*** The "ask a miscellaneous editing question" thread ***

From time to time I have questions that I don't feel deserve their own threads, and others probably do as well, hence the existence of this thread.

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Here's a "circle" with a radius of around 16400 mu.



I want to use it as a "sea". The actual playable area of the map would be much smaller, of course. Will this result in blockmap (or other) issues in Boom, and what's the largest this circle can be before these bad things happen?

Right, this is gonna sound pretty stupid but how do I makes stairs raise out of a flat floor? I have never quite understood how to do that trick used even in vanilla Doom maps.

mrthejoshmon said:

Right, this is gonna sound pretty stupid but how do I makes stairs raise out of a flat floor? I have never quite understood how to do that trick used even in vanilla Doom maps.

Chubz has a video tutorial here.

I found a few threads already based on this COMMON question but I still couldn't get it to work how I wanted. I just can't help feel there is a simpler method to getting this running in today's Doom modding.

Running GZDoom Editor.

Breakable Glass. It is on action specials, I have gotten as far as making a middle texture translucent and when shot it instantly vanishes.

However I want it to break with shards and soundfx. Can it only be done via ACS scripting with custom glass shard sprites spawning when bullet connects? Must I include a glass breaking sound as well?

Or is there a prefab or tool somewhere most clever mappers use?

rdwpa said:

I want to use it as a "sea". The actual playable area of the map would be much smaller, of course. Will this result in blockmap (or other) issues in Boom, and what's the largest this circle can be before these bad things happen?

If by Boom you mean PrBoom, it shouldn't cause any trouble.

rdwpa said:

Will this result in blockmap (or other) issues in Boom, and what's the largest this circle can be before these bad things happen?

This is a thing that's still unclear to me, looking on the wiki it looks like you will eventually have problems only with Vanilla, but I'm not sure if Boom raised the limits also for this.

Edit:

Linguica said:

If by Boom you mean PrBoom, it shouldn't cause any trouble.

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure the first map of HacX has breakable glass, so it can be done even in vanilla.

In doombuilder 2 and gzdoombuilder, you can hold ctrl while drawing a sector and the drawn lines turn red instead of orange. I don't know what this is doing, but more importantly what circumstances it would be useful for. I suspect its drawing a "deleted sector," such as if you wanted to create a pillar in the center of a room, but if you draw one that's half inside of a sector, and half outside, it still draws unused lines outside the playable area, which makes me unsure how it's useful.

mrthejoshmon said:

Right, this is gonna sound pretty stupid but how do I makes stairs raise out of a flat floor? I have never quite understood how to do that trick used even in vanilla Doom maps.

Foxpup's explanation for rising stairs

mrthejoshmon said:

Right, this is gonna sound pretty stupid but how do I makes stairs raise out of a flat floor? I have never quite understood how to do that trick used even in vanilla Doom maps.

Took me a while to work this one out myself (no thanks to Doom's method of stair building being somewhat bugged meaning I never trusted the fucking thing), to the point that where possible I'd use several scripts instead just to get such relatively simple shit working.

VGA said:

I'm pretty sure the first map of HacX has breakable glass, so it can be done even in vanilla.

I don't know how you do it exactly, but it is possible to have "instant lower" lifts. You can also have "crystal sectors", which allow for doors and lifts with transparent parts in them. So you can give a crystal lift a "glazed" look, and set it to insta-lower when shot. It won't "look broken", make a sound (unless you sacrifice one type of switch sound or a smashing sound, and never use switches that make those sounds anywhere else), or spawn flying debris, though (unless you 'sacrifice' a monster and do some dehacking). But this is only vanilla!

DP

Oh yeah, and my question:

I've made Lost Souls into "scripted" explosions, using Dehacked (they rush through all their frames, until the death frame, which has explosion damage on, on sight). This has also made the Pain elemental into a deadly "flamethrower", which I've decided to exploit.

However, the "exploding" frame (SKULG, 596) ((actually, SKULE and SKULF have been 'skipped', as they may be handy later. This dehack is going to be VERY extensive when it's done. Like HACX level complicated) is not the final frame, the following four frames are supposed to be harmless (I've set them all to "fall"), but if you touch any one of them, it jumps back to the first frame and blows up again! Is there any way to stop this?

