The Machinations of myhouse.wad (How it works) - Part 1

[Music] recently after requiring some encouragement I played through and posted a video of my house.wod which is a level for the gz Doom Source Port that was released at the beginning of March 2023 in its description the world promises a 10-minute map with some cute household items rendered in Doom sectors released as a memorial to a friend of the author what it delivers is a multi-threaded descent into madness using features of udmf in Twisted ways to confuse exasperate and frighten its players and it's unlike anything else I've played in Doom after exploring the insanity I wanted to know how the tricks were done so I Doven with ultimate Doom Builder to find out what the map was doing underneath if you want to experience it for yourself or preserve the mystery of the game definitely don't watch this video just now if you're feeling bold you can play my house yourself at the link I'll put in the description but if you're as curious as I am here's a backstory and examination of this incredible piece of Doom work in September 2022 a post suddenly appeared in the Doom World Doom pictures thread from a forum member called veg who had last been active 16 years ago in 2006. in the post veg explained how a childhood friend had recently died and that in a stack of floppy disks given to him by the friend's parents he had found a doom Ward file recreating their house he showed a couple of screenshots of living areas constructed out of Doom sectors and said he had resolved to clean up the rough edges of the map and release it in his memory and he was met with sympathies and encouragement from other map authors in the community over the next few months veg made a couple of posts that kept up the story asking advice about the standard text description that the company's downloadable Doom mods and the etiquette of releasing things that contained resources that had been created by other people in the community they also took part in Social threads occasionally mentioning that they had been having difficulty sleeping and positing that it may be due to the trauma of the events happening in their real life and even something to do with their act of building the map on the 2nd of March 2023 a thread announcing the release of my house appeared sharing the same stories in the September post and naming the friend as Thomas the reaction was initially slow but snowballed as people detected that this wad was much much more than it seemed to be the link in the post briefly just pointed to the download but was quickly replaced with a link to a whole package of information on the Google Drive these folders hinted some extra backstory about the world including a journal that the author kept which describes more and more Vivid nightmares as he pressed on with making it several image files are provided as well in the Sketchbook folder there are three photographs of black and white pencil drawings by the friend showing the house the blue key card and the Monstrous dog encountered during one section of the game the screenshots folder depicts various screens from around the world's environment some of which indicate that something is going to go very wrong the photos section shows an obituary for Thomas Allard saying that he died at his home on August the 3rd 2022 a month before veg's first announcement appeared on Doom world the rest of the photos showed the contents of a folder that contains photographs of what looks like various running or sports events together with pictures recognizable of the inside of the house that the wad replicates finally there's a photo of Thomas together with a friend who is presumably veg the file section has a readme and two Doom files in it award and a pk3 which is a file format specific to gz Doom the readme reveals some more somewhat disturbing information with the author warning that the game has become something else and should not be played if encountered consistent with the journal saying that they intended to upload the simple word version but somehow couldn't erase the expanded pk3 version the where to get this file section simply reads don't for people who choose to ignore this very sensible advice here's an overview of the strange experiences that they might go through many of the disorienting tricks used by my house are built around silent teleportation the act of moving the player to somewhere else on the map without them noticing in vanilla Doom you can only ever move the player very obviously as whenever you step over a line with the teleport line def action a green flash will appear along with a distinctive sound and the player will be paused for a moment before being allowed to move again but the first Doom extending Source Port boom introduced a large list of new line def actions that have been carried forward into udmf among these were lines that transport the player instantly to another line when walked over without any special effects or even affecting their momentum in udmf this action is number 215 teleports to line used in the right way these can be used to create the illusion of a continuous path between two distant points in the level the scenery around the source and destination lines need to be set up to match so that the player doesn't notice the transition the door to my House's basement is one of the more obvious places where this is used the Doom engine requires some trickery to position rooms above and below other rooms and one of the ways to get around that is to teleport the player between two different sections of the map that contain the upper and lower floors of a building therefore two variants of the house are laid out in the levels map the top one shown here contains the main floor of the house and the bottom one has the rooms in the basement the stairs down to the basement exist in both copies and the lines that caused the silent teleportation are here on this step near the bottom of the staircase when the player passes over these lines they'll be moved to the other floor of the house and because the surroundings look the same on both copies it's difficult to tell that any movement has happened at all usually you can tell when silent teleportation happens by looking at