Things about Doom you just found out

[Doomkid]

Zandronum/Skulltag and Legacy change the air control to be much higher by default, but it's very easy to set them back to vanilla air control. Conversely, ZD and Oda start with the default but can be increased manually. All of this can be changed through a client (or server) console, custom mapinfo lumps are not necessary.

[Gez]

For Skulltag/Zandronum, see description of compat_limited_airmovement in there.

[printz]

In Eternity I finally added air control, which acts like in Hexen: your velocity is added by a tiny constant amount in the direction you try to move; it's not proportional to the force you apply. Still, for maps with low gravity, a more flexible air control would be very welcome, so I'll add it when demand kicks in.

[fraggle]

kb1 said:

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.

This probably sounded better in your head.

[Graf Zahl]

LOL. I didn't even notice that gem in kb1's ramblings, but here's my take:

My grandma also had some favorite recipes and passed them on to my mother - who, with a lot of experimentation made them even better.

There you have it! That's how I see GZDoom. :P

[dpJudas]

This thread is making me really hungry. Can someone pass me the ketchup? :)

[kb1]

Gez said:

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.

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.

You claimed that I didn't say #1 or #2, but now you claim to see that I did, in fact say those things. I'm thinking that maybe you just skimmed the text vs. reading it (I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, which is pretty generous on my part, all things considered, don't you think?)

#3 is where you still misunderstand and misquote: Let me re-phrase:

It is disrespectful to do the fix on maps that were designed and most-likely tested with the bug in place.

Let me also state clearly: There's nothing wrong with the fix - it's a good and solid idea.

The issue occurs when the fix is applied unconditionally. There's no debate: This (and other gameplay fixes) breaks some maps, to some degree.

What I wish for, is that devs:
A. Acknowledge this fact.
B. Deem it as important.
C. Make efforts to resolve the issue.

So, the only real remaining question is: When should the fix be applied? This question deserves some consideration. The map breaks occur when the map author tests in vanilla, and then someone plays the map in a port that changes game play. Here's some possibilities:

1. Add an option in the Options menu/DM flags. This is a possibility. It's not ideal, but would be better than nothing.

2. Try to detect when a map was tested in vanilla. Not really possible.
3. Try to detect when a map is a vanilla map. Very difficult, and not 100% accurate, without some massive, convoluted test apparatus.

4. Try to detect that a map is NOT vanilla. Now, this has some possibilities. A per-map MAPINFO flag would be quite accurate. Also, map format=UDMF. Also, wad format=ZIP.

5. Combine #1 and #4: Detect when to apply fixes (MAPINFO flag turns on fixes), but allow the user to override in the menu. That gives the player 100% control, and also does the right thing in the vast majority of cases.

#5 is the most flexible. And, if the devs announce that, for example, the setting of this particular flag is the proper way to designate that gameplay fixes are to be applied, everyone could start doing that in all of their port-specific maps.

Another thing to acknowledge is that the current situation is a mess. It is downright difficult to know which port to use, and which settings to set for any given WAD/map. Sure, you can read the text file. But, for example, a launcher can try to guess - detecting which port to use, based on the contents of the files, attempting to scrape and interpret the text file, etc, but it cannot be accurate each time, without a database.

But, moving forward, there are possible solutions. The MAPINFO idea is nice, cause it gives the map author the ability to explicitly state his/her intentions and test environment. And, giving the player the ability to override makes everyone happy. But the way it is now, there's nothing the map author or player can do.

@Gez: Now don't you feel silly going ballistic over that? Reading the whole post before losing your shit, please :)

[Bauul]

Aww man I thought we were done with this argument! As entertaining as it was.

Long story short: every single source port handles Doom in a different way. Mappers should test all their maps across a range of source ports, and if there are certain ports it doesn't play nicely with, make a note in the readme.

Done.

[kb1]

Arctangent said:

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?

The guy is claiming that his house is red, though it just isn't. And, people that have never seen blue think it is called "red". (That's too harsh of an analogy, but whatever.)

And, yeah, there's other ports that do emulate vanilla. But the thing is, the Z ports do everything else - that's a point of pride. Everything but proper emulation of the maps. There should be a disclaimer pop up: "This port cannot emulate the gameplay of the map with accuracy. Continue? (Y/N)". Which would be ridiculous. It would not take an enormous amount of effort for it to get massively closer than it does. But, it seems like some personal philosophies prevent it from doing so.

And, the biggest issue is that it causes real problems, for all people, across ALL ports. Imagine going in the other direction: A vanilla map, tested in a non-compliant port. Same issue, it won't play the same in a port that emulates vanilla. It's the same issue in reverse.

