thing heights in Doom
In Doom the "Romero-head" boss and the "Eye symbol" scenery decoration thing are now defined not high enough and the player can walk straight through them. But they should be obstacles like green and red pillars or tall lamps.
Also the "skull in flames" thing could use some more height too.
Also the "skull in flames" thing could use some more height too.
Comments
I posted about the Evil Eye and why I thought the height of it needed to be changed, over at Sourceforge a while back.
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.p ... tid=542099
Though I missed the Romero Head, I think the same comments above, about the Eye, are relevant to the Head.
In hindsight, regarding my comment about the Evil Eye's height being changed to the exact same height as ZDoom though; a look through more of ZDoom's Decorate reveals that Dday and ZDoom feature different heights for some other scenery mobs. Hence matching ZDoom specifically over the Eye height is probably pointless when there are other height differences between the ports. As far I could tell, the widths of all scenery mobs was the same between Dday and ZDoom.
Tall Green Column; Dday 53; ZDoom 52
Tall Red Column; Dday 53; ZDoom 52
Evil Eye; Dday 16; ZDoom 54
Floating Skull; Dday 35; ZDoom 26
Torch Tree; Dday 70; ZDoom 56
Tall Blue Torch; Dday 60; ZDoom 68
Tall Green Torch; Dday 60; ZDoom 68
Tall Red Torch; Dday 60; ZDoom 68
Short Blue Torch; Dday 40; ZDoom 37
Short Green Torch; Dday 40; ZDoom 37
Short Red Torch; Dday 40; ZDoom 37
Stalagmite; Dday 40; ZDoom 48
Heads on a Stick; Dday 67; ZDoom 64
Head Candles; Dday 43; ZDoom 42
Dead Stick; Dday 66; ZDoom 64
Live Stick; Dday 66; ZDoom 64
Big Tree; Dday 124; ZDoom 108
Burning Barrel; Dday 30; ZDoom 32
These mobs are non-solid, so don't affect gameplay:
Candle; Dday 16; ZDoom 14
Meat2; Dday 84; ZDoom 0
Meat3; Dday 84; ZDoom 0
Meat4; Dday 84; ZDoom 0
Meat5; Dday 84; ZDoom 0
Non-Solid Bloody Twitch; Dday 84; ZDoom 0
Colon Gibs; Dday 16; ZDoom 4
Small Blood Pool; Dday 16; ZDoom 1
Brain Stem; Dday 16; ZDoom 4
Other mobs:
Romero Head; Dday 16; ZDoom 0
ZDoom actually lacks both height and width fields for the Romero Head (the Meats have width fields); the fact that the mf_solid flag remains on its Decorate though, suggests that the lack of these fields may have been a mistake.
I'd give ZDoom's values higher preference in this (note I did not say, automatic preference), simply because I imagine that other Decorate supporting ports probably use the same values.
Given that the thing heights are defined in external definition files which can be freely modified by the user, I'm not quite seeing the problem here. Simply copy all the values from ZDoom into a DED file and then load it alongside the ZDoom mod.
Independent of other ports though, the Evil Eye and Romero Head heights in Dday, also run afoul of potentially breaking Vanilla compatibility for the reasons I commented on in the quoted part of my post.
Whether or not a mod uses Doomsday specific features is irrelevant. If a mod author used Doomsday for testing during creation of their mod they may well have made assumptions based upon it's behavior.
I agree with changing these specific values if there are incompatibilities with vanilla. However by right this should also be compatibility optioned.
If a mod author used [insert port name here] for testing during creation of their mod they...
The way source ports have handled things in the past probably eliminates the possibility for 100% compatibility without jumping through countless hoops.
But Dday surely wants to support the majority of mods by default? This is what needs to be worked out; which values have been used to test the majority of mods on.
This is not something that can be predicted with any reliable accuracy for non-port specific mods. But the majority of port specific non-tc mods out there are for ZDoom and ZDoom based ports, hence why I suggested ZDoom’s values maybe gain some raised preference.
I believe it is best to consider this before Doomsday Script comes along potentially leading to a much larger pool of Dday specific mods and Dday begins gaining features that allow it to run other ports mods.
However, this is about something unrelated to Vanilla; if one chooses 'real heights' (to call it something) for mobs, wheter all ports should use the same values and if they don't all use the same values, should anything be done about it and what.
In practice these modes and their associated resources would likely be packaged as add-on bundles.
It won't be an easy task to accurately emulate all features of other ports, but at least when it's organized in this manner we can iteratively improve on the support for a particular emulation mode.
EDIT: added a proposal about this for further consideration and planning: http://dengine.net/dew/index.php?title= ... ion_layers
Though, regarding thing heights specifically it still needs to be considered whether Dday is going to go off on its own, necessitating a Dday 1.9/2.0, or is going to match ZDoom (or another port; just using ZDoom as an example) anyway meaning that there would only be Vanilla, Dday 1.8 and Dday 1.9/2.0/ZDoom.
I suppose some research needs to be done into what thing heights other ports actually use (i.e. it was only a guess that most other ports match ZDoom due to either being based off it or because they feature Decorate).
I'll have a rummage through my various installs of other ports and see if I can pull up any differences in thing heights.
However, most Boom behaviors are already implemented and made optional via compatibility flags.