Special thing_allowdrown

[Jack]

New special suggestion:

thing_allowdrown(tid,delay,damage)

Effect: Allow deep water damage/kill tagged monsters and/or destroy tagged items after a delay time.

[Graf Zahl]

You are aware that monsters would have no means to do something against this, do you?

[Jack]

Of course, but the wad authors shall know where to use this special. If well used, this special may be great.

[Jack]

You are aware that monsters would have no means to do something against this, do you?

And monster also don't evade a crushing ceiling, and even thus is a good special

[Cutmanmike]

well with +DROPOFF monsters can easily find themselves in the deep. Pointless however, since you can't make monsters swim.

[Graf Zahl]

Pointless however, since you can't make monsters swim.

Indeed. Which makes this idea rather useless.

[MartinHowe]

Of course, but the wad authors shall know where to use this special. If well used, this special may be great.

Unfortunately, there are several people on these forums who seem to think that because monster AI isn't up to evading damaging areas, that they should not be subjected to them. The two are of course not necessarily relevant to each other, as in many cases the area concerned is a trap that the monster is NOT MEANT to be able to get out of.

Doing this as things stand is unnecessarily complicated, involving excessive use of TIDs, scripts, actor-enters-sector things and suchlike. Of course, the final decision rests with Randy and (for GZDoom) Graf, but the only "impediment to doing it" (as opposed to "reason not to want to do it") is the time it takes to code. It would need added the same checks to the root class of all monsters that are applied to the player, plus a DECORATE flag that is by default off. Another alternative would be to predefine state names for "damage due to X" on the understanding that not defining those states would mean the monster is immune to damage type X. This could well be a lot of work.