TERRAIN lump wad

[Daniel]

I want to notice that I made a wadfile with TERRAIN lump and terrain definitions for every Doom 2 flat, and, of course, with properly sounds for each kind of terrain. I gave credit to Enjay, because he did the TERRAIN wad used by everyone and where I started to make this wad. The link will be up shorty to:

ftp://archives.3dgamers.com/pub/idgames ... rrains.zip

I don't know where the maintaner of the site will put this file; maybe into the directory /COMBOS. Let's see.

[Enjay]

I've got my own terrain wad like that sitting here. Every flat has at least 3 sounds, and usually more so there is quite a bit of randomisation. I particularly like my squishy sound when you land on the fleshy-gut flats.

The only problem nowadays is that people aren't just using flats on floors. Virtually any graphic in the IWAD can be used and in recent maps a lot of them have been. It sounds kind of funny to have foot step sounds on most flats, and then suddenly go quiet. Of course, that problem always existed when people added their own flats.

And then there are the wads that make changes to existing flats. The flat may look like rock, or metal plates or whatever, but when you land on it you hear a gravel sound or something.

Also, when you, or even worse - monsters, are walking up and down slopes, they make a helluva noise.

My WAD also contains an ANIMDEFS lump to change the sound of all the switches to something more suitable too. I think that's a really cool thing.

Oh! and are you sure I'm responsible for the TERRAIN that inspired you? I have a copy of SPLASH3.WAD on my site and aside from a little help from me, it's all Corwin's work. So if it's that file you mean, he deserves credit, not me.

I suppose I could upload my WAD somewhere. It's not that big. I'll do that if I get a chance.


[edit]OK, I've uploaded my one to my Tripod site http://members.lycos.co.uk/Enjay001/ (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.) Hopefully the upload went OK. Just load the file from the command line, or stick it in your skins dir if you really like it.

It borrows from Corwin's splash3.wad, and only uses the sounds he included for the default liquid flats. I did define smaller splashes for light (ie not heavy as opposed to bright) objects. So, if you load a dehacked patch that changes bullet puffs to any value less than mass 10 you'll get the smaller splashes for bullet puffs.

I think all the Doom1/2 flats are defined, as are most of the switches. I think I left one using the default sound. I'm not convinced my sound for the gargoyle /satyr light (ie bright ) switches is that great. You'll also find things in there not intended to be used with Doom (eg feet walking on snow sounds). That's because I ripped the sounds out of another project of mine and didn't clean everything up.

Have fun.[/edit]

[GeeDougg]

Enjay: Cool, I think I just downloaded everything you had on there!

Daniel: It still hasn't shown up in NewStuff.

[Enjay]

As I said at the top of the page, some of it is a little out dated because they were made to do stuff before Zdoom supported them natively, so I can't guarantee the older files will work properly.

[GeeDougg]

That's OK it's still cool to see what you've done to engineer around problems. For example, if someone figures out a trick way to have slopes in maps for regular vanilla Doom (which is damn near impossible to do) then I like and appreciate it more than ZDooM's own native slope support, because it's a challenge and if you can do it you've shown what you can do with tricks and that gives me hope for some of the other features I want in ZDooM as well. Yes, they don't beat the stability and ease-of-use ofnative features that later became available, but at least it's good for older ZDooMs and for their time I'm sure people who used them loved them!

[Enjay]

Oh yeah, nearly forgot, the other BIG advantage to making the bullet puff thing have a low mass using dehacked is that I have set up all the non-liquid terrain definitions to have a silent splash when hit by low mass objects. That means that when you fire the supershotgun at the floor, it doesn't sound like 20 marines just jumped onto it at the same time. Note, I have not included a patch to do this in the WAD because I didn't want a hidden dehacked patch in there potentially messing things up. So, unless you load one yourself, bullets hitting the floor will sound like feet hitting the floor instead.

Some time ago, Randy reduced the mass of the bullet puffs to 5 so that they would use the small splash definitions in TERRAIN. At Corwins request, they were increased back to their default value because, at the time, he hadn't worked out how to make the small splashes work properly. Of course, now we know how to do it but we have to use a dehacked patch to take advantage of it in Doom because I don't think anything has a low enough mass to trigger the small splashes in Doom by default.

I'd like to see low mass bullet puffs (blood splats and glass shards too perhaps) as an option in Zdoom rather than having to load a dehacked patch every time to make terrain splashes work properly with certain things.

[Kate]

I don't know where the maintaner of the site will put this file;

You know, you can look at the recient(Last 24 hours) log to find out where your file goes after it's accepted into the archive. If it's not in that log, not in the 7-day log, and not in the archives as far as you know, then check the rejects log.

[Cutmanmike]

Say enjay, why do you have those two different sites eh? It makes things complicated when trying to find something

[Enjay]

Because my BT site is actually quite a good host generally, but the storage space is very limited. My Tripod/Lycos site has more space, but puts those stupid adverts on the page and doesn't let you link directly to files other than pictures (which is why I always link to the page rather than the files). Also, it seems to "go down" quite often.

I originally started the Tripod site purely as somewhere to store files and I linked to them from my BT site. That was when they allowed people to hot link files. However, they changed that so I had to put up a page on their server to allow access to the files on there.

[Daniel]

well, I think after this explaining of Enjay, my wad is outdated. I used some old commands to generate it, so footsteps and random splashes aren't used in my wad. I'll have to review it. Even the credits are wrong! Time to go back home and stay in comp. for some hours...

[Daniel]

I edited the ZDoom.exe file and discovered a few new TERRAIN commands:

Into the "splash" "{ }" (got it? ), you can add:

noalert -> to keep the monsters quiet when you fall into a floor.

And into the "terrain" "{ }", we got:

damagetimemask, damagevalue, damagekind -> for damage flats
rightstepsounds, leftstepsounds -> sound of player's steps
stepvolume -> it says by itself

I never could do the step sounds to work, I don't know what Randy has to say about this.

[Enjay]

The player step sound commands you have found have been there for ages (read years) but have not been fully implemented. I don't think Randy has any intention of changing that in the forseeable future. So, they cannot be used.

When I referred to "footsteps" in my WAD, I was perhaps being misleading. They are not true footsteps. They are more like splashes that do not use a splash sprite but do use a sound. So, when you drop onto the surface (even by a unit or two) a sound is given off like a splash but it sounds like a footstep. It's not in any way as impressive as true footsteps, and of course all monsters and items also make the sounds. You may decide it doesn't work too well in Doom where the monsters are all claw or hoof footed things. However, it was fine in my mod, where I pulled the sounds and terrain lump from, because nearly all the bad guys were booted humans.

I like the noalert flag. Without it, any monster in earshot would wake up whenever you walked down a flight of steps with this WAD loaded.

GameArena created his own mod of the Zdoom source. It did have true footsteps. However, I've not heard from him for some time and GADoom was based off an older version of Zdoom than the current one.

[Bio Hazard]

is it just me, or do pallette translations run really slow with this wad loaded? :\

[Enjay]

Well, if it's my WAD you mean, I can't think of any reason why it would cause a problem. I've had it sitting in my skins directory for months, maybe years now and had no problems with it.