ZDoom

Arctangent wrote:I feel like you're being willfully oblivious over the fact that we want the option for monster fall damage akin to that the player experiences, so that it'd trigger on falls that aren't obscene and therefore has reason to deal less-than-telefrag damage.

But whyyyyyyy?

A monster isn't a player. Who cares if something isn't fair to the monster?

Let's take a concrete example.



If I push one of these jerks in the lava, is the ~~~gameplay experience~~~ improved by them wandering around uselessly on the bottom?

An imp falls from the castle wall, bridge, canyon, okay, that imp is no longer an obstacle. It has been defeated.

of course, the seargents in the blood won't be relevant anymore. you're not supposed to go into the blood

a castle map may have you flowing throughout it in multiple ways. Maybe you can quickly get down to the surface from the walls. Maybe that big demon you punted off and didn't think anything of would become an issue later because you didn't think about them

Keep in mind you can disable falling damage in given sectors, it's a UDMF property.

And then you'll say "but then falling demon won't be taking fall damage" and then I'll say "would it having taken like 6 points of damage be relevant or noticeable at all?"

It's pretty clear to me that originally Raven Software did do progressive damage for monsters. If they fell 256--628 units, they'd take between 6 and 72 damage. If they fell more than 628 units, they'd die instantly. Then they playtested that. And they found it was dumb, so they made it so that monsters would just always die if they fell enough.

Please continue this discussion elsewhere. Closed bug threads are not the right place for it.

Graf Zahl wrote:Please continue this discussion elsewhere. Closed bug threads are not the right place for it.

Or a moderator could have moved/split the discussion into Editing instead of you closing the thread. Which I have now done.

Gez wrote:If they fell 256--628 units, they'd take between 6 and 72 damage. If they fell more than 628 units, they'd die instantly. Then they playtested that. And they found it was dumb, so they made it so that monsters would just always die if they fell enough.

At this point, I feel the discussion now is less about "is it a cool idea with Raven's magic numbers" and moreso "would this be a cool mapinfo/actor/whatever property in the modders hands to make some cool gameplay/maps/whatever with their own magic numbers"?

Either way, this would make a cool feature suggestion, like Xaser said. Maybe being able to set the velocity/damage ranges or something?

The math used in Raven's implementation is indeed not that useful, hence why they bypassed it. Also hence why we'd need to be able to control it in some fashion. The pushback on this idea reads as a mix between "this won't work in circumstance 'x' so it's not useful" combined with "this won't be useful unless we can customize it, so adding the ability to customize it is useless."

A more interesting discussion IMO would be where to define the semi-proposed monster falling damage properties. Configuring them as actor properties would be the most flexible but a MAPINFO-level deal would cut down on a lot of boilerplate (especially if it's just a map that otherwise wouldn't need to touch actor defs).

+1 to modder-customizable falling damage, reading that original Hexen code snippet makes me cringe. Bet to leave that alone though because it's been there forever.

I'd put it as an actor property, because maybe you want some monsters to be more resistant to falling damage than others (like let's say there's a robot monster with impact-compensation devices installed in their legs)