Things about Doom you just found out

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, Walter confetti said:

Discovered this thing while making a map for Limit Buffet, based upon 1 sector limitation.

Explosive barrels acts as monster count and they make all the monsters not attacking, also they don't do chain explosions when a group of barrels are shotted, as well as giving damage. Weird.

1sbarrel.zip - Demo wad, complevel 2. MAP01 is the 1 sector map, MAP02 have 2 sectors and acts normally.

Because your map actually requires more than 1 sector. Aspects of Doom's behaviour expects at least 2, monster targeting behaviour is one of the things that breaks otherwise, not surprised explosives is the other.

Edited January 31, 2023 by Edward850

[ImproversGaming]

Spoiler

8 hours ago, Walter confetti said:

Discovered this thing while making a map for Limit Buffet, based upon 1 sector limitation.

Explosive barrels acts as monster count and they make all the monsters not attacking, also they don't do chain explosions when a group of barrels are shotted, as well as giving damage. Weird.

1sbarrel.zip - Demo wad, complevel 2. MAP01 is the 1 sector map, MAP02 have 2 sectors and acts normally.

 

 

This is really interesting. Bet you could be creative about making an interesting map from this! Is it possible to take damage at all, like crushers or any other way? Could be an interesting map as it is so different!

[Noiser]

On 12/16/2022 at 8:09 PM, zokum said:

No. It is used for the partial invisibility powerup, lite-amp goggles, cacodemon projectiles and in at least one texture. It shows up in the middle of one the brownish tech ones if I'm not mistaken.

It also appears on the second fireblu frame, barely visible as well!

Edited January 31, 2023 by Noiser

[Wagi]

18 hours ago, Walter confetti said:

Discovered this thing while making a map for Limit Buffet, based upon 1 sector limitation.

Explosive barrels acts as monster count and they make all the monsters not attacking, also they don't do chain explosions when a group of barrels are shotted, as well as giving damage. Weird.

1sbarrel.zip - Demo wad, complevel 2. MAP01 is the 1 sector map, MAP02 have 2 sectors and acts normally.

I don't know if it's still the case, but older versions of Doombuilder required you to have at least two sectors before it would even run the nodebuilder, and probably for this reason. My best theory here is that maybe it doesn't know what to do with with the REJECT map calculations here, as it's basically acting as if there is no line of sight between any two objects, preventing enemies from seeing you and preventing any splash damage from working.

[TasAcri]

I was playing Calico DOOM (Jaguar DOOM on PC) and something happened that i never saw before.

 

I was shooting a zombieman with the pistol and he got gibbed!

 

Now, what happened was that another zombieman behind him was trying to shoot at me but because my zombieman was in the way, he was getting hit instead. At some point i think both mine and the other zombieman's bullet must have hit the target at the same exact time, while his health was nearly zero, and the extra damage got him gibbed.

 

Is this a thing in DOOM? Or maybe in Jaguar DOOM? Or just a Calico feature/bug? I can't tell. But all these years i play DOOM in every system or source port, it only ever happened to me once.

Edited February 1, 2023 by TasAcri

[peach freak]

1 hour ago, TasAcri said:

I was playing Calico DOOM (Jaguar DOOM on PC) and something happened that i never saw before.

 

I was shooting a zombieman with the pistol and he got gibbed!

 

Now, what happened was that another zombieman behind him was trying to shoot at me but because my zombieman was in the way, he was getting hit instead. At some point i think both mine and the other zombieman's bullet must have hit the target at the same exact time, while his health was nearly zero, and the extra damage got him gibbed.

 

Is this a thing in DOOM? Or maybe in Jaguar DOOM? Or just a Calico feature/bug? I can't tell. But all these years i play DOOM in every system or source port, it only ever happened to me once.

 

I remember gibbing a Zombieman with a Shotgun in PSX Doom, so maybe the console ports have different gib mechanics? Unless someone knows, I heard one possibility is that the HP threshold to gib a monster in some of the console ports is negative half of the monster's spawn health, instead of being less than the negative of the spawn health (so for a Zombieman at 20HP, you'd only need to get it to -11 to gib it instead of -21, and -11 is possible with a maximum damage bullet/shell/non-Berserk Fist/Chainsaw, things that couldn't gib a Zombiema in the PC game).

