Hideous Destructor 4.10.0b

[Silentdarkness12]

[*]Cyberdemon. Now has a shield and stupid, idiotic amounts of damage from its rockets. And can aim.
[*]Spiderdemon. Also shield; no particular damage increase, but can aim.

Oof....define shield, again, tho?

[*]Tripwire-rigged grenades are now doomednum #23032![/list]

Also, i'm a bit curious how you accomplished the wound system. I'm trying to HD-ize the Zombie Scientist, the one with the axe, and I can't seem to get his attacks to do wound damage. Is there something I should know, if i'm trying to make it work good with Hideous Destructor?

Also, what exactly is the smooth-chase thing you're talking about? Details would be nice.

EDIT: I don't see the tripwire grenade in here. Is it tacked on to a ZScript file?.....Mmm, i'm beginning to suspect GZDoom Builder doesn't actually have support for doom ed nums tacked onto a ZScript Class.....I used the ID number, and it seemed to only spawn the grenade itself... Nevermind, I see how it works now. That's ingenious.

[Matt]

The crits are available both ways. If you aim for the area between the eyes and the sternum you should be able to hit it.

I haven't touched the Grimdark difficulty in ages so things could be a bit wonky.

I'll try to make spiritual armour more effective in the next release, but it will remain qualitatively different from the mundane armour.

Will fix spider mastermind shortly later today whenever eventually I get home.


Serathis: In addition to DW's explanation, the answer is literally no it is not.

Relatedly: this mod has weapons that are described in the manual with things like "Protip: It is nothing short of murder to send out men against the enemy with such a weapon", the context implying that the murder victims are the men you are sending rather than the enemy. It really shouldn't be surprising, especially given the typical Doom engagements which take place within 50m, that a semi-automatic shotgun would be better than a bolt-action sniper rifle practically every time.


That said:

1. the Hunter semi isn't jamming like it used to. Will fix.

2. the marine replacements are insanely accurate right now, and that may be subject to change. Right now they already take much longer to shoot at longer ranges, and I will probably just increase the spread in inverse proportion to the increased delay.



SD: Shield blocks first 500 points of damage of any given attack (but sometimes allows residual damage to get through) and constantly regenerates.

[DavidWolfe]

If you aim for the area between the eyes and the sternum you should be able to hit it.

I haven't ever gotten this to work in my ~ 200 hour gameplay so far. Are you absolutely positive about this?

[Silentdarkness12]

Alright. Interesting. How would I go about adding that to my own things? (sorry, i'm so terrible at ZScript. I can't even get my head around it.) Also, how are you doing the smooth chase?

[Matt]

DW: Turn on hd_debug and it will log the crits. It's a damage bonus not an instant kill - often I'll see a critical where the base random damage was very low, and the net result is even less than an "ordinary" hit in the same shotgun blast.

SD: git gud lol (But seriously, I don't recommend trying to Decorate this - I can imagine it working but the hackery required would be unmaintainable unless you want a very easily painlocked cyberdemon)
It's a DamageMobj override that manipulates some numbers before going to the actual damage function. A custom blood actor is used that checks whether the spawning actor has shields up and changes states accordingly. (I need to double check to make sure this actually works as intended)

[Serathis]

Imo the cyberdemon got bit too much of a buff. Now he snipes me from across the map. And with this projectile speed he is nearly impossible to take head on.
Also the zombies should be a little bit slower. They are literally braindead. The evil marines having good reflexes and skills is aokay.
I think the whole blur sphere evil energy/ healing good energy thing could be elaborated on. Kind of like a morality system in other games. If you have the energy for that kind of stuff.

[Silentdarkness12]

Alright. Thanks. I'll have to try to learn ZScript some time and try and figure this out.

Er, how is the wound system managed tho? I don't need the smooth chase, but some info on the specifics of wound mechanics would be nice. As it seems like random custom foes don't really cause bleed.

EDIT: Additionally, none of the RandomSpawners in dcspawner.txt with the editor IDs are picked up by GZDB. If you manually punch in the ID number, it works, but it looks like a mistake in the map builder. No name, a big question mark. Thought you might want to be a bit aware. Seems like the advent of ZScript has really fucked up map editors.

[Matt]

Serathis: It was already a significant concession to the "Z word" that they're undead at all in HD.

I've tended to leave it unsaid that the soul sphere and blue potions are iconic of baptismal waters.

