User talk:Ryan W/2008

Something tells me...
...that you'll never want to look at an image again. Zack 21:13, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


 * What are you talking about?  :D     Actually I think this wiki is getting too large for such projects anyway; that one started when I decided to check for logical inconsistencies in the categorization of categories, which is now basically done.  Hopefully the images are sorted carefully enough now that if we decide to make another change, the first pass can be done by a bot.  (Jdowland is always saying he's going to write a bot.)    Ryan W 22:18, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Elastic collisions with walls
It's been almost two years since you added this to the bugs list and there's still no article, so I want to put something together. I just wanted to make sure we're on the same page though: Are "elastic collisions with walls" what you call the phenomenon that involves trying to slide along a wall, and being thrown away from it or moving unpredictably? The result is a kind of rough, shaky movement as opposed to a smooth slide. You also refer to it as "snag" here. Zack 01:48, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * No, what I meant was that the Doomguy runs full speed into a wall, but instead of stopping, recoils in the opposite direction with nearly the same speed. The player seems to have some control over whether or not it happens, depending on when he takes his finger off the key (not sure I am skilled enough to exploit it in a real game, but the COMPET-N people do), and IIRC the bug was also present in Wolfenstein.


 * The "snag" is something I hadn't thought about in detail, just some adversity I noticed while trying to make a wallrunning demo on an oblique wall. In light of the code-related comments since posted at Talk:Wallrunning, however, snag could arguably form an article in itself!    Ryan W 02:18, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Agreed. The "snag" is just one of those forgotten bugs, I think - You either notice it a couple times and don't care, or you're so used to it that you forget it's even a problem, and just accept it as normal Doom behavior. At least, that's how it happened with me. :P


 * Can you point me to a demo demonstrating the Elasticity you had in mind? I wonder if its cause is similar to "snagging" as well? Zack 02:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * so used to it that you forget it's even a problem, and just accept it  Yeah, let's hope that hasn't happened to me with keyboard rollover.  ;>


 * Fast-forward to 1:55 in, and watch Kai-Uwe fire the SSG twice, then go for that first red switch. Boing!    Ryan W 07:14, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Would you happen to be able to share your copy of doom2.exe? The demo is desyncing in Chocolate Doom. Thanks :P Also is there a way to contact you outside of this Wiki? My email address is zack18 at comcast dot net. Zack 14:43, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Edit - nevermind the strike-out texte. Zack 14:49, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Final Doom demos for COMPET-N are supposed to be recorded with v1.9, so when you play them with a port, you have to set the compatibility to "v1.9", not "Final Doom". Actually I think anyone seriously interested in old demos should learn to use PrBoom+ because it gives you the finest degree of control over the compatibility options &mdash; even for vanilla demos, bug emulation may never be perfect.   :>


 * My e-mail address was registered last time I checked. If it's not, then people's e-mail addresses may have gotten wiped out in the upgrade, which is a bug that I keep hoping I won't have to report.   :Z     Ryan W 06:48, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Okay - I was always thrown off by Final Doom demos. A lot of them are recorded in "native" Final Doom instead of with Doom 2 v1.9, including some 30-level runs. Thanks for explaining that for me.


 * I'm sorry - I'm not super-experienced with Wikia ... but I don't see your email address anywhere. Where's it supposed to appear? Zack 17:04, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * On this page (for example), you can click "E-mail this user" in the toolbox on the left.   Ryan W 17:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Found it! This skin shows the link at the bottom. I feel stupid ;-; Zack 18:13, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Oh, whoops. I keep forgetting that nobody besides me still uses the old skin.   :P     Ryan W 18:19, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Ryan, I sent you an email some time ago. Did you ever get it? Zack 18:33, 15 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I got it. Sorry to be so long in responding &mdash; graduate school sometimes doesn't leave huge amounts of space in my brain for subtle questions, which is what your question is.  (ETA: that's meant as a compliment.)    Ryan W 23:22, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Aspect ratio
"Note that the automap is not generated by the rendering engine, so it does not automatically inherit the aspect ratio correction of a given port (see figure)."

This is confusing to me. The screenshot is taken from vanilla Doom, where the automap was distorted because no compensation was in place for rectangular pixels. It is not meant to be compared to source ports. What are you trying to say here?