[Bucket]

"Gantlet" is probably not misspelled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_(glove)

 

Quote

"Running the gauntlet" was a military punishment in which a soldier or sailor had to pass between a double row of comrades armed with cudgels. The expression is now generally used metaphorically. Gauntlet in this context is unrelated to the "protective glove" meaning, but is instead derived from the Swedish gatlopp ("street run").[3] Because of this difference in the derivation of the word, the expression is sometimes written "running the gantlet".

 

[rawmeat]

found out that some demons just magically decide to not monster infight even though ones projectile hit the other.

[Edward850]

1 minute ago, rawmeat said:

found out that some demons just magically decide to not monster infight even though ones projectile hit the other.

Nothing magic about it:

 

[Gez]

On mercredi 1 février 2023 at 2:50 PM, TasAcri said:

Now, what happened was that another zombieman behind him was trying to shoot at me but because my zombieman was in the way, he was getting hit instead. At some point i think both mine and the other zombieman's bullet must have hit the target at the same exact time, while his health was nearly zero, and the extra damage got him gibbed.

There's no such thing as "exact same time" in Doom.

 

So the game is split into tics, right? But a tic is divided into a variable, but usually large, number of discrete events, that happen at the same time but sequentially. Like, event A happens at the same time as event B, but before event B, and event A is fully finished when event B takes place, even if they're simultaneous. Pretty weird, but that's how it goes, because the game's world is simulated so time is split into a rather small amount of frames (just 35 per second) and each frame is a massive update to the entire world where plenty of separate events have happened.

 

But each of these event must be computed separately -- Doom is not a multithreaded, multicore game, and those words were pure science fiction back when Doom was developed anyway.

 

Look at a super shotgun. It fires twenty pellets. Each one can deal 5, 10, or 15 damage to an enemy. In theory, if you point-blank-shoot a zombieman with the SSG, he's gonna receive a minimum of 20x5=100 damage, assuming you're close enough that each pellet hits. That's enough to bring a perfectly healthy and fit zombieman to -80 health, where he should be thoroughly gibbed. But it won't happen. Is it because the 20 pellets are not simultaneous despite being simultaneous? Yes, that's exactly it! While each pellet is hitscan and therefore happens immediately and instantly, each pellet is handled sequentially. One of the pellets -- could be the second, third, or fourth to hit if the zombieman wasn't already wounded -- will bring the zombie to 0 hp or less. When that happens, the zombie instantly dies, and therefore becomes non-shootable. The next pellet goes right through the already-dead zombieman and continues on its merry way, potentially hitting another enemy, or a barrel. Same for all the others that come after in the same tic.

 

It is much more likely that the half gib health thing is the explanation. We know Heretic does half gib health. I suppose we could check Calico's source code to be sure...

[Gez]

1 hour ago, Gez said:

It is much more likely that the half gib health thing is the explanation. We know Heretic does half gib health. I suppose we could check Calico's source code to be sure...

So I went in checked it.

https://github.com/team-eternity/calico-doom/blob/c2aa6ec7d80bb62a15ec84c6d9c93f3e8f7178d5/src/p_inter.c

And it does the half-health gib thing! ... only for players. Players get gibbed when below -50 health, rather than when at -100 health. But monsters still use their full negative health, I see no halving done there.

 

So maybe the pistol deals more damage? I went in and checked that too:

https://github.com/team-eternity/calico-doom/blob/c2aa6ec7d80bb62a15ec84c6d9c93f3e8f7178d5/src/p_pspr.c

Negative. In fact, it seems it deals less damage. See, here's the vanilla Doom code for the pellet damage:

 damage = 5*(P_Random ()%3+1);

And here's the Calico code (Calicode, if you will) for the same thing:

damage = ((P_Random ()&3)+1)*4;

