Things id got wrong

[Stupid Bunny]

Isn't there some vestigial code in the Doom source for sliding Wolf3D style doors? I recall they look flat and don't animate well but that somebody's implemented them in an ancient WAD or two.

[Linguica]

Yeah, there's code stubs for basically making a 2-sided line that has a texture slide sideways and the line go from impassable to passable. Fraggle tried re-enabling it IIRC.

edit: yeah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF3hQfo9ju0

[VGA]

Isn't Doom's ammo pickup strategy and weapon//berserk/splash damage/chainsaw/fist usage a form of inventory management and ammo conservation strategy?

[Lenswot]

Ah that is interesting. It just uses the regular animated texture code, which was fixed at one frame rate. I can see why the function was not implemented. It might have suited some other interactive elements, like machines or fountains that you could turn on/off, but clearly nothing that id thought their levels desperately needed.

[BaronOfStuff]

I'm pretty sure that EDGE adopted some sort of sliding door code at some point. From what I remember it was pretty smooth and looked fine, although I can't recall if it blocked hitscans/projectiles when closed (because there was nothing hostile to shoot at during regular play).

Fake edit:
It was some test map IIRC.

[mdmenzel]

Am I the only one who thinks Doom E2M7 is too easy (even on UV with pistol start) compared to the surrounding maps?

[billbuckner]

E3M7 and E4M7 are actually comparatively easy too.

[Lenswot]

There are such great sound effects for the chainsaw but none of them are played properly in the game. It would have needed something like hexen's sndseq (I think) lump that lets a noise start, stop and repeat based on how long it lasts rather than how many actions the source object initiates.

[esselfortium]

Lenswot said:

There are such great sound effects for the chainsaw but none of them are played properly in the game. It would have needed something like hexen's sndseq (I think) lump that lets a noise start, stop and repeat based on how long it lasts rather than how many actions the source object initiates.

The easiest way to accomplish it would have been to give the chainsaw a couple of dedicated sound-playing codepointers like the one used for the cyberdemon's hoof stomping. That way the sound wouldn't restart itself for every frame.

[Krazov]

billbuckner said:

E3M7 and E4M7 are actually comparatively easy too.

I actually like “Limbo’s” calmness, like right before the big storm. Spiderdemon is not particularily strong opponent these days, but it builds the atmosphere of the episode. So on a storytelling plane it works fine for me.

“Thy Flesh Consumed,” on the other hand, has broken difficulty along whole episode, so it’s hard to put it together anyway. Plus there’s no story.

[Lenswot]

esselfortium said:

The easiest way to accomplish it would have been to give the chainsaw a couple of dedicated sound-playing codepointers like the one used for the cyberdemon's hoof stomping. That way the sound wouldn't restart itself for every frame.

For that method, the chainsaw would need probably about 30 extra frames in its cutting sequence since it goes fast but the sound effect is rather long (and ths startup noise would still be cut off). In contrast, the cyberdemon walks at a leisurely pace and its sound effects are brief. Although I suppose even two additional brief cutting noises would be more interesting than just one.

[Ishtar's Gate]

Icon of Sin really feels incomplete and rushed, mostly because of the rest of the level being absolutely bare.

Then you get to the disappointing Baphomet boss at the end. All it does is stay absolutely still and shoot the spawn cubes from the brain, waiting for it's rocket-inflicted death.

It's quite hilarious, really.

[Guest Unregistered account]

I honestly think the Baphomet is really cool. A gigantic, screen filling demon that's constantly giving you an evil, disturbing smile with a head that's been ripped open just in front of where its brain is? I'm surprised there isn't more speculation about how that happened, actually.

Also: We have the same avatar! :D

[Vermil]

Krazov said:

I actually like “Limbo’s” calmness, like right before the big storm. Spiderdemon is not particularily strong opponent these days, but it builds the atmosphere of the episode. So on a storytelling plane it works fine for me.

