#688 Incorrect voodoo doll behaviour

[Michael Bäuerle]

With Doom Legacy a voodoo doll transfers damage to the player, but seems to not take thrust (is not pushed away e.g. from an explosion as expected).

Some maps require this behaviour. An example can be found in Solar Struggle map E3M6:
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/Ports/megawads/sstruggle

In sector 24 there is a switch (linedef 279) that triggers a voodoo doll effect in a separate chamber (sector 58).
A barrel is crushed and the blast of the explosion pushes a voodoo doll over a linedef that lowers the floor.
A health bonus is placed under the player as blast damage compensation.
If the floor does not lower, the player is stuck in sector 24.

The attached demo map tries to reproduce the scenario with a W1 trigger.
Walking forward, across the red line on the floor, should crush the barrel.
The explosion should do blast damage to the voodoo doll and push it to the right side.
The exit teleporter on the left side should lower, triggered by this movement.
The health bonus should allow the player to exit with 100% health.

This effect works correctly with Chocolate Doom (tested with version 3.0.0),
Crispy Doom (tested with version 5.9.1) and PrBoom+ (tested with version 2.5.1.4),
but not with Doom Legacy 1.48.12 (rev 1648).

Some potentially unrelated things I have found while tracking down the issue:

1) In the demo map the voodoo doll thing is facing north.
Doom Legacy displays the voodoo doll with wrong orientation (facing east).

2) With PrBoom+ it is possible to shoot the voodoo doll to the right side with the pistol and lower the teleporter this way.
With Chocolate Doom and Crispy Doom the voodoo doll can be pushed to the right side with the pistol too, but the teleporter does not lower until the barrel explodes.
The behaviour of PrBoom+ is what I would expect.

[Wesley Johnson]

The thrust seems to work if you change the voodoo mode menu item to "Vanilla".
This switch is in the game options, adv options, 2nd page.
At least the platform went down in your test wad.
In the other voodoo modes, it will redirect the damage, and probably the thrust, to a selected player. Did not feel much of a thrust, but that voodoo doll does not move much either.

There are some wads that did not work without this fix. It was being used to damage the player when the touched an electric arc, and the wrong player was getting killed.

Auto mode might be improved someday to automatically detect these situations, but right now
I don't know how.

I generally follow the original and PrBoom.
I am a bit leery of Prboom+ now, as it is now under control of someone who might put ZDoom-isms into it. We generally do not follow ZDoom-isms, and will stay with the Edge and Eternity compatibility.
That still means inventing new things or adopting something like umapinfo.
There are always going to be maps that were made using ZDoom that we cannot play because the author adopted ZDoom-isms, even if it it was meant to be targeted at doom1 or doom2 compatibility. What I do not want to have happen is to chase adopting ZDoom-isms, that we become little different than a clone of ZDoom, and stop being DoomLegacy first.

[Wesley Johnson]

Is there anything in any wad that has the voodoo facing be relevant ?
It is set to 0 in P_Set_Voodoo in p_mobj.c

[Michael Bäuerle]

Sorry for overlooking this option.
I can confirm that it works with the "Vanilla" setting.

[Michael Bäuerle]

Facing of voodoo dolls should not be relevent for progression.
But if visible from regular map areas, maybe things does not look like the map designer has intended.

Would it be a problem to simply spawn all voodoo dolls with the orientation defined by the map?

[Wesley Johnson]

I already have a patch that would fix it, but was wondering exactly what bug I would be fixing.
It seems to really be of low priority, so might put it in with some other patch.