[Request] Creative Thinkers

[NeuralStunner]

Damnit, a rocket is supposed to blind you for some seconds and knock you 10 metres, if you're still alive. I have a feeling that ZDoom fixed this alleged inconvenience (the blinding), making you come up with this remark.

Wat.

[printz]

In Doom, if you take too much damage, the screen gets 88% red, making it very hard to see, which is a good side effect. Now, I'm not totally sure if ZDoom attenuated it or not.

[NeuralStunner]

ZDoom doesn't crank it up that high, but it's eye-searing enough. It calculates the pain blend and duration based on damage taken, and [wiki=Actor_properties#Player.DamageScreenColor]a player class property[/wiki].

Doesn't make your response any less needlessly antagonistic. Seriously, knock it off.

[printz]

Bleh, it's all in your mind.

[Xtyfe]

I'm thinking now that I will totally forget the charging and instead have it teleport in a random spot around and close to it's target. How could I do something like this? I guess it would need some funky math

[NeuralStunner]

Because an unpredictable, undodgable attack certainly wouldn't be aggravating?

[Xtyfe]

Because an unpredictable, undodgable attack certainly wouldn't be aggravating?

It wouldn't be undodgable, I wouldn't have them teleport within melee range, but close enough for them to move into it.

[insightguy]

Why not let the lost soul charge at the player making him/her temporarily disoriented or even run around like a mad man for a few seconds.

So a silly skull charging at you knocks the hell out of your orientation, but a rocket is just fine.

this is interesting

I was thinking more of temporary possession.

[Z86]

A_Recoil

(Don't mind me...)

Seems to me that the Lost Soul's behavior is a bit too... iconic to be changed up too much.

As far as I know A_Recoil only moves the actor on the horizontal plane, so LS would charge above you if they started from a higher position (unless using compatibility settings). Normal LS charge does this sometimes as well, but it hits regardless.

One of my first modifications on Lost Souls (with dehacked back then) was to make them explode upon death. Their death looks like a rocket explosion anyway. OFC this creates chain reactions unless deliberately prevented.

Missile state could be them temporarily speeding up with the charge anim playing, and melee is just bumping into you and then immediately bouncing back (a'la Spawn in Quake).

[NeuralStunner]

Short of a small-radius exploding death, I can't think of anything that wouldn't make them worse than they are. This may be because I've tested weapons on map10 a weeeee bit too often...

[Apothem]

If you're trying to come up with creative alternatives to the kind of attack a lost soul does, perhaps instead of replacing it, you could add on to it?

A lost soul that if you shoot, can burst into smaller multiple souls.
If you get hit, perhaps do something like a Fadeto() trick or something simple.
When the lost soul dies, it could leave behind a "lost aura cloud" that would heal friendly demons and hurt the player(s)

But if you wanted to replace everything, I would suggest possibly that maybe the lost soul has more of a 'body'. All you see when it's normally moving around is the skull, but the body would 'materialize' when it tries to melee you. The melee attack would happen after the initial charge, and you can only damage it when the enemy materializes/exposes a weakpoint upon performing its melee. You could replace melee with anything else, projectile attack whatever. Point is to make them a little tougher, but perhaps also bigger targets. They would still, for the most part, be an easy kill. It would be a combination of some new movement pattern or attack that would enable the charge/materialization of the enemy's weakness to be exposed, and destroyed.

I guess the mentality is to change the way to approach the enemies as more of a tactical puzzle than just number balancing at that point. Hope this helps