Making Boom Sector Worms

[Fonze]

Double-postage costs twice as many stamps... but I suppose this would be best posted here. This is basically the same as the status update I posted last night: detailing how to make the Boom sector worms with a tiny bit of musing over possible Boom+ additions. I added background bullcrap at the end too; it's not worth reading.

 

I know a handful of people have seen this already, but here's a short video showing the worm:

 

 

In a nutshell:

The first voodoo doll controls most-everything, starting by crossing the floor raise/lower triggers, which are tagged to all three control sector's respective segments. This causes all three relevant control sectors to move. 2 of them scroll the floors and walls, one tagged to the sectors of the "real" worm and the other tagged to the dummy sectors, respectively, (since the "real" worm's lines don't care what sector effects happen to them) while the last control sector creates a fake floor for the "real" worm, tagged to the "real" worm's sectors. Unfortunately the fake floor won't transfer its texture properly, so the second voodoo doll is present merely to change the flats as needed, tagged to the "real" worm's sectors.

 

The key to understanding this design is looking at it in general terms; while each number here (10, 11, 20, and 21) represent an entire chain of unique tags, all of them are merely segments of the overall worm, so there is only reason to examine one segment of each sector/action/tag. This worm can be broken down into three/four main purposes: to have the floors move up/down in sequence to emulate a worm crawling, to have the lines scroll with the movement, as well as floors to emulate 'moving,' and to be silent in the process (which calls for a second voodoo doll and the 11/21's tags (the floor scrollers could otherwise be on the 10/20's).

 

Before getting into the details, a quick flow diagram for the voodoo dolls:

 

 

So while they start off moving directly eastward, once really any trigger is activated the voodoo dolls can be thrust in a different direction, with the only limitation being that they must complete their 'rotation.' I added in an extra 'behavior' for the worm through placement and length of the teleport-to-line lines; because of their positioning and length, they slowly but surely move the voodoo dolls closer and closer to the North/South, causing them to take off on those other paths naturally and simultaneously* after about 35 seconds, which should hopefully be enough time for people to both see the worm and go through the bullcrap in the beginning of the map this is for. About 10-15 seconds after the worm changes path/leaves he "kills" the player (if they haven't escaped their cage yet, because apparently the worm outsmarted the player and trapped them with plans to kill them, so the player must escape the cage and wander around the map seeking a way to find, catch, and probably stomp on the evil worm while under constant pressure from monsters that revive when the worm passes through their area; wow after typing that I can't believe I'm devoting time to this). Point is though: the player makes the move to escape the cage, which aside from if the player were to do nothing and accept death, is what causes the worm to 'make a break for the escape tunnel button and leave.' This basically establishes the proof-of-concept for the remainder of the 'logic' yet to be implemented, such as chasing the worm and how the little guy will evade the player, as well as finally catching the little bugga and murdering him in cold blood, a fitting end to the worm's most dangerous game. The main caveat of this is how the player will interact with the worm in the map proper, which is something only a massive binge of testing will straighten out. But cross bridges when reached; if the idea works then solid execution is only a matter of time and imagination.

 

*Note that there is a small chance for Doom to happen and the voodoo dolls will not go as simultaneously down their intersected-paths as might be expected; there are work-arounds for this, but their style depends on the worm's eventual area-to-area 'movement' style. Still, it would be great to find a way to cut the second voodoo doll out.

 

Getting back to how it works: with the flow and idea established, here is a breakdown of the triggers:

 

 

Note that "real" means fake, because this whole worm is fake. (in the sense that the playable map sectors never actually move)

 

Also note that I marked all scroller movement with purple arrows, including the constant/mapstart ones.

 

IIrc, there are only 9 different actions that make up the worm (10 with the button raising the escape hatch), not counting the player's interactions with it. The raise/lower floor height triggers do not actually affect the "real" worm's sectors in order to preserve silence without having to move the control sectors twice as far away, as well as rely on tons of tiny joined sectors scattered all throughout the map which are joined with tons of other tiny sectors scattered very far off the map... just a bad recipe; though I suppose if just one worm were used it might be okay to use joined sectors instead of the extra voodoo doll. Perhaps a silent floor (or ceiling/lift, for that matter) move would be a good addition. The Scroll Wall when Sector Changes Height triggers operate off the same tags as the raise/lower floor height triggers, but their tag number is arbitrary; their tags could be the same as the scroll floor and fake floor tags, or their own unique tags, but due to the sheer number of tags to be involved, it makes the most sense to double them up as much as possible on either set arbitrarily chosen first. I'm just showing it the way I built it, which is influenced by the process it took to nail every effect needed down.

 

The first voodoo doll only does the raise/lower floor actions on the dummy sectors (which controls basically everything), while the second voodoo doll only does the change floor texture action on the "real" worm's sectors. If they get off-time, the flats are the only things that are off. After the first voodoo doll crosses a trigger, each of the three control sectors for the worm moves accordingly. The floor-lower triggers for each segment are located several triggers 'behind' the floor-raise triggers for those segments, for obvious reasons.

 

The triangles on the far left side are mechanical locks to turn everything on/off; copied over from THT MAP19 where they were needed, but so far uneccesary here.

