Editing challenges you've overcome

[Cutmanmike]

Let's face it, you can't do everything in Doom. Every once in a while I come up against some huge limitation forming a barrier over a certain feature I want in a WAD, or the whole idea for the WAD itself. Whether it's something I can't do in physical mapping space, or something I can't code up in ACS or DECORATE without requesting new features. But beating down one of these barriers is great. Sometimes I wonder what other challenges Doom/ZDoom has thrown at other creative minds and how they overcome such limitations. So in this thread talk about those challenges you overcome, how you conqured them and how chuffed you were when you finally did it.

My most recent challenge was a projectile not giving frags to the shooter. This was because of a damn dirty hack Doom does by making the shooter it's target to identify who shot it and who deserves the kill, among other things. I was using A_LookEx to make a projectile that flies above and drops down on enemy players, but that was taking the target away. After tons of alternative methods to make this work, inlcuding shooting projectiles down to check for players, having playerclasses shoot up repeatedly to check for the projectile etc, I involved a little ACS to have the projectile change it's TID to it's hatee's tid (plus 33, so it doesn't use any other player tids), then on it's See state to call an ACS script to call Thing_Hate to hate it's own TID before reseting the projectile's TID and finally drop down correctly and remember who the shooter was. Jesus. Hope it's worth the hassle!

[.+:icytux:+.]

To make you be able to jump in and out of drivable cars(morphing) in a gta kind of style. also, making a realistic steering system and engine sound system for the car. holy friggin crap the script is hacky messy uggly and took one helluva time to get to work right. the solution was indeed so horrid that i wont share how i did it tho, i will release it some day tho, because driving around in doom with cars is dead fun i've made zombies have new kind of death frames for getting overrun by a car (flying doing all kinds of flips, slamming their heads into the asphalt turning into alot of gore etc)

[Jimmy]

I was pleased to finally create an NPC dialogue system that I could rely on. I don't think I'll ever work with Strife dialog scripts to any large extent.

Oh, and this.

[Gez]

Making randomspawners work with projectiles.

[Ceeb]

Getting a fucking door to finally work when I first started mapping.

I was doing basic ACS and DECORATE before I learned how to construct a goddamn door.

[phi108]

I was pleased to be able to rip weapon sprites from models and use them in ZDoom at 35 fps. (later helped by the enabling of true-color weapons in ZDoom's Direct3D rendering)

And then I was exited to be able to scale weapon sprites with TEXTURES to display them to the player at their original aspect, without having to squash them and then let the aspect adjustment unsquash them.

And then I was really exited to be able to use TEXTURES to add a pistol or shotgun in the left hand for other weapons, without having to increase the .pk3 filesize by making a bunch of duplicate sprites. Next, I was amazed that I was able to use the alternate fire and inventory hacks to actually get left-handed shotgunning and pistoling working correctly.

And then, with examples and contributions by Doomrater and Xaser, I was actually able to add in genuine dual pistols. I was amazed.

And in the "near" future, a genuine effective third firing button for meleeing, Doomrater's method. (though it's been on the drawing board for months...)

[NeuralStunner]

Recently I found a way to transition smoothly from Primary to Alternate fire without having to wait for the animation to finish, by putting a call to A_WeaponReady right before A_Refire.

And working around the inability to specify an absoulute angle with certain weapon attack functions, such as A_FireBullets. Using A_SetAngle multiple times in one tic, between firing, works wonders. Check out the code in this post to see what I mean.

[Enjay]

I had a level where the player returned repeatedly to a single point in the map to be given a key by an NPC. There were 6 areas in the map and the access to each was controlled by one of the 6 keys. The areas could be completed in any order so, to mix it up, I wanted the keys to be given in a random order so that the game could play differently each time the player tackled the map. And that's where my difficulty came: I needed the player to be given a different key six times in a single play of the map. The keys needed to be given at random but once a key had been given it should never be given again.

Sounds simple doesn't it? However, it was incredibly complicated for me to get my head around. I managed with the help of people on here though.

[ThatOneZDoomer]

There were some I overcame, but I'll just go over one for now.