For those who don't do programmer maths, &3 means "modulo 3", so we get a random number that will be divided by 3 and we take the remainder -- so a value that will be 0, 1, or 2. Then we add 1 to that (with the +1, as you've all guessed) to get a value that can be 1, 2, or 3. And then we multiply that by 5 in vanilla... and by 4 in Calico! So a Calico pistol shot actually does only 4, 8, or 12 damage while the vanilla pistol does 5, 10, or 15 damage. By the way, the shotgun is also affected by the same nerf, though it still gets to fire seven pellets. That puts its damage range between 28 (minimum theoretical damage when all pellets hit: 7x4) to 84 (maximum theoretical damage, 7x12) while vanilla shotgun has 35 to 105. Super shotgun is moot as it doesn't exist in Calico; Jaguar Doom being only a port of Doom 1. Oh, and the chaingun is affected too, since beneath the hood it's just a rapid-fire pistol.

 

At this point, since clearly nothing is sacred, I decided to go take a look at the zombieman. If the guns are nerfed, it stands to reason the monsters could be nerfed too.

https://github.com/team-eternity/calico-doom/blob/c2aa6ec7d80bb62a15ec84c6d9c93f3e8f7178d5/src/info.c

Nope.

{		/* MT_POSSESSED */
3004,		/* doomednum */
S_POSS_STND,		/* spawnstate */
20,		/* spawnhealth */

He does get his whole 20 health, same as vanilla. Clearly something weird is going on. I've looked a bit at the damage dealing functions and stuff, but without noticing anything out of the ordinary, so at this point I have no explanation.

 

[TasAcri]

So did i experienced a bug then? Maybe i'm using an older version of Calico that has that bug or different values? Pretty sure i have the latest version though (last edited 31-Jan-21).

Edited February 3, 2023 by TasAcri

[Foxpup]

11 hours ago, Gez said:

For those who don't do programmer maths, &3 means "modulo 3",

No it doesn't. % is modulo. & is bitwise AND, and 3 in binary is 00000011, so the damage function is effectively taking the two rightmost bits of the random value, which have four possible values: 00 (0), 01 (1), 10 (2), and 11 (3). Add one and the final damage multiplicand is a random value from 1 to 4, not 1 to 3, so the possible damage values are 4, 8, 12, and 16. This distribution has the same mean and standard deviation as the PC version*, which would explain why nobody noticed the difference before. It's still not enough to gib a zombieman unless something else is going on, though.

 

*Which makes one wonder why it was changed at all. Modular arithmetic inefficient/not present on the Jaguar?

[Gez]

Oops, yes. In my defense, it was past 1 AM for me when I wrote that, so I was a bit tired.

[SaladBadger]

The reason why zombiemen can gib in Calico (and all of the jaguar derived console ports, too) is because their damage was buffed up some, for whatever reason. It's now 3r8 instead of 3r5. Here's Calico's A_PosAttack

Edited February 4, 2023 by SaladBadger

[Individualised]

Just noticed that these poles in The Crusher unfittingly use a crate texture on their top and bottom sides.

[Individualised]

As you may know, the earliest available Doom 2 prototype looks for "DOOMR.WAD" rather than "DOOM2.WAD". However, something I noticed more recently is that, in the final game's .WAD, quite a few Doom 2-specific textures (and maybe other lumps too) are prefixed with the letter R which would otherwise not be relevant to the description of the texture, for example the Doom 2 sky textures are "RSKYx" as opposed to "SKYx" from Doom 1. I originally thought that "DOOMR" meant "Doom Retail"; but now I'm wondering if "R" is an initial for an early title for the game before they decided to go with the much more generic "Doom 2".

Edited February 7, 2023 by Individualised

[Scypek2]

Pretty sure it all does stand for "retail". They weren't sure what the next thing was gonna be named, but they knew one thing for certain - there was gonna be some kind of retail sequel. And so it was the most reliable way to name all those new things without it becoming confusing. There's countless references to "retail" in the code and other files too. And so, before Sandy Petersen came about and gave actual names to everything, Doom 2's actual boss was the Retail Wall Demon. Truly intimidating.

 

On a related note, while I quickly realized that the shiny metal textures were named after Shawn Green (pretty much as soon as I learned English and found out there's no type of steel alloy called a shawn), it took me ages to consider that the SP_ in some texture names might stand for Sandy Petersen.