E3M6-E3M8 are an interesting trio. E3M6 sort of begins to introduce damaging floors as a heavy map element and then E3M7 goes all out with them to the point that the bad guys take a back seat.

Then E3M8 has no health at all, after the player has potentially taken a load of largely unavoidable damage on E3M7 (the bad guys attacks can all be avoided, a damaging floor merely minimized by efficient movement).

[Marnetmar]

Vermil said:

E3M6 sort of begins to introduce damaging floors as a heavy map element and then E3M7 goes all out with them to the point that the bad guys take a back seat.

I actually never thought of it this way. I appreciate Limbo a little more now.

[SYS]

Linguica said:

Yeah, there's code stubs for basically making a 2-sided line that has a texture slide sideways and the line go from impassable to passable. Fraggle tried re-enabling it IIRC.

edit: yeah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF3hQfo9ju0

If a midbar-style texture is used is it displayed as a see through mid-texture?

[Linguica]

I would assume so? It's just a normal linedef with a middle texture, afaik.

[SYS]

It would be the only scenario that I could see it being useful. Aside from wolfenstein levels but nobody cares about those.

[Lenswot]

It seems to me like whatever artist designed the demons either did not know how ungulate legs worked, mistaking their ankles for reversed knees, or simply decided not to give them thighs. Doom 64 demons look to have both joints, when applicable. I still think the quality of id's art is higher, however.

[Gez]

Lenswot said:

It seems to me like whatever artist designed the demons either did not know how ungulate legs worked, mistaking their ankles for reversed knees, or simply decided not to give them thighs. Doom 64 demons look to have both joints, when applicable. I still think the quality of id's art is higher, however.

I think it was a deliberate decision to give them reversed knees, as that was part of folklore description of demons. And it helps making them look wrong and alien.

[Avoozl]

And people still think IoS is a Baphomet with no idea whatsoever about what it originally represented (equilibrium) and go by popular media and satanists misconceptions of it.

[durian]

dew said:

The scale of the secret Wolf3d levels is just jarringly wrong, it's like either no one ever tested them, or they literally couldn't care less about the secrets. I guess the latter is the case, given the all-permeating sloppiness.

After playing through a chunk of DOOM2 last night, it occurred to me that this might have actually been deliberate, purely for the sake of this moment:

Spoiler

[Ishtar's Gate]

Shame they never took the time to recreate Hans, though.

[Guest Unregistered account]

I always thought the Spider Mastermind would've been a more fitting replacement for that bit, as both it and Hans use massive chainguns. Must have been a scale thing, I suppose (the Spider Mastermind's actor is abnormally large, and also the Cyberdemon has more humanoid proportions).

[Koko Ricky]

Actually, was it turns out, there's a version of Wolfenstein 3D with higher resolution textures, that I believe was released for Mac and at least one of the consoles (3D0, I believe). The 64x64 textures in the original game would have been too small, although one can argue that the Mac/3D0 textures are too large. I think id basically decided bigger was better. I used to think it was JUST for the benefit of the cyberdemon, but that's a silly rationalization. Clearly, they wanted to show off how nice these slicker textures looked in Doom 2. I guess.

EDIT: Here's one thing I think id got wrong. I really think Commander Keen should have been a special sprite that could be assigned any special the user wished; that way, someone could rework it to be, say, a demonic effigy, a corpse, what-the-fuck-ever, and destroying it (or them) could be used to do anything in the game, whether it's transporting the player, lowering a wall, opening a door, accessing an elevator, even exiting the level.

[Gez]

GoatLord said:

EDIT: Here's one thing I think id got wrong. I really think Commander Keen should have been a special sprite that could be assigned any special the user wished; that way, someone could rework it to be, say, a demonic effigy, a corpse, what-the-fuck-ever, and destroying it (or them) could be used to do anything in the game, whether it's transporting the player, lowering a wall, opening a door, accessing an elevator, even exiting the level.

Giving specials to things isn't possible in the Doom format.

It would have been good if they had started with the Hexen format. Just with two changes: extend special and parameters fields to word size instead of byte size, and add a line id field instead of having to hack it around with line_setidentification.

