Things about Doom you just found out

3 hours ago, Grimosaur said:

If you crush the Icon of Sin while it's playing its death sound, you won't exit the level when the sound clip ends and the animated explosion effect will keep going indefinitely.

That's gonna come in handy! I've got a level where I kill a bunch of icons (plus a ton of teleporting barrels) to make a train explode. It is at the end of the level, so the level ending is not a huge issue, but with this knowledge I can make the explosions go on for longer, spread the icons a bit wider... More control is always a good thing.

People have regularly been sharing their dislike towards the Doom II iWad claiming "it's too brown." It only recently dawned on me that the new beastiary added to the roster may also have been a contributing factor.

In the first Doom, the only majorly brown enemies were the Imp and the Cyberdemon, and, to an extent, the Baron and Spiderdemon. Three of these four are bosses, and the general color palette of the enemy roll is rather diverse otherwise.

Cue Doom II, and we're introduced to at least four more majorly brown monsters - the Hell Knight, Pain Elemental, Mancubus and Archvile (some props to the latter for turning yellow during its attack.) Two more which are partially, but still remarkably brown - the Revenant and Arachnotron. The Chaingunner is literally the only one who's much rather red/maroon instead of brown, and even it has spades of it. The other enemies are much more diverse in color, but even those are niche and/or hidden - them being the Wolfenstein SS, Commander Keen and the Romero head.

As a bonus factor, the only added weapon's - the SSG's - pickup sprite is also majorly brown. This is a bit nitpicky at this point as the Shotgun and Plasma Rifle pickups are also of brownish shade, and the only other colors present in any weapon are grey, barring the yellow of the Chainsaw.

I figured I'd ask a general question here and say the answer is something I just learned. Why do Imps sometimes take two punches with berserk?

Imps have 60 HP, the fist does between 2-20 damage. The berserk multiplies the damage by 10, so it can range from taking 3 berserk punches to gibbing them in 1 punch, and taking more than 1 with berserk is still common.

Doom is full of RNG and some things can swing hugely depending on luck. But I think the imp having more than the minimum berserk damage roll worth of HP is pretty obvious considering you've seen this phenomenon.

It's more related to GZDoom, rather than Doom, but anyway.

I've decided to make some colormaps in Photoshop, then feed them to Slade. Here are some results.

Some details about their creation:

1st one was made by mistake, as it contains 2 bright levels.

2nd one was made with the same template, but uses white as max level and black as min level.

3rd one uses 15,15,15 as its min level, and, apparently, this is the colormap generated by GZDoom's palette tonemap.

4th one is the closest one to original Doom colormap and uses 8,8,8 as its min level.

After a little bit of experimenting, the closest generated colormap uses 11,11,11 as its min level.

On 8/20/2023 at 12:15 AM, Cell said:

People have regularly been sharing their dislike towards the Doom II iWad claiming "it's too brown." It only recently dawned on me that the new beastiary added to the roster may also have been a contributing factor.

In the first Doom, the only majorly brown enemies were the Imp and the Cyberdemon, and, to an extent, the Baron and Spiderdemon. Three of these four are bosses, and the general color palette of the enemy roll is rather diverse otherwise.

Cue Doom II, and we're introduced to at least four more majorly brown monsters - the Hell Knight, Pain Elemental, Mancubus and Archvile (some props to the latter for turning yellow during its attack.) Two more which are partially, but still remarkably brown - the Revenant and Arachnotron. The Chaingunner is literally the only one who's much rather red/maroon instead of brown, and even it has spades of it. The other enemies are much more diverse in color, but even those are niche and/or hidden - them being the Wolfenstein SS, Commander Keen and the Romero head.

As a bonus factor, the only added weapon's - the SSG's - pickup sprite is also majorly brown. This is a bit nitpicky at this point as the Shotgun and Plasma Rifle pickups are also of brownish shade, and the only other colors present in any weapon are grey, barring the yellow of the Chainsaw.

Don't forget the new decorations - six brown hanging corpses, blood pools with brown guts and brain, two brown tech lamps... and a brown Megasphere for good measure.

Lol, did you know you could get this message?
I definitely didn't :D

In Vanilla the word replaces the time taken

If you spend more than an hour on map.

I just found out that John Carmack is John Romero, who knew?