[Faceman2000]

I’ve always been confused by the references to Shawn Green among the original textures, seeing as all of his contributions I’m aware of started with Doom II.

[spineapple tea]

While the menu is open, pressing 'n', 'o', 'l', 's', and 'q' will move the cursor to the respective options (New Game, Options, Load Game, Save Game, and Quit Game).

[rita remton]

 

for my wip (4096x4096x4096 mu) simple boom map (currently 8379 linedefs, 100 vanilla monsters), gzdoom 4.10 (with all post processing disabled, dynamic lights disabled, texture filtering all off, opengl and hardware accelerated, no environment+monsters+weapons mods whatsoever) renders this scene at 15-20 fps. dsda-doom 0.25.2 displays this at 59-60 fps. using a potato lappy (intel hd graphics 4000), but the huge performance difference of 200% is a bit baffling. oh well, back to the drawing board i guess 😅

[TakenStew22]

A friend told me this awhile ago, but apparently the green armor and blue armor have different armor values. Where the green armor absorbs 1/3 of damage and blue armor absorbs 1/2. In this case, if you grabbed the blue armor it is not recommended to pick up a green armor even after dropping to 99% or lower, because your armor value will be replaced by the weaker one. It's wise to pick up the green only after all armor is depleted or close to being depleted.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Armors

I can't believe I never knew this until now. I hope I remember this weird fact the next time I play Doom.

Edited February 23, 2023 by TakenStew22

[ＤΞＬＴΛ]

Anyone noticed this ceiling texture on doom 2 map 29?

[zokum]

On 2/8/2023 at 7:42 PM, Faceman2000 said:

I’ve always been confused by the references to Shawn Green among the original textures, seeing as all of his contributions I’m aware of started with Doom II.

There are several inconsistencies when it comes to Shawn's contributions. I think he did some misc work while doing his main job. Not enough to get credit, but he chipped in where it was needed.

He is credited as the mapper for Doom 2 map25. e4m3 is listed as his first map. Timeline wise, this doesn't make sense. I think he finished map25 from an early version made by Petersen. If they had e4m3 or an early version of it, it would make much more sense to use that map instead of something like map21. E4m3 was probably his first map made from scratch.

Stylistically map25 is a bit different from what Sandy usually designs. All of his maps tend to be very compact. Map25 on the other hand spans a large area, with lots of dead space. Stylistically I would guess that Petersen made the start area, the courtyard and the possibly the northern area. Shawn did the other parts. That could also be why the map uses the slightly awkward teleport across the map to get the key. That part doesn't seem to be planned ahead at all. Hard to tell though, the map has several quite different designs an detailing is overall sparse. The southern part has more design mistakes and bugs.

Green also managed much of the Doom stuff when the rest were working on Quake. My hunch is that he was a useful person that took care of the various odd jobs and chipped in where it was needed. Managed projects, made some simple textures, finished a map for Doom 2, made some e4 maps etc.

If his mapping progression went from map25 -> e4m3 -> e4m8, I would say his skill quickly increased. The complexity and quality is rising. Would have been interesting to see some more maps made by him.

[Individualised]

On 2/23/2023 at 12:05 PM, zokum said:

There are several inconsistencies when it comes to Shawn's contributions. I think he did some misc work while doing his main job. Not enough to get credit, but he chipped in where it was needed.

He is credited as the mapper for Doom 2 map25. e4m3 is listed as his first map. Timeline wise, this doesn't make sense. I think he finished map25 from an early version made by Petersen. If they had e4m3 or an early version of it, it would make much more sense to use that map instead of something like map21. E4m3 was probably his first map made from scratch.

Stylistically map25 is a bit different from what Sandy usually designs. All of his maps tend to be very compact. Map25 on the other hand spans a large area, with lots of dead space. Stylistically I would guess that Petersen made the start area, the courtyard and the possibly the northern area. Shawn did the other parts. That could also be why the map uses the slightly awkward teleport across the map to get the key. That part doesn't seem to be planned ahead at all. Hard to tell though, the map has several quite different designs an detailing is overall sparse. The southern part has more design mistakes and bugs.