your Auto map as you'll see the player moving suddenly from one place to another my house foils this by blanking out the map screen not only does it Define every line in the whole map as invisible on the Auto map but it overrides your normal Auto map settings with a piece of map info definition and sets all foreground and background colors to black meaning you couldn't see anything even if all the lines were completely visible I disabled both of these safeguards in an attempt to make sense of the map and you can now see the switch taking place as I go back and forward over the line at the bottom of the stairs even with the safeguards in place you could see the effect happening at the start of my playthrough video when I opened the basement door and then retreated because I had only opened the door that was in the lower copy of the house with the basement the door in the copy of the house with the Upper Floor remains shut and is in fact just the textured on the wall you can also see the effect by looking up when descending the stairs the upper parts of the house will suddenly become walled off when you reach the teleporting line because they can't exist on the part of the map that has the basement level and I don't know this but I'm guessing that this Quirk was put in deliberately to make the map seem like it was going to be less clever and complicated than it really is most of the site of hand taking place is used much more insidiously just a moment ago I said that there were two variants of the house in the levels map to handle going between the main floor and the basement this was a slight simplification because there are in fact 21 and the player just swapped between them throughout the course of the level depending on what actions they take the first of these swaps happens before you would even think to look out for it at the start of the world you'll find yourself in front of what I'll call the initial house standing on the path facing the garage and the front entrance you'll only stay here very briefly from this position you can wander around the outside of the house but you won't see any windows or doors on the ground floor on the other side and eventually you'll have to enter via either of the obvious entrances or buy a back door at the other side of the garage as soon as you step into the main area of the house through the front door of the door connecting the entryway to the garage or the door that leads downstairs to the furnace room you'll hit a line that will silently move you to another copy of the house area which I'll refer to as the first house this move is done with another kind of line action called set line portal which is more sophisticated than teleports to line it doesn't just teleport actors as they cross it it makes gz Doom treat the areas of the map on either side of the lines as if they were next to each other with a portal you can Loop through the entrance line and see everything on the other side of the exit line even if it makes no sense geometrically and it can seamlessly handle the player or other actors moving through it line of sight calculations and so on it's also possible to give sectors portal properties so that the floor or ceiling becomes a portal and they can be treated as stacked above or below each other the swap that takes place when the player first enters the house doesn't do anything too critical just yet but the first house has the following differences from the initial house a slanted roof is now visible on the house from the outside where the initial house just had a vanilla Doom style border at the top two teleporting line deaths are added to the West End of the garden for reasons that will become clear later and a hidden chainsaw in a box in the initial House's garage is unavailable in the first house and you'll find a chalk outline of a chainsaw if you open the secrets from here apart from the line teleport trick to enable the existence of the basement the first house places you would expect of a vanilla Doom WOD you make your way through rooms opening sliding doors that disappeared into the ceiling finding a yellow and red key card that unlock more areas followed by a blue one that can be used to open the gate where you started at this point the player can simply go back to the Garden unlock the gate and take the teleport to move on to Doom 2's second level underhalls if they complete underholes as well a definition in the map info lump will prevent them from proceeding to the third level The Gauntlet map o2's next level is defined to be mapo1 so they will instead be taken back to restart the my house level all progress in the level is reset but the player is allowed to keep their weapons and items including the crucial super shotgun possibly giving them an advantage later in the game however observant players May avoid the gate because they all have noticed something outside during their exploration of the first house a soul sphere floats temptingly on top of the metal pole in the southwest corner of the map visible through one of the windows on The house's lower level if the player had already explored the garden they might wonder how they missed it and they're likely to head outside again in an attempt to collect it the state of the Soul sphere is controlled by two scripts numbered 68 and 75. the author chose to use numbered scripts instead of named ones which can make things difficult to follow but comments are used to name the script instead script 68 is called Source rear Allure and script 75 is called source for sneaky when the player picks up the yellow key card inside the house it will run Source feeder lure which will create the soul sphere in the garden and will assign a run script action to the lines tagged with number 1955 at the three possible house entrances the next time the player crosses any of those lines they will run source for your sneaky which removes the cell sphere deactivates the lines tagged 1955 and in their place sets up a new set of lines also in the doorways now when the player crosses a line tag 1956 they will run Soul speed allude again and make the other set of lines active therefore once the solosphere has been created once moving outside the house will remove it and moving inside