Back in '07 when I was still figuring out how to create Decorate weapons, I wanted a third firing mode and melee attacks on the same weapon. I also had each firing mode use it's own ammo. So since I was still just figuring out the basics, I was amazed when I finally figured out the use of dummy inventory items and A_TakeInventory. This was also back in the days when it took me awhile to figure out how to start with a custom weapon, so I would use the console to give me the weapons you were supposed to start with every time I started a game.

Simple to anyone remotely good with Decorate, I know, but I wasn't remotely good yet back during those times.

[Mr. Tee]

This might sound very simple to any experienced mapper too, but I actually only recently figured out how to make solid platforms floating in water that you can swim under. It's actually just making use of walkable linedefs (so you can walk on them), transfer heights (to give an actual floor to the platforms) and floor_waggle (to make the platforms float).

Unfortunately, when I tried to do this to make a solid bridge that you can walk under, I got notorious HOM underneath from ZDoom trying to render 2 floors on top of each other in line of sight at the same time. Only reason it works under water is the fake water surrounding the floating platforms prevents ZDoom from having to render underneath the platforms when you're above water (and vice versa when you're under). It just feels like there is still another way around this that I'm not thinking of.

Note, this is in ZDoom, not GZDoom, where those 3D floors would have made this much easier.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Hmm, plenty have come and many have fallen...let's see if I can bring up a few of the greater ones (not counting stuff like my first <xyz>):

Creating fake 3D huts with windows (SSD) was the most ambitious 3D hack ever...but eventually managed it with skybox portals and lots of suspended main textures, with linedef doors that only opened technically, not visually (except for a message telling you it's open/closed). Then I stuck mobs in some of them...probably not a good idea.

Creating an area that was to be completely flooded with 3D floor water was a pain due to the way lighting behaves when the water goes above the ceiling in sectors with 3D bridges in. The sectors were sloped too. I had to resort to Transfer_Heights ceiling hacks (so the true ceiling is never reached but the fake ceiling covers it) with bridge things to keep you out. I had to remove diagonal bridges and any connected to walls to avoid upsetting the hack, but it was worth it.

Generating a unique set of random numbers for a boss fight (kinda like Enjay's key example)...not pretty but with extensive use of multiple OR operators in while loops I was able to make it work. (and some months later I used an entirely different method to do the same thing in a java app)

Creating a bunch of exits on a 3D spiral staircase was not fun...eventually I resorted to storing the exits in a copy of the bit you could see and teleporting you to the relevant point with an enter script.

Finally, getting a friendly monster to follow you into another map (if it was close enough to the exit) was quite troublesome too...it took a fair bit of scripting and decorate trickery to remove the old one, spawn the new one, preserve it's health and follow the rules of the spell used to summon it.

[Ceeb]

I just figured out how to achieve haze/motion blur.

[Nash]

I just figured out how to achieve haze/motion blur. :mrgreen:

Screenshots or it never happened.

[Ceeb]

I'll do you one better, have an example.

Information about the "effect" is in the SCRIPTS lump.

http://www.mediafire.com/?zuzmwjwmmzq

[ThatOneZDoomer]

Another challenge I overcame also started back in '07, but took a long time before I finally got it to where I wanted it to be.

Creating a laser beam like projectile was something I fought with for quite awhile. At first, I used really high projectile speeds (like 150), but that has issues with vertical aiming and other possible problems. I didn't want to use a hitscan because I wanted direct control over the damage (instead of the usual damage formula for hitscans) and visual effects aside from the puff. At one point, I even used a really long range melee attack. It had the side effect of making aiming too easy since you pretty much were locked onto your target once you hit. There was also the problem of being a little too good at keep monsters in their pain state. Custom pain chances solved that problem, but only for monsters I set it up for, not when I used my weapons across any mod with custom monsters. I settled with a high speed projectile for quite awhile, all throughout the rest of '07 and '08 till I learned about FastProjectile early last year. The NoPain flag showed up sometime as well and I used that along with FastProjectile and MissileType for it to create a good looking beam that actually worked. I even checked mods that had a lightning gun or a weapon like it and they just simply used rail attacks.

Making a child actor of one of the Hexen classes could likely have worked long ago, but I didn't thought of that way back.