It's not about me. I am speaking for all of the map authors and players, who all are affected, by some degree. That includes you, and everyone posting and reading this thread. I guess most people either do not understand the ramifications, or have just given up on a solution.

Bauul said:

Aww man I thought we were done with this argument! As entertaining as it was.

Long story short: every single source port handles Doom in a different way. Mappers should test all their maps across a range of source ports, and if there are certain ports it doesn't play nicely with, make a note in the readme.

Done.

You're right, of course - this is the only remaining solution, because some of the devs don't care enough to do what it takes to solve the issue. Pity. Must feel big to have that much power to disrupt and cause mild frustration, disappointment, and confusion across so many people. To each his own, I suppose. I tried.

[Graf Zahl]

kb1 said:

It's not about me. I am speaking for all of the map authors and players, who all are affected, by some degree. That includes you, and everyone posting and reading this thread. I guess most people either do not understand the ramifications, or have just given up on a solution.

No, you are just speaking for yourself. Ask any map author and the most likely response will be a confused "Huh?" at best.

[Cynical]

kb1 said:

So, the only real remaining question is: When should the fix be applied? This question deserves some consideration. The map breaks occur when the map author tests in vanilla, and then someone plays the map in a port that changes game play.

Again, what map does fixing this bug break? It's a lot more likely that a map is going to randomly break without this fix than the mapper somehow stumbled into building a map that needs this bug without knowing it (and, as far as anyone seems to know, the only map that uses this bug intentionally was created in response to this thread).

(And this is coming from someone who generally uses prboom-plus.)

[roadworx]

kb1 said:

stupid bantering

j e s u s c h r i s t who cares

if you love this single bug so much, then why don't you take the task upon yourself and mod it back in the game? it probably wouldn't be too hard

kb1 said:

It's not about me. I am speaking for all of the map authors and players, who all are affected, by some degree. That includes you, and everyone posting and reading this thread.

how does this affect me? i couldn't care less.

edit: fonze is probably right, making dumb replies like this just makes everything worse. and let's be honest, my replies probably are just useless to the conversation. i should probably just leave this conversation alone.

[Fonze]

roadworx said:

j e s u s c h r i s t who cares

if you love this single bug so much, then why don't you take the task upon yourself and mod it back in the game? it probably wouldn't be too hard


how does this affect me? i couldn't care less.

You have nothing useful to contribute to the conversation; how about you let the knowledgeable people (read: adults) talk without derailing and inserting your ignorant views.

If it doesnt affect you, why are you posting here? Waste your time spanking off or doing something else more productive than posting useless crap. It's overreactive posts like this that help turn debates into hateful shouting matches. Quite frankly, when I see two or more knowledgeable people talking, I want to listen to them uninterrupted so I can learn more; maybe even see something get done more than just talk.

[baja blast rd.]

Valiant: Pyro knights and daddybusses won't infight due to which monsters they replace. A shame, I wanted to see who'd win in a balanced match-up HP wise: nine pyros for every five daddybusses. Also pyros are really cool infighters, especially at close range with their ridiculously fast sequence of scratches.

[SFoZ911]

Not exactly found out but I noticed that in Evilution's intermission screen, the sky texture is from Doom 2.

[kb1]

Cynical said:

Again, what map does fixing this bug break? It's a lot more likely that a map is going to randomly break without this fix than the mapper somehow stumbled into building a map that needs this bug without knowing it (and, as far as anyone seems to know, the only map that uses this bug intentionally was created in response to this thread).

(And this is coming from someone who generally uses prboom-plus.)

There's no telling. It has some effect on many maps, undoubtedly. And it's not just this bugfix, there's lots of them being applied to maps that were tested without these fixes in place.

Graf Zahl said:

No, you are just speaking for yourself. Ask any map author and the most likely response will be a confused "Huh?" at best.

I speak for who I say I speak for. But, you're right - most mappers would say "Huh?" - they don't know why their map doesn't play right in your port.

But you do! The archive is chock full of vanilla and limit-removing maps. And the overwhelming majority of players in the community have played at least one of them.

By ignoring the problem, you're shoving your gnarly middle finger at every one of them, the players, the mappers, your followers, id Software, essentially everyone. That's what you're doing with your unconditional bug fixes. I just want your followers to know who they are getting in bed with when they support you. I imagine most of them do not realize the full depth of impact these choices have made. But you do! Now they know.

