[ZScript] Universal mirrored deaths

[m8f]

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Source code

Features

- 50% chance of death animation being mirrored horizontally.
- raising animations are flipped too.
- works with any game and mod (hopefully).
- blacklist to exclude specific monsters from mirroring.
- bonus feature: alternating mirroring (controlled by df_alternate CVar).

Can be included in mods, or used as an addon by itself.

This mod is a part of m8f's toolbox.

[bLUEbYTE]

I love non-intrusive mini mods like this that add variety.

[bLUEbYTE]

Hi m8f,
I added this into my Universal Entropy mod. Two questions;

Why did you need to blacklist chaingunguy and cyberdemon from being flipped? In my testing flipped bodies for these look just fine.

Why not go further and flip the sprites on Spawn, to create left/right handed variants? As far as I can tell, the projectiles do not originate from the arms anyway. For example, Cyberdemon's rockets seem to fly off his belly.

[m8f]

Because these monsters are asymmetric, and it will look wrong if the monster weapon flips to the other hand on death animation.

About flipping monsters from the start - I simply didn't think about that.

[bLUEbYTE]

Because these monsters are asymmetric, and it will look wrong if the monster weapon flips to the other hand on death animation.

About flipping monsters from the start - I simply didn't think about that.

I replaced all the code in death-flip with this:

Code: Select all • Expand view

         // Flip
         let flip = random(0, 1);
         if (flip == 1)
         {
            a.A_SetScale(-a.Scale.X, a.Scale.Y);
         }


All looking good to me, including chaingunner death animations, and they do come back with the correct orientation if revived. I guess the engine doesn't clear the actor's sprite scaling values when it becomes a corpse, rendering all the Inventory stuff unnecessary. But if I'm missing something here, let me know.

[3saster]

All looking good to me, including chaingunner death animations, and they do come back with the correct orientation if revived. I guess the engine doesn't clear the actor's sprite scaling values when it becomes a corpse, rendering all the Inventory stuff unnecessary. But if I'm missing something here, let me know.

The issue would be if the monster's behaviour is related to its sprite. Consider a Cyberdemon that has been modified to shoot a rocket from its arm instead of its chest. If you mirror it on spawn, then when it fires, its animation will not match its behaviour anymore. If you could mirror EVERYTHING about the actor, including the behaviours, then this would be good, but I'm not sure that's actually possible in a generic way.

[bLUEbYTE]

Well, forget what I said above regarding my super simple 3-line flip code working fine... It doesn't. Although admittedly it looks pretty funny, it causes the monsters to moonwalk .

So I'm back to using m8f's full code in my mod. Lesson learned.

[eviltechno]

Any reason why it doesn't run well with the zombiemans in Brutal Doom? The deathpic is always default. I think its the same with the pinkies. Any way to fix it?

[m8f]

I noticed that the death animation starts mirrored, and then flips back to default when a zombieman falls on the ground. It's because in Brutal Doom, at this moment dead bodies become invisible and spawn a new actor, for example

Code: Select all • Expand view

TNT1 A 0 A_SpawnItem("DeadZombieman1")

Probably this is to make dead bodies shootable. It's a code design choice of Brutal Doom, I cannot fix it in my mod.

If you want Brutal Doom with mirrored shootable corpses, I can recommend BDLite with Universal Gibs.

[MObreck]

Out of curiosity was there a reason you chose to use scale.x over the XFLIP flag?

By using the flag method I was able to get the same result while completely eliminating the need for the inventory hack items. I used this script for df_EventHandler and was able to delete df_Unflipper and df_MirroredFlag by doing so:

Code: Select all • Expand view

class df_EventHandler : EventHandler
{

// public: // EventHandler /////////////////////////////////////////////////////

  override
  void OnRegister()
  {
    blacklist = new("df_StringSet").init();
  }

  override
  void WorldThingDied(WorldEvent event)
  {
    let thing = event.thing;
    if (thing == NULL) { return; }

    if (blacklist.contains(thing.GetClassName())) { return; }

    bool flipped = df_alternate
                 ? (isPrevFlipped = !isPrevFlipped)
                 : random(0, 1);

    if (flipped)
    {
      flip(thing);
    }
  }

  override
  void WorldThingRevived(WorldEvent event)
  {
    let thing = event.thing;
    if (thing == NULL) { return; }

    if (blacklist.contains(thing.GetClassName())) { return; }

   thing.bXFLIP = false; //Might as well always clear the flag.
  }

// public: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

  static
  void flip(Actor thing)
  {
   thing.bXFLIP = true;
  }

// private: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

  private df_StringSet blacklist;
  private bool isPrevFlipped;

}


[m8f]

There is no much difference between using of scale.x and XFLIP flag. With XFLIP, I'd had to use df_MirroredFlag and df_Unflipper too. The point is, with df_MirroredFlag and df_Unflipper I can save my own mirrored state for the actor. If some mod utilizes scale.x (or XFLIP) and I unconditionally override it, it may result in visual inconsistencies.