2016/04/28 [RE 45.06] Curses!

[Tapewolf]

So, what happens if your curse does both good and bad things?  Is it a blessing?  A curse?  A blurse?
Can you curse a God?

[Puyon]

So, what happens if your curse does both good and bad things?

You must have encountered an indecisive mage who isn't sure whether you you made them really happy or really ticked them off and their only way to express their mixed feelings was through a powerful magical bond.

[Tapewolf]

You must have encountered an indecisive mage who isn't sure whether you you made them really happy or really ticked them off and their only way to express their mixed feelings was through a powerful magical bond.

Way back, and I mean like 20 years ago, my brother and I wrote an add-on for Doom, one of a number of mods that tweaked the game engine to provide new physics.
It was called 'The Blessed Engine', and was named after what we did to the BFG-9000, or as we referred to it, 'the blessing cannon'.  Instead of doing its usual mass-destruction thing, it fired a small shot about the size of a pea, that did approximately 2 billion damage points.
Thanks to the wonders of 32-bit signed integers, this meant that depending on the damage multipliers, it would often wrap around, resulting in a weapon that either incinerated an enemy instantly, or gave them millions of health points and left them practically immortal.  It was utterly unpredictable as to whether it would 'bless' or 'curse' a given foe.  Using it on other players in deathmatch was not recommended - the game would flash the palette with varying degrees of redness depending on the damage received by the player.  It was not programmed to cope with negative amounts of damage and took this very badly.

The Blessed Engine was used as the basis for my 'The Sky May Be' mod which made the top 10 most infamous WADs list in 2003.

[Puyon]

The Blessed Engine was used as the basis for my 'The Sky May Be' mod which made the top 10 most infamous WADs list in 2003.

Oh my god. What a legacy. I gotta see this thing in action. This blessing/cursing/blursing(?) action.

[Tapewolf]

Oh my god. What a legacy. I gotta see this thing in action. This blessing/cursing/blursing(?) action.

It's not an easy thing to install, and it seems to have problems on the current version of chocolate doom.
However this may help, if you have the original DOS version of Doom in DOSbox and can ignore the snide comment in the intro (   )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou7-rn0PGU4

EDIT: PrBoom Plus seems to work well.  Before trying to run SMB, you'll need to go into the compatibility options in the menu and set the following options.
God mode is not absolute: YES
Linedef effects work with sector tag 0 : YES
...The only thing I've found so far that doesn't work under PRBOOM is the room that makes the game exit with the error "Don't open that door!"


EDIT EDIT: The latest Chocolate Doom does work.  You have to do the following:

1. Unpack the Sky May Be installer using WINRAR.  It's an MSDOS executable, but it's actually a self-extracting RAR file.
2. From the RAR, copy the files BLESSED.DEH and _SMB417.WAD into your Doom directory.
3. From the Doom directory, run chocolate doom with the following parameters:
chocolate-doom -merge _SMB417.WAD -as _SMB417.WAD -deh blessed.deh

...even that still doesn't do the "Don't open that door!" thing, but everything else I've tried so far works.

[Lying Foo]

Isn't there a story about a guy going to a rabbi alternately to thank God for a recent blessing and ask what brought on recent misfortune, only to be told every time (each time borne out by subsequent events) that he's come for the wrong of the two reasons?