Cherry-tapping with the Chaingun.

The Plasma Rifle being faster than the Chaingun itself. 

Archvile not being able to deal full damage to Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind due to the latter two's immunity to splash damage and thus even a larger number of them being ineffective against them in general.

The farthest range of your hitscan weapons (like your Chaingun) being only 8192 map units at range most. 

While a Chaingunner's range of hitscan against you are even significantly less than that.  

19 hours ago, SealSpace said:

The farthest range of your hitscan weapons (like your Chaingun) being only 8192 map units at range most. 

 

While a Chaingunner's range of hitscan against you are even significantly less than that.  

The limit for hitscans (both your chaingun and enemy chaingunners) is 2048 units: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Hitscan

(This is where it's defined in the source code.)

when mapping in doom2 limit-removing format, if a joined control sector for line action 5 (floor raised to lowest ceiling) is positioned in an area with negative x and negative y coordinates, the effects of that control sector is nullified. tested with ultimate doom builder r4060, nodebuilder bsp-w32 (normal). note: i did not use the default nodebuilder zennode because my map would break when using zennode (tested and confirmed).

On 8/4/2023 at 7:49 PM, Individualised said:

I don't know about Petersen's contributions to Doom 2's level names, but many of Doom 1's level names existed before Petersen joined id, though many of them were assigned to different levels. Doom levels and their names were always separated from each other, the level names are solely names of locations for story purposes and they assigned levels to locations towards the end of development. That's why you always see ex-id employees refer to levels by their level IDs and not the names they were given. Doom 2 did this a bit less and they did try to actually give the levels themselves names (Tricks and Traps, Barrels o' Fun) but there are even some examples of this in that game - The Catacombs used to be assigned to MAP04, and back then "The Focus" would have been the name given to it (which makes sense given the level's design). The map called "The Focus" in the final game was quickly drafted up and placed in MAP04 after they cut a level (a late-game hell level which was merged into The Spirit World) and needed a new level to fill the gap. I actually have a lot more to tell about that topic, including why Doom 2's levels often don't match the theme of the episode they're in. (it wasn't always like that - techbases actually looked like techbases, and at one point the level order was nothing like the final) Jaguar Doom and it's derivatives also have examples of this, with 2 new maps taking names of maps from the original game and Fortress of Mystery being called Dis.

I think Sandy may have misremembered here, and it was probably the SSG. I say "probably" because yes, the normal shotgun was there from the very beginning of development, but the SSG was at least hinted at even before the game started development, although it was never included in Doom 1:

(Source). Him having the SSG become a thing in game is just my speculation, though.

Also, on the topic of level names, that's absolutely true. They mostly had the list of levels they wanted for Doom 1, but they didn't have the levels. What you see in Doom 1 is levels they made, but with names they assigned as development went along. Originally they had started making certain levels to fit with specific previously decided level names, but most of them were just moved around and renamed for the final version. You can see most of the levels in some form in the alpha versions of the game:

• "Hangar Two": Became E2M7.
• "Supply Depot Two": Became E2M2.
• "Waste Processing": Became E2M3.
• "Enlisted Quarters": Became Doom 2's MAP10. You can see the earliest version of this map in the v0.5 alpha.
• "Tower": Became E1M6.
• "Recreation and Training Center": Became E1M4. In alpha v0.4 the map is mostly recognizable, and it even has its own rough layout for a movie theater where the yellow key is in the released version, but you need to edit the executable so you can climb tall ledges to get to that room (see below).
• "Mess": Never made as a map, AFAIK.
• "Officers' Quarters": Same as above.
• "Personal Storage": Where the "second, more powerful shotgun" would be found, but never made it as a map either.
• "Control Center": Became E3M3.
• "Power Plant": Became E1M2.
• "Lab": Became E2M4.
• "Observatory": Was briefly seen as E1M10 in alpha v0.4, a small map made up of 2 rooms, but then it was quickly removed and never seen again.
• "Supply Depot One": Appears in alpha v0.4 as E1M11, and it's a huge level that's mostly empty, and features lots of mazes that lead nowhere. Infamously described by possibly either Hall or Romero as "devoid of real levelness".
• "Anomaly": Became E1M8.
• "Main Hangar": Was never made, AFAIK.