[Xegethra]

SYS said:

It would be the only scenario that I could see it being useful. Aside from wolfenstein levels but nobody cares about those.

Sliding doors are good for user made maps, so having modern sourceports figure it out was nice.

[Koko Ricky]

I wish portals, sliding doors and doors that only open once the elevator has reached your floor, as well as transparent doors, were possible in the original Doom. The last one can be done through some clever mapping, but I think it should have been a core feature of the engine.

[Foxpup]

GoatLord said:

doors that only open once the elevator has reached your floor,

What a coincidence. I was just thinking that a vanilla map I'm currently working on could do with an elevator with a unique trick to it, since it already has enough door tricks, so I'll take that as a challenge.

Let's see.... The first step is obviously to put a control sector adjacent to each door, tagged to a line in front of the door with action 72 (WR ceiling down to floor+8), which will either lock or unlock the door depending on where the floor is (doors open to LEC-4, so a too-low adjacent ceiling will prevent it from opening at all). The hard part would be getting the control sectors' floors to move in sync with the elevator, but I think it's doable (at least in vanilla; Boom won't allow a floor to go up through the ceiling, so the trick doesn't work).

I'll take a crack at it tomorrow and report my findings.

[pritch]

Doomhuntress said:

she's

Extra points for getting the gender right.

Linguica said:

* The Doomguy can't decide if he wears gloves or not, or if he's left-handed or right handed. Minor, but a pretty pointless discrepancy.

* The Spiderdemon should have been the Episode 2 boss and the Cyberdemon the Episode 3 boss. Does anyone disagree with this? The Cyberdemon is clearly the "real" endboss of Doom. I think Sandy Petersen even once admitted that this turned out to be a mistake.

* No animated waterfall texture in Doom or Doom 2, which caused level designers untold amounts of grief. There's a slimefall and a bloodfall, but no waterfall? Come on!!

Good points all.

My feeling about the Spider Mastermind, to give her her full title, is that she should've been tougher. 3k hitpoints vs 4k for the Cyberdemon isn't it? She's too easy to take out with point blank BFG spam.

Now others have commented on things like, barons aren't that tough etc. You have to remember playing on a 386 in 1993 at low resolutions, with keyboard only, barons and cacodemons were plenty tough. Doom 2 brought the pain on UV thanks to chaingunners, revenants, Mancubi and arch-viles - all shit that could end you fast. I wasn't able to beat the game on UV in that era - I had to wait for Doom 95.

These days with zdoom in 1920x and a Logitech gaming mouse etc. it's necessary for me to use a .deh to make Doom 2 a little more challenging. I use the same .deh when I want to tone up the difficulty with pwads, too. Monsters changed include the Spider - up to 10k hitpoints - now we're talking - and doubling baron/hell knight hitpoints and making their fireballs faster and more damaging. Also gave imp, demon, mancubus and caco a bit more hp. I left the damned revenant alone though.

I'll add my specific gripes;

* Doom 2 sky textures could've been a lot better.

* Doom 2 level design makes no contextual sense in many places. Barrels of Doom? Really?

* The Icon of Sin looks like a giant poster painted on a wall.

* Doom 2 needed better new textures and flats (I seem to have a lot of gripes with Doom 2 so let's move on)

* Berserk damage could be a little more consistent.

* A chainsaw probably shouldn't have infinite fuel.

* The shotguns and chaingun feel a bit too slow. Firing rate and reload times could've been quickened/shortened a tad. Again if you tweak this in a .deh, a much more satisfying feel.

* Bosses triggering level special - needed better implementation

* Sometimes you can be burned through a rad suit by the most damaging floors. Not fair.

* Night vision goggles underused (leading to massive under-use in pwads over the years...)

* Barrels don't have a big enough damage radius

* The whole rabbit thing was weird

* The master levels were mostly crap

* Corpses balancing over ledges. This still bugs the hell out of me.

That'll do for now.