31/12/2005 @05:06:23 ^07:52:55

MERRY CHRISTMAS

The last update started with "Happy Birthday" so this one gets "Merry Christmas"

I asked Graeme if I could put his Blitherances page on snafu and he said all right but then he said, no, link to Other Bits instead. It seemed to me like the wrong page to which to link, because snafu is usually for linking to weblogs/journals as opposed to what I rather disparagingly called "a changelog", but, whatever. "Moose Fish" is the title of the index page

Doom Advent Calendar roundup part 2

I thought I'd better do this before the end of the year at least. Here are part 1 and another link to the Doom Advent Calendar itself.

  1. Remake of E1M8, originally destined to be part of the Flashback project(*). It is a lot harder, ammunition is tight and there's more barons to kill. Somehow I don't think it looks hellish enough though.
  2. A small, but surprisingly long, mostly rock and stone, map. It fits within a 1024x1024 square and is by the compiler of the Congestion 1024 project so I suspect it's something he made for that and had it left over or something. It's impressive how much map can be fit into a 1024 square, but, it is cramped. It is also very hard. There are lots of traps, the archvile teleporting onto the lift made me jump and the other one that comes out the wall behind a crowd of revenants all but killed me. But I was very lucky and managed to get all the way to the end, only to die surrounded by large monsters - and the worst part was, I was expecting them and had a BFG...
  3. This is another map from Flashback, this time, the E2M9 replacement. It is much better than the original, although to be fair it's not hard to make a better map than Fortress of Mystery. This one has plenty of weird architecture and action, most of which occurs in a central courtyard area. It's a good map for making monsters fight each other, but the big teleporters don't go off fast enough.
  4. This is a map from the as-yet-unreleased tribute to the Talosian Incident. It's bricks and metal, with a lot of fancy lighting, and true to its inspiration, has a lot of doors and symmetry. It is also very hard, being terribly low on ammunition, and the monsters, although not appearing in hordes, are large and difficult to kill. (Apparently the reason it doesn't play so well from a pistol start is that it was to be a map 6 replacement or thereabouts)
  5. Originally a speedmap, this E1-style base just goes to show what you can do in two hours with an editor that does all the tedious stuff for you! Okay that's probably a little unkind. This map has plenty of secrets and instantly recognisable E1-style architectural features. It's not particularly hard, though some of the traps can catch you off guard.
  6. Wood and rusty metal surrounds a number of grassy courtyards, and is the constitution of some dungeons here and there. This map is extremely difficult to start off, there is very little ammunition and you really do have to find the secrets.
  7. Speed Villa. Yeah okay, here's the story: on about the 15th or 16th Torn posted that the project was short by a few maps. I like this project and wanted it to be a success so I messaged him on the forums and said, here, use Speed Villa. I guess I could have given him a map from my unfinished megawad like a few other people seem to have done...
  8. Erik Alm, author of Scythe etc. probably knocked this thing out in an hour or two and it's still one of the best maps of the year. It's beige brick and metal in style, industrial, vaguely factory-like. The gameplay is as exciting as you'd expect and the cohesion and connectivity are spot on. There's a blue armour and some medikits apparently outside the playing area, the bars in front of them have a tag number but no corresponding linedef. They're not really necessary though, it's not too hard once you know the location and composition of the traps.
  9. When I downloaded number 21 I ran it and prboom spewed a load of unknown texture errors. Fine. It was my own fault really as I'd been using wget to fetch the wads rather than visit the page. So off I went, and discovered there was a textures wad you needed. I ran prboom with both and the textures wad came up with a load of missing patch errors and whatnot. Oh well. We'd been doing so well up to this point...
  10. Unfortunately yesterday's map was the first of a small series all by the same author and requiring of the textures wad that breaks prboom.
  11. Part three of the series, and thankfully the last. There were in total seven maps that flatly refused to work in Prboom and one that had bugs that stop you from finishing it. It's a shame, on the other hand sixteen playable maps is not to be sniffed at...
  12. To finish off we have a techbase in a snowy landscape. This map looks like a cutdown version of map 7 from Community Chest 2, which given that they are by the same author is not surprising. The "snow" is limited to a cold grey sky texture and some white flats and textures, but is still pretty effective, although Scientist 2 did snowy landscapes a lot more effectively. Damn thing still made me feel chilly, though.