On the topic of "Recreation and Training Center", here's some screenshots of the rough movie theater room, just because I find this pretty fascinating:

This is the same area in the released map, for comparison:

On 8/14/2023 at 5:32 PM, nicolas monti said:

 

Yep, the alphas, there were even some linedef with crate texturing if I'm not wrong.

You're both right and wrong. This is only a thing in deathz0r's conversions of those maps for ZDoom. Can't fault him on that one, because the alphas' map format was extremely different. A couple years ago I reverse-engineered the map format for study purposes, and the reason the wrong assumption happened was because in the alphas, the textures on walls are not named, but instead referenced by id numbers.

The first-ever version of what we know now as "Limbo" appeared on alpha v0.5 as E2M1, possibly as an accident. The level was originally mostly covered by what eventually became the REDWALL texture, and you could be able to see it in the alpha if it wasn't because the game crashes when you try to load it, because alpha v0.5 is built different and it crashes if literally any texture in a one-sided linedef is missing. In this case, the corridor to the left requires some textures that don't exist in the game anymore, and the rest of the map points to the texture ids to textures that look like crates and make no sense given the context.

Inserting the map into alpha v0.4, however lets you see the map, since that version doesn't care if the textures are missing as long as you're not looking at them. I added all this info to the wiki a couple years ago, but here you have the screenshots if you're curious:

And, also if you're curious, this very early texturing can still be found in the released version of E3M7. Just load the map in Doom Builder, and see the back side of most 2-sided linedefs:

And, as an extra fun fact, it's safe to assume this level was originally created to be "Entrance To The Dying God". Tom Hall originally envisioned episode 2 to be hell, and already had a list of names for all the possible levels, although most of these were dropped almost immediately:

• "Entrance To The Dying God"
• "Belly of The Beast"
• "Heart of Darkness"
• "The Mind of God"
• "Gates of Dis"
• "Fleshalls" [sic]
• "Temple of The Summoner"
• "The Unholy Shrine"
• "Castle of The Dukes"
• "Magma Deeps"
• "Hell Hole"
• "Spirit Drains"
• "Shadow Walk"
• "Darkaan Tower"

I guess they thought Sandy's names for the levels sounded a lot cooler (because they do lol). If you look at the original drawing for the map, you can see that the episode 3 overworld map in the released version is directly based on it. Dropping the "Dale of The Evil God" entirely, most of the original names correlate to what you see in "Inferno" and also make a bit more sense as well. "Gates of Dis" becomes "Hell Keep", "Castle of The Dukes" becomes "Pandemonium", "Temple of The Summoner" becomes "House of Pain"/"Mt. Erebus", "Unholy Shrine" becomes "Slough of Despair", "Magma Deeps" becomes "Unholy Cathedral" (which explains why it's covered in lava), "Hell Hole"/"Shadow Walk" become "Gate To Limbo", and "Darkaan Tower" becomes "Dis".

I think it's also really interesting that, as late as the Press Release beta version, hell was still episode 2. They only changed it around around when Doom v0.99 was released.

Sawed-off doesn't necessarily imply double barrelled, right? STRAIN replaced the non-super shotgun with a sawed-off version.

edit: oh wait the "wider radius of damage" part suggests it's being compared to the usual shotgun and therefore its own thing, silly me

5 minutes ago, hfc2x said:

 

I think Sandy may have misremembered here, and it was probably the SSG. I say "probably" because yes, the normal shotgun was there from the very beginning of development, but the SSG was at least hinted at even before the game started development, although it was never included in Doom 1:

 

(Source). Him having the SSG become a thing in game is just my speculation, though.

 

Also, on the topic of level names, that's absolutely true. They mostly had the list of levels they wanted for Doom 1, but they didn't have the levels. What you see in Doom 1 is levels they made, but with names they assigned as development went along. Originally they had started making certain levels to fit with specific previously decided level names, but most of them were just moved around and renamed for the final version. You can see most of the levels in some form in the alpha versions of the game:

• "Hangar Two": Became E2M7.
• "Supply Depot Two": Became E2M2.
• "Waste Processing": Became E2M3.
• "Enlisted Quarters": Became Doom 2's MAP10. You can see the earliest version of this map in the v0.5 alpha.
• "Tower": Became E1M6.
• "Recreation and Training Center": Became E1M4. In alpha v0.4 the map is mostly recognizable, and it even has its own rough layout for a movie theater where the yellow key is in the released version, but you need to edit the executable so you can climb tall ledges to get to that room (see below).
• "Mess": Never made as a map, AFAIK.
• "Officers' Quarters": Same as above.
• "Personal Storage": Where the "second, more powerful shotgun" would be found, but never made it as a map either.
• "Control Center": Became E3M3.
• "Power Plant": Became E1M2.
• "Lab": Became E2M4.
• "Observatory": Was briefly seen as E1M10 in alpha v0.4, a small map made up of 2 rooms, but then it was quickly removed and never seen again.
• "Supply Depot One": Appears in alpha v0.4 as E1M11, and it's a huge level that's mostly empty, and features lots of mazes that lead nowhere. Infamously described by possibly either Hall or Romero as "devoid of real levelness".
• "Anomaly": Became E1M8.
• "Main Hangar": Was never made, AFAIK.

On the topic of "Recreation and Training Center", here's some screenshots of the rough movie theater room, just because I find this pretty fascinating:

 

This is the same area in the released map, for comparison:

 

 

You're both right and wrong. This is only a thing in deathz0r's conversions of those maps for ZDoom. Can't fault him on that one, because the alphas' map format was extremely different. A couple years ago I reverse-engineered the map format for study purposes, and the reason the wrong assumption happened was because in the alphas, the textures on walls are not named, but instead referenced by id numbers.

 

The first-ever version of what we know now as "Limbo" appeared on alpha v0.5 as E2M1, possibly as an accident. The level was originally mostly covered by what eventually became the REDWALL texture, and you could be able to see it in the alpha if it wasn't because the game crashes when you try to load it, because alpha v0.5 is built different and it crashes if literally any texture in a one-sided linedef is missing. In this case, the corridor to the left requires some textures that don't exist in the game anymore, and the rest of the map points to the texture ids to textures that look like crates and make no sense given the context.

 

Inserting the map into alpha v0.4, however lets you see the map, since that version doesn't care if the textures are missing as long as you're not looking at them. I added all this info to the wiki a couple years ago, but here you have the screenshots if you're curious:

 

 

And, also if you're curious, this very early texturing can still be found in the released version of E3M7. Just load the map in Doom Builder, and see the back side of most 2-sided linedefs:

 

 

And, as an extra fun fact, it's safe to assume this level was originally created to be "Entrance To The Dying God". Tom Hall originally envisioned episode 2 to be hell, and already had a list of names for all the possible levels, although most of these were dropped almost immediately:

• "Entrance To The Dying God"
• "Belly of The Beast"
• "Heart of Darkness"
• "The Mind of God"
• "Gates of Dis"
• "Fleshalls" [sic]
• "Temple of The Summoner"
• "The Unholy Shrine"
• "Castle of The Dukes"
• "Magma Deeps"
• "Hell Hole"
• "Spirit Drains"
• "Shadow Walk"
• "Darkaan Tower"

I guess they thought Sandy's names for the levels sounded a lot cooler (because they do lol). If you look at the original drawing for the map, you can see that the episode 3 overworld map in the released version is directly based on it. Dropping the "Dale of The Evil God" entirely, most of the original names correlate to what you see in "Inferno" and also make a bit more sense as well. "Gates of Dis" becomes "Hell Keep", "Castle of The Dukes" becomes "Pandemonium", "Temple of The Summoner" becomes "House of Pain"/"Mt. Erebus", "Unholy Shrine" becomes "Slough of Despair", "Magma Deeps" becomes "Unholy Cathedral" (which explains why it's covered in lava), "Hell Hole"/"Shadow Walk" become "Gate To Limbo", and "Darkaan Tower" becomes "Dis".

 

I think it's also really interesting that, as late as the Press Release beta version, hell was still episode 2. They only changed it around around when Doom v0.99 was released.

There are some versions of the alpha maps contained in a wad called DEV.wad, I don't know where that file came from, or what stage of development it is, some maps like alpha 0.4 E1M11 (warehouse /supply depot) or 0.5 E1M6 (DOOM2 refueling base) look worse than the actual alpha version. In that wad limbo contains walls textured with crates.

there is some early version of spirit world in that file too, but for doom1, the map is from Petersen but the symmetry is resembling to Tom Hall's early maps so I don't know if Tom contributed to that map at some point. Its theme is hell but there are lots of techbase ceilings and even some crates as walls, I see house of pain vibes there.