Edit: The same goes for Automap, in which you modified the image caption and removed the paragraph for which I originally uploaded the image. Zack 21:17, 11 March 2008 (UTC)


 * (Sorry to be so long in responding again &mdash; I've been away at a conference for the past week.) What I was trying to say was, "If you try to play vanilla with a 4:3 resolution, both the rendered view and the automap are distorted.  If you instead use a source port with a 4:3 resolution, aspect ratio correction tries to fix the rendered view, but leaves the automap unchanged."


 * My goal in changing those two articles was to keep a cross-reference between them while removing as much duplicate information as possible. I suppose I tend to err on the side of the latter because of all the disambig stuff I've done here.  In this case, I also didn't playtest as extensively as others apparently have, so perhaps my edits were a bit heavy-handed; feel free to modify them.    Ryan W 11:51, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Your edits on Doom II
I don't quite understand the purpose of this edit you made. Why did you rename the "Doom II weapons" section into "Doom weapons" and remove the links pointing to the Wikipedia articles of the games mentioned in the article? -- Janizdreg 16:52, 26 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Um... wow. I actually have no idea.  Maybe that was the day the ad servers were really slow and I lost track of which old revisions I was loading to revert things?  The other two changes, where I added/removed italic marks, were the ones I meant to make.  I've fixed it, sorry.    Ryan W 19:24, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Foxing
There's been various copyright-related actions or cases due to mods, namely outside DOOM. The event that helped coin the term in question was related to the Alien Quake mod, and is not DOOM specific. I don't remember that anything for DOOM was ever really "foxed". Foxing is not an explicit term, and if it appears in any media (including general gaming site) articles and such, it is as a side-note (sometimes known as "foxing" to gamers). It's not even dealt with in the Wikipedia. I'd use it only in an article about something that literally got "foxed", and I'd say what foxing means in the process, especially if any sources related to the event used the term. Thus, an article about it shouldn't be worthwhile in this wiki. Who is like God? 03:19, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Names from the manuals
Responding to this, the monster names are not proper names, regardless of the styling in the manuals. The guideline about names shouldn't override the (I think) policy about the use of caps (which is basically to use them only when really necessary). At most, "The Cyberdemon and "The Spiderdemon" may be proper names, but only as long as we are referring to the individual bosses found in DOOM itself, and not to such a monster in general.

Rather than literalism, let's go for materialism, where the manuals act more like a secondary source that may help in some cases that need clarification, and where the primary one is what we play and mod, the direct game materials. Who is like God? 17:10, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * To continue the conversation, I think some archaizing authors such as Tolkien may have furthered the use of caps for species and the like, who used them for Elves, Orcs and so on to present them as "peoples" or more or less like nations rather than just classes of creatures. At least in some books; not in The Hobbit, for example (he probably wasn't so anal because it was aimed more towards kids). But on the other hand D&D adventure modules have started monster names with lower case letters since the start, because after all saying orc in general is little different from saying wolf or rat. Like D&D, DOOM is just a game and its creatures don't have complex "cultural" explanations that need special casing to show some aspect of that.


 * I was myself a proponent of capitalizing monster names before I started editing (some forum posts show this), but it is annoying to do so over and over, especially since there is no disambiguating need to do so. Besides, in the manual even stuff like Rocket Launcher uses caps... we might as well move over to the German DOOM wiki if we want to capitalize nouns indiscriminately (which is not a practical option for me as my German tends toward Null, heh).


 * For language it's best to use common sense and general editor-level usage, rather than adopting many arbitrary styles found in some sources. If something really needs a certain format or style for clarity, then it can be adopted. Who is like God? 20:57, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Shotgun "shell" damage
Editing the shotgun article I gnawed like a hungry rat at something you just added; a note saying that even though the monster and the player inflict different damage, the shells dropped by the zombies still inflict full damage when used by the player. That info is not suitable there, I argue, because the article isn't explaining these technical elements against any realism. The things that cause damage are the player using shotgun, and the monster attacking, the shells are simply units that fill the player's supplies. There's no need to explain that some shells do different damage because the shells don't have anything to do with the damage inflicted in the first place. The fact that the shotgun and the shotgun guy fire different amounts of pellets is given in each corresponding article (shotgun and shotgun guy), properly linking that damage to those things (not the items picked up).

I think, in fact, that in the past I've removed a similar note in some article.

To eliminate any ambiguity to people obsessed with realism I changed "shotgun" to "player's shotgun" in the article's Combat characteristics section.

By the way, we should get rid of the specific skill level links on the items per game tables, substituting them for one link to skill level, possibly right over the table ("the numbers of per skill level"). I think I did it already in one table but I don't remember which. Who is like God? 21:47, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


 * That info is not suitable there, I argue, because the article isn't explaining these technical elements against any realism.  I didn't add that because of realism, but to match the analogous statement which has been in the chaingun article for years.  Your point about the data tables is perfectly valid and probably does make such statements extraneous (although there are indeed games where confiscated ammo is inequivalent &mdash; Waste Land and New Centurions come to mind).  Additionally, I have no objection to changing the links in the skill level tables.  I believe the edit you are referring to is this one.   :>     Ryan W 22:33, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Hmm, then maybe I hadn't removed anything before... must have just though "is this helping here?" (unless it was also in Pistol). Well, I did now :p


 * Aditionally the chaingun appears in Hitscan. Maybe the hitscan and projectile articles could have some general data (number of pellets, damage, speed, and whatever else applies) about weapons and monsters using them, so that readers can compare all the differences from one source. Who is like God? 23:22, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Hmmm. The projectile article could certainly describe stuff like the common field in the mobjinfo variable (or whatever it's called), whose value is the number of eight-sided "damage dice".  I don't know that the hitscan attacks share quite so much code, especially if both players and monsters are included and melee attacks are considered as well.    Ryan W 23:35, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

RE: problem #9108
It was more than 3 weeks old, and the article hasn't been edited in 8 months, so I figured if anyone was going to "fix" it, it would've happened by now. Anyway, I re-opened it. Sorry about that. JoePlay (talk) 19:21, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

New at Doom Wikia
Hey guy. Im new at this wiki and i viewed all articles that were here. It was just to comment that i edited a few more articles from locations and non-controllable weapons designs. Please send a message if you receive this comment.


 * Hi 83.56.167.168, welcome to the wiki! I'm not sure where you're asking me to send a message, since only registered users can submit e-mail addresses (I'll copy this to the IP talk page as well).  Our Doom 3 material has been very incomplete for a long while, so it's good to see you working on it; please read the policies and guidelines for adding articles if you haven't already.  Good luck, and enjoy your stay!    Ryan W 19:46, 22 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Hello 83.56.167.168 and welcome to the Doom Wiki! If you intend to regularly edit this wiki and post messages to other users, I'd recommend that you take a minute of your time and register. It is quite useful and makes it easier for us to recognize your messages. Thank you. -- Janizdreg 00:48, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Message Received
Hey, Ryan. I received your message and im pleased with you. Its an Honor to work with this wikia. Im working not only in Locations. Im editing in Doom 3 characters. Ryan, ill work with it. I think that we are a very good Team. I will keep expanding the wikia. So, dont worry about my email-adress. If you see a new article for Locations or Characters, then its me. But now lets get to work.

Incomplete Last Man Standing information
Ryan. I have to say that the Doom 3 Last Man standing information is incomplete. The articles about new enemies in LMS mod havent been writed and i want to request a section about enemies in LMS mod. Ryan, write me in this section if you have an opinion about this.


 * [edit conflict] My ignorance of Doom 3 mods is near-absolute, so I don't have a strong opinion.  LMS seems to be widely known, however.  An entire article about the new enemies would contravene our notability policy at this time, but if you want to add a section about them, go right ahead.    Ryan W 01:10, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Deletion from an article
Hi, Ryan. Sorry to bother you but i need your help. I have a very serious problem. I edited an article called ,,UAC Base,, and someone called ,, Janizgred,, wants to delete it. I need to talk with you and i want you toi answer me. What should i do?


 * [edit conflict] You should go to the talk page and explain your reasoning.  If the eventual consensus is to keep it, it stays; otherwise not.  I don't have a strong opinion on this one either, but I can tell you that, in the past, we have avoided splitting up subsidiary in-universe articles (like characters and companies) unless they are becoming extremely large and unwieldy.  As pointed out by User:Who is like God?, the UAC article itself has probably not reached that condition.


 * By the way, you can sign your talk page posts by typing ~ .    Ryan W 01:10, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

New Section in Last Man Standing
Ryan, the section about new enemies in LMS is complete and edited. You can see it in LMS. By the way, thank you for your responses. I know the UAC base article was a mess and it didnt provided too much information. Therefore you can delete it. I know i writed like a novice in that article. But Ryan, you can see my new section. OK. Ryan, lets get to work.

"Welcome, and thank you for experimenting with the Doom Wiki..."
I hope you don't mind me using your "thank you for experimenting" message in response to this guy. ;) The Green Herring 04:51, 4 August 2008 (UTC)


 * If I minded, then I shouldn't have posted it, right?  :>    Actually it is a near-exact copy of a Wikipedia template (the first and least sarcastic in a series of four, IIRC).  Hmmm, do I need to dig that up and link to it on the talk page?    Ryan W 00:55, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Cdoom/PSX screen shots
Hi Ryan! Thank you for the invitation. I don't actually know that because I know awfully little about legal stuff when it comes to copyrighting issues and licenses. So the images would belong to id Software and other software developers really? Waiting for you confirmation. Symbioosi 08:20, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

The new guy
Hi Ryan, I saw the new guy has builded up various articles from the Last Man standing enemies. I viewed all of them. Although they must be cleaned up, i think he has done a well done job. What do you think?


 * No one has worked on those articles since they were proposed for merging, so my opinion hasn't changed. Yes, the descriptions are better than nothing, but I am certain that they could be absorbed into Last Man Standing as one subsection without distorting them or bloating the main article.  If you disagree, that's fine; you are welcome to start a broader discussion about altering the notability policy to permit such articles.  (Be patient however, as it is a very dry topic and commentary can be solicited only with difficulty.)    Ryan W 15:31, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Doom 0.4 Levels
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Talk:Doom_0.4

What do you think about this? Darkman 4 04:49, 29 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I've never used Doom 0.4, so I cannot comment on such a specific issue. Sorry.  If you have strong opinions on it yourself, and nobody responds to your initial talk page post, I suspect that you could just change the article, and any subsequent questions (from more informed editors than I) would work themselves out in the normal wiki manner.  Just be prepared to explain your comparisons in some detail if necessary.    Ryan W 15:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

what is unylopedia
i dunno what that site is


 * You mean this?   Ryan W 16:56, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Re:The new guy
Yeah, i think this should be merged with the Last Man Standing article. That should get better the things. By the way, Ryan. I saw the UAC Base and i think this doesnt meet the requisits for staying here. I know the new guy has worked with it hard, but we should discuss if it will stay or not.

Im Back
Hi,Ryan. I was during very time out but im here back. I was studing the Doom 3 Videogame and in the Moment i am out of Ideas. When i got another idea ill comment it on this page. Oh, i have an idea. What about the Alpha Version of Doom 3?. Comment it here.


 * You mean this? I hadn't heard of it before.  Information about pre-release software is more difficult to verify now than it was in 1993, due to changes in licensing practices, but if this was a big deal within the community, then by all means start an article.    Ryan W 19:28, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Wrong article
Ryan, remember that i wrote an article about a modified sabaoth? Well, I looked for it and the name isnt sabaoth. The real name was ,,Failure,, an biogenical project to copy the sarge. Ill modify the article when i have time.

Damage done by a projectile probability
Hello, I see you have all those info there. Do you has a listing of the exact values, like 17.0666... or 256/15 (which in your listing would appers as 17%)?

It would be good I have the perfect values for a project of mine. (in the case, I tried to recreate the damage done by DooM projectiles, although the "dice rolling" seems like to have a better randomical system, and so for example, a Rocket may cause 1000 of damage with much less than six Rocket)

Other than that, I was thinking if it is possible to explain how does this results came out... if it being possible to recerate them (I believe it is, since I was looking, and I think that the graphic has the same curve if the number of different values are the same). For now on, I am using a very simply code: (for example the Rocket Launcher) create a random value of 1 to 8, and multiply for 20. As I said, it will kill a enemy of 1000 health with fours Rockets instead of six...

Thanks. =p

Ilovefoxes 18:53, 18 October 2008 (UTC)


 * The important issue here is that the damage (like everything else in Doom) isn't random. If you watched someone play one frame at a time, and you knew what keys and mouse movements he was using, you could in principle calculate where all the monsters would step and how much damage each attack would inflict.  No dice rolling needed.


 * I'll be glad to post some of the code I used, if you want to see it. Is there a specific calculation you were looking at (this one for example)?    Ryan W 22:46, 20 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I would like to know the calculation for all the amounts from 1-2 to 1-10 (I think there is no value in original DooM higher than that).
 * Ilovefoxes 20:03, 25 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi again. I got the listing of pseudo ranbomical with m_random.c, so I already got to make it work properly. Thanks for your attention anyway (and giving knowledge about the damage =P).

Image:Jr.jpg
I have asked a question on Image_talk:Jr.jpg. Could you please go there? Fangusu 15:13, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Question
Do you play ZDaemon? This is my player name on it, also you guys forgot to add the cheats for the PS one's DOOM! Goto www.cheatcc.com to find the codes. DOOMED91 15:31, 27 October 2008 (UTC)


 * No, I don't play ZDaemon (high-speed links are few and far between where I live, for one thing). The term "forgot" implies some sort of organized planning before a page is created, which I assure you is not the case.  :>   It's a volunteer project, so people write what they have time to write.  If you think those codes should be in the PS1 article, feel free to add them.    Ryan W 22:29, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Search engine optimization
Hey Ryan, I just wanted to give you a heads up on the edit I just made to MediaWiki:Pagetitle. I've been assigned with dropping by the top 50 gaming wikis to edit that file in order to maximize traffic from search engines. Feel free to replace and/or add words as you see fit. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to shoot me a message. JoePlay (talk) 01:42, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Talk:Alpha
Remember that question I asked at Talk:Alpha? I am curious to know what you meant by that reply. Fangusu 03:15, 30 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Uh... not much really. I support the merge, so I was listing reasons why.  Sorry if it sounded like sarcasm.    Ryan W 22:13, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

what wad do you like allen vendetta 2 or hell revealed 2
--Skulltag Vs Zdamon 16:55, 9 November 2008 (UTC)--Skulltag Vs Zdamon what wad do you like Allen Vendetta 2 or Hell Revealed 2 ?--Skulltag Vs Zdamon 16:55, 9 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but I've never played either. Education can be a slow process.   :>     Ryan W 20:39, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

re: It's green and it's pissed
Hi Ryan,

IANAL, but considering it was posted to a publicly accessible BBS and I'm fairly certain had no terms over who owned the content, wouldn't that be fair use to quote public speech? I know I was able to login anon back then without agreeing to anything certainly.

I've also found the source code for the Voxel Editor (RadED) that John Carmack posted, again, on a freely available basis to the same BBS. It's what he was toying with for the enemies in DOOM before he decided on sprites.

As an aside, I found the electronic copy of the "It's Green and It's pissed post" as well after many many floppies.


 * (copyrighted material removed)

Shotgunefx 07:54, 2 December 2008 (UTC)shotgunefx


 * IANAL either, but because the Doom community is notorious for not discussing or researching copyright-related issues, and because Wikia is neither willing nor able to offer financial support in case of a dispute, I try to encourage people to be cautious.


 * The rule of thumb AFAICT is that all text and images are owned by somebody until that somebody explicitly releases a particular item, in writing. Even if the BBS did not assume ownership of posts (which wasn't normal then as it is now, I agree), then the copyright of each post belongs to the writer.  We have no evidence that it's in the public domain.    Ryan W 18:34, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Source Port
What is the source port you and Ducon use when you take screenshots? The one with the "STS KEY WEA AMM HEL ARM" in the bottom left corner of the hud? Duckreconmajor 04:27, 3 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I use ZDoom for screenshots except when there's a slime trail that doesn't show up, in which case I go to PrBoom+ or (very occasionally) vanilla in the WinXP "shell". Ducon hasn't edited in a while, so I don't know if he'd reply to your question, but I believe that HUD comes originally from the Boom code base, so it can appear in a number of programs.  I'd speculate it was PrBoom because that port's compatibility options would have helped his wiki research, which involved playing PWADs from many different time periods.    Ryan W 19:01, 3 December 2008 (UTC)