Hideous Destructor 4.10.0b

[Eric_]

Taunt works well for me, assuming my usage of it to "knock" on doors/closets and judge what's waiting on the other side by the responses I hear is what's supposed to be working. I tend to prefer more direct methods of alerting nearby enemies that I already have clear line of sight to, but I use it to that end for testing on occasion and it works fine for that too. I have encountered issues with monsters having a hard time escaping their closets - this video would be the best documented example I have - those cacos simply refused to approach the wall closely enough to touch the teleport line. They were alerted properly though, they just couldn't navigate to the way out.

Got a VM abort on latest commit immediately after airbursting the blue carpet room in Entryway.

The DERP controller doesn't get cleared from the inventory by attempting to use it when no intact DERPs are deployed. If you deploy a DERP and it breaks and ends up somewhere you can't reach, the now-useless controller is stuck in your inventory for the rest of the level. You can get rid of it with the take console command, but it doesn't clear out automatically the way the HERP controller does.

SMG operators have been exclusively firing in semiauto since this commit. ZM operators function normally and either plink with semi shots or dump out quick bursts of auto as they see fit, but SMGs will invariably stand there slowly emptying their mag one pistol round at a time.

As for the bonedrone, it's the A_HDBlast call specifically that's giving it such excessive damage. I'll mess around with the numbers locally and see if I can get something that's still dangerous but not so unreasonable (I'd particularly like to keep it strong against armor - that was pretty much what boners were best at before these changes, and most other projectile enemies do little to no armor damage, so I think it's a good niche for them to have). I do like the idea of boners being a long-range artillery threat that actively avoids close quarters, it's an interesting alternative interpretation of their vanilla melee behavior. I'm not sure having a limit on drones will do too much for them, as the danger is typically that you encounter a group, get swarmed by a dozen drones at once, and die because one out of the dozen didn't get caught by your TB spray. Limited ammo wouldn't mitigate that problem, but it would allow the player to trivialize single boners or smaller groups that weren't a major threat anyway just by shooting their drones a few times.

On the subject of trivializing, I'm wondering if something could be done about the archvile curse. Before the rework it operated similar to frag shards, so even if you did go hide somewhere with no corpses around, they'd wander off and find something to revive eventually. The new one is purely radius-based and there's little incentive to not just sit in a corner from the time that you kill an archvile until the curse activates and depletes. It's not a huge priority to me because I'm here for the action and I'll just keep progressing and deal with the mess I'm in when it comes, but I just don't like the thought that you can choose to completely ignore the mechanic by literally not playing the game until it goes away.

[Abba Zabba]

To be clear, I think the new revenant projectile is far better than the old one, they're just incredibly noisy for when there's no target at all, and you have 1-5 revenants in a relatively enclosed area. It quickly becomes a whooshing vacuum-esque cacophony. Maybe if there was a gentle hum for when they slowly patrol around until gaining sight of a target, then I'd use the new revenant. Make the projectile more stealthy overall, especially when they're trucking along at around 80 mph, around the speed of an average baseball pitch. Would make them a good long range silent killer. Additionally, it seems that close range bone drones have trouble detonating when colliding with their target, sort of like the old ones. The damage is still absurd, though I'd definitely keep the high shrapnel, anti-armor aspect of it. Revenant fear is also a neat concept, but they still don't seem to get out of it except when in melee range.

[Eric_]

Another VM abort on latest commit.

[Somagu]

I really sincerely hate boner closets right now. With the current behavior, they'll happily just drop their balls through the teleporter that can instantly defeat any meaningful form of protection, and then happily wait out their refractory period safely away from harm's way before turning back around to blast another load all over the unsuspecting players. It goes beyond simply being caught with your pants down, escalating into full-blown paranoia of knowing you could get boned at any second from locations you couldn't possibly expect. The issue I really take is not necessarily that they're constantly showering the player with their squirmy little friends, but rather the way they shamelessly persist in doing so for potentially minutes at a time, without ever once managing to expose themselves to retaliation.

No but really, it's really frustrating that their fear effect means they're quite likely to just sit around in their closet, raining death from safety.

[Eric_]

After some pretty thorough testing, I think the only way to get the boner drone's damage to a more reasonable state without completely changing its mechanics would be to stat out a new bullet just for it. The huge shield damage comes from the fragtype being hdb_scrap, which has much higher mass than normal fragmentation. Switching the type to hdb_frag allows a shieldcore to absorb one hit without breaking, but any unshielded hit becomes guaranteed instant death (because you just got hit in the face with roughly the same volume of shrapnel that a rocket grenade would have). Another possibility would be reworking A_HDBlast to have a new argument for customizing the amount of fragmentation within fragradius - just lowering fragradius has no measurable effect until a certain threshold which basically removes the damage entirely. Not entirely sure that I like either option.

I'll also second that their behavior when placed inside a teleport closet is pretty much gamebreaking. They just keep launching more drones that teleport out to attack you and never leave themselves. It just plain sucks.

[Yholl]

Adding to previous feedback, I'll say that the boner drones are really noisy, hiding inside monster closets and endlessly thundering. They're also apparently capable of clipping entirely through linedefs that they shouldn't be able to. I assume it's from the switch in behaviour, where they'd be flying around and bouncing off an impassible midtexture for a while, and when I turn my back suddenly it clips through and pounces on me.

Personally, I really wish looping sounds would get used for things like full auto vulcanette fire or boner drones rather than a thousand rapid sounds, but I understand if you're doing that just to stick with the existing sounds you have to work with.

[Matt]

Definitely no looping sounds for the vulc if it's literally a series of gunshots. As for other things, it's always a problem of sounds taking up so much space.

