What are "custom skin death"s supposed to be?

[MartinHowe]

The DECORATE definition of DoomPlayer includes a reference to a strange action function called A_PlayerSkinCheck. The Wiki entry thereof simply states the cryptic message "A_PlayerSkinCheck checks to see if there is a custom skin death before the player dies" and that's it. That's all she wrote. No explanation. Nothing.

The DECORATE definition of the DoomPlayer includes some strange extra sprite frames (X/Y) but these don't exist in standard Doom or Doom2:

Code: Select all

	Death:
		PLAY H 10 A_PlayerSkinCheck("AltSkinDeath")
		PLAY I 10 A_PlayerScream
		PLAY J 10 A_NoBlocking
		PLAY KLM 10
		PLAY N -1
		Stop
	XDeath:
		PLAY O 5 A_PlayerSkinCheck("AltSkinXDeath")
		PLAY P 5 A_XScream
		PLAY Q 5 A_NoBlocking
		PLAY RSTUV 5
		PLAY W -1
		Stop
	AltSkinDeath:
		PLAY H 6
		PLAY I 6 A_PlayerScream
		PLAY JK 6
		PLAY L 6 A_NoBlocking
		PLAY MNO 6
		PLAY P -1
		Stop
	AltSkinXDeath:
		PLAY Q 5 A_PlayerScream
		PLAY R 0 A_NoBlocking
		PLAY R 5 A_SkullPop
		PLAY STUVWX 5
		PLAY Y -1
		Stop

The other game players are flagged NOSKIN and don't have anything like this and the "custom skins" tutorial makes no mention of alternate skin death sequences whatever!

Please, can somebody explain all this? In particular, is there any point in new player classes even trying to support skins? I would have thought that new player classes are the "official" way to do skins nowadays - could this be wrong

[Ryan Cordell]

Somehow I've heard it's related to Heretic or something. I'm not entirely sure however.

[Enjay]

It's for playing Doom with a Heretic skin or vice versa. If you look at the player frame allocations, they are slightly different in those two games.

[edit] Spot on Mr Nightflame. [/edit]

[Graf Zahl]

For new player classes you can simply ignore this. You neither need A_PlayerSkinCheck nor the additional states.

And if you don't want to allow skinning for your new player, just add '+NOSKIN' and it will be disabled.

[MartinHowe]

For new player classes you can simply ignore this. You neither need A_PlayerSkinCheck nor the additional states.
And if you don't want to allow skinning for your new player, just add '+NOSKIN' and it will be disabled.

That's what I thought after reading the previous posts and some checking in the Wiki, but it's nice to have it confirmed, thanks.

How can one suppress or modify the status bar face, though? The SBARINFO is fine to draw custom status bars, but new player classes should not necessarily override every part of the user's current status bar just to change the face. Surely it should only use the face if the DOOM status bar is in use and do nothing if it is not? So what puzzles me is that in an old-skool skin, one can simply use the "face" property, so is there any reason why this is not a player class property?

This is especially important if morph artefacts are being used in Doom! Imagine morping somebody to a chicken when the DOOM statusbar is enabled; it'd just look odd!

[Ryan Cordell]

Hehe, he transforms into ChickenGuy.