As for the cyberdemon, I was getting a bit worried since it was very easy to dodge their shots from the other end of the range... but then I wasn't trying to return fire! I may lower their aggressiveness somewhat, just to keep them in character. (limited rocket ammo; alternate fireball drains shields)



SD12: oops, forgot about those questions!


HD's wound system is built into the heartbeat function called by the ticker. Every so many beats, if a random number exceeds an amount derived from the wound amount and blood pressure, some damage is dealt to the player to represent the bleeding.

Your blood pressure goes up with pain and exertion and slowly goes down after a while. It slows down bleeding so ideally you should be able to finish a fight without exsanguinating in the middle of it.

To implement this without redefining an actor and overriding Tick(), you could use an inventory that is given in a painstate (or by the attack puff), and set the numbers on the inventory actor and track things with DoEffect() instead.


Bleeding on monsters right now is really just a bit of damage every see state cycle in which the monster's health is below a certain threshold. For players, it depends on the type of damage you take, as can be seen in the DamageMobj() override - SmallsArms1 through 3 deal the most, bleeding does none, unspecified stuff has a tiny random chance of dealing a tiny bit.


Re: DoomEdNums, like I said I do intend on doing proper versions of that sometime. I don't use GZDB and have no idea how they even handle randomspawners if at all.


The smooth chase is 3 basic steps:
1. Call A_Chase and save the new position
2. Revert to the original position and average out the old and new angles
3. Use the difference between the new and old positions to derive a velocity to add to the current velocity
Everything else is just dealing with edge cases, special situations (e.g., extra speed if fleeing) and bugs.

[DavidWolfe]

DW: Turn on hd_debug and it will log the crits. It's a damage bonus not an instant kill - often I'll see a critical where the base random damage was very low, and the net result is even less than an "ordinary" hit in the same shotgun blast.

Aiming specifically for the head vs zombiemen in several stances using the 4.26 hasn't resulted in crits for me.
Punching directly gives me the headshot prompt, but anything other than that I've not been able to produce a single crit outside the shotgun's random spread pattern. I'm certain I'm aiming for the head.

However, I noticed if I shoot Center of Mass that I do get crits frequently. Is the crit hit location a spawned object on the character? And, if so, is it set to the correct height?


Edit:
Also, can we do something about the weapon pushback whenever you lean into a corpse? Getting some massive motion sickness everytime I raise my weapon and get stuck on a mancubus/arachnotron, causes my character to flip out and spin in circles.

[Somagu]

Crits are center of mass, not headshots. Punching uses headshots, everything else uses center of mass. Don't aim for the head.

[DavidWolfe]

Crits are center of mass, not headshots. Punching uses headshots, everything else uses center of mass. Don't aim for the head.

That doesn't make any sense, though. As far as the lore goes, all humans are wearing some sort of security vest, their head, legs and arms would be the most unprotected areas.
Not to be a bastard, but, instinctively on close range don't we always go for the eyes?

[Somagu]

The legs and arms don't contain vital organs, but more importantly than that, very generally speaking any shooter by profession aims for center of mass, not the head. The main exceptions to this rule are hostage situations. Center of mass first to disable the target, only then do you take time for anything else. Even if they're wearing a vest, odds are two shots center of mass will stagger or wind them regardless.

[DavidWolfe]

The legs and arms don't contain vital organs, but more importantly than that, very generally speaking any shooter by profession aims for center of mass, not the head. The main exceptions to this rule are hostage situations. Center of mass first to disable the target, only then do you take time for anything else. Even if they're wearing a vest, odds are two shots center of mass will stagger or wind them regardless.

However none of the targets are wearing helmets and all of them are open to be engaged at longer ranges where clear shots are easy to take. Besides, considering recoil any followup shots would align for the head eitherway in close range encounters.

Regardless of that, that has nothing to do with critical hits, the armoured chest is probably the least effective point to fire. Needless to say that we're combatting zombies.

[Matt]

You're aiming at the wrong spot.

Here's a demonstration video of proper targeting in action.

[DavidWolfe]

You're aiming at the wrong spot.

Here's a demonstration video of proper targeting in action.

See previous statement.

Also you're contradicting your previous statement

The crits are available both ways. If you aim for the area between the eyes and the sternum you should be able to hit it.

Adding to that on a biological standpoint it still doesn't make sense, regardless of military and law enforcement procedure.

At least make the head a super critical hit on human-like creatures. We have no way to know the biology of demons, their bonestructure could be enforced enough to stop headshots.