In conclusion I'm glad this project was done and although it wasn't perfectly executed it was a great idea and I hope they do it again next year! My favourites from this half - not counting Speed Villa, everyone loves their own maps - were probably, for both looks and gameplay, 20 and 24. 15 and 17 deserve mention as well, as does 14 which gets the special award for frustration of dying right at the end!

(*) Flashback was to be a recreation of the original episodes of Doom, by Torn, the organiser of the advent calendar project - hence the number of Flashback maps here, I guess - Erik "can do no wrong" Alm, and Espi, author of the acclaimed Suspended in Dusk. It was never finished, although there was a six-level demo released a couple of years ago that was extremely good. Classic Episode standard, easily. There is talk of its revival - we can only hope...

21/12/2005 @23:27:36 ^01:59:30

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

The Overdetailed Map Cheat is 5 years old!!

Doom has always had a map. It is well known that the game is not properly three-dimensional, that inside the map there is one and only one sector at any given point. You can embed it into the plane in a well-defined way, and thus get a map of it from above. I'm sure that mathematically there is a precise way to express this but you get the idea.

Doom has always had cheat codes. In particular if you go to the map and type "iddt" it firstly shows you all the lines, even ones you haven't seen yet, or wouldn't be able to see normally. Then if you type it again it shows you where all the things are, in the form of small green triangles. A third time returns it to normal.

You can make some inferences of thing types from this display. A good working knowledge of the radius and speed of the monster types can let you identify some of them if they're awake. For example archviles move very quickly usually in long straight lines. Lost souls move very slowly and tend to clump together. Spiderdemons are very large, so if there's a triangle always with a lot of space around it, it might be one of those. And so on. Also, you can use context. If something looks like it is on a pedestal in a prominent location in a room, chances are it's a key or a weapon or something.

In Boom's map cheat, things stayed much the same as in Doom's, except that keys show up as coloured crosses. MBF, which implements friendly monsters, shows them in a different colour. Prboom, descendent of Boom and MBF, shows things that count towards your items percentage in different colour. That was useful because I hate missing items but not amazing.

However this isn't where the overdetailed map cheat came from. We have to go back to well before I was using Prboom, even before I had a Linux machine.

At the end of 1999, the RISC OS engine "Doom It Yourself" released a new version which incorporated Boom game logic. Prior to that it had just been a port of Doom to RISC OS and POSIX systems, and with RISC OS optimisations. Not all of Boom's code was included, there was none of the new menus, HUD etc; just enough that DIY could play maps that required either Boom map features or removal of common engine limits. It also enhanced the map cheat, but didn't just use what Boom had done, but took it further.

(In fact I thought DIY's map cheat was actually Boom's map cheat, and was quite surprised to find Prboom didn't have all DIY's extra shapes and stuff. But I digress.)

DIY's new map cheat classified things into one of a number of categories; monsters, ammo, health, keys, powerups, lamps, corpses, obstacles, etc. As you can imagine, this was enormously helpful and a huge step up from what I was used to. But it didn't go far enough. You couldn't tell the difference between a dropped shotgun and a BFG, or between an imp and an archvile (if it was still asleep), or between a stimpack and a health potion, for those 100% items. There was a classification, but it was too broad. The thing to do was now obvious - extend it.

Of course it was about a year before I actually did anything, but eventually I set about making a finer classification which I called the Overdetailed Map Cheat. I reused the extra hexagon, pentacle and key shapes DIY had added, and made a whole load more; I added a lot of extra colours, and tied them all up together in some lookup tables. It was good. Weapon shapes looked like the guns themselves. Items were easily visible. The monsters were all different sizes of triangle; the spiderdemon's is so comically large it still makes me laugh to this day. You could almost play the entire game on the map.

But this was all years ago in DIY. When I switched to Prboom, I lost it all.

I resisted switching engines and platforms for a long time. I knew I'd lose all the stuff I'd put in to DIY, but in the end Prboom won over by the fact that it ran on a computer that could play modern detailed maps without the frame rate falling through the floor, and with the convenience of fast access to the entire internet's library of WADs without having to muck about with copying files by floppy disc. I always thought it wasn't so bad because I could still hack on the engine source, but that took even longer. Software development in Linux annoyed the hell out of me since no Unix text editors seemed to hold a candle to RISC OS's Zap. It took three years to find Vim and use it enough until it stopped annoying me. There's still tons of stuff I miss about RISC OS's GUI but it's been so long I've learned to live without them. X sucks except as a way to have half a dozen terminals all visible at once.

