ZDoom

I don't suppose this is much help but I do recall this very issue being reported many, many years ago. I don't recall if there was an attempt to fix it or not though.

[quote="Graf Zahl"]Well, they added deliberate coding for that. The function is present in GZDoom and ZDoom but a long time ago something must have bugged it, and because in the grand scheme of things it is not important, nobody bothered to report it as a bug. Although I played quite a bit of Heretic over the years I never actually noticed something being wrong here.[/quote]
Well, if you never played it how it was back in the day, it is indeed easy to overlook something like this, especially with no foreknowledge. I should know :mrgreen: .

Especially since it's apparently tied to enemies of different races now, so you could just as well die surrounded by different enemies and not notice it, because in that scenario they will still fight each other.

Well, they added deliberate coding for that. The function is present in GZDoom and ZDoom but a long time ago something must have bugged it, and because in the grand scheme of things it is not important, nobody bothered to report it as a bug. Although I played quite a bit of Heretic over the years I never actually noticed something being wrong here.

How do you know it's not a vanilla bug? :mrgreen:

This is one of the most memorable things about Heretic. It's so hilarious to see them clobber each other after they kill me. :mrgreen:

I... had absolutely no idea this was supposed to be a thing.

[quote="drfrag"]It only works when all the alerted monsters are not of the same type (unlike in vanilla).[/quote]
According to Quasar, that may be indeed the case. Copy-paste:

"ZDoom (needlessly IMHO) adds and enforces a bunch of restrictions onto Heretic's "mad melee" when the player dies - for example, in ZDoom, monsters of the same species won't fight each other under this condition, whereas they did in vanilla Heretic. Vanilla's "rule" for when the player dies is that a monster will literally fight the next living thing it sees regardless of what it is."

Urgh, this happens in Hexen too.

In a hard game for the fighter or the cleric in MAP01 walk in front of the three ettins and let them hammer you down. After that they stand still. In Hexen 1.1 on Dosbox they too start battering each other. For the mage the hard/warlock game MAP01 has two ettins and one afrit. If you wake up only the two ettins they'll squish you and instantly the afrit wakes up and starts a fight with ettins.

It only works when all the alerted monsters are not of the same type (unlike in vanilla).

Works fine for me. Enemies are brawling when I die.

Perhaps it did in fact break at some point, or it's a false memory, I've had quite a few of those over the years with various games.

Only to return there and notice it was all a lie, wtf.

I feel like I'm being gaslighted. The mass brawl after player death is something that I've witnessed many times and I only play Heretic in GZDoom.

It's a joke, it's ZDoom Classic but it also happens there. https://github.com/drfrag666/zdoom-old/releases/download/2.1.8-cl/zdoom-2.1.8-cl.zip

"Pirated"?

Seems it's been always like that in ZDoom, i've just tried the pirated 2.1.8 version.