I've seen similar horror-themed mods where the levels are empty (and sometimes all walls are replaced with grey textures to make it seem more lifeless and unsettling), and the player is stalked by some randomly-appearing monster that mustn't be looked at (or else).
As I've already tried mapping once I'm pretty sure the game only put things that are in a specific difficulty level and so since no object has the 0 difficulty, they will not spawn. I guess difficulty 5 or 6 would do the same.
I would have guessed the same thing. Anything different than the regular difficulties would cause the same issue as zero. It's a cool trick to see the empty map though. :)
Actually, I tested it myself and the effect only appears on difficulty 0, anything higher than 5 resulted in nightmare difficulty or, skill 5. My guess is that the game treats any value above 4 as Nightmare difficulty.
I wonder what the code responsible for the "difficulty zero bug" looks like. It looks like a sensible behavior, something planned by the devs, to avoid crashing. At the start of the video, my guess was : no monster mode is the 0-difficulty, but saldly no... It would have been even more sensible than the actual behavior.
I remember at least one of the Commander Keen games had faulty code that allowed you to enter something like difficulty 0 (or "Super Easy" mode), though it is practically identical to Easy (difficulty 1).
It's not really anything planned by the devs really, entities in doom maps are called 'things' in editors and they come with a flag value to tell things like in which difficulty do they appear. Is it multiplayer only? if it's a monster, is it in ambush mode (doesn't react to sound, only wake up on seeing the player or being hurt.) Internally, for placing things in a level, there are 3 difficulties, Easy with a value of 1, Medium with a value of 2, and Hard with a value of 4. Furthermore, Ambush has a value of 8, multiplayer only a value of 16. So, for example, for a thing to appear in all difficulties but to not be in ambush or multiplayer only, you give it a flag value of 7, adding the values of each difficulties together. Skill 0 has no defined difficulty value, it's neither easy, medium or hard, therefore nothing is enabled in the map. The only exception to this are the player starts, as they always works and don't take into account their flag value, enabling us to play on skill 0 with crashing.
7:00 no, I'M Dynamite. Also, kinda surprised you can even PLAY difficulty 0. Normally ALL entities/things/actors use difficulty flags, even DooMGuy himself. I'm genuinely curious, which difficulty does it look up for the DooMGuy? Also, what would happen if you tried to save/load during Difficulty 0?
But are you a power load? :P AFAIK, player starts are treated as special cases, so they work even on difficulty 0. I haven't tried saving and loading... but maybe it would work?
So now I'm curious. I noticed for the first time that the ceiling of E1M8 in the room where you fight the Barons of Hell is the acid texture. If you could somehow get in the ceiling, would it actually damage you?
No, the fact that a floor damages you relies on 2 things: 1. You are standing on the floor of the sector 2. The sector properties specify that it does damage The texture choices (floor/ceiling/walls) themselves do nothing, and if you are "in the ceiling" you are likely not standing either. If the ceiling looks like acid, but you don't take damage from standing in the sector, then the sector wasn't marked to damage you at all. The reason a floor damages you is entirely separate from how it looks, it's just usually a convention that the nukage floor texture is used with a specific sector type to do it's damage effect while you stand there, and others like lava use a similar but different sector type that does more damage each time it procs. Some maps / campaigns don't follow this convention so it's sometimes unclear if blood pools, or dirty water hurts you, and it can even be different for different maps, or even different uses of the same texture in the same map; inconsistencies like this are either a mistake or intentional cruelty on the part of the mapper. There are notable exceptions, such as in E2M1 of Doom there is a doorway shaped like a cross that does damage while you stand within it, but has a normal floor texture, and in E2M5 there is a sector in front of a wall with a Arch-vile carving that also does damage if you stand on the otherwise normal looking floor in front of it. There is also a version of the damaging floor type that causes the sector light level to pulse, which is at least a clue that something is wrong, such as in E2M7. If the mapper wanted to, they can make a map where it's only safe to walk on lava/nukage/acid/boiling blood, and the regular floor hurts you. The only real limitation is that only one sector type can be used at a time in Vanilla Doom, so you can't have most the normal flickering lights, secrets, or the timed sector open/closing logic on a floor that also damages the player. BOOM compatible maps (and later formats) allow arbitrary mixing of the sector type options. A tricky map could use the ceiling texture to indicate damage instead, such as open-sky being a hazard (maybe you are a vampire?). In E2M2 (Containment Area) there is a secret bridge across a damaging blood pool that is revealed by looking at the ceiling.
One thing I sorta wish you did during the IWAD experiment was open the automap during each test. It would give us the level name, and that would tell us if the exe was capable of switching text banks based on the IWAD it loads, or if that's all completely static.
It works, since the Final Doom executable is built upon all previous others, so it supports all IWADs... though there are some small issues. For example, Ultimate Doom's Help screen doesn't work, so pressing F1 causes an immediate crash. I think this problem is unique to the updated id Anthology executable.
@@AlexeiVoronin Well one of the things that brought the question to mind was the old steam version of Final Doom had set up the directories wrong, and it resulted in TNT loading up the Plutonia level names and intermission texts. Which is why I wanted to see what texts get loaded when the .exe actually gets to choose which IWAD to load.
yusss another alexi video. this is top shelf doom content! i think i remember renaming doom2.wad to doom.wad to see what happens. i actually forgot the result. maybe thats another video?
I wonder, does the super shotgun become available in Doom 1 through cheats if it is loaded through the Doom 2 executable? After all, the executable itself holds the game logic, while the IWAD only has the content like graphics, maps etc. My theory is that a silent, invisible super shotgun would be available. Any thoughts?
AFAIK, there is no way to get the SSG as long as the game is running in "Doom 1 mode." There was a bit more peculiar behavior in the beta versions preceding the release of Doom 2 - in older versions, using IDKFA in Doom 1 and then trying to select the shotgun would immediately crash the game. In a later beta, they "fixed" this by making the shotgun unselectable after using the cheat.
