DavidN

Thank you, I'm going to be so interested to watch this! Update: Bloody hell D:

Yes, bring down the console with the backtick key ` and use the command: changemap hubmap This will act like you've completed the level and will bring you back to the hub.

Are you using the latest version of GZDoom, 4.12.2?

Welcome! The good news is that you don’t have to modify anything :) Doom is built so that custom wads are layered over the top of the base game when they’re loaded, so you never modify the original game’s data. You need an IWAD such as DOOM2.WAD, which contains the base data for the game. Running that WAD in a source port or vanilla will play the game as it was. In most cases, if you drag a custom WAD on to the source port’s executable, it will load the base IWAD with the custom WAD on top of it, and it’ll replace whatever levels it’s designed to. If you’re on true vanilla, the command line is DOOM2.EXE -file MYWAD.WAD - most source ports will use a similar syntax if you’re a terminal user.

I'm really enjoying all the screenshots and videos that are being posted so far!

Yes, this is an oddity that comes from how Doom 2 graphics were stored originally... "flats" for floors and ceilings were completely different things from "textures" for walls, so they could have the same names and not interefere with each other. UDMF allows any graphic to be used for flat surfaces and walls, so UDB/GZDoom can disagree about whether to use the flat or the texture version. To work around this I would actually just add your own texture that doesn't have any name clashes - you can export the step graphic using SLADE and copy it into your own WAD under a different name. I've just put up a video that shows how to work with textures :)

That’s really strange, one other person in the Discord has said the same thing but I’m not sure why it doesn’t happen to everyone! It doesn’t sound like you’ve done anything wrong - I’ll see if I can do anything about it

Can you believe it's June again already?! That means the fourth round of RAMP, the Rabbit's All-comers Mapping Project, is now open for business! This is an event to encourage people who are curious about the Doom community to give mapping a try and to be part of a wider project. If you're looking for a place to get off the ground, or you know people in your other communities who might enjoy mapping - or if you've been wanting to try something in mapping that you haven't before - please point them this way and I'd be delighted to see what they can create. The submitted levels will be compiled into a hub where your map gets showcased alongside the other submissions and becomes part of a wider sort of meta-game. The goal is simple: make a map. Any theme, any level of skill, it doesn't matter - just try something out, experiment and enjoy! If you're not new to Doom you're still welcome to join - try out something that you haven't before, like experimenting with ZScript (or the other way around, limit yourself to vanilla). There are some more details, tutorials and a link to the RAMP Discord at https://ramp2024.doomproject.com to help people who have never so much as played Doom before get up and running quickly. Like in previous years, the project will run on GZDoom and DOOM2.WAD. A pack of editors and resources is available on the project site. https://ramp2024.doomproject.com

Those look great :) You’ll find people have all sorts of techniques and sequences in which they do things, from blocking out the entire map first then adding details, to detailing as you go. I’m very disorganized, I have some basic ideas for what I want rooms and sections to look like but then fly around everywhere adjusting and expanding things as inspiration strikes until they looks roughly like how I’d pictured them. You definitely have the right idea by going ahead instead of getting into little adjustments too early - having a basically complete start-to-finish route before going into the details is a huge boost to me getting a map finished. I also like maps to loop back on themselves, so I often begin with a central room or area that the player will keep coming back to from multiple angles.

It’s always good to see more Doom rabbits :) Talking to yourself can be awkward at first but it gets easier - you have to bring your inner monologue outwards :)

I really enjoyed this one :)

It’s sometimes difficult to tell because there are so many different compatibility concerns with GZDoom - was I meant to be able to shoot that switch from here? Can I walk on top of these barrels or were they meant to be a barrier? Did the author mean to allow jumps or are they using a format that assumes they don’t exist? Check the readme for the WADs you download to make sure you’re not missing out on things due to these differences, but it’s really about your own enjoyment. If anyone tells me how to play Doom (except in cases where I really did trivialize the level by making a mistake) I tell them to get lost! Recognize when people should be minding their own business - the weirdest comment I ever got was from someone who just said “I have never felt the need to have damage numbers appear on the screen when I play Doom”. Okay, don’t download and run m8f’s damnums mod then, what do you want me to do about it

It’s amazing that there are people young enough to have Doom 2016 as a “back then” memory, who are still coming to this forum and keeping Doom alive! Even if it makes me acutely aware of the passage of time. The possibility of getting the Ouchface scared me so much that I used to play Doom in full screen even though the 386 obviously couldn’t handle it, and I’m still uncomfortable with it to this day. I first saw it in the demo for Toxin Refinery in the shareware version, but I can’t remember when I first triggered it myself.

@BeachThunder This project’s to encourage beginners to take a step into Doom mapping without any restrictions or themes (although maybe a prompt generator might help people get ideas…) If you’d like to run a project with a theme yourself I can set up an instance of Rampart for you!

I've just remembered that I used to be very scared of the heartbeat monitor on Blake Stone, and always had to turn its sound off! I'm really not sure why.

These look professional quality - really nice interpretations of the sprites!

A while ago, my daughter Penny was bored of her usual Minecraft and Dreamlight Valley favourites and asked if there was something new we could play together. I suggested that she could try playing Doom with me, and she breathed in, stood up tall, and bravely and dramatically said "...I knew this day would come." So I set her up on my desktop computer and I joined in on my laptop - here are some things I observed! Content If it were still the early 90s I probably wouldn't have let a seven year old play Doom (so okay, Dad, you were right). But she'd never been bothered by it when glancing at it over my shoulder, even eagerly asking me to "do the fountain again" which I would come to realize meant the voluminous gushing effect when a Cacodemon is killed with the Deadmarine effects - and I felt that the bloody effects were far enough removed from realistic these days that it wouldn't disturb her. And I also feel that it's important to note that she and all her friends love things that are absolutely bloody terrifying anyway - Poppy Playtime with its demented Sesame Street monster with a mouth full of needle-teeth, the horrors of Freddy Fazbear and his chain of possessed restaurants, and even Minecraft is pretty horrifying when you first see the weirdly proportioned dark Enderman out of the corner of your eye (followed by it stabbing you in the face). She got through episode 1 on the easiest difficulty setting with no deaths at all, which is impressive even bearing in mind I was around to help her through some of the bigger encounters. She did get a bit panicky once we went up a difficulty level and entered episode 2, though, so now she prefers to play Chex Quest instead. Other than that, there were only a couple of things that disturbed her: The player's dead face on 0 health. I'd never even thought of this as particularly disturbing because he doesn't look distressed to me, just sort of tired - meanwhile, the Ouch face still shocks the hell out of me whenever it pops up. "I don't like how you can move the bodies". I didn't understand this one at first, imagining she was seeing the weird movement of corpses bouncing down (or even up) stairs when they're killed with some momentum. But I later worked out that she meant how the corpse graphics only have one direction and always face you when you turn around - that's another thing that I'd never really considered, but that I can see might be strange to someone who doesn't understand that they're just rendered as a single sprite. Graphics I'm honestly really proud that Penny isn't a graphics snob like I expected most children to be. I think that nowadays, the games industry race to shun "old"-looking graphics in favour of new ones has more or less stopped, and we're at a point where games can be 2D, 3D, flat-shaded, pixelly or realistic and they all coexist. As a result, Penny doesn't really have a concept of old/new graphics - for her, a game looks how it chooses to look and it's as simple as that. Apart from the issue with the corpses above, the only graphics-related thing that tripped her up was that your appearance doesn't change based on what you have equipped or what you're wearing. In Minecraft, these are always visible to other players - they'll be able to see the four possible pieces of armour in the appropriate places, and the item that you have equipped is visible in your hand. As we know, Doom doesn't do this - the player always stays the same colour they started with even if they picked up blue or green armour, and will appear to be firing a little rifle no matter whether you have a pistol, rocket launcher or just your fist equipped. Having all these sprite variations would have been a bit much in the early 90s, but having the appearance change is a logical expectation that we didn't really have back then. Mechanics The mechanics of Doom are simple enough - collect things, point weapons at demons, shoot them and get to the exit - so this was all very straightforward for her to grasp. She preferred avoiding the mouse and keyboard controls and instead used the Playstation 2 controller that I've had attached to my computer for the last twenty years, because she's got very used to navigating first-person games with dual analogue sticks - this is a skill that I had to learn much later in life and I'm still not good at it! She had some difficulty with precision because you're just so enormously fast in Doom, but over her lifetime it's been pretty incredible to have seen her evolve from barely being able to walk a character in a straight line to having precise control over what she's doing. She had a small panic when running away and finding more health, because she assumed that all the medikits and potion bottles she was picking up were going into an inventory that she didn't know how to use. I'm struggling to think if there's anything similar in her other games - the only thing in Minecraft that you 'use' immediately on pickup are the little orbs that represent experience, so she didn't have a lot of context here. The only other things she didn't immediately understand were things in the game that she reasonably has no idea about - she doesn't know what shells are and identified the sprite as batteries instead, which works equally well as a concept for fuelling something. But the most surprising revelation I learned from playing Doom with Penny is… Doom is a game about building things! Obviously it's about shooting demons, of course, but she made me realize that that's been pretty secondary for a couple of decades now. Through what Penny's seen in my interactions with it, Doom is really about people building these big techbases or caves or castles and setting up challenges for other players in them, just as much as it is about actually playing those creations. She's seen me going around adjusting things in UDB, and it took her a bit of time to understand that editing the game happens in a separate environment from playing it. In Minecraft, if you want to build or move around freely, you can just flip the game into creative/spectator mode without having to exit and change things around externally - and she saw me zooming through the same Doom worlds in an editor 3D preview and in the game, so why shouldn't she assume that they were the same thing? And now that I'm thinking about it, it's not impossible these days to imagine some combined editor/Doom source port that would allow you to modify a Doom level while it's being played, just one step beyond the 3D previews that we never had in the 90s. I hope we get to play more - and hopefully she'll be interested in trying Ultimate Doom Builder for herself quite soon :)

I just found out that the random pitch offset on sounds existed until Doom 1.4 in mid-1994! I thought it was just an early alpha thing… I definitely don’t remember realizing it was there when I first played shareware Doom, but it’s possible I just never played the earlier versions.

Tom Scott explains it really well! A hash is the result of a function that's performed on your password before it's stored - unlike encryption, the transformation is one-way so you can't retrieve the original password by looking at the hash. So an attacker might not know your password, but there are some other vulnerabilities described in the video.

Thank you for that insight! I didn't think it was likely that I'd discovered something new about monster infighting after 30 years.

I just saw a revenant go after an arachnotron that was already dead! Is it possible for a monster to target a dead other monster if monster 2 died after launching the projectile that hit monster 1 (therefore bypassing the "change targets when target dies" check)? Or I could have been mistaken and it was trying to reach an enemy further back and was having difficulty negotiating the ledge in between.

I’ve played with continuous integration-like arrangements with Doom mods before, but there’s no central place as yet that supports versioning and automatic updates. Continuous integration during development is what I’ve been working on, with this Rampart system to collect together people’s submissions for community projects and produce a continuously updated complete project from them.

Thanks for all the work that you put in to celebrate the incredible creations made by this community! The number of notable things this year was amazing - Myhouse alone was a landmark for exposing our little community to the wider internet, but to also have everything else that happened this year and to finish it off with Sigil 2 and Eviternity 2 on the same day... it's a good year to mark the 30th anniversary :) And a special thank you for the attention paid to the many, MANY newcomers who tried out Doom mapping and submitted maps to RAMP this year - I was completely unprepared for how large the project grew, and I hope many of them stay around for more :)

Wall looking a bit blank? Stick a recessed computer in there!

I suppose it would have to be a surface/line whose “texture” was continuously updated to display the output from the MAME emulator code, which would have to be allowed to tick as part of GZDoom’s usual tick cycle. Good luck