In fact I might never have hacked on the game engine again had it not been for Prboom 2.2.6's live monsters counter. 226 has a lot of useful bug fixes over 224 but also had this thing that was always wrong and it annoyed me so much I had to fix it. That started me off hacking at it again. It wasn't like I hadn't been reading Prboom's source in the interim and becoming familiar with its differences from DIY.

So the next thing I did was fish out the old DIY map cheat code and put it into Prboom. Aided by the fact that the compiler on both platforms was GCC it turned out to be surprisingly easy, and made me wonder why I hadn't done it earlier. Anyway I mean it's mostly data, shapes and colours and lookup tables and that. There's very little executable code. In fact I severely reduced the amount of code because I decided doing an inefficient linear search on three different lookup tables was stupid compared to having one big array indexed by thing number (the only reason I'd done it like that was because, elsewhere in the source, collectable things are distinguished by sprite number, not thing number like everything else)

There was more work to do though as Prboom does have all Boom's extra user interface and in particular you can reconfigure the map colours inside the game. It took a bit longer to add this in as I was having to write new code but it worked, and there was an extra page of colours in Options->Setup->Automap.

And there we might have left it. But I thought, why am I adding new features to the stable branch? Shouldn't I be editing the development version (2.3.x)? I had tried 23x (or 240 if you get it from upstream SVN) and found it to run quite acceptably well, and indeed have a lot of useful enhancements that I felt I could do with. There's a console, a decent key binding system, the sound code is better, blah blah blah. After about a week I imported the development version into my repository and then added the map cheat to it. It was quite a bit different, mainly because of the new console variable and menu system (the actual map code remains largely the same)

So there you go. There are still some issues that will always remain. For instance it's completely oblivious to dehacked patches. For example Scythe 2 replaces Commander Keen with another monster but on the map cheat it still looks like Commander Keen. Then there's other stuff that's a matter of style - I like the default colours but someone else might hate them or strongly disagree with my choice of shapes or whatever. The sizes of triangle for each monster are chosen by radius only and don't take height into account so demons are larger than barons which somehow seems the wrong way round. And I can't decide if barrels should only show up in clutter mode or not. They can be relevant to gameplay. But so can monster corpses, if there's an archvile around. But those don't appear in important mode. I don't know.

Furthermore, the development version is, well, just that. Unstable. Although it has enough new useful stuff in it that I want to keep working on it, it's so full of bugs and global variables that interact in bizarre ways and patched up code edited by seventeen different people that doing anything can be quite frustrating. However that's a topic for another day...

Hells bells, that was a load of self-indulgent rubbish.

19/12/2005 @21:04:58 ^00:15:54

Doom (2005)

I saw the film. Now I'm going to spoil it for anyone who hasn't.

I saw it in an almost empty cinema on the last day it was open. That was good. I'm glad I didn't miss its closing date, and of course I like empty cinemas. The fewer people around making me self conscious, the better.

On the other hand while waiting for it to start I pressed the light button on my watch. To my horror the resulting power drain pushed the battery over the edge and the display got all scrambled. This could really have ruined my day as my watch is 16 years old and I'd hate for something to happen to it. However after I got home I managed to get the back off - I'm surprised I had a screwdriver small enough - and found there was a reset button which put it right.

The reason I just wrote out that anecdote was that it was as relevant to the film as the plot of the film was relevant to the game.
ZING!!
No, no, that was a cheap joke. See the thing is I liked this film, unlike, as it would seem, nearly everyone else. The fact is I like terrible action / SF / fantasy / horror / whatever films. The more excessive gore, violence, swearing etc, the better.

Let's make a list of points I laughed at or otherwise found noteworthy

Nevertheless like I said I enjoyed Doom and embarrassing as you might think it is to admit I'm glad I went to see it. Just to confirm my monumental sadness I'll leave you with a few more references I spotted. Obviously most of the game references were to Doom 3 but there were a few from the original era...

12/12/2005 @23:52:43 ^01:37:43

DER-NER NER-NER NER-NER NER-NER NER-NERR NERR NERRR

der-ner ner-nerrrr nerrr nerrrrr ner-ner ner-ner ner-ner der-nerrrr nerrrr
der-ner ner-ner ner-ner ner-ner ner-neee ner-noo ner-neeeee
der-nerrrr nerrrrr ner-ner ner-ner ner-nerrrrr nerrrrr nerrrrrrrrrrrrrr

NOW YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE THE GRANNY'S GARDEN MUSIC STUCK IN YOUR HEAD ALL DAY AHAHAHAHA

Doom Advent Calendar roundup part 1

It's halfway to Christmas I guess, so here's an overview of the first twelve maps of the Doom Advent Calendar. You can find the links on the thing yourself, that's half the fun of an advent calendar!