In the final release of E3M3 there are lots of techbase textures hidden if you look them in doombuilder, even COMP textures in the central area are present.

11 minutes ago, nicolas monti said:

 

There are some versions of the alpha maps contained in a wad called DEV.wad, I don't know where that file came from, or what stage of development it is

Dev.wad was put together by @Individualised utilizing maps released in Romero's Doom Dump. I don't know how he went about converting them so I cannot comment as to whether or not all the textures were translated over correctly. The maps themselves are difficult to place in the production timeline - some of them show earlier geometry than we got in the alphas and yet have texturing closer to the final versions. Some of the maps are from during Doom 2 and perhaps even Ultimate Doom's production.

As far as the Observatory being 0.4 E1M10, that's never been verified and there's precious little to go off suggesting that conclusion. E2M4 always seemed a better fit for that name seeing as you have a giant tower resembling an observatory with precious other reason for it to exist, but that's also just speculation.

DEV.wad was built directly from map sources found in Romero's Doom Dump. I did not edit the maps in any way except to add a player start in a map that was missing one. Some levels used textures that were not able to be located in any known build (they may be present in some of the texture editor screenshots in Romero's Doom Dump but as I have no way of knowing what those textures would have been called I decided to not bother with those), so I put a placeholder "missing" texture for those, however I did not edit the maps in any way to do that, I just added each missing texture to the .WAD with the same placeholder texture. As such any texture oddities are as they were originally. (apart from one texture that I accidentally messed up, but oh well)

Yeah, what I said is that that very early E2M1 references textures that don't exist in the build it came in, so it displays crates and unrelated stuff. That's why I said it was included in alpha v0.5 probably by accident.

I don't think it was included by accident, it's an internal build so they wouldn't need to remove anything, it's not like the press release build or Qtest1. Likely they had only just started work on episode 2 (which would be episode 3 in the final), and maybe around the same time they had re-arranged some textures and hadn't updated the level yet, episode 1 would have still been their main focus at the time (during all of development it would have been, this was the case for all id games with a shareware version. That's not to say they wouldn't have finished the other episodes before release unlike Wolfenstein 3D but episode 1 would have been a priority as they needed to get the shareware version out the door before the full game).

@hfc2x Also I had no idea that Tom Hall had names for the Inferno levels too, that's cool. I wonder which one of those was for what ended up as The Spirit World in Doom 2, since that was originally a Tom Hall(? I don't think it could be by anyone else and the Doom 1 version in the Romero Doom Dump is bundled with a Doom 1 version of Refuelling Base which we know is a Hall map) Doom 1 map. "Fleshalls" sounds like the closest match as the map is literally a bunch of corridors/halls made out of flesh (an element which didn't survive in the final version in Doom 2), and it's one of the few locations that isn't on the final Inferno map.

If Sandy Petersen isn't bullshitting about this too, then Inferno and The Shores of Hell swapped late in development as per his suggestion. I suspect it was sometime before the A Visit to id Software build as that build uses the final episode 1 sky, while the press release build was back when you could actually select a sky per sector using different flats, and there's 5 different skies to choose from there.

Interesting how Dis was originally called Darkaan Tower, and the final Episode 2 boss level is Tower of Babel. I wonder if that's coincidence, because when Inferno and The Shores of Hell were swapped, that included their bosses too; the Cyberdemon was originally meant to be the final boss.

11 minutes ago, Individualised said:

@hfc2x Also I had no idea that Tom Hall had names for the Inferno levels too, that's cool. I wonder which one of those was for what ended up as The Spirit World in Doom 2, since that was originally a Tom Hall(? I don't think it could be by anyone else and the Doom 1 version in the Romero Doom Dump is bundled with a Doom 1 version of Refuelling Base which we know is a Hall map) Doom 1 map. "Fleshalls" sounds like the closest match as the map is literally a bunch of corridors/halls made out of flesh (an element which didn't survive in the final version in Doom 2), and it's one of the few locations that isn't on the final Inferno map.

