wonder about all the other subtle "visual narrative" I miss because I'm running around at 20+ miles per hour shooting at demons. Some things I've read about, and been surprised to learn, in the past few years:

• Dead marines in episode 1. Starting from E1M5 there are no more marine corpses. Implying you are the first one who has made it that far. Did you pay attention to the placement of player corpses? Or did your brain, like mine, quickly learn to tune out decorative objects that have no obvious gameplay effect, to avoid distraction from the main goal of not getting killed.
• The altar scene in E3M6. Are those demons worshipping human technology, in awe of its destructive power? I don't know, I didn't even stop to look. I just jumped down off a ledge to grab some weapons off a pedestal -- and unsurprisingly, got ambushed. Supposedly there, it is also shown how lost souls are created, from the ritual sacrifice of imps. Would you notice this when the monsters all wake up on sight and immediately move out of position? Would you notice afterwards that the imp corpses are specifically placed, they are not just regular monsters that happened to fall there in combat? I didn't. Fun fact: they are the only placed imp corpses (thing type 20) in all of Doom and Doom2.
• The Remorseless Eatin' Machine of E2M4. You walk in the room -- the floor drops -- you're surrounded by monsters -- you can't back out. You dive for cover through an odd-looking machine -- argh! The ceiling! Too late you realise what all those blood pools were telling you. But do you notice, in your haste, that the machine has two eyes and you just ran into its mouth? You can even "kill" it if you shoot at the right spot. I paid no mind to the placement of the eyes for nearly 20 years, because again, the brain tunes out decorative objects with no gameplay effect. Nowadays, I wonder if the evil eye sprites were created specifically for this construct.

 

I realized long ago there are not corpses from E1M5 to the end of the episode. I think Romero just forgot to put some in the latter levels, one may argue that is because the other players didn't get that far but that is too imaginative.

[MoreMending]

I actually found this out a few weeks ago, but I found out that Soul Spheres aren't actually called Supercharges, and that "Supercharge!" is just the message that displays when you pick it up, and nothing other than a message.

[Spectre01]

Just had Dead Simple trigger the step to the exit platform twice:

In this case, the exit becomes reachable by straferunning off one of the Mancubus platforms. I assume this has something to do with the last 2 Arachnos dying at almost the same time. Either way, first time I've had it happen to me on a map07 across all wads.

[MegaZzZeux]

Just realized that monsters cannot open TURBO (LOCAL) DOORS... Maybe I knew this when I was younger, but I definitely just relearned it last night

[Oday]

I just found out about the wall tagged 666 that lowers down today in the forum.