User talk:Fraggle

Discussion page
If you have an idea for a funny name, go ahead and create a page with that name (just put it in the Doom_Wiki: namespace). Something similar to the Village Pump on Wikipedia?

There is the Doom Wiki:Community Portal which I suppose should be expanded with more information on how to use the wiki, communicate with others etc.

By the way, you can sign your posts with ~. Fredrik 08:37, 10 Jan 2005 (PST)

Sysop
You now have sysop rights. This means (among other things) that you can edit protected pages, delete pages, and block users. Have fun. Fredrik 09:12, 10 Jan 2005 (PST)

Style tips
You could create an official manual of style page instead of hiding such things on your user page :) - Fredrik 14:30, 16 Jan 2005 (PST)


 * P.S. Was it you who made a page of "frequently misspelled words"?  I remember seeing one somewhere, but now I can't find it.   Ryan W 06:28, 26 Sep 2005 (UTC)

"Make sure you read the style guide if you haven't already."  Yes, I saw that. (In fact, I have the much longer Wikipedia version open in another tab.) And maybe someday I'll be ambitious enough to make edits so large that I actually need it. :> Let's get to work. Ryan W 03:46, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Nukage/Slime
In Nukage I wrote "nukage is green and slime is brown", based on the texture lump names, but now I'm not so sure. Any thoughts? radius 17:49, 11 Feb 2005 (GMT)
 * I think it's all rather arbitrary. In the end I think what you've written is fine.  Does the Doom manual say anything?
 * It says: "Slime and other radioactive waste: Many of the areas in Doom/Doom II contain pools of dangerous liquids that will damage you if you walk through them. There are several varieties of waste, each doing an increasing amount of damage. If it looks fluid, beware!" So, maybe nukage is green slime, or maybe it is "other". And then, there is lava which is liquid but maybe not radioactive. And those hot rocks that sometimes are damaging, which are not even liquid. Maybe I will rework the article into a general one about "Damaging floors", and redirect "Nukage" and "Slime" to that... radius 19:39, 12 Feb 2005 (GMT)

Making polygons
Any ideas how to construct the convex polygons that make up level geometry from the level data lumps? I guess the most important info is in SEGS and SSECTORS, but I can't figure out how it works. Fredrik 15:38, 25 Feb 2005 (GMT)
 * Yeah, this looks kind of tricky. The SSECTORS themselves are lists of SEGs, and each SEG seems to have a starting "distance" along its length but no length or ending distance.
 * You can probably infer the end point of SEGs by something like (ruby pseudocode):

seg_hash = {} foreach seg in segs seg_hash[seg.linedef] = [] if seg_hash[seg.linedef] == nil seg_hash[seg.linedef].push(seg) end seg_hash.each_key do |linedef| # sort by start point seglist = seg_hash[linedef].sort { |a,b| a.startpoint <=> b.startpoint } # assign endpoints from the start of the next segment in the list # use the full length of the linedef for the last entry for i in 0..seglist.length-1 seglist[i].endpoint = if i >= seglist-1 linedefs[linedef].length else seglist[i+1].startpoint end end end
 * 1) create a list of segs for each linedef
 * 1) go through each linedef
 * Then you'll get the complete data you need in order to highlight segments for example. You wont be able to get complete polygons unless you do something cleverer (maybe involving the dividing line data in NODES?)
 * Fraggle 16:01, 25 Feb 2005 (GMT)



All of a sudden I came to think of glBSP, which generates convex subsectors. Watch the difference :)

I wanted this for more advanced level statistics such as volume, volume per sector, monsters per volume unit etc. Fredrik 18:10, 25 Feb 2005 (GMT)


 * I finally figured a way to do this (see third image):


 * For each subsector, determine a point within it (in map coordinates). I did this by taking the first (or only) seg, finding the normal vector at the midpoint and projecting -1 units (i.e. to the right of the seg). (N.B. The end points of each seg are given by the vertices in the seg structure.)
 * Create a rectangular polygon enclosing the whole map.
 * Starting with the root node, slice the polygon using the node's partition line, and keep just the part on the same side as the subsector point determined above. Then, select the subnode corresponding to the side the point is on and repeat slicing and subnoding until you reach the subsector in the node tree (0x8000 bit set in child node).
 * Now, the polygon covers the subsector but may extend out into the void. To clip, slice the polygon with each seg in the subsector, keeping just the right-hand slice each time.
 * There is one subsector in E1M1 (subsector number 143) for which this does not seem to work, and one or two subsectors in some of the other maps I checked as well. I'm not sure why this is, but I just ignored these anomolous subsectors.
 * radius 14:59, 15 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Style
Hi, I just read your message and checked out that link, I should have no trouble adapting to the style if writing you have laid out. Thanks for the link =)

