Advanced lift design techniques

Usually, Doom II lifts are restricted to travel to the level of an adjacent sector. There is a trick that allows you to have a sector that may rise or lower to any height. These advanced lifts are very interesting because they allow plenty of advanced tricks, including spiral staircases and second floors.

Implementation

Create a new dummy sector outside the map and give it the same sector ID as the lift sector. This can be done easily in editors which provide an option to join sectors. Then draw a new sector adjacent to the dummy sector and set its floor height to the desired height.

Additional tricks

• The lift can be composed of multiple sectors, each rising to a different height; this allows for the creation of more detailed lifts, but should be used carefully—e.g. if one part of the lift is stopped from moving (by a player or a monster blocking it), it will be "out of sync" with the rest of the lift for some time.
• By changing the floor/ceiling height of the new sector, you can change the lift's rising/lowering height during gameplay. This can be used e.g. to create a tripwire that opens a door with a monster ambush, but only functions after something else is done in the level, and can be passed safely before that.

Example

• LIBRARY.WAD (file info) is an example of this trick.

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