The drones need to be able to cross the same lines as projectiles can or we'll run into some situation where the map was designed to have revenants firing through barred slats in some fortification that would end up being completely blocked in HD. (By the way if anyone's got a better way of doing this than literally setting +missile on the actor I'd love to know.)

[Abba Zabba]

Throwing my 2¢ in to say that the new new revenant (and projectile) revamp is great. Crazy fast speed right off the bat is a strong direction imo, it was one of the things that made the old revenant rocket scary, when they spawn in the far off distance where they're hard to spot, but have plenty of time to pick up speed and become a danger when they reach several yards of your position. Now, they immediately demand a reaction from the player. Can't say for the revamped damage, but if it's proper shrapnel now and not scrap (a damage type I'm assuming that was used for barrel debris flying around?) then it shouldn't be too far off the money so to speak.

The revenant fear now feels appropriate since they switch on and off, potentially ambushing players when they're in teleport traps by deliberately being late to the party, instead of hanging back in the corner and troll spamming indefinitely. In fact, the fear distancing on and off reminds me quite a bit of how revenants in DoomRL behave, generally shying away from melee in favor of lurking towards the backwall and launching projectiles. Good!

Bug: the new new bone drone doesn't have the -countkill flag, so the kill count gets busted.

Old bug: I apologize if this gets annoying and repetitive but the HERP laser fear bug is still unaddressed.

[Matt]

Oops, didn't even see that thing about the HERP. Should be fixed now.

[Eric_]

Also liking the new new boner direction. The damage against green armor is a bit excessive I think, you're looking at multiple medkits worth of wounds for one hit in the unlikely event that you don't instagib, but I like where it stands against blue and shields now. I've also encountered more than a few instances where the drone flies straight through me without exploding. The bouncing may be a bit excessive, it gets really hectic and hard to keep track of anything with even just a few boners in play.

I'm also not sure the A_HDBlast changes are working properly. Airbursts are severely gimped now compared to before and changing the fragshit value around, even to comically high numbers, doesn't seem to help. Direct hits are also much less reliable now. I'd have expected any one of those hits to be a kill prior to the change. Edit: there's a pull request addressing this.

[Matt]

I think it's fixed now but did i mess up the numbers somehow? Airbursts seem terribly ineffective...

[Eric_]

The pull request made it work correctly (and still does, if you apply its change to explosion.zs), I tried it locally before you closed it.

[Matt]

Need to stop multitasking stuff like this. Should be fixed now for real.

[Abba Zabba]

Oops, didn't even see that thing about the HERP. Should be fixed now.

Thanks, much appreciated.

Ha, I should have noticed when my gyro grenade did barely anything to a manc, but it was a one off. Glad to see that fixed.

---

The current bone drone damage is pretty strong, and I'm not sure if the damage values should be tweaked, but my god the acceleration is crazy. I tested survivability with full HP and garrison green armor, and out of 20 or so detonations, I only survived once, and I think it was because the drone went off several feet away instead of on contact. Now, when compared to battle blue armor, your chances are far more favorable, even if you're unlucky enough to be struck more than once in a fight. Shield cores are also great counters. But that's to be expected.

The only other mid-tier monster with similar brutal damage output would be a arachnotron blast within similar distance to you, and that's fair. More than likely a caco power blast would too, if not worse. However, they both have decent mitigation strats that the revenant doesn't; arachnotrons need a full second to make their beam burst, and often get blocked by ledges and other obstructions when they're on the low ground. They also are susceptible to pain, and thus can be shot (even with shields up!) to stop their focus. Cacos can (rarely) launch a super plasma charge when they're a mile away, but it takes around two seconds to build up, and is accompanied by a loud, map-encompassing scream to warn you. Often times, with decent cover or you being on the move, this power blast misses you, but may still be quite damaging (but survivable!) if you're unlucky.

Honestly, with regards to the bone drone, they should take some more time to accelerate to top speed, both initially, but especially on bounce. I like the huge damage that brings it in line with the two aforementioned attacks, along with the sense of permanence of the drone when it misses its target compared to other projectiles, but currently, once a drone gets spawned, and you don't happen to destroy it right off the bat, you're likely dead. At least, out in the open. Basically, reward successfully dodging a projectile that sticks around so you can have a chance to shoot it down.

Edit: oh, and as Eric mentioned, the collision of the bone drone is somewhat bugged in that there's a decent chance for the drone to completely pass through you and not detonate.

[Eric_]

Got a nasty desync for you to unravel. It can happen under much more ordinary conditions, but this is the most reliable reproduction I've got:
Go to the range with two players. One player goes into the tunnel and waits at the other end of the range (does not leave the tunnel yet). The other player summons a bunch of hell knights (about 30 will do, more wouldn't hurt), alerts them, then hides in the tunnel. The first player in the tunnel, not yet known to the knights, comes out at the far end of the range and flies back towards the counter and the horde. Somewhere along the journey, it'll desync or even hard crash on Linux.
I don't think this is actually specific to hell knights. It seems more related to general targeting functions, because it only desyncs under the exact circumstance that the first player in the tunnel is never seen or heard by the knights before the second player has alerted them and then left their line of sight. It might even be the result of a GZDoom-side change, considering the OS-specific hard crashes and that I was able to replicate the desync as far back as 4.7.1b, even though it only became a prominent issue much more recently.

Regarding the bonedrone: now that the fragmentation has been cut down, it feels pretty reasonable switching their fragtype back to hdb_scrap again. They do a lot more armor damage compared to hdb_frag without the constant oneshots. It maybe feels just slightly too weak on average, but the projectile is so fast and hard to avoid that it really shouldn't be that strong, and when it does roll well, you certainly feel it the same way you feel a vanilla revenant rolling an 80. Boners stand as the tier between imps and hell knights, so their attack probably shouldn't be both harder to avoid and more instantly deadly than balefire.