impse
Why'd you rv without talking on Talk: ? The edit wars go on. I vote to drop the article altogether. 82.39.116.133 21:37, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

doom internals
My main interest on the Wiki is in writing quality technical articles about Doom's internals.. I really like your Barrel suicide and Picked up a medikit that you REALLY need! writeups along these lines, exposing the guilty code is a lovely touch. I look forward to similar edits :) Now I've got my hands a little dirty in the doom source code, I will be trying similar write-ups. -- Jdowland 09:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

cube wikipedia link
on Kurt Kesler, but there's a link to Cube on Wouter "Aardappel" van Oortmerssen too. I plan to write a small Cube article for this wiki. I may well base it on material from the wikipedia article, but

-- Jdowland 08:41, 14 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) the wikipedia article sucks (I'll probably work on that too)
 * 2) there's definitely some doom-specific stuff to discuss about cube which would be out-of-place on the wikipedia one

Spammers
You can also block all the spammers that tried to modify the Entryway, There were yesterday 4 attempts (note that the last IP reverts and is no spammer). Ducon 09:08, 21 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * I've just dealt with those two. I note they're from the same IP block as the two before that. I suggest we keep all spam discussion in one place - how about Spam? -- Jdowland 10:38, 21 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * No, Spam may be interpreted as a spam article about Doom. It should be Doom Wiki:Spam. OK, I moved the page, can you delete the redirect? Ducon 10:44, 21 Jul 2005 (UTC)

this isnt an xhtml page.
this isnt an xhtml page. - it certainly claims to be: the doctype is XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the HTML tag carries an xhtml namespace declaration. Also, the BR tag I used is backwards compatible, the one you've reverted to is not forwards compatible. If you still disagree, please explain why :-) -- Jdowland 10:20, 27 Jul 2005 (UTC)

"Tick" redirects to "Tic"
Fraggle says: "there is no article about the doom 3 tick yet; a disambig page will be useful then but for now, might as well just redirect to tic". Okay, but that doesn't solve the problem of the link in the Monsters article pointing to the wrong place. Do you like my new solution better? :>   Ryan W 06:17, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * That looks like a better solution. I think it is pointless having a disambig page with only one entry in.  There is hardly any Doom 3 information on the Doom wiki, and nobody has expressed much interest in adding any.  If that changes then we should think about these things, but for the time being I think it is better to just concentrate on Classic Doom.
 * Note that 'tic' is not just a misspelling of 'tick'; that is how units of time (1/35th of a second) are consistently refered to inside the game, and it is commonly used terminology. Fraggle 14:59, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * Agreed. And I never said that "tic" was a misspelling of "tick"; I thought that someone was saying "tick" was a common misspelling of "tic".  :>   I didn't know that people actually used it as a variant.    Ryan W 07:27, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)

deletion of "Glitches in Map 16 of DOOM II"
Hmm. But if this was just a HOM, then why did it only happen in that corner of that map? Ryan W 21:54, 26 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * I bet it works in loads if you try it Fraggle 22:49, 26 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * It does seem to work on any level. On the other hand, it is definitely not a normal HOM: the extra wall textures he talked about do appear.
 * I'd bet you a Happy Meal that this is actually an incidence of a different bug, the rendering problem involving large pieces of architecture disappearing and reappearing (like sprites do when there are too many) &mdash; play E2M3 of DARKHELL.WAD with monsters, for example, and you'll see the outer walls suddenly develop giant rectangular gashes as one observes them on the run from across the arena, then reconstitute themselves &mdash; which we don't have an article on at the moment, and which I don't even know a good name for.  Ryan W 03:28, 30 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * That sounds more like a nodes issue to me. Plus, this description of textures flashing in and out sounds more like what happens when you venture near the ±32767 boundary. Bloodshedder 05:14, 30 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * It could indeed be a nodes issue. I was using Doom95 exclusively at the time, and you wouldn't believe how many weird problems Maximum Doom (from the days of vanilla v1.666) seemed to cause that engine.   Ryan W 06:56, 5 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Doom movie article
" [ T his isnt the place for random speculation."] Are you therefore of the opinion that we shouldn't have an article about the movie until it has been released and some of us have seen it? Ryan W 05:31, 30 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * The DOOM/DUNE article was random "what if Id decided to do this..." speculation. It had no basis in fact whatsoever and was just an idea that a fan had come up with.  Having a Doom Movie article is fine because we can reference actual articles about the movie - we know who is going to be in it, where it is set, when it is going to be released and some details about the plot. Fraggle 12:03, 30 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Link to Doom movie on Entryway
"I'm putting this here under the justification that it is part of "doom's history" - it doesnt really fit with the games"   But by this logic, the Doom novels could be there too, and surely nobody would put those on a par with the release of Heretic (e.g.).

