ZScript: Randomized monster skins

[EmperorGrieferus]

So, I'm currently transferring my Smooth Doom fork to ZScript, and I wonder how to translate this script to ZScript or, at least, make new script with the same functionality.

[ZzZombo]

I'd been working on a skin system, a generic skin system for all non-player actors. It worked by overriding the sprite to be rendered of an actor with a different one, you define your skin as a separate actor with the desired look, and as long as your state sequences matched in total length the ones of the reskinned actor, the script would almost seamlessly transfer the visual aspects of the source actor to the target one. This was actually inspired by "Smooth Doom" because I didn't like the way it changed the monsters, for example, causing them to move faster due to more calls to `A_Chase` within the same time frame. With my skin system in play the monster would still execute the same sequence of states but the skin would animate more states within the same sequence, causing it to animate smoother w/o any changes to the original monster.

It's not finished yet, there is some inherent jank to it, and there is an issue with accurately tracking all possible state changes within a completely arbitrary actor so that the skin and the actor won't go out of sync, but as a prototype it worked for most of the vanilla actors I tried it on IIRC.

[EmperorGrieferus]

The only problem why zombiemen in SD are faster is because A_Chase is called every 3 tics instead of 4. Also, wouldn't it be easier to just spawn variants of monster that are just actors that inherit from their main variant?

[EmperorGrieferus]

Okay, I'll rephrase my question: is it possible to make RandomSpawner CVar-dependant?

[ZzZombo]

Also, wouldn't it be easier to just spawn variants of monster that are just actors that inherit from their main variant?

Nope. In certain cases it's not possible to make "too smooth" animations w/o altering the behavior of the actor if you go with subclassing and even if it is, rearranging all the codepointers around is a bitch.

[EmperorGrieferus]

Also, wouldn't it be easier to just spawn variants of monster that are just actors that inherit from their main variant?

Nope. In certain cases it's not possible to make "too smooth" animations w/o altering the behavior of the actor if you go with subclassing and even if it is, rearranging all the codepointers around is a bitch.

Isn't something that scares me.