  1. A small base/processing plant map. Textured with metal and dark green, with large pools of slime. You start in the middle and have to run to one end, then back and to the other end. I found it extremely difficult due to a high monster density and lack of health and ammo, even turning the skill level down didn't help much.
  2. Another small base map, this time with less slime and more computers. It is very symmetrical and lacking in ammo, but you get a berserk early on which it is obviously intended you use. The symmetrical design is a little dull but there's lots of detail. I seem to recall zdbsp-style texture alignment glitches
  3. This is a complex gothic/hellish map which for some reason replaces map21 (probably for the sky texture?) It's large and difficult especially if you're not expecting some of the traps, and sometimes, depending on the route through the map you take, is not entirely clear on the next thing to do. However it is beautiful and very much worth playing. Just watch for fire from rows of imps on high ledges around the edge of the map.
  4. Requires ZDoom; Prboom failed to run it, citing texture errors.
  5. See previous map
  6. Hooray, here's one that works! This is a very small mostly E2-style map. It is very cramped and linear. Some of the architecture is rather attractive, I liked the corridor with all the flesh coming up out of the ground and stuff. The final area is found via a staircase which is so steep you need mouselook to see the top. However I found you could just charge up there and get out onto the grassy roof and then run around shooting while the crowd eats each other so good luck!
  7. You are in a partially constructed underground base; next to operational workstations there are plain rockfaces and tunnels. You eventually find the surface, and further on a teleporter station that takes you to... another planet? There's another base here which must be cleared out, after which you finally escape on a boat! Overall this map is a fully-realised mission and very immersive, using to great effect Boom/MBF features such as the ability to have more than one sky texture in the same map. However on closer look it's really just a number of rooms connected by a corridors and tunnels; they're detailed and pretty, but nevertheless, still just corridors. Also there are a number of bugs in the version I have which range from visual glitches to showstoppers (including what amounts to a race condition between Commander Keen's death sequence and a crushing ceiling) but the author says he's fixed all of those in the final version.
  8. Also ZDoom-only, causing Prboom to spew texture errors. I think these wads make use of ZDoom's relaxed rendering engine that allows you to freely mix flats and textures. Of course Prboom chokes on this.
  9. Again, see previous map (sigh)
  10. This is an E1-style techbase running on E1M1. It has areas clearly taken from various E1 maps and is very authentic. Even so it felt fairly flat and lifeless for an E1 map. For example the maze in the southeast was all the same texture. The gameplay is rather curiously skewed; there's no clear route and it's even possible to miss out two of the keys, for example. But it doesn't feel like a speedrunning trick. Still it's easy and at least it doesn't choke Prboom...
  11. Stylistically I don't know what this map is supposed to be; the first half is mostly cracked stone and the end ashwall, but all the walls have computer screens, metal panels and wiring embedded in them, and there's metal pillars everywhere so I don't know. It's also rather repetitive, indeed it reminded me of maps from the 10 sectors megawad. However, who cares what it looks like, because this is a great little map to play! There's height differences, windows, just the right amount of backtracking, a lot of smallish monsters, health and ammo that you reach just in the nick of time, all that good stuff. Just don't do what I did the first time I played it, that is fail to spot the little passage near the start, and miss the shotgun...
  12. This one is a lot like 7, essentially a maze of rooms and corridors, but lavishly constructed with lots of detail and polish. It uses techbase textures and also a lot of Boom effects, but there's still very little in the way of glimpses, interconnection etc. Still, there's plenty to shoot at so it's not boring by a long way. The "evil trap" the web page mentions isn't so evil, I mean I didn't even know about it but I got past it, I think the teleporter doesn't really go off fast enough and you have time to get into a corner and let rip with the chaingun. Worse, there's this really annoying "easter egg" at the start which stops you getting 100% kills unless you're really fast to react. It appears to be deliberate, as well. Still ignoring the gameplay flaws this is one of the best maps in this project.

