Terrain Damage on Monsters

[peewee_RotA]

I've defined a new terrain. It basically causes a little bit of damage over time to "freeze" the player.

I also have some ice monsters in the water. I wanted to make sure they are not getting damaged. So I got ready to make them take 0 ice damage, but before even making that change, I noticed that they never seemed to be hurt at all. I even changed them down to 3 HP to double check if they'd die in 2 cycles and they never took damage.

Do custom damaging terrains affect monsters?

Here's my code:

Code: Select all

splash ColdWaterSplash
{
   smallclass      ColdWaterSplashBase
   smallclip      12
   smallsound      world/drip

   baseclass      ColdWaterSplashBase
   chunkclass      ColdWaterSplash
   chunkxvelshift   8
   chunkyvelshift   8
   chunkzvelshift   8
   chunkbasezvel   2
   sound         FreezeDeath
   noalert
}

terrain ColdWater
{
	splash			ColdWaterSplash
	footclip		10 
	liquid
	damageamount	5
	damagetype		ice
	damagetimemask	23
}

floor CWATER ColdWater

[peewee_RotA]

After a lot of testing, they definitely do not damage monsters.

I was able to find 2 references.

This one is in regard to the sector types, not in regard to Terrain with predefined damage. (It's also about default doom behavior, not clones or source port features.)

Damaging floors do not affect monsters.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Damaging_floor

This one implies that getting monsters damaged by a sector has a work around. Even though it is only describing actors in the air, it seems to answer the question.

SectorDamage
...It is even possible to use this function to damage monsters and actors not touching the ground, instead of only players with their feet on the ground...

https://zdoom.org/wiki/Damaging_floor#SectorDamage

The confusing part in all this is that monsters that don't fly seem to take take fatal damage from relatively short falls. And a large number of those falls are into a damaging sector, or sector with special behavior (water or ice) making it seem like a non-fatal fall was followed by sector damage.

Anyway, it looks like if a map needs to damage monsters, SectorDamage is the right answer. And any case where they do not need damaged, then they won't take damage from the custom terrain.