I've actually been referring to that map as "Fleshalls" for years ever since I first played it and I only just found out about Tom Hall's Inferno level names today too haha. 

35 minutes ago, Individualised said:

I don't think it was included by accident, it's an internal build so they wouldn't need to remove anything, it's not like the press release build or Qtest1. Likely they had only just started work on episode 2 (which would be episode 3 in the final), and maybe around the same time they had re-arranged some textures and hadn't updated the level yet, episode 1 would have still been their main focus at the time (during all of development it would have been, this was the case for all id games with a shareware version. That's not to say they wouldn't have finished the other episodes before release unlike Wolfenstein 3D but episode 1 would have been a priority as they needed to get the shareware version out the door before the full game).

Well, in reality, I think it's more complicated than just "accidental". Alphas were meant to be sent to industry professionals or certain gameplay testers approved by id Software back then, not public release. So yes, I suppose they just built the game with all the assets they had, which included that map.

Thing is, I'm mostly saying because all the evidence points at the level being made when a different texture set was available for the game at the time, due to those textures correctly coinciding with "hellish" textures in alpha v0.4, which also perfectly match with what you can see in Doom Builder in the final version of the IWAD. I remember asking Tom Hall directly about some of these details many years ago, but not precisely about this map in particular. I'd have to probably go digging for those emails, but might as well just go and ask him again.

26 minutes ago, Individualised said:

@hfc2x Also I had no idea that Tom Hall had names for the Inferno levels too, that's cool. I wonder which one of those was for what ended up as The Spirit World in Doom 2, since that was originally a Tom Hall(? I don't think it could be by anyone else and the Doom 1 version in the Romero Doom Dump is bundled with a Doom 1 version of Refuelling Base which we know is a Hall map) Doom 1 map. "Fleshalls" sounds like the closest match as the map is literally a bunch of corridors/halls made out of flesh (an element which didn't survive in the final version in Doom 2), and it's one of the few locations that isn't on the final Inferno map.

I have no idea if that early version of Spirit World is a Tom Hall map. It could be, since it sort of matches his style, including how you can almost perfectly encircle the entire map into a squarish shape, and the overall level lacks verticality and is mostly comprised of 90-degree walls, as well as placement of bonus items in what appears to be treasure caches. However, it lacks something that's very important for a Tom Hall map, and it's the attempt at using sector lighting to create "realistic" light sources.

If it is a Tom Hall map, then it was definitely meant for Doom 1, and almost certainly supposed to be a hell level. If not, then it's almost certain (to me, at least) that it was always intended for Doom 2.

33 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Interesting how Dis was originally called Darkaan Tower, and the final Episode 2 boss level is Tower of Babel. I wonder if that's coincidence, because when Inferno and The Shores of Hell were swapped, that included their bosses too; the Cyberdemon was originally meant to be the final boss.

No idea how the levels were supposed to be ordered, and considering Sandy changed the names for most of the maps, it's probably just a coincidence.. although I think the people developing the PS1 version of Doom were onto something here lol.

24 minutes ago, Faceman2000 said:

I've actually been referring to that map as "Fleshalls" for years ever since I first played it and I only just found out about Tom Hall's Inferno level names today too haha. 

Well, if Hall was indeed the author of that map, then I guess it's the best candidate for the slot. Remember they came up with those names even before they made any maps for the game.

7 minutes ago, hfc2x said:

If not, then it's almost certain (to me, at least) that it was always intended for Doom 2..

I doubt it; the DEV.wad version has the artefact items, and no Doom 2 stuff. Unless they were planning to bring artefacts back in Doom 2, which I have no reason to think so. The layout is almost identical to MAP22 from the Doom 2 prototype except there's a lot of steep ledges/non-functional doors that make the level impossible to traverse after the first few rooms, not unlike many Tom Hall maps in pre-release Doom 1 versions, which is part of why I think it might be one of his.

Well, I guess that's a thing I just learned about Doom lol.

1 minute ago, hfc2x said:

Well, I guess that's a thing I just learned about Doom lol.

