How to make monsters stay around areas.

[Velsphar]

Hello! I was playing some Quake 3 and realized that most of the time, the bots would only get quad damage and other power ups if I died while I had it. I started thinking that what if, in Doom, I could make a monster attracted to certain areas with certain properties. For instance, a room with a low brightness might be something that a sneaky enemy would stay somewhere in. Do you think that this would be possible, and if it is, how would one achieve the desired effect?

[Enjay]

When mapping, careful use of monster blocking lines can restrict a monster to a particular area without the player realising that the monster is actually trapped in that area.

You could also put monsters on a [wiki]Monster_path[/wiki] and have them walk towards particular areas of a map.

As for a general "load this and monsters will stick to the dark areas in any map" type of mod, that would be a lot more complicated if it is possible at all.

[Syfo-Dyas]

I am no ZDOOM expert, not in the least, but would it not be possible to write an ACS script to tell the enemies, or enemies of a certain type to constantly work their way towards a certain sector? Then to keep them their maybe have something in the ACS script to tell them to continue free roam again once they have reached the sector.

Then to keep them from roaming too far have an invisible trigger that if passed will encourage them to turn around and return back to the sector in order to start the free roam process all over again?

Just a theory.

[Enjay]

Yes, that basic idea could be done with monster paths using [wiki]Thing_SetGoal[/wiki].

[Velsphar]

Thanks! It works pretty well.

[Mr. Tee]

Another quick and dirty method would be to use A_Wander, although this is not nearly as precise as the method EnJay mentioned. Still, it could have some fun uses for getting monsters to "wander" in a certain area while in their Spawn state. Adding A_Look will have the actor look around for the player while wandering.

http://zdoom.org/wiki/A_Wander