So there you have it. So far I think 7 was the best one - or at least will be without the bugs - but 3 and 12 give it a close run. For gameplay, I'd pick 11 (I've done a demo of 11, watch this space) or 12 (without that stupid easter egg, damnit)

10/12/2005 @13:39:31 ^15:30:33

The reason why club DJs shouldn't have radio shows, part 673

"For those of you that sit down and think, 'that's a bit hard for Fabio', just remember: Fabio gets hard every now and again"

- Drum and bass DJ Fabio, after playing something not in his usual soulful style, Radio 1, 2am 10/12/2005

lots of gates

A sprawling conglomerate

Due to the limits imposed by doom2.exe you could make large maps but you'd have to split them into independent sections because the renderer couldn't cope with too much going on at once. Thus a lot of old maps are in the form of completely separate areas with at most a locked door linking them or even completely separated except by teleporter. UAC Gates Central is one of those maps.

It was released earlier this year, having apparently taken 9 years to make. Thus it does have a very old school doom 2 feel to it, but with 900+ monsters it's certainly not something I'd recommend running with the original game engine. The sections are mostly dark metal/industrial style, though occasionally you stray outside into a rocky canyon or something.

You start off in a very small room with some hidden doors that reveal teleporters. These lead to three separate areas, a dark area around a river of slime, a warehouse, and a large maze of flooded tunnels with fake walls and no map which I found quite annoying. Having navigated these a fourth door is revealed in the initial room that leads to the exit.

However the exit is barred off and you're only halfway through. Now you have to go and find all three keys. The first is in one of a small number of buildings outside in rocky valley, the second found via some more dark places which resemble the start of MAP06 and finally the third in a cage in the middle of a pool of slime which you get locked in when you pick it up. Doing all this gets you into the final huge room which is covered in flashing demon faces and a lot of monsters. The final room was probably the most fun to play.

So this is a large level that took me nearly 100 minutes to finish the first time. It also has nearly 50 secrets, some of which are very hard to find, and worse, only give you one chance to get into them; the mapless maze has one where you press a button to open a door only for it to close again if you don't know exactly what you're doing and guess what the open door button only works once.

UAC Gates Central is not perfect but will pass time if you've nothing better to do. Come on the guy took 9 years to make it, give him some sympathy; his name is apparently Richard Head.

A celebration of infighting

Hell Gate is quite the opposite. It's a fairly small map in a brown brick and wood style. However it still has nearly 500 monsters, more if you count all the inevitable resurrections. It requires the Gothic texture set.

While being relatively simple in the detail department, the overall layout is pleasantly interconnected and complex. There's plenty of goodness like windows, height differences etc. I wish I had a word for this type of thing, coherence or cohesiveness or something I don't know.

The gameplay is rather erratic however. There's very little health and, while there is plenty of ammo, it requires doing some quite dangerous things to get it. You end up spending ages getting the monsters to fight each other, then having a massive surplus of ammunition at the end. There's far too many archviles in the big crowd outside to run out there and go to town with the BFG. In order to get a backpack and carry a good amount of ammo you have to go outside and press a switch which is behind a lowering wall and yet more large monsters, which you need to do because you need the cyberdemons behind it to do some fighting for you... it's a bit of a mess, really.

In many ways it is similar to nutslite, which may or may not be by the same author, I'm not sure, there is conflicting evidence. It is fairly replayable, although never quite being able to finish it makes it annoying for me. I want to run out and shoot the monsters, not hang around in corners waiting for enough of them to kill each other! Let's get on with it already!

04/12/2005 @22:18:34 ^23:06:37

This update is going to be rubbish but read it anyway. You haven't got anything else to do.

Write a parody of Spark's user profile. Then click this thing, there's a very good chance you'll see something hilarious (depending on your sense of humour)

I haven't played much Doom recently. The sheer quantity of stupid bugs in the development version of Prboom is depressing. However here are a couple of things which I can mention:

Related: note to authors, just stop using zdbsp, it only works properly with zdoom and fucks up texture alignment in everything else. 1024.wad really suffers from this.

Changing the subject, Harry Potter films can't hold a candle to the books. The second one was on TV yesterday. The ending made me feel ill and if I hadn't read the books I wouldn't know what the fuck was going on at all.

Speaking of films - definitely "films", "movies" is American - The Two Towers was rubbish as well. I read the Lord of the Rings books when I was 12 and they bored the shit out of me, so when I saw Fellowship of the Ring earlier this year I was actually very surprised to find I liked it. But The Two Towers or Twin Towers or whatever the fuck it was called was just like I remember the book. That is, long, boring and incomprehensible.