I think the movie should be linked on the front page because it's a topic of current interest, and I agree that it fits as well into that column as it would anywhere else. But I say we delete the link three months after the DVD release. :>    Ryan W 01:31, 17 Oct 2005 (UTC)

system specific/unspecific i_*.[ch]
I looked at the source before performing that revert: i_main.c is not system dependent, none of the *.h files are system dependent; which, with prboom, leaves i_network.c and i_udp_sdl.c. The latter appears to be system independent too. So, why exactly is it correct? -- Jdowland 21:48, 19 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * You should look at the original source, as it is more pronounced. Also, you missed the src/SDL/ directory which makes it more obvious.  i_* is for stuff like low level video access, sound, networking etc.  In PrBoom, SDL and SDL_net provides all of this, but originally, there were separate modules for different systems.  Essentially, they provided their own hardware abstraction layer, the kind that SDL now provides. Fraggle 10:28, 20 Dec 2005 (UTC)

User_talk:Ashley_Pomeroy
Sorry it took so long to answer your question (it's item 10) &mdash; I've been on the road a lot during the last month. :>   Ryan W 15:55, 15 Jan 2006 (UTC)

Screenshots
Hello. I was wondering if the "taken by me" thing that is common for some users to say on Wikipedia (regarding image pages like screenshot ones) is somehow avoided here in the DOOM Wiki. It's no big deal, really, but I'd like to know. Thank you.--Kaonashi 19:16, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I might add that the text in Template:screenshot seems a bit incomplete. It's fine for levels designed by id, but doesn't say anything about additional copyright claims the author of a PWAD (or of Strife) might have. I would revise it myself, but I don't know enough about the legal issues associated with emulation. Ryan W 05:44, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I've changed it to state that it may be under the copyright of id or "others". Is that ok?

Well, looking on the Style page, under the "other" section, it says not to sign your name to articles you write... I would imagine that this applies to screenshots as well. As far as templates for D64 screenshots go, there's Template:Doom_64_TC_screenshot for screenshots of the D64TC, and Template:Doom_64_screenshot for screenshots of D64 itself. -- Nuxius 08:28, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Ah, okay. That's alright. It's just that I was thinking things here would be more or less like Wikipedia, where it's common to see people saying "taken by me" at screenshot pages, but it's no big deal. I've also noticed people don't pay as much attention to image pages as they do to regular articles (not even close). And about those DOOM 64 templates, I didn't know. That'll be useful. Thank you.--Kaonashi 18:01, 10 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Actually, I kind of see your point. When the pictures are photos, it makes sense to have "taken by me" type messages as it asserts who the photographer is, which gives a source for copyright reasons.  For game screenshots, the author of the game usually has a better claim to the copyright, so ownership messages are less useful.  Anyway, feel free to add such messages in the future if you want, I hadn't thought through all the issues. Fraggle 18:31, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

WadC
agreed :) -- Jdowland 23:22, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Sleeping Sergeant of Doom II MAP02
The fact that it was nonsense had been noted on the talk page. I was hoping that that editor, whose technical familiarity with Doom far exceeds mine, would just fix it him/herself.

Do you suppose the article should have a less map-specific name, since any instance of the "wild coincidence" (as Phipps called it) can induce the bug? Ryan W 20:11, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I was going to add more stuff last night, but I got distracted and it seems you beat me to it :-) I do think a better name would be "Blind Sergeant of Doom II MAP02" - I don't think that making the name map-specific is a problem. Fraggle 10:21, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I think you rewrote the article while I was putting off rewriting the article in order to make the demo. :>    Ryan W 19:53, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Image reverted
Er… sorry, I reverted Image:Screen melt.gif by mistake. I wanted to see the difference between the two images and bam! Ducon 16:46, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
 * That's ok :-) To clarify: the only difference in the new version is that I made the last frame last longer - that way it doesn't immediately restart the animation. Fraggle 19:11, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

novel covers
You just beat me to it, I was about to upload them :) -- Jdowland 20:54, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Doom RPG walkthroughs
Remarkable work, sir. Given the ephemeral nature of cell phone OSes, this is an important scholarly task you are performing. Ryan W 21:42, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Talk:Speedrun
Yes, there are Heretic speedruns. :>   But I certainly agree with your basic point. Ryan W 00:16, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Re: Articles from Raven website
Hi!