I've tried setting the frames after the explosion one to those of another object (the BFG "hit" from the rays), but that doesn't solve the problem.

The Lost Soul itself has the following flags: Visible and untouchable / No Gravity / Travels over cliffs / Floating / Semi no-clipping / Puffs vs bleeds (though it's not even shootable, but yeah). So in theory I shouldn't even be able to touch it and "reset it", right?

I could set it to no clipping, but I'm a bit wary of having the flamethrower tank shooting through walls / unexpectedly up onto platforms.

I tried the large circle thing and for some reason it led to impassable walls not working anymore. I'll stick with circles of saner radii. :D

rdwpa said:

I tried the large circle thing and for some reason it led to impassable walls not working anymore. I'll stick with circles of saner radii. :D

Divide the circle into smaller sectors. I ran into a similar issue when testing a Switcheroom! map and splitting the huge outer sector a few times solved everything.

http://s2.postimg.org/6ksog2p4p/asd.gif
How on earth does 3d slopes work in GZDoom Builder? What am I doing wrong? I'm sure it has something to do with heights, but still... wth

Great!

I was thinking of making a thread like this, but I always forgot because I'm dumb or something. Sonic Retro already has one for hacks and it works pretty well, only problem is unless you have a searching system like Zdoom Forums does it can be very hard to find if a question's already been answered in the giant sea of posts. Oh yeah, and expect these kinds of thread to have to be split after a couple of years like the Post Your Doom Picture thread.

Great!

Lore said:

http://s2.postimg.org/6ksog2p4p/asd.gif
How on earth does 3d slopes work in GZDoom Builder? What am I doing wrong? I'm sure it has something to do with heights, but still... wth

You have to construct a second control sector, giving the sector height to which to slope to, beside the real control sector which has to match the game sector alignment.





However, this can become problematic with large maps and/or constructs at an angle.

On the other hand, you can make your life easier if you use boris's 3D_Floor_plugin.

3D floors in Boom are as interesting as they are confusing. Anybody have a guide on them or better yet do they work in PrBoom?

Kappes Buur said:

...the real control sector which has to match the game sector alignment.

Thank You!

When you're adding custom graphics directly to a wad (after using the texture resource separately while mapping) and then purging the unused entries, is it a good idea to keep the unused IWAD definitions listed in TEXTURE1 and PNAMES? Can not doing so lead to any unexpected problems? I was planning to do this:

1) Copy-paste the entries in my graphic resource wad to my level-containing wad in SLADE.

2) Use SLADE to remove the unused graphics the typical way.

3) Copy-paste TEXTURE1 and PNAMES from the iwad and get rid of the existing versions.

4) Add the graphics that are still in the wad to their respective entries.

But I can skip a couple of steps if they turn out to be unnecessary.

rdwpa said:

is it a good idea to keep the unused IWAD definitions listed in TEXTURE1 and PNAMES? Can not doing so lead to any unexpected problems?

You must always keep all the IWAD's default skies, also all switch texture counterparts to each switch texture you've used in your maps (example: you've used SW1BROWN, so you must not delete SW2BROWN), and all IWAD stock textures used anywhere in your maps, whatsoever.

In classic ports that don't support stacked TEXTURE1 lumps (vanilla, Chocolate Doom, PrBoom+, and similar non-ZDoom ports), the IWAD's TEXTURE1 will be forgotten if your PWAD provides its own - therefore, if the player tried to launch a map that contained stock textures without being present in the new TEXTURE1 definition, the map will crash in these classic ports.

Skies are a hardcoded exception that must always be present in TEXTURE1, even if not present in the map or episode that the player tried to play.

I think there is no benefit from deleting IWAD definitions from your TEXTURE1 (except slightly lesser filesize, by a few kilobytes at maximum, pretty much negligible). Also, if you delete them, you won't be able to use them if you decided to revisit your wad to retexture some maps or add new maps, and you would have to repeat the whole texture inclusion procedure again.

1) Copy-paste the entries in my graphic resource wad to my level-containing wad in SLADE.

2) Use SLADE to remove the unused graphics the typical way.

3) Copy-paste TEXTURE1 and PNAMES from the iwad and get rid of the existing versions.