[Cynical]

kb1 said:

There's no telling. It has some effect on many maps, undoubtedly. And it's not just this bugfix, there's lots of them being applied to maps that were tested without these fixes in place.

That's ridiculous. If it does have an effect on "many" maps, it's purely negative. If there were "many" maps that only worked correctly because of this bug, it wouldn't be coming up in a thread titled "Things about Doom you just found out" in the year 2017. It would be like Lost Soul limits or stairbuilder differences or special lines eating usepresses or ghosts or blockmap bugs or any of the other fifty million quirks between source ports that are well known.

But you do! The archive is chock full of vanilla and limit-removing maps. And the overwhelming majority of players in the community have played at least one of them.

By ignoring the problem, you're shoving your gnarly middle finger at every one of them, the players, the mappers, your followers, id Software, essentially everyone. That's what you're doing with your unconditional bug fixes. I just want your followers to know who they are getting in bed with when they support you. I imagine most of them do not realize the full depth of impact these choices have made. But you do! Now they know.

Given the number of maps that have been special-cased in ZDoom in some way, it seems like a stretch to claim that Graf Zahl is giving vanilla mappers and people who want to play classic wads the finger.

(And, again, this is coming from someone who uses prboom-plus as his main port, who has released two maps both of which had issues in certain ZDoom variants at the time of their release. I'm aware that ZDoom breaks maps sometimes. It's not worth starting a moral crusade over. And the Doom 2 projectile "issue" isn't an issue at all.)

[kb1]

Cynical said:

That's ridiculous. If it does have an effect on "many" maps, it's purely negative. If there were "many" maps that only worked correctly because of this bug, it wouldn't be coming up in a thread titled "Things about Doom you just found out" in the year 2017. It would be like Lost Soul limits or stairbuilder differences or special lines eating usepresses or ghosts or blockmap bugs or any of the other fifty million quirks between source ports that are well known.

Given the number of maps that have been special-cased in ZDoom in some way, it seems like a stretch to claim that Graf Zahl is giving vanilla mappers and people who want to play classic wads the finger.

(And, again, this is coming from someone who uses prboom-plus as his main port, who has released two maps both of which had issues in certain ZDoom variants at the time of their release. I'm aware that ZDoom breaks maps sometimes. It's not worth starting a moral crusade over. And the Doom 2 projectile "issue" isn't an issue at all.)

When I make a statement, I am typically very careful of the modifiers I use. Each game play "fix" has some effect on many maps. I will be the first to explicitly state that this effect is varied, and in the majority of cases, it is a small effect.

Please understand, that any change effectively changes the environment, opening up the possibility for a complete failure. Most of the time, it's a subtle effect. Instead of "I have a fever of 104", it's more like "I've been feeling a bit off this week.". The tragedy of it is that, the mappers who obsess on the placement of every vertex, and every thing, have the most to lose. There are the guys that meticulously test each battle, ensuring that there's just enough health and ammo to survive. They don't stand a chance perfecting their levels, when someone retroactively changes the rules from under their feet.

And, yes, we hear about it all the time, without the reasons being known. "I walked around for an hour, and could not figure out how to proceed - I had to noclip". And, even in PrBoom: "You must use -cl 9 for this map - that's why it failed to work properly." Or "It's too hard." "It's too easy." "Why didn't these monsters come out?" Some are flat out map bugs. But some are due to a run-on effect of multiple changes to the way the environment is rendered."

Please note: Some of these change may actually improve an experience, indirectly, beside from their intended direct improvement. For example, missiles opening doors are usually unintended. But a mapper may depend on that happening, unknowingly or not. That's why making the change, and applying it to maps not intended to have this fix, is always dangerous at best. It creates an opportunity for failure that the mapper cannot control.

It really wasn't such a big deal. But everyone got crazy defensive, illogical, and unreasonable, and started posting pages of hate and sarcasm. Why we can't have civilized discussion on technical issues, and specifically, differences in port behaviors is beyond understanding. It seems like there's a lot of people with pinned up anger, and a need to vent, by dumping on the closest sucker that walks by. What does it take? Does every conversation need to be padded with sugar coating, praise, "Don't take it the wrong way, awesome person, but...". Do we really have to hold hands while discussing Beef-meister DoomGuy - the baddest-ass space marine?

None of us can claim to have created Doom, so we are all lesser human beings. Get over the egos and dick-measuring contests, and let's rock. It's boring.

@finger:
It's not a stretch - I've seen a lot of these threads, and there's rarely remorse or empathy. Just "here's how I like it, so you're going to eat it. Or go elsewhere."

[Bauul]

Edit: I did write something long, but in hindsight it didn't add anything to the discussion, so never mind!

