Enemies Rise Through The Floor?

[DooMAD]

If you create a lower sector inside a sector, and don't give it any below textures, it doesn't look like there is a lower sector. It just looks like a completely flat floor.

If you tag the sector to a linedef, to make it rise to highest floor level, and put an enemy inside, it looks like the enemy rises through the floor!

I know it sounds confusing, but it works well. http://forums.newdoom.com/UBB/smilies/cwm26.gif

[Doom_Dude]

That sounds like a kewl trick http://forums.newdoom.com/UBB/biggrin.gif Reminds me of those Quake guardian dudes in the Quake: Dissolution of Eternity mission pack.....they rose up out of the floor and it was kewl.

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[darknation]

Batman doom did this... baddies would rise from the sewers to koom batdude.

The cool ting was that the would splash water when they did it... that was cool

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[DooMAD]

The Quake thing was probably done in the same way. If you put the tagged linedef in the right position, you can time it so that the enemy pops up right in front of you. It scared the hell out of my mate, who playtests my wads! http://forums.newdoom.com/UBB/smilies/cwm27.gif

[Doom_Dude]

I have to disagree for there are no Linedefs or sectors in Quake. Tis an entiely different beast. I'm sure they coded the Quake guardians to rise out of the floor.

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[Aliotroph?]

Don't some versions of Doom give a "hall of mirrors" effect when you do that? Some GL ports might just show a hole in the map.

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"Carnage killed Aliotroph?"
- obituary from Perfect Dark

[Boingo the Clown]

No. Omitting lower textures does not cause HOM as long as the missing textures are kept below the player's eye level. If the player is able to see the floor to which the textureless lower is attached, the DooM engine will automatically flood the offending lower with the adjacent floor texture, as if it was part of the floor itself. The same thing works for uppers, provided the missing textures are kept above the player's eye level, and the player can see the ceiling to which these uppers are attached. The moment the player is unable to see the floor (in the case of lowers), or the ceiling (in the case of uppers), HOM will appear in the offending areas.

As the other members of Team DeiM will testify, I have come up with quite a number of interesting special effects based on this quirk of the DooM engine. In fact, I am currently working on an effect similar to the one you described, except that it is an entire building that rises out of the ground in this way, and not just a single monster (It's not just a simple square block either. This is quite a complicated structure.).

I have had a little experience with the "rising out of the floor" trick, so I may as well warn you about some of the potential problems you can run into.

The main problem with the "rising out of the floor" trick is that the hole the monster starts in must be larger than the monster's collision detect square, and that the collision detect square must not be allowed to touch the sides of the hole. If the monster's collision detect square does overlap any of the sides of the hole by even a single pixel, the monster will not rise slowly out of the floor the way you want it to. Instead, it will instantly pop up to the top of the hole the moment the floor of the hole starts to rise. This, of course, will ruin the effect (although this tendency for objects to instanly pop up can also be used as a special effect).

Making the hole big enough for the monster will cause its own problem, on the other hand, because the larger hole could potentially allow the player to fall into it. Obviously, this too would ruin the trick. Not only would the hole itself be revealed to the player, but the player would also see HOM for however long he is stuck in the hole. To prevent this, you would either have to restrict the player from directly entering the rising monsters' zone (i.e. The player could be passing a graveyard, and the monsters rising from their graves would be on the other side of the fence.), or have the monsters rise up quickly enough from the ground for their holes to seal themselves before the player can reach them.

The rising monsters effect is a nifty little trick. I really hope to see what your final level will look like when it is done. Don't forget to left me know when it is ready for download!

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[Boingo the Clown]

Oh! I almost forgot.

You will also have to make sure that the hole is deep enough that neither its floor nor the monster in it can be seen by the player before the monster starts to rise. This may need to be quite deep, since most, if not all, DooM ports allow the player to look down.

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[DooMAD]

I know about the problem with the player falling down the hole. If you make the hole just the right size, the player collides with the creature inside, stopping you from falling in. With some ports, however, you can stand on top of enemies. This means you have to make the floor rise <JUST> before you get to it and the creature pops up right in your face!

That particular level "The Crypt" along with many other wads can be downloaded from my new site.

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[Boingo the Clown]

You can't rely on the player colliding with the monster inside.

In ordinary DooM, the collision detect is infinitely tall, and it would stop the player from falling in the hole, but in DooM Legacy, and many other ports, the monster's collision detect is the same height as is for deciding if it can enter a room. If the player's feet are higher than the monsters' heads, they won't block him as they would in ordinary DooM.

In other words, the monsters will stop the player from falling into the hole in ordinary DooM, but not in the DooM ports. This is an important thing to remember, because most people play the ports these days.

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[Sphagne]

In zDoom you can have a sector just like the surrounding sectors and make a script that lowers the sector, spawns an enemy and raises it again, creates splashes...

all around the player!

Viva la script.

[The Undertaker]

It's a shame most of the editing community doesn't know the first thing about scripts. Just looking at them is enough to scare them off.

[Boingo the Clown]

"First you must learn to walk. Then you learn to fly."

The reason there are not many people using scripting is because there are no tutorials around to help people get started.

Usually, all you you get when you go looking for information about scripting is a list of functions. Without some kind of tutorial to teach users the basics of how to use the scripting, these lists are pretty much useless to them.

It is like going to a foreign country, and handing out dictionaries to people, expecting them to figure out how to speak English by looking at the list of words. A very small number of the people who receive dictionaries might be able to do it, but the other 99.9% of them will probably just give you a confused look and toss the dictionary away.

That has been the case with me and Fraggle script (used by Legacy). All I have to go on to learn how to use it is a crummy list. Otherwise, I would have been using fraggle script a long time ago.

This is a recurring problem with Legacy and its new features. They included information on how to use the features with version 1.32, but this information is not in a simple or meaningful form. When people complain that nobody is using Legacy's new features, all I need to do is show them what we have to use for refernce. Before v1.32, the only information was on a two year old page on the Legacy site.

If you want more people to use scripts, why don't you come up with a couple of basic tutorials to help them get started?

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[DooMAD]

Exactly. Plus, it's not easy to keep up with new features. Once you've learned how to use some features, they give you new ones.

With the way these features work, it creates the situation where you need a particular port to use a certain wad. As I want everyone to be able to use my wads, I don't bother with scripting.

Just to let you all know, there's a few bugs with my site at the moment. I'm not even sure if you can download anything just yet. I've sent an E-mail to Paddy (the semi-sober Irishman) to fix the problems. http://forums.newdoom.com/UBB/smilies/cwm32.gif

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[Aliotroph?]

Scripting tutorials would definitely be very useful. Most of the software I learned involving games was from a tutorial like this. I learned DEU from one (even though it was bad and full of holes and missed bugs) and I learned BUILD (nobody plays Duke3d anymore) from one. Same with WorldCraft. Heck, I even learned Visual Basic that way. If there was a tutorial for FraggleScript, I might actually learn it (even if it's just for interest).

While I'm here, there is a similar effect in Relik's Mayhem wad. Imps rise from lava pools. This was done with deep water and stairs though. It looks really cool, but the lava doesn't hurt you.

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"Carnage killed Aliotroph?"
- obituary from Perfect Dark