Your Name: Lieutenant John Doom. Your Mission:

[Patriot1776]

Don't know how relevant it is, but a bit more info on the invulnerable shotgun zombie. I encountered one at the very beginning of MM2 MAP03, in the alcove just off to the right from the starting spot, where you have a view through iron bars of the large cavern area with the yellow door that has to be teleported too. At the extreme right corner of the bars window, you see a shotgun guy that's facing away from you that you can peg before a door opens later where he can peg you right after you hit a switch that opens said door. Head-shotted said zombie and he immediately went invulnerable, I couldn't kill him. Restarted the level, went back to the same spot but this time targeted the exact same shotgun guy's body and he died normally, bleeding out first.

I think the observation I can gleam from this is that maybe the immortal zombie problem may have something to do with the head hitboxes being attacked with fatal damage before the zombie has been alerted. Has this possibility been looked at a bunch?

[-Ghost-]

Yeah, that sounds similar to what I've been getting. A headshot that should've killed them, then they're just immune to damage. Were you killing a lot of zombies in a row quickly with headshots? I generally see it in groups rather than lone ones.

[Devianteist]

Shiiiiiit dude I completely forgot about that, my bad! I promised you that months ago. Better late than never I guess--check out the DL link and it'll be in there.

Oh that's quite alright. As you said, better late than never, and I've got plenty of patience. And now to beat up Hellspawn with grenades for backup!

[phantombeta]

I was gonna download this and debug this with GZDoom plugged into Visual Studio's debugger try to find the cause of the invulnerable zombies but...
Holy shit. This thing is big.
Why is this so big?
(ninja) [edit]Bleh. I'll just try to download it anyway...[/edit]

[Patriot1776]

Yeah, that sounds similar to what I've been getting. A headshot that should've killed them, then they're just immune to damage. Were you killing a lot of zombies in a row quickly with headshots? I generally see it in groups rather than lone ones.

Not too sure with groups. I see groups zombies/imps in this, I just go to chucking grenades like Christmas presents instead of trying to saw their heads off with the chaingun, so all of them usually die from bodily damage via grenade. I do think though the phenomenon of headshots before the zombie's been woken up needs to be looked at more, see if that's when the immortal bug's showing more regularly.

[phantombeta]

Yeah. Tried out with the Fly, God and NoTarget cheats, shooting a dormant zombie in the head breaks it.
I think it's getting sent to a state that isn't Death related when it's supposed to be dead. Kill monsters can't kill it and Linetarget can't hit the Trooper actor.
[edit]YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP. Added "TNT1 A 0 A_JumpIf (health <= 0, "Death")" to the top of the Stand and Idle states and no more "ghost" zombies.[/edit]

[Patriot1776]

Yeah. Tried out with the Fly, God and NoTarget cheats, shooting a dormant zombie in the head breaks it.
I think it's getting sent to a state that isn't Death related when it's supposed to be dead. Kill monsters can't kill it and Linetarget can't hit the Trooper actor.
[edit]YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP. Added "TNT1 A 0 A_JumpIf (health <= 0, "Death")" to the top of the Stand and Idle states and no more "ghost" zombies.[/edit]

You didn't add that to the head-hitbox actors right, just the normal zombie actor code? And what classes?

[phantombeta]

Only to the Trooper class. I don't recommend doing this to fix it.
I was only trying to find what was the reason for it. The actors are ghosting. Now someone should find out what is causing them to ghost.
I'd try to find it, but I'm not familiar with the code in this mod.

[Patriot1776]

Only to the Trooper class. I don't recommend doing this to fix it.
I was only trying to find what was the reason for it. The actors are ghosting. Now someone should find out what is causing them to ghost.
I'd try to find it, but I'm not familiar with the code in this mod.

Explain 'ghosting' to me then from a ZDoom/DECORATE perspective. I've read up about player ghosting on vanilla DooM bugs. How is enemy ghosting different here in the ZDoom case?

[phantombeta]

It's basically the same as the Ghost monster bug caused by the archvile resurrecting crushed bodies. The monster is sent back to its living behaviour without resetting its stats.
In this case, it gets set to non-solid by A_NoBlocking. This and the death height aren't reset, so the monster ghosts.

[Devianteist]

That seems like a very odd problem. What would you theorize could cause such an issue?

[johnny]

Patriot, phantombeta, and ghost, you guys are a couple of geniuses. I got them to pretty reliably spawn on tnt map01 and realized that this problem happens in both v19 and v20's hitbox code so that wasn't to blame... then I came here last night and saw patriot's post and it all made sense. Phantombeta, thanks for taking the time to figure this out. That jump state WOULD fix the problem, but you'd also miss out on all the special deaths. He'd go straight to the same corpse lying on the ground every time. New shit has been brought to light so I'm gonna take all this into account and get to work. I'm putting the v20 hitboxes back in because they play the head popping animations more reliably and then doing some experimenting.

Why does this happen to zombies but not imps? Their spawn/idle code is basically the same.

[LostFury]

Well with the 20 hitboxes so far after 5 levels of an oblige wad I havn't run into a ghost zombie yet, where i usually run into them within 3 levels. I've been trying to recreate the ghost zombie while i play (headshots etc.) but so far this seems much better then 19 hitboxes

[phantombeta]

That seems like a very odd problem. What would you theorize could cause such an issue?

I think it's getting sent to a state that isn't Death related when it's supposed to be dead. Kill monsters can't kill it and Linetarget can't hit the Trooper actor.

If you want to know what specific kind of thing could cause this, probably a lot of shit. Only things I can think of right now are ACS setting the state when it's not supposed to and (G)ZDoom being stupid tho'.

That jump state WOULD fix the problem, but you'd also miss out on all the special deaths.

Only to the Trooper class. I don't recommend doing this to fix it.

Why do you think I said I didn't recommend doing this to fix it?

[Devianteist]

I just had a thought; has anyone experienced this "ghost" zombie bug/glitch in ZDoom? I know more recent versions of ZDoom can run Brutal DOOM with most of its features intact (with minor issues according to the ModDB page).