 

 

The first and second control sectors control the floor and wall scrolling for the worm. These actions unfortunately require 2 exactly identical control sectors, due to the shape of the worm, the scroll-direction needed, and the segment-to-be-scrolled. Tags could be identical as well (once again they just aren't here because I'm too lazy to 'clean up for human-viewing' the lot of them, same as the sectors that encompass the floor raise/lower triggers, since their change texture effect is useless while silent). Perhaps a combination of scroll wall when sector changes height and scroll floor when sector changes height would be a good addition? It would allow me to cut down one massive control sector for each worm-path. These two control sectors require a height difference of 25 to scroll for long enough for the segments to rise, sit for a bit, and fall.

 

 

The third control sector is scaled exactly to the same size and shape of the "real" worm, which actually doesn't matter, but it's easier to copy+paste the same size, though when tweaking for slime trails it would prolly be smarter to match this control sector's size to the 4x ones. The main purpose of the third control sector is to have a space for the fake floor triggers that only moves up/down by 1 pixel instead of the 25 required by the scrollers.

 

This is a view of the "real" worm:

 

 

When he decides to take the southern path over the button, the escape tunnel rises out of the ground as he approaches it.

 

 

A little back story on making this:

The idea originally came to me while designing the map "WormHell" with Z0k; apparently we had both individually pet-named the map WormHell, which was good enough reason to stick with it for the release, heh. One night while inebriated, I thought of the idea of maybe putting a literal worm into WormHell, because that totally makes sense while drinking, however the thought was merely idle bullcrap and I didn't know how to implement it. My thoughts trended towards maybe something on the ground, but I wasn't sure it would turn out okay, and it's pretty clear for any Doom mapper the tediousness of such an endeavor long before going into it. My boss at work actually suggested putting the worm on the wall, which I interpreted as "make an animated texture;" (I think Z0k might have suggested an animated texture as well, though I forget now) I suppose in retrospect I also could have made an animated flat, but I liked the idea and it seemed way easier than mine, so I made an animated texture from the grey marble baron face texture which has a worm crawling from his mouth to his eye or something like that. That actually did make it into WormHell, right next to where the worm was originally set to be: in the graveyard (Hell region of the map). The animated texture is very unnoticeable, but it is the one you see as you go down the stairs into the crypt.

 

I made the worm shortly after that, and while still working on WormHell, however we didn't have enough lines left to implement it into the map without running afoul of the limits; I suppose I could have gone around and penny-pinched linedefs from everything possible (I already had to a few times), but we had a deadline, so unfortunately the worm had to be cut. However, I did want to include the worm in the overall project he was built for, so I started making another map with didy with plans to use the worm to a more noticeable effect, as in WormHell I was just going to have him crawling in the graveyard somewhere out of the way for "ambience." Part of the reason I wanted to make a map that brought him out a bit more was from people telling me that I need to showcase the stuff I make rather than "hide it away in corners." So the worm (x3) was put into THT MAP19, Bug Freaking Guardians, as the guardians for the BFG. Didy and I were having trouble coming up with a name for that map; Chris is the one who came up with Big Freaking Guardians and I just love that name, lol. After that I still got told by a few more people that I basically hid my stuff too well and needed to bring it more to the forefront, so eventually, after zoning out one too many times to the Boom Calculator wad, I came up with this probably terrible idea of "chasing" the worm through a level in a puzzle-y way, which then begs the question of "...combat?" followed by "...what about the 2nd, 3rd, 10th time you chase the worm through that area?" Don't want to wind up with all monsters dead and chasing a worm around an empty level, so Plu-styled arch-viles it is, and might as well add a small sector in-between the AVs and mobs-to-be-revived to allow the AVs to only revive mobs when I want them to.

 

To talk more about the worm's actual development and not just it's back-story: I first put in the first voodoo doll and his triggers, as well as made the "real" worm's stuff in the playable map space and the first control sector, as well as joined the respective sectors. That was cool-and-all, but it was just sectors moving loudly up and down with no scrolling; it still needed work. However, I had this thing that was just so cute that I had to lovingly dub it Plankton:

 

 

So I made the second control sector and added the massive amount of floor and line scrollers, tagging every respective segment/line the same. It now looked like it moved, but it was still just too loud to be anything but comical. So I fiddled, and I tinkered, and I futzed with it for a long time, banging my head against the wall because I just couldn't make it silent without either moving the control sectors very far away (which I was unwilling to do) or making a second voodoo doll. Finally I bit the bullet and made the second voodoo doll, which meant not only tagging an entire set of new lines (worm's # of segments x2), as well as retagging all of the "real" worm's sectors, I also had to retag the floor scrollers (that's why the line scrollers are different numbers; I didn't feel like changing them too). 

 

Anyway, all said and done I had this:

 

 

... and that's when I found the rabbit hole :)

 

 

And some fun 3D-mode views:

 

 

 

[Guest Unregistered account]

yEaH YOu diD It

[riderr3]

Cool stuff!
Especially now, when I'm also making Boom maps and every time I found something new, related to voodoo-doll magic.

[snapshot]

Imagine Big worms sectors with this.

[CaptainManiac]

Sectors,controlled by voodoo dolls?Superb!

[kb1]

Yes, I just wanted to comment: Wow! This is absolutely amazing stuff, on the level of Boom Calculator and beyond! Things like this continue to make Doom amazing to me. I would have never, in a thousand years, thought this was possible, yet here it is: realistic, smoothly animated, easily recognizable. Great work, Fonze! Now let me play as the worm!