I suppose it is possible that it's from a very early version of Doom 2 that had removed entities with the same entity IDs as the removed artefacts, but I doubt it. Here's some screenshots:

1 hour ago, hfc2x said:

Well, in reality, I think it's more complicated than just "accidental". Alphas were meant to be sent to industry professionals or certain gameplay testers approved by id Software back then, not public release. So yes, I suppose they just built the game with all the assets they had, which included that map.

 

Thing is, I'm mostly saying because all the evidence points at the level being made when a different texture set was available for the game at the time, due to those textures correctly coinciding with "hellish" textures in alpha v0.4, which also perfectly match with what you can see in Doom Builder in the final version of the IWAD. I remember asking Tom Hall directly about some of these details many years ago, but not precisely about this map in particular. I'd have to probably go digging for those emails, but might as well just go and ask him again.

 

I have no idea if that early version of Spirit World is a Tom Hall map. It could be, since it sort of matches his style, including how you can almost perfectly encircle the entire map into a squarish shape, and the overall level lacks verticality and is mostly comprised of 90-degree walls, as well as placement of bonus items in what appears to be treasure caches. However, it lacks something that's very important for a Tom Hall map, and it's the attempt at using sector lighting to create "realistic" light sources.

 

If it is a Tom Hall map, then it was definitely meant for Doom 1, and almost certainly supposed to be a hell level. If not, then it's almost certain (to me, at least) that it was always intended for Doom 2.

 

No idea how the levels were supposed to be ordered, and considering Sandy changed the names for most of the maps, it's probably just a coincidence.. although I think the people developing the PS1 version of Doom were onto something here lol.

 

Well, if Hall was indeed the author of that map, then I guess it's the best candidate for the slot. Remember they came up with those names even before they made any maps for the game.

Man it would be great if you could ask Tom Hall if he started Spirit world as he's not ccurrently credited. If this is the case, also to ask him what was the original texture scheme for it since the alphas almost do not contain hell textures other that a couple with skulls. The only large room in that map looks somewhat like a chapel to me.

@Faceman2000 I'm not sure if those marble variations and the additional eye switches in the alphabeta resource file of our project are original or some addition for the project itself.

36 minutes ago, nicolas monti said:

@Faceman2000 I'm not sure if those marble variations and the additional eye switches in the alphabeta resource file of our project are original or some addition for the project itself.

The eyes that look back and forth were in Romero’s asset dump; I don’t think we know for sure how they would’ve been used by NaturalTvventy and Xaser’s interpretation in LostRes seems valid enough to me. As for the brown marble (I assume that’s the marble variation you’re referring to?), there was a single blank brown marble texture in the asset dump; It’sNatureToDie made the other varieties based on it.

On 8/23/2023 at 6:25 PM, Individualised said:

I suppose it is possible that it's from a very early version of Doom 2 that had removed entities with the same entity IDs as the removed artefacts

I had forgotten about the COMM1 version of the map. I'm more familiar with the MAP21 version, which has Doom 2 monsters and the like. Funny thing, that later version is also full of Doom 1 textures that don't exist in Doom 2, like ASHWALL and SKULWAL3.

So I went and had a closer look at COMM1, and I think it's a Sandy Petersen map. The overall architecture and room shapes look more like something you'd see in The Shores of Hell, like with E2M5 or E2M6. If it's indeed a Petersen map, it must have been one of the first maps he made for the game upon joining id Software, since most of the score items were removed after the Press Beta version.

I suppose the name "COMM1" means "Commercial 1", considering COMM2 in the same folder for unused maps, is what eventually became MAP10 in "Commercial Doom" AKA Doom 2.

On 8/23/2023 at 8:19 PM, nicolas monti said:

Man it would be great if you could ask Tom Hall if he started Spirit world as he's not ccurrently credited. If this is the case, also to ask him what was the original texture scheme for it since the alphas almost do not contain hell textures other that a couple with skulls. The only large room in that map looks somewhat like a chapel to me.

Yeah, I'll definitely ask him. Thing is, this is probably a thing that Romero would be a better fit for. Although like I said above, this really looks like a Petersen map. Here, have a look and compare:

On 8/23/2023 at 7:14 AM, Shepardus said:

The limit for hitscans (both your chaingun and enemy chaingunners) is 2048 units: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Hitscan

 

(This is where it's defined in the source code.)

Yeah but in GZDoom, the limit for your Chaingun's hitscan shots are significantly increased compared to its vanilla version.