[WIP, Maybe] Zeretic - Heretic Monsters in DRPG/DRLA

[explosiverunes]

Zeretic

• What is Zeretic: Zeretic is a simple mod that adds monsters from the Heretic game into Kyle837's Doom RPG mod when used in conjunction with Yholl's DoomRL Monster Pack (and in fact requires both to work).
• Why is it called "Zeretic" that's pretty damn lame: Yes it is, very, but the Doom RPG Launcher utility seems to sort patches alphanumerically, and Zeretic needs to be loaded after the Doom RL Monster Pack patch for Doom RPG, so I put a 'z' in front of it.
• Are there Screenshots?:

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• Where can I download it?: here
• How do I install it?: Simply extract the DoomRPG-Zeretic folder into your DoomRPG folder, refresh your wads in the Doom RPG Launcher utility, and enable it. It requires all of the Doom Roguelike Arsenal wads and patches also.
• What does it include?: All of the monsters from Heretic are added to the spawn lists for a new "Zeretic" difficulty in the New Game menu, other difficulties are not affected. Some slight changes have been made to the names of some of the enemies to make them a little more generic. There is also a "Nightmare Wizard" that is, frankly, just the Apprentice of D'Sparil from this page on Realm667. The Sabreclaw and Iron Lich are also resistant to melee and bullet attacks, as they are made of metal.

I made this for personal use a while back, but if there's some interest in it I'll probably add more stuff to it. Add in the ghost variants and make them immune to anything but plasma weapons, add in the heretic weapons and make them all function off of a unified mana systen because no doom 2 maps will have ammo spawns for them, add the heretic player class as a playable option, etc. If I actually do all of that, I might even make a Zexen patch.

[-Ghost-]

That's a pretty good idea. I'm always happy to shoot Heretic monsters with guns after the frustration of Heretic's unsatisfying weaponry.

[explosiverunes]

Ha, I made a terrible hilarious mistake when adding in the ghosts, they were invulnerable. They aren't now, and should work properly. 15% damage from everything except plasma and "mysterious" damage (not sure if any player weapons in DRLA actually do mysterious damage, but whatever).

I've been looking at the feasibility of adding in Heretic weapons and holy fuck is the ACS for upgrading weapons with modpacks complicated in DRLA (well, not complicated, its obvious how it works, but tedious at the least). It actually looks like it would be easier to provide a compatibility patch for Samsara and just leave the weapons unupgradeable if I just wanted more variety.

[BFG]

nice, yeah these monsters fit the RPG style perfectly!

someone needs to make one for Blood monsters next

[explosiverunes]

Do you mean the monsters from Hexen: Confliction? I could probably do that sometime, it's relatively simple to make just monsters compatible with Doom RPG.

[Triple S]

For the weapon problem, you could just take it one weapon at a time. Figure out assemblies later too.

[BFG]

there is a Duke 3D monster pack for ZDoom too, that would be nice too, would make it similar to that NR Eduke3d mod.

[explosiverunes]

Without assemblies, the weapons are relatively simple to import, I could probably do it over a weekend if I wasn't being lazy. It's possible I could have them run off of DRPGs EP system too, seeing as it already functions as a mana analoge that lets you summon demons. It might be simpler just to add in tome of power drops instead of doing modpacks for them, giving you a reason to use them at higher levels of play. Or even to choose a specific modpack you could add to each weapon that would permanently unlock the Tome of Power variant.

Good news, I found out you can use color translations on truecolor .png files if you're a little bit creative, so I think I actually will start making more difficult variants of the Heretic enemies soon, without just cribbing from others. The sprites are all already done in essence. Below you can see my first test work on this concept.

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[Triple S]

Could treat them as Legendary weapons, where attaching Firestorm, Nano, or Sniper changes the weapon drastically (and just disallow the other mods). Would simplify things a bit.

[explosiverunes]

I was thinking a little bit during work, and I believe it would be possible to produce a wad/DRPG patch set that would, together, make most wads that replace the default doom monsters compatible with DRPG+DRLA Monsters. This would be it's own project that would get it's own thread, but I'll go ahead and explain my logic here since people seem to be interested in that sort of thing here.

• Most wads that introduce new monsters into Doom/Doom 2 do so by inheriting from a standard actor and then replacing the original actor, therefore when loading such a wad in conjunction with DRLA you end up with, for example, HDooms (haha!) ImpEncounter1 inheriting from from DoomImp and then replacing it. The wad also likely replaces the DoomImp sprites with sprites that have identical naming, thus overwriting them at runtime.
• The first step would be to create a WAD (Aardvark.wad) that gets loaded first, before any replacement, and has copies of all of the Doom 2 monster ACS decorate information and sprites, but has the sprites using a different naming convention. Afterwards the monster replacement wad gets loaded, and replaces the original Doom monsters as normal.
• Next the DRLA Monsters wad comes along and does it's thing, unintentionally inheriting from the new monsters instead of the standard doom ones, these monsters are fucked up. Fortunately DRLA Monsters gives the actors unique names and does not replace the originals.
• Finally the comparability patch is loaded first in the DRPG launcher (Aardvark again). It goes back and fixes RLA monsters, recreating the ACS decorate verbatim from the WAD and redirecting the the renamed original sprites from aardvark.wad where needed. The replacement monsters are modified to initiate health bars and item drops. Finally, both versions of the monster are placed into the the spawn list.

So in our example, Aardvark gets loaded and creates dummy versions of the original doom monsters and sprites, HDoom comes along and replaces all of the imps with sexy imps, RLA Monsters comes along and creates new imps using new RLA imps that now use some sexy imp sprites, the Aardvark DRP patch gets loaded and fixes all of that shit and places both the RLA imp and the sexy imp into a the spawn list. It's possible that the spawn lists would require a second DRPG patch that gets loaded last (Zzardvark?).

The only problem I see with this is the generic compatibility patch likely don't have name tags, and thus would not have names above the health bars. If anyone sees any flaws in let me know.

It is notable that this would NOT work for wads that do not directly replace Doom monsters, such wads would still require a hand made DRPG patch.

[Yholl]

ACS

I feel compelled to point out that ACS is scripting, monsters and weapons are made in Decorate.
There's absolutely no ACS involved in modding weapons in DRLA, for instance, it's pure Decorate.

[explosiverunes]

You know what, I knew DRLA didn't use any scripting, but I'm such a scrub that I just confused my terms.

[MoonTurtle]

Just wondering, How did you make that healthbar above the enemy there? I always wanted to make my own, but I could never figure out how, and the closest mod I can think of that is dedicated to simulating this sort of thing is Target-Spy, I know Brutal Doom and brutal Heretic do it, which is what inspired meto at least try to make my own. (the only thing I have done is the health bar graphics)