Green also managed much of the Doom stuff when the rest were working on Quake. My hunch is that he was a useful person that took care of the various odd jobs and chipped in where it was needed. Managed projects, made some simple textures, finished a map for Doom 2, made some e4 maps etc.

If his mapping progression went from map25 -> e4m3 -> e4m8, I would say his skill quickly increased. The complexity and quality is rising. Would have been interesting to see some more maps made by him.

Someone close to id a while back said that a lot of maps solely credited to Sandy Petersen in Doom 2 were co-authored by Shawn Green. There's not really much way to verify this though. Something interesting that could back this up is that what ended up becoming MAP28: The Spirit World, which is credited to Petersen, was actually a composite of two separate hell-themed maps. In the July 29th, 1994 prototype, they hadn't been merged together yet and The Spirit World was still two seperate maps, being much less refined than the final version. This implies to me that the maps in Doom 2's Hell episode are what that guy was talking about, that they were originally made by Shawn Green and then finalised by Sandy Petersen similar to what he did to Tom Hall's maps in Doom 1.

 

In the same prototype, MAP07 Dead Simple, whose final version is credited to both Sandy Petersen and American McGee, has a completely different and much more basic design. Petersen does not have any recollection of having anything to do with the final Dead Simple. That may have also been a Shawn Green map. This is where the details get muddy though, as our partially reconstructed version of the prototype uses the game data from 29/07/94 but uses an executable from a few days later in August. Apparently, by that point, they had already replaced Dead Simple with what would become the final version, as the game executable already has the "boss defeated" stuff.

Edited February 24, 2023 by Individualised

[spd7693]

I wonder if it's just me, but it seems like I'm most comfortable when my gamma correction is set to 2 in GLBoom+ and 1.5 in GZDoom. Seems like I make my maps that way as well. No wonder why when playing with GZDoom you all see my maps darker than usual. Just noticed it when I tested my most recent map. 

 

Also, it feels like in GLBoom+ the game runs faster. Maybe I should check the speed settings, but I'm sure it seems like that. 

 

[DiR]

On 1/31/2023 at 7:24 AM, Walter confetti said:

Discovered this thing while making a map for Limit Buffet, based upon 1 sector limitation.

Explosive barrels acts as monster count and they make all the monsters not attacking, also they don't do chain explosions when a group of barrels are shotted, as well as giving damage. Weird.

1sbarrel.zip - Demo wad, complevel 2. MAP01 is the 1 sector map, MAP02 have 2 sectors and acts normally.

 

I love how the chaingunners are just aggressively minding their own business.

[Individualised]

Locked switches were introduced in Final Doom, not Doom 2. They technically exist in Doom 2 but go unused. I could have sworn they were in Doom 2 but they're not. They never stuck out as new level elements to me. Doom 2 does have those locked bar-like doors though so it could be that I mixed them up back when I first played the games when I was younger.

Edited February 25, 2023 by Individualised

[Graf Zahl]

1 hour ago, Individualised said:

Locked switches were introduced in Final Doom, not Doom 2. They technically exist in Doom 2 but go unused. I could have sworn they were in Doom 2 but they're not. They never stuck out as new level elements to me. Doom 2 does have those locked bar-like doors though so it could be that I mixed them up back when I first played the games when I was younger.

 

These are actually the same thing technically.

 

[Individualised]

17 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

These are actually the same thing technically.

 

I know the locked bars are the exact same as locked doors - but younger me didn't know that and registered them in my mind as something new to Doom 2 when I first played it. Hence why younger me may have not registered the locked switches in Final Doom (and Episode 4 as well apparently) being a new thing, as I already remembered there being a "new" type of locked element in Doom 2 and filed them as being under the same thing in my mind. Before I just found out that locked switches weren't used in the Doom 2 maps, I could have sworn that locked switches were used in The Inmost Dens, but in fact, I was thinking of a switch behind a locked door, that caused bars to lower (not actual locked bars funnily enough).

Edited February 25, 2023 by Individualised