4) Add the graphics that are still in the wad to their respective entries.

What if some of the custom textures were multipatch? If you delete the texture pack's TEXTURE1, you will lose all definitions of the custom textures, therefore you will have to re-assemble them manually. In case of single patch textures that have the same name as their respective patches, this is easy: You just click "Graphic -> Add to TEXTUREx". But in case of multipatch textures, or single patch textures with different names than their patches, tedious manual care would be needed for each and every of them. Your method seems inefficient in this way.

Here is a better method: Simply copy the very entire content of the texture pack into your wad, then remove unused textures and make sure that skies and switch counterparts won't be deleted.

Do doors naturally block sound, like do they at least count as one sound block line?

SuperCupcakeTactics said:

Do doors naturally block sound, like do they at least count as one sound block line?

Yes.
Other than that you need two block sound lines to keep sound from progagating into other sectors.

If you want to see this in action, then use the Sound Propagation Mode in GZDoom Builder.

SuperCupcakeTactics said:

Do doors naturally block sound, like do they at least count as one sound block line?

To clarify, the sound traversal keeps track of the first sound blocking line and stops at the second. Any 0 height sector will not be traversed into either (so doors in your case). And seeing as all traversal is sector->line(s)->sector based, you can also do "impossible" traversal into otherwise disconnected rooms if the same sector id is used in more than one "location".

How do I make some basic teleporter traps for ZDoom in Hexen format? I know how to do a sound-based trap, but they're all dependent on the player firing their gun, and it's highly unlikely that anyone will actually fire their gun in the sector the trap will be placed. What other ways can I make a similar trap with?

ConorMacLennan said:

How do I make some basic teleporter traps for ZDoom in Hexen format? I know how to do a sound-based trap, but they're all dependent on the player firing their gun, and it's highly unlikely that anyone will actually fire their gun in the sector the trap will be placed. What other ways can I make a similar trap with?

1) Place a small (8-by-8 or so) square sector in a room that you expect players to fire their gun -- best are 1) rooms where it's strategically unfeasible for the player to *not* fire their gun; 2) open areas where sound can travel freely throughout multiple rooms -- and then use the "join sectors" function to link it to a similar sector placed in the teleport trap. Make sure the floor and ceiling heights of the teleport trap is such that the sound actually passes from the joined sector into it. (This method works in Vanilla onwards.)

2) Use scrolling floor conveyors: have the floor in the trap scroll the monsters towards the teleport lines; but until the trap is sprung, keep the monsters in place with something like a raised floor. The player will end up removing this "barrier" with a trigger at the trap location. (This method works in Boom onwards.)

3) I haven't attempted ZDoom-specific mapping in a while, but as far as specific methods only usable in advanced ports go, I am pretty sure you can also use scripts to spawn or manipulate monsters. http://zdoom.org/wiki/Category:Thing_specials. "Thing Spawn" and "Thing Move" appear to be simple ways to do this.

Not really an editing question as such, I'm just curious as to whether there is anything which can convert vanilla (just classic Doom/Doom II in Doom format, none of this Boom, ZDoom and beyond shit) WADs to the format used by Doom 64 EX.

I'm only asking because having to manually dick around applying 'Impassable' and/or 'Double-Sided' flags to every fucking linedef on a map just copy-pasted across is tiresome, tedious and soul-suckingly depressing to do.

It's not exactly what you're after, but you might be able to speed the process along by using Doom Builder's "Select 1 sided lines" and "Select 2 sided lines" menu options. Drag to select the entire map, then use the menu to narrow your search so you can then apply the needed flags to all the relevant lines at once.

...how the FUCK did I not see that option?

Cheers, Essel.

I want the highlighted sector to be an invisible "door" -- the player will be able to see the archvile but won't be able to damage it, and the archvile will remain unalerted. The "door" will open when triggered. I've seen this effect in a few maps, but I can't remember which ones. Apparently it's possible in Boom without any self-referencing sector hackery. What do I do?

action 242 is your best friend. here's a minimal example: https://www.mediafire.com/?9l1h9zus74c1w4f

detailed explanation of the action functionality can be found here: http://doomlegacy.sourceforge.net/docs/boomref.html (just control-F "242")