the house will create it again this whole business with the sourcephere is of course a trap by trying to investigate and heading towards the West End of the garden the player will cross over one of the teleporting line devs that weren't in the initial house copy hitting any of these will move them to a third area which contains an altered version of the house my house is really good at invoking discomfort by pacing itself slowly so the altered house doesn't hit you in the face with anything crazy at first instead it gradually gets stranger and more uncomfortable the more time the player spends here the first thing they're likely to notice when they unknowingly arrive here is that monsters are visible Through The house's newly grown ground floor windows and that those monsters are remarkably intact considering the player has definitely had to kill some of them to get as far as this curiosity will lead them to go back inside and after a nagging feeling that something has changed they'll notice that the doors are now poly objects and that they open by swinging or by sliding horizontally instead of vertically like standard Doom doors just like before as the player steps inside they'll be forced to cross one of three lines placed in this House's copy of the three doors to the main part of the house this time crossing the lines will cause the background music to change this trick can be more noticeable than the others because the music has to start from the beginning when it switches but in my playthrough it happened to switch at a point close enough to the correct Rhythm that I didn't notice up until now the background music for the map has been the same one that's accompanied several billion single level ones that replaced the first level of Doom 2. it's Bobby Prince's midi Running From Evil often referred to by its lump named D running these lines will change the music to a lump called run in two which is an 11 minute midi that contains several Loops of running from Evil getting gradually more demented each time occasionally parts will be shifted forward a beat or pitched slightly Out Of Tune Drop some notes or go missing entirely the jump pattern might suddenly become different and at one point the guitar Melody from the boss level of shareware Doom make an appearance wailing behind the normal music the changes gradually become more detectable again contributing to the growing feeling that something isn't right here another thing that I didn't notice was that Crossing these lines also grants your weapons smoother animations enhanced from their vanilla Doom Originals the game does this by giving the player an inventory item called Zed Doom dummy and then defining custom weapons that check for that item when they're fired if the item is present then they'll perform an alternative firing sequence using more frames as the player fights through the house for a second time they'll discover more Oddities the skull keys are now where the key cards used to be and if they check the gate outside again they'll notice that the blue key indicators on either side have changed to show the blue skull as well the other contents of the house have also changed slightly the 1990s PlayStation in the corner of the living room has been replaced with a modern Xbox but the rest of the house has been upgraded in general with paintings or other things adorning many previously blank walls the shiny metal textures that stood in for mirrors have been replaced with functional ones using udmf's mirror line action the bk3 also contains lumps that overwrite all the player Sprites with blank ones so that you don't appear in the mirrors generously adding to the level of discomfort one of the most significant changes although it's one that's relatively easy to miss is that two frames with a total of eight blank pictures will appear in the corner of the living room next to the kitchen these will become part of the puzzle that eventually allows the player to exit the house and achieve the best ending for now the player will go around the houses they did before collecting the skull Keys except when they use the red skull key to open the dot at the back of the laundry room they'll find that the small cupboard with the blue key has been replaced with a narrow staircase leading to an attic area that didn't exist before again achieved using line portals to give the appearance that the attic is above the house the attic contains a few scattered boxes an unmade bed and at the far end is the blue skull this key is actually a custom object to find for this pk3 called invisible Blues skull that extends the normal Blues skull key the only difference in its code is that it has a flag set so that it doesn't appear in mirrors if the player presses use on the large covered object next to it it will reveal a mirror with a bobble visible in it in place of the skull uncovering this mirror will also allow access to a route later on when the player picks up the blue skull it runs script 3 which causes several things to happen this time the altered ties will be further modified without teleporting the player instead using Doom's floor and ceiling movement actions to hide and reveal various parts of the map the doors are the time of the player to leave the house will be hidden by lowering the ceilings of the sectors in front of them down to the floor this will happen to all sectors tagged 197 and 1987 which affects the copies of these doors in some realities we've seen already and some that we haven't next to them are cupboard in the entryway is also revealed by moving the ceiling upwards from floor level like a doom door the usual speed for the sector moving like this is 16 or 64 for a fast moving door but these actions are all done at speed 1000 making them switch practically instantly to demonstrate changes that happen behind the player's back like this I've slowed them down throughout this video some other changes also happen that are less immediately noticeable in the basement furnace room two sectors are moved up and down to reveal a button marked escape on the device to the right of the boiler and another thing that we can't see just yet the lines that open the door to the cupboard in the small bedroom at the north side