[printz]

Bauul said:

Aww man I thought we were done with this argument! As entertaining as it was.

Long story short: every single source port handles Doom in a different way. Mappers should test all their maps across a range of source ports, and if there are certain ports it doesn't play nicely with, make a note in the readme.

Done.

Sadly, average people don't read the warnings, then proceed to give low ratings, misled reviews and wrongly complaining gameplay videos. I feel you kinda need to show the warning prominently. Sometimes they test a wad in ZDoom on default settings and think I placed the chainsaw for the purpose to kill spiderdemons, when the only reason I placed it was to tease the player... worse, they assume I only tested the wad on ZDoom and falsely blame me for that...

[Gez]

kb1 said:

#3 is where you still misunderstand and misquote: Let me re-phrase:

It is disrespectful to do the fix on maps that were designed and most-likely tested with the bug in place.

No it's not.

There's two situations here:

• the bug was taken into account and the map's behavior is reliant on it happening, and then it'll break in ZDoom; or
  
• the bug wasn't taken into account, it was never noticed to happen during testing, and therefore the fix in ZDoom will have no negative consequence

kb1 said:

The issue occurs when the fix is applied unconditionally. There's no debate: This (and other gameplay fixes) breaks some maps, to some degree.

No it doesn't. We have asked you to provide a list of maps besides Fonze's case demonstration map; and you've come up empty. (Or I missed it because it was drowned in a logorrhea about barbecue and "Start Wars".)

kb1 said:

@Gez: Now don't you feel silly going ballistic over that? Reading the whole post before losing your shit, please :)

Ballistic? I make simple statements of facts; you're the one who makes TL;DR diatribes about how fixing bugs is evil.

[Szymanski]

Fonze said:

I just recently found out that Doom 2's monster's projectiles can set off monster-specific walk-over line actions.

Lame, more shit to avoid

[Arctangent]

kb1 said:

The guy is claiming that his house is red, though it just isn't.

Ah, yes, I see all the places where the blue house claims it's red, instead of being formerly a red house before a new coat of paint was applied.

[Graf Zahl]

Gez said:

There's two situations here:

• the bug was taken into account and the map's behavior is reliant on it happening, and then it'll break in ZDoom; or
  
• the bug wasn't taken into account, it was never noticed to happen during testing, and therefore the fix in ZDoom will have no negative consequence

Actually, there is a third scenario: A map was made without any awareness of the bug but contains a setup that might inadvertently trigger it. In that case the map may break randomly in 'compatible' ports but work in ZDoom.

As for the likelihood, here's my estimate of order (most frequent first):

1. The map does not contain any situation where the bug may trigger
2. The map does contain a situation where it may trigger but it's not fatal.
3. The map does contain a situation where it may trigger and breaks if it does.
4. The map contains a setup depending on the bug.

And with 3. being magnitudes more likely than 4., I see no reason to change anything. Actually, 3 is a scenario I have seen happen in real-life maps on occasion.

[VGamingJunkie]

Besides, couldn't you simply get around it with Decorate? It's not like those maps are doomed forever, you should be able to change a few lines of code and have it working just fine. Those very rare maps that actually rely on the bug.

[Gez]

Graf Zahl said:

Actually, there is a third scenario: A map was made without any awareness of the bug but contains a setup that might inadvertently trigger it. In that case the map may break randomly in 'compatible' ports but work in ZDoom.

That's just a subset of the second scenario: the one where there is no negative consequence in ZDoom.

[Graf Zahl]

Correct, but it's the relevant decision factor here. 3. and 4. are the scenario where it matters how this is being dealt with. With case 2. it's irrelevant.

[Hisymak]

Today I just found out that there is written "UAC ROCKETS" on the box of rockets.

[Summer Deep]

ShotgunDemolition said:

The arch-vile says << Why? >>, when killed, because he is a healer and he thinks that he is just doing good for his fellow demons. That's sad!!! I saw this in Doom wiki being said by Bobby Prince. It was pretty interesting.

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....

Also I only realized a couple of days ago that the Berserk pack's effect lasts until the end of the level, not just for the duration of the red tint. Someone pointed this out to me in another thread. I've been playing Doom (on and off) since 1996, but punching has never been part of my repertoire.

[printz]

I knew the berserk lasts the entire level, from the very beginning, for two reasons:

1) I read the goddamn manual. Or skimmed it, it doesn't matter. Each artifact had a clear "duration" info. Time based or one level.

2) I had Ultimate Doom, and the second (and third) demo show the player using the berserk.