Player takes damage for no apparent reason

[Empyre]

In my new map, Into Hell (EMP09), there are a couple places where the player takes massive damage for no apparent reason. The easiest place to reproduce this is in the back (west) outside of the box-shaped building (chaingun inside, so the box represents a box of ammo). To get there. go left after you get out of the star-shaped building where you spawn.

It does not happen when there are no monsters on the map (either the No Monsters flag or you've killed them all), and when it kills you, the obit either says that you were killed by a baron or a hell knight.

What could be causing this, and how can I fix it?

[SwordGrunt]

The map looks nice, I like the theme and architecture, haven't played much through it though, I stopped when I realized I was literally shooting straight through a Baron of Hell. This is probably something related to nodebuilding or just sector collision glitching due to the sheer size of your level. This kind of stuff is hard to get a concrete solution for.

Try to reproduce that and see how damage you're taking at a time. If you're being damaged at a multiple of 8, you're eating Baron/Hellknight fireballs, which is probably what is happening anyway. Their abnormally large height compared to other Doom projectiles (16 versus the 8 of any other projectile, even BFG balls) could be the reason they're the only projectiles glitching in collision detection here.

For gameplay, I'd say you should cut down on the size a bit, as there just don't seem to be enough monsters to justify these enormous open areas, which generally encourage infighting more than anything anyway and make some enemies (Masterminds, Archviles, Revenants) a lot more threatening than others (Barons, Arachnotrons) whose projectiles are more easily dodged, and make the latter feel boring to play against. But then again, I haven't played through the whole thing, only until the second room with Spider Masterminds. Speaking of which, I had to screenshot me shooting right through the Baron without hitting him:

[spoiler][/spoiler]

[ZZYZX]

Haven't looked at the map, but I know there's a bug (or rather, incomplete limit removal) that requires your map to be 16384x16384 32768x32768 pixels in size and have it centered, otherwise introducing weird bugs like aforementioned shooting through monsters.

Looked at the map and it's 32k by 39k. So that's probably that bug in action.

[WaTaKiD]

indeed it seems similar to http://zandronum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=5854 so try shrinking the map

[Empyre]

I reduced the extent box of the map to within +/- 16 K on both axes, and the mysterious damage problem seems to have gone away. I never saw the shooting-through-monsters problem, so I don't know for sure whether that problem has vanished as well. Thanks for the help, everybody!