Yes, I have permission. I obtained way email. Cacodemon 20:39, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Doom RPG monsters, etc.
Doom RPG and Doom 3 are both retellings of Doom using most of the same weapons and monsters, but completely different engines and somewhat different plotlines. Our Doom monster articles are stuffed with information which is presumably not valid for either of the remakes (except by coincidence or as an easter egg), including:


 * tactical advice (Doom RPG is turn-based!);
 * WAD lump data, such as sound names and sprite names;
 * statistics such as hit points and reaction time;
 * historical notes.

Therefore, I think the Doom RPG information should have its own articles (even if they're currently not very long), as the Doom 3 information does, rather than just being a misleading sidebar in each article about Doom monsters and weapons. As our local Doom RPG 'club pro', what would you think of that? :>    Ryan W 19:03, 13 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Doom RPG behaves very similar to classic Doom in a lot of ways. Monster behavior, for example - Archviles still resurrect things, Pain Elementals explode into Lost souls when they die.  The authors have obviously tried to maintain the same behavior as classic Doom as far as they can.  I do agree with some of what you're saying, but there is a lot of common text that is relevant to both classic Doom and Doom RPG.  I don't think it's worth the effort splitting them into separate articles for Doom RPG. Fraggle 08:27, 14 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I'll take your word for it, since I can no longer buy new consoles etc. for testing whenever I feel like it. :>   I still think the Doom RPG info in the monster articles is incongruous and should be placed as close as possible to the "See also Doom 3" links.    Ryan W 15:59, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Re-re: Articles from Raven website
Cacodemon 22:09, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay of the answer, it's because I had no internet for a long time. Here's the email copy:

Law, Caryn  to me 

Hi nightmare! I don't think there's a problem with using that biography as long as you state where you got it from. Thanks!

- Caryn Law Technical Artist - Raven Software www.ravensoft.com  From: nightmare [mailto:nightmarelh@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 10:59 AM To: GRP RAVENSOFT www Subject: [Retrieved]permission


 * Cool! Thanks! Fraggle 12:41, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Template edits
Are you saying that trailing carriage returns are always included with a template? If so, I'll have to go back and take them out (there are a lot more than the ones you fixed) when that becomes possible again.   Ryan W 22:02, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Doom RPG Trivia
I think this should go in the Junction article. But is it Dr. Kelvin or Dr. Jensen? Ryan W 17:54, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree. I don't know which of these it is, though, if it is one of them. Fraggle 11:57, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Chainsaw sound effect
Reading this for the first time, I have just exclaimed "awww N1CE" to no one in particular. My co-workers appear somewhat puzzled. Ryan W 23:43, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

deletion of Bio Force Gun v3.14
merged into BFG9000  I am not sure this was really the consensus on the talk page; most said they agreed with your original recommendation. More importantly, it is not consistent with precedent in articles like Doom novels and Doom comic, where the differences from classic Doom are discussed in the expanded universe article, not in the main gameplay article. (We did make an exception when listing all those names at the top of BFG 9000, but that makes a little more sense because people new to the game might have seen/read about the movie and need to be set straight. :>     Ryan W 21:24, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

deletion of editing software subcategories
Hi. I notice that you recently deleted several of these, which is probably a good idea. There are still more, however, left over from my first attempt at reorganization. Ryan W 02:13, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

User talk:Ryan W
I suspect that we ought to be careful about copy-editing outside the main space. There can occasionally be controversy. :>   Ryan W 18:05, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the help
Thank you for the rephrasing process in Doom Italia article. Now the whole article sounds indeed more encyclopedic. :) --Afullo 00:47, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Registration on Doom Italia
Here are the links to register on Doom Italia site: http://www.doomitalia.com/register.asp and to register on Doom Italia forum: http://www.gamesforum.it/board/register.php --Afullo 19:37, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Brainless
Please ban the brainless that spammed the wiki, and delete the crap he left. Ducon 06:06, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Void
''map01? this is a single map!''  Interesting. Would you want to remove *all* single-level PWADs from those categories? I suppose it is a bit inconsistent to put them in the slot categories but not in "Levels by name" (which might look very silly since they are already in "PWADs by name"). On the other hand we would end up with dozens of slot categories which contained almost no PWADs (because 99+ percent of PWADs only have one map). Ryan W 06:29, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
 * IMO, there should be a distinction made between "level" articles and "WAD" articles. If we use GothicDM as an example, you'd have the main GothicDM article and then separate articles if you _wanted_ to write individual articles on each of its maps.


 * Er... right. I thought we had all agreed on that already.


 * If you have a single-map WAD then it's obviously absurd to have separate articles on the WAD and the level, because they're effectively the same thing. But that's okay!  The whole point of the MAPxy categories IMO is for disambiguation.  You search for "MAP23" and the wiki says, "MAP23? Which one? Do you mean MAP23 of Doom II, Plutonia, TNT, Hell Revealed ....?".  It isn't just an end unto itself: it's there for a specific reason.
 * More important is the specific point you bring up: 99+ percent of PWADs have only one map. We run the risk of making Category:MAP01 frustrating/useless.  Imagine if in three years from now we have 100 more articles on single map PWADs, all of which are in the MAP01 category.  Now imagine yourself as a user trying to search for MAP01: Entryway (Doom II).  You do the obvious thing and put "MAP01" into the search box, and get back a page listing every single single-level PWAD article on the entire wiki.  Effectively you've then broken the search function because you have to manually search through the category list to find what you were looking for.  It's not inconceivable to think that this might end up stretching onto multiple pages. Fraggle 09:00, 31 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmmm. Okay, you've convinced me.  I'll fix the other single-level PWAD articles and tweak the policy page.    Ryan W 20:10, 31 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Still one possible problem for maps which were released both singly and as part of a larger project. If we rename it to MAP##: Level Name (WAD Name), we make it sound like the megawad release was the more important part of its history, which is not necessarily true (e.g. DWANGO5, RALPHNEW).  If we don't rename it, however, someone doing the above described search in Category:MAP27 might not recognize Thematic Elements as the level he's stuck on.  (Yes, a megawad editor should patch the titles in, and yes, the readme file should be included with every download, but...)    Ryan W 20:50, 31 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It's not inconceivable to think that this might end up stretching onto multiple pages  Hmmm, especially if we use Fredrik's criterion for WAD notability, which is that it was released.  (I can easily visualize a bot that auto-dumps every text file from Doomworld/idgames into a poorly organized stub.)    Ryan W 05:01, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Doom 3
okCapt Jim 21:25, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

also don't you think we should get a character template or something? CaptJim 23:48, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

yeah, just like that. they usually contain stuff like a picture, name, gender, status (dead or alive), job, and weapon of choice.CaptJim 02:36, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

geekery
I just saw on the Doomworld forums that you linked to this, which is four dimensions of awesome through space and time. Ryan W 05:03, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

User:JuJube / "vandalism" on User:Danny Lilithborne
Apparently, this guy and User:Danny Lilithborne are one and the same, as given by the fact that going to User:Danny Lilithborne on Wikipedia redirects to User:JuJube on the same site. I don't know if that edit was real or if somebody had hijacked the guy's account or something, but I'm just letting you know. TheGreenHerring 20:41, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Broken pages
Doom: Gates_of_Hell and Doom: The Battle for Mars

Are inaccessable

They return bad titles

96.240.16.221 20:33, 15 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi 96.240.16.221, welcome to the wiki. I'm sorry that your first editing experience was so frustrating!  This is actually a known problem with MediaWiki, which I thought was fixed, but seems to have returned in the most recent upgrade.  Because Wikia appears to value interwiki links so highly, perhaps we should cut our losses at this point, change the article titles to omit the colons (there are actually four:  ), and use Template:Wrongtitle.    Ryan W 01:35, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah, sorry for the mess, I thought I could fix it with a few magic tricks up my sleeve, but alas none of the brackets worked (not even the template brackets). That page is really really messed up good. 96.240.16.221 07:27, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I asked on IRC and the wikia techs are looking at the problem. It's some kind of namespace/interwiki link problem. Fraggle 20:23, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I posted this to bugs.wikia.com a while ago, and it was bug 61, but since they moved over to bugzilla.wikimedia.org I can't find it.   Ryan W 07:02, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Image:Search logo.png
Wikia seems to have deprecated this, at least in the new skins. Do you think we still need it? Ryan W 08:09, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I guess not. Feel free to slap a delete tag on it. Fraggle 09:19, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Command line arguments

 * Please don't spend time trying to bring this up to date. I have a script that generates a list of command line arguments from the source code automatically and one of its output modes is wiki text for use here on the wiki.

!!!!

Does that mean you could do the same thing on this wiki?

If so, would you advocate trying to document how command line options changed between releases of a given port, or should we just refer people to the docs (if they exist)? Ryan W 14:27, 26 January 2008 (UTC)