I found a bug in E1M5 Hallowed Grounds that gives endless 'secrets'

[zombie-football]

Hello All,

So recently I played through the demo of blood and noticed a few quirks, mainly when I enabled cheats to find the last few secrets.

One time when I was playing through map 5 with unclipped movement, I finished the level and it said I had found 10 of 9 secrets. I assumed I had found a secret that the developers had added and then decided not to use but forgot to remove. I also found two zones where, if you go through the wall you will then teleport for some reason.

I searched for this 10th secret and realised that there was one you could get repeatedly. When you get the invulnerability pick up from that ledge - you can return to that ledge to 'find another secret' which you can do over and over.

I gave myself jumping boots and finished the level with 22 secrets of 9. I'm not a big gamer and am not great at using the jumping boots efficiently but am sure that someone else could get a much better result using the two pairs of jumping boots they have available at that point. Especially if they use a keypresser program (is tool-assisted bug exploiting a thing?)

I was also curious where the number might top out, what the integer limit is for secrets found. So I ran a keyboard pressing program and got over 1000 without a problem. I remain curious what the limit is and what happens when it is reached. (When I started running the keypresser the game displayed a chat message "Amatuers!" which was nice)

Sorry if you all know this already, but I did a little search and found no mention of it.

As a bonus thing, through the wall clipping cheat I discovered the following: going out of bounds makes the camera go weeeird and there are secret areas on the edges of the maps (reveal the map using the cheat and random rectangles can be seen) in which enemies and zombies sometimes live - they can't be interacted with.

[Soben]

Cool finds zombie-football and welcome to the forum!

I knew a little about there being enemies in strange cordoned off areas, but I didn't know about this seemingly infinite(?) secret thing!

Daedalus is doing a playthrough of the game on hardest difficulty on Youtube and can tell you the specific levels with unreachable enemies and unactivateable secrets. As for a hard limit on the amount of secrets the game can handle, I'm not sure if that would be something in the source code (something we dont have/ the publisher owns and keeps guarded) or viewable somehow in Mapedit.

Anyways, if anyone would know it would be him and I'm sure he'll be along a little later today :3

[Daedalus]

Welcome to Altar of Stone, Zombie-Football! You are the first new member in these quiet halls for some time.

Nice discovery on the Hallowed Grounds secret. I see that the bug exists in the map to this very day. I haven't specifically investigated exactly which secret areas are broken, but an easier one I'm aware of off the top of my head is the beast vision chest in Phantom Express in v1.00, which you could close and re-open to increase your secret count. This was later fixed to have picking up the beast vision trigger the secret instead. Your statement regarding the game declaring 'Amateurs!' for the key pressing program is interesting and I'd definitely like to see that. The teleporters you discovered are actually found in quite a few maps, and are bloodbath-specific ones. If you play the game in a game mode which isn't singleplayer or co-op, those will be accessible.

Almost all of the retail maps will have some 'floating rooms' outside of boundaries. These usually serve as a useful place in which to store the various map triggers. In some rare cases, though, you will get lucky and find "secret" concept pieces hidden away. While none of these are amazing, some are reasonably interesting. It's usually Craig Hubbard's creations that seem to feature these. Remember that the 'goonies' cheat is an easy way in which to find them.

It wouldn't be much trouble at all to create a map that gives you somewhere in the region of ten thousand secret area discoveries a second. I do have about five thousand things on my plate currently, of which two thousand pertain to Blood, so that will be definitely have to be filed under a future investigation.

[zombie-football]

Hello, these halls are nice though someone should replace the rugs that got ripped by the hellhounds last week.

I tried to get the message 'Amateurs!" to show up again, no success.

Nice to know what the teleporters' purpose is.

The floating rooms where a nice find but not super interesting. I liked the ones with zombies etc. stuck in the floor, the switches I figured had a purpose regarding the level and there was at least one in the shape of the nickname 'Shade', which could have more going on so it wasa fun easter egg (maybe more zombie football?) It's like the ghost train on map 2 - I was expecting a big gargoyle type thing to attack and was a little disappointed with what I found. (A big gargoyle that grabbed Caleb and flew off and dropped him into a pit or something - that would have been fun.

From what I understand of computers, the secrets count must have a hard limit. Being an old game, I thought it might be the 8-bit limit, I passed that. A map that gives 10,000 secrets a second would soon reach the 16-bit limit. The idea of generating secrets that fast does impress me.
If, like many games Blood using something huge like the 32-bit limit then it could take a long time to find.

Much more interesting, I think is how high a secrets tally someone could get without resorting to cheat codes. They have 200 seconds of jumping boots to use in as small increments as possible. What would be the maximum attainable? One limitation might be the game has a tick speed - I have no idea.

Another thing I remember that can be done without cheats. In map 3 when you blow up the train, if you stand next to the furnace, the blast is lethal but you can survive it if actually in the furnace.

[Dead Reckoner]

The super secret in The Phantom Express - while it doesn't raise the secret count after the first time, will keep respawning the group of cultists every time it's reentered, so you can keep murdering them to your heart's content.

[Daedalus]

Technically you can be even lazier, as it is opening the door to exit the super secret that does that. You could actually blow up the universe if you want to by hammering your use key on the door.

There was an old and terrible bug in v1.00, though I think it was tied to your computer specs, whereby multiple monsters exploding at the same time would cause the game to crash. In the early days I would always have to be strategic with explosives - you couldn't be too effective or the game would crash, so you had to kind of aim for blowing up about three or four zombies at maximum at a time. I believe this was the reason for removing the zombies in the jumping boots secret in The Siege. Originally they were kind of pointless and would just die to explosions when triggering the secret, but on higher difficulties a greater zombie count meant that the secret was rendered uncollectable - the game would crash simply through the player legitimately trying to access the secret.

[zombie-football]

UPDATE: This morning I had a go at trying to automate jumping onto the platform using the funky shoes (didn't get very far) but tested an idea that you might not have to even keep going on and off the platform. If you creep to the edge so when you look down you are half off the platform you are on no longer in the hitbox for the secret so if you step back onto the ledge fully you get the secret again.

This means that without cheat codes it is possible to get endless secrets, so there is no point in trying to see how many times you can get the secret through economical use of the jumping boots.

So there you haves it