of the house also have their actions replaced to run scripts 59 and 60 instead of just causing the door to open we'll return to this later with the blue skull in hand the player is likely to head back down the stairs to get out of this mad house as soon as possible only to find that the doors have gone as they move towards the entryway again they will cross over this line which has a line action locked by the blue skull key triggered when the player walks over it now that the player has this key the line performs its action which is to raise the ceiling of a sector that was apparently part of the wall next to the three doors in the north Corridor this reveals another small section of the house it exists on the other side of another portal line which allows it to exist in the Apparently impossible position behind the door to the master bedroom the newly grown Alcove contains another door that leads to a new living room area with a fireplace and a can of Pepsi sitting on the counter this is one of 16 items that the player has to collect to achieve the best ending all of them run the script when picked up that will lower the floor of a tiny sector at the picture frames between the kitchen and the living room making an image of the item come into view in the frame you'll notice that even though I said there were 16 items only eight pictures are shown here and once again we'll come back to why later the script that runs when the Pepsi is taken also raises a sector ceiling and causes yet another new door to appear adjacent to the one that led into this room this one leads the player into a very obviously new room with a striking black and white style once again the player has to find and pick up the item in this room this time a milkshake to get it to move into place on the picture wall the milkshake also has some side effects the door that led to the room with the Pepsi will be covered up again the bookcase behind the pool table in the basement will slide slightly aside and the object that causes the sound and visuals of an electric spark from the fuse box will be activated making a spark at random intervals between 10 and 100 ticks in 5 tick increments this noise is there to draw the player's attention to the basement at about this time the player might also hear the discard notification sound this is caused by a script that's been running since level opened and isn't tied to a particular event it weighs 21 000 takes which is 10 minutes and then plays a sound misleadingly called ambient one with the house in this state and two special items collected the player can now follow one of at least four routes by following the noise and paying attention to the bookcase they can get themselves transported away to the burned house like I did on my playthrough the path that leads to the best ending is instead in the small upstairs bathroom they also have the choice of looking at the escape button on the device in the furnace room but for now we'll look at the door on the bedroom cupboard that was messed with when we picked up the blue key usually the line actions assigned to the level Swinging Doors use LINE action number seven which tells a poly object to rotate then move back again after a short delay the action on the outer side of the cupboard door in the north bedroom has now been replaced with a call to run script number 60 which is called door portal this script picks a random number between 0 and 10 and for all numbers except 10 it will call the same poly object rotate action as the door we'd have before but if it does get a 10 it will tell a line a short distance into the cupboard to become a portal to line 1885 before opening the door this will present the player with a dark Stony Corridor that leads to an area I'll call the Labyrinth this Labyrinth is a dark and completely unnavigable mono textured Maze and I had to mess with my brightness and contrast quite severely to be able to capture any video where it was visible it's full of line portals that lead invisibly to unexpected places or lungs that move walls around so I was very glad at this point that I'd restored the Auto map for all the effort it takes just to get around here there is absolutely nothing in the maze in terms of items to pick up or Monsters to defeat although the player can find a couple of strange features among the twisting Stone corridors there's a pool of water towards what for the sake of argument are called the west side of the Maze and nearby is an absolutely gargantuan Square Room 9216 map units along a side that contains a large circular hole with a spiral staircase cut into it there's no way to reach the bottom of this hole because you'll just hit teleporting lines on the way down the stairs that make it appear to go on forever and if you jump down the middle you'll be instantly killed it's been observed by the community that this Labyrinth Bears a very close resemblance to the maze in the novel House of leaves by Mark Zed daniellewsky the maze is described as a confusing multitude of uniform gray surfaces featuring a room called the Great Hall with a huge downward spiral staircase the book is also written in The Labyrinth and way making use of unusual narrative structure and type setting including coloring the word house blue throughout a feature shared by the creator of my House's Journal after exploring the player's only option at this point is to return to the door leading to the altered house if they're able to find the way back script 59 which is now on the line def on the inner side of the door will open the door and remove the line portal returning the cupboard to normal the player still has three possible routes to explore and they'll start by going down the one that I happen to find during my playthrough which begins with the player being drawn to the noise behind the bookcase in the basement the bookcase has already been moved slightly by the script that ran when the milkshake was picked up revealing a gap in the wall behind it the player can now move the bootcase 36 more map units South by using it from the front which activates a line def at this location this line treats the milkshake as a key item that determines whether the player is allowed to move it the player can now reach the fuse box and use it this will run script 56 which has a rather dramatic effect the player will be teleported to yet another copy of the house with a much darker variation of the basement the sound of panic screams will play and the music will change from the slightly decayed version of running from Evil to run in three a hideously distorted cacophony made out of bits of the song stretched and manipulated in various ways expertly mangled by esophortium when the player fumbles the way out of the fuse box cupboard they'll be confronted by one of the common Community made enemies the shadow as they climb the stairs the player will realize that they're now in a version of the house badly damaged by fire at least they will if they can take a moment to look around and not be killed by the menagery of Horrors inhabiting it like the shadow these are all Community created monsters and they've definitely been chosen on the strength of their hideousness again there's no escape from here as the doors to the outside remain non-existent but through the broken windows the sky can be seen to have turned to a hellish red once the player has dealt with the monsters they'll be able to explore around the ruins and find three more items a frame photograph of burned book and a teddy bear these items don't count towards the total on the picture frames next to the kitchen in fact in this version of the house the pictures are no longer there however like the blue key before there is another line in the hallway and this version of the house that has a locked walkover action this time it's lock 15 which is defined in lock depths to require the three items when the player crosses the line with the required inventory it will tell the line across the doorway to the basement to become a portal to yet another different area this time a brutalist concrete version of the lower floor outside the sky can be seen to have turned gray and any plant life has disappeared being replaced with pointed gray rocks like the burned basement this area is extremely dark and it took me a long time to find where I was meant to go from here but if you manage to make your way into the furnace room you might see a darker patch of wall where the door to the garage used to be using this wall will make it sink into the floor and behind it another line portal will take you away into the brutalist house the player is now in a version of the house that's even further away from its initial form rendered in the mesmerizingly ugly brutalist architecture style of angles and bare concrete this copy of the house has no basement level and seems to have become a single floor flat floating in a depressing high-rise building like the Labyrinth this area is full of invisible portals which lead to various places in two copies of the brutalist house one of them is rendered twice as large as all the other copies of the house which I believe is meant to signify that the player is child size when inside it this area is home to two monsters which start in what would be the living room of the large and small copies of the house the one in the large house is a two-headed nightmare dog with the class named Kev Cerberus which uses Sprites from monolith's build engine game blood cave Cerberus is a very aggressive and fast boss monster with the ability to LEAP across the room to bite you if you picked up the blue key card in the first house and didn't skip past it you can open the nearby vent which contains a plasma gun this will help out but not very much in the small house the monster is a much less threatening variant with the class name best buddy and it is still a monster as far as the game knows it just has no states that cause it to attack the dogs can can be killed like other monsters but their Fates are connected a pair of scripts 38 and 39 will continuously check that the dogs exist and will set the other dog's health to zero if the check ever fails the Cerberus starts with 3 000 Health points on the best body with only 25 so the easier way to remove the dogs is obvious if you don't have a conscience when these death scripts are run they will also remove the object with tag number 1646 which will come into play much much later avoiding being chomped to death by whatever means necessary while navigating the maze the player can find three more special items here the first is a pumpkin sitting out on the ledge that would be the porch of the larger house which according to the pickup message is called pumpkin Rick the second is a frisbee in a small space that looks like a kennel in the middle of the house and the third can be reached with an awkward jump across to the frame that forms part of the border of the living room then following the concrete vent around it's a can of tuna with these three things collected the player has done everything there is to do here before we move on we should talk about the other ways to get to this area the two remaining routes I mentioned in the altered house eventually lead the player here as well the first way here is simply to press the escape button on the device in the furnace room after picking up the blue key this will make the adjacent vents fold away and give the player access to a chalk portal drawn behind them which was uncovered all the way back when we picked up the blue skull stepping through here will teleport the player to the brutalist house so that they emerge behind the concrete panel with the square on it which frustrated me with its unopen ability in my playthrough this route lets the player skip the burnt house and things play out the same in the brutalist house from here the other route is a lot more legwork and will take us through three more environments before we come back to this concrete monstrosity so in part two of this exploration we'll go back to the altered house and reflect on our decisions I'll probably cut that out thank you to everyone on the left here for supporting me creating stumbling tourist videos if you'd like to join in or make suggestions for other games to cover please have a look at David X Newton on patreon

Channel: DavidXNewton

Views: 291,114

Keywords: doom, zdoom, gzdoom, wad

Id: Iq1-TZXz9xo

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023