Requires GZDoom version 2.4 or higher
Crawling out from the depths of Hell comes another attempt at randomizing Doom's monsters. ZDoom has a long history of attempting to spice up Doom's gameplay by adding some more randomness to the sandbox. While many attempts rely on not using other monster mods with it, ZScript has allowed us to go a step further. I present to you...
Another Monster Randomizer (bold text for emphasis)
What makes this mod unique? Nothing! It doesn't add anything to the monster sandbox whatsoever. Instead it just takes whatever it's given and spits out a new random monster. Yes, any monster. This mod has full universal support with other monster replacers. That means you can run a monster randomizer on top of your monster randomizer. Even Brutal Doom works with it! Not only that, but this mod has full support across all Doom engine games. Heretic not feeling spicy enough? This mod's got you covered. Hexen in desperate need of monster variety? Done. Does anyone play Strife? You might now, now that things are completely random.
There's, uh, not really much to say since it does what the tin says. There's some options in the menu for you to play around with if you truly want to break things and make the game hilariously unplayable. Seriously, you don't wanna see the Pain Elementals. Here's some pictures of it with the oh so glorious Colorful Maps mod.
Spoiler: Doom 2 in its full gloryQ&A
Q: Does this work with Brutal Doom?
A: Yes.
Q: How do I run this?
A: You can either drag and drop the .pk3 file onto your GZDoom executable or use one of the various mod loaders. If you plan to use this with other monster mods make sure this mod is loaded last to be safe.
Q: I was playing X megawad and level Y broke!
A: While I've put in quite a few safe guards to ensure that maps of any variety don't break, there's only so much I can do for a universal randomizer. Sometimes it's a case where I can't fix it without hardcoding the solution, something that could break other maps, and other times it's a unique issue that can be fixed but is something I never would have thought of. I'll say that I tried to get as many of the vanilla cases as possible with the map compatibility option. Right now there are only plans to support official IWADs with this option. Other settings have been provided for you to play with that can hopefully alleviate the issue.
Q: A monster spawned that's invisible/has no sounds/projectiles. What gives?
A: This can happen when a monster that's missing assets is spawned. This happens if you happen to have the correct sprite names but nothing else. There are a few fixes for this:
- Turn Fighter Boss off. Zedek is a special case where he can spawn in any Doom game due to his use of the default player sprite names as his sprites. He should mainly only be used when playing Hexen
- Full monster randomization adds a few monsters that weren't included such as the bot marines, who may break games other than Doom. To turn off the bots you can disable Doom monsters
- Get the correct sprites and sounds for the monster. What matters is that the names of the sprites and sounds match the vanilla monster's names. They do not have to be the actual vanilla sprites/sounds
A: To be fair I never said it worked well. Ok, real explanation. The idea behind this mod is pretty simple: if an actor is a monster, add it to the pool of monsters that can replace monsters. If a monster spawns, check for a replacement. The problem is that different mod authors have different standards for how they do things. While the easiest way to make something shootable is to flag it as shootable, unfortunately the second easