Things about Doom you just found out

He probably doesn't know the BFG mechanics well enough to realize how much of a shotgun it actually is.

I didn't know that the dwarf planet Eris is actually an existing object, until it was today featured in the german Wikipedia as (136199) Eris; its name is based on the greek Goddess of Strife, and it even has a moon: Dysnomia (Goddess of Lawlessness, her daughter).

Eris belongs to the Trans-Neptunian Objects; even Pluto was once declared a TNO instead of a regular planet, due to its slightly excentrical and extra-ecliptical orbit. Eris is even bigger than Pluto, and its orbit is rather extreme, with both a stretched ellipsis and high inclination angle.

Jimi said:

Being close or far doesn't increase or decrease the damage... of course being close to the target makes it easier to hit the target with more bfg tracers, shotgun pellets. Maybe you're just missing your shots at longer distances...

Huh.
Well then I redact my last reply. That never occurred to me, but it was the most obvious answer.

LigH said:

I didn't know that the dwarf planet Eris is actually an existing object, until it was today featured in the german Wikipedia as (136199) Eris; its name is based on the greek Goddess of Strife, and it even has a moon: Dysnomia (Goddess of Lawlessness, her daughter).

Eris belongs to the Trans-Neptunian Objects; even Pluto was once declared a TNO instead of a regular planet, due to its slightly excentrical and extra-ecliptical orbit. Eris is even bigger than Pluto, and its orbit is rather extreme, with both a stretched ellipsis and high inclination angle.

Also, between 2003 and 2006, before the coining of the term "dwarf planet" Eris was regarded as the tenth planet, due to it being larger than Pluto. If it ever got any media coverage around that time (I can't remember) then it would've been under the name 2003 UB313, with the name "Eris" being given in 2005.
The discovery of Eris is ultimately what got Pluto demoted. It was after the discovery of Makemake and Haumea, that it was apparent that Pluto was just one of many, and off it went.

Haumea and Makemake are both smaller than Pluto I think, so the Solar system never had more than 10 planets.

Avoozl said:

Although it's more to do with DoomWorld I just found out the first post on the site was helled.

So many of the early posts were helled. Most of the first 100 posts, actually. Wow.

Eris Falling said:
Haumea and Makemake are both smaller than Pluto I think, so the Solar system never had more than 10 planets.

It had eleven from 1807 to 1845 and many more soon after that. The process of demoting asteroids into their own class began in 1854. At that time there were officially over 30 planets...

Interesting, I thought it was always classed as an asteroid.
Thanks *opens up brain*

I recently learned that Doom is the greatest game ever made. I was 2 when it came out. Watched my cousin play it a few times when I was a bit older but never played it myself. Then I was in a foreign country with a cheap laptop and got bored so I played Doom. My fav game of all time now

I was looking through the Linuxdoom source and it looks like the source for DoomEd was originally included in the files given to Bernd Kreimeier, but he deleted or excluded them due to mangled contents/filenames, thanks to character encoding issues with NeXTStep.

If they still existed, solving this would be a trivial issue these days. :(

README.b:
The NeXTStep DoomEd sources in the dump were garbled (filenames - prolly an issue of ISO9660 with or w/o extensions). Somehow Bear never got around to send me a list of the correct filenames, and I won't bother guessing without a NeXT box at hand.

There is a plethora of useful editors for DOOM. I suggest using DEU for X11.

View weapon sprites can be moved around with Dehacked (the parameters), plus they can be made to get back to center when firing the weapon.

So if you place 1 and 32 to the parameters (X, Y) of every first firing state, the weapon will be reset to the center (muzzle flashes follow the weapon). The offset thing doesn't seem to work if X parameter is 0, even if Y is something else.

Positive X parameter move the weapon to right, positive Y parameter move the weapon down.

I think Hexen used them in the weapon animations...

plums said:

I was looking through the Linuxdoom source and it looks like the source for DoomEd was originally included in the files given to Bernd Kreimeier, but he deleted or excluded them due to mangled contents/filenames, thanks to character encoding issues with NeXTStep.

If they still existed, solving this would be a trivial issue these days. :(

Oh joy, another reason to hate the "clean up" done to the source.

I realized you could make an imp, hell knight and baron of hell fire their balls manually by getting close. When they do the melee, stand back.

Fellowzdoomer said:

I realized you could make an imp, hell knight and baron of hell fire their balls manually by getting close. When they do the melee, stand back.

????

Maes said:

????

Imps, Hell Knights, Barons, and Cacodemons use the same code to fire a missile as they do to make a melee attack. To quote doomwiki:

For monsters that have melee attacks, the function P_CheckMeleeRange is called, and it returns true if a melee attack will be successful. If so, damage is inflicted immediately; if not, a ranged attack (if any) is launched.

Unlike fireballs, which are launched semi-randomly, a melee attack is always done if there's a target in range. So you can rush an Imp to get him to try to scratch you, and then move while he's winding up, and he'll shoot a fireball instead.

That's actually pretty cool.

Imps, barons, knights, and cacodemons all use a "combo" attack: the same function, called at the same point in the same animation, will either cause melee damage or spawn a projectile, based entirely on the distance between the monster and its target.

The revenant is the only monster in Doom/Doom II that has both a melee and a ranged attack, and use different animation and code for them. Which is why you can easily abort a revenant's attack by sticking close enough for it to start the melee animation, then backpedaling out of melee range. Doing the same trick on an imp, baron, knight, or cacodemon will instead result in a fireball being thrown your way.

That cacodemons actually have a melee attack is relatively not well known because they do not have a "scratch" sound for it, contrarily to imps and nobles, so it's easy to think instead you got hurt by a projectile that instantly exploded. This is changed in some mods (I remember notably Demon Eclipse).

When you do that Maunual fireball trick, sometimes when you get the monster to turn around, it does the animation, but the projectile comes out of the wrong end.

Interesting.

And by the way, I have noticed that revenants usually won't throw missiles at you until you deal damage to them. Am I just crazy, or this behavior is actually in the code?

It depends how long time they've been awake/moving around. Monsters that have been awake longer fire about as soon as they see player.

As I understand it, the Revenants do have code that causes them to counter-attack with a missile after they go into their pain state, although it's not instant and can be interrupted by making them go into pain state again, or (if you're quick!) forcing them to make a melee attack. It's always seemed a bit inconsistent to me though, and I don't know enough about the Doom source code to say for sure.

That's certainly not the only time they fire a missile though. You might notice it most then if you always attack them as soon as you see them, over other targets.

Revenants do attack in the same pattern as other monsters, with this exception: When they're closer to you than 192 map units, they won't use their missile attack until you hit them. Then they may fire one missile against you, and the process repeats. As long as you stay within the 192-units range, you are "safe" until you inflict damage to them again. That's what I believe.

Ah, that makes sense in terms of both observable behaviour, and coding.

That pretty much explains it (I like to live dangerously, so I'm almost always closer than 192 units to revenants when I find one :P).

This also leads to exploitable situations ("Revenant bottlenecking"), given the right circumstances.

Revenant bottlenecking: a "dynamic" variation of the above [alcoving/snaking], if sieged by revenants you can fend them off (or at least stall them) if you find an alcove deep enough to stay within the "no missile attack" distance of sieging revenants, farther than their melee range, and be narrow enough for them NOT to be able to walk in and close the melee distance (e.g. the alcove in the Great Bicycle Mystery MAP15). This way, revenants will soon crowd outside of it but their numbers and attraction towards their target (YOU) will keep them in a "stalemated" position: the one(s) closer to you won't fire at you (unless you go within melee range or move farther beyond the "no missile" range, and those farther away will fire uselessly at the backs of the frontal one. You can stay like this almost indefinitively, at least until other monsters drop in and infighting disrupts the equilibrium.

I just found out in my astronomy class (senior) that Diemos represents the Greek figure of Dread, whereas Phobos represents the Greek figure of Fear. Even though Thy Flesh Consumed is on Earth (DooM II prequel), could E4M9:Fear be alluding to the Greek meaning? The name always seemed obscure to me.

Platinum Shell said:

I just found out in my astronomy class (senior) that Diemos represents the Greek figure of Dread, whereas Phobos represents the Greek figure of Fear. Even though Thy Flesh Consumed is on Earth (DooM II prequel), could E4M9:Fear be alluding to the Greek meaning? The name always seemed obscure to me.

To my understanding, the map names for Episode 4 were taken from the Holy Bible.

PRIMEVAL said:

To my understanding, the map names for Episode 4 were taken from the Holy Bible.

I'm sure Fear's in there a couple times, but the Phobos reference seems pretty intentional, given the map theme.

Crasger said:

When you do that Maunual fireball trick, sometimes when you get the monster to turn around, it does the animation, but the projectile comes out of the wrong end.

This is probably a case of the baron's attack code lacking the call to A_FaceTarget.

RjY said:

This is probably a case of the baron's attack code lacking the call to A_FaceTarget.

It also happens to imps and other enemies that spawn projectiles.

On a non-projectile related note:
I just found out that there are Marines being killed in the background of the Doom titlescreen.

It's not something I've just found out, but I've gone over 10 years without knowing that Cyberdemon has red eyes at the sides of his head.

If you put an object hanging from the ceiling, such as a one of the many hanged corpses, above a floor that is tagged as a lift or a moving floor, it stays put. If the floors original height is too close to the ceiling that it exceeds the objects height, the object will come down with it when the floor is lowered.