Mancubus Fireball Sprites In Doom.Wad

[22alpha22]

I was poking around in my ultimate doom iwad (doom.wad) and noticed that the mancubus's fireball sprites were present. They were even named the same as in Doom 2, "MANF**". I also found Icon of Sin spawn cubes in the iwad as well. Thinking these might have been accidentally added in when ultimate doom was created with its fourth extra episode, I checked a shareware copy of doom (doom1.wad) and the Mancubus fireball and Icon of Sin cube sprites were present there as well. So whats the story behind this? Was the mancubus and Icon of Sin originally planned for Doom but got cut somewhere along the line?

[Rachael]

They were probably accidentally left in the Doom 1 folder after Doom 2 was released. To the best of our knowledge these sprites did not exist prior to Doom v1.4 (of which we only have shareware betas of anyway), and that was the time that Doom 2 was being developed. The Icon of Sin boss did not exist until the later stages of Doom 2's development, and that would have been sometime before the v1.666 patch release of Doom 1.

I've attached a very old shareware wad - those sprites should be absent there.

[Enjay]

The flaming barrel sprites are also in there, but their offsets are messed up so if you try to use them, the barrel "dances" around as it goes through its animation.

None of these sprites were originally in doom.wad but they did indeed appear around about the time of the Ultimate Doom. I certainly remember recognising the mancubus fireballs as such when I first saw them in doom.wad. That means I knew what mancubus fireballs looked like. So it was definitely post doom2 release.

The fun part is that they were accessible via dehacked so some later Doom dehacked patches hacked things to use those sprites.

Other fun accidental inclusions in the ultimate doom.wad is an extra copy of all of the sounds. At a time when file size was still something of an issue (but becoming less so due to CD ROMs), that's quite a mistake.

Oh yeah, and two copies of of the patch sw18_1.

Both the sounds and the patch thing messed me up when making IWAD mods "back in the day" because the available tools swapped out the first copies of the lumps in the WAD, but the game used the second copies. So you could spend ages swapping out sounds only to find the game ignoring them. (In those days, many of the tools expected you to hack the IWAD rather than provide a PWAD. In fact, for sprites you pretty much had to in the early days.)

[22alpha22]

I had done a quick google search and nothing turned up so thanks for satisfying my curiosity.

[leileilol]

Yep. They oopsed their way in for v1.666r

[Enjay]

Ack, my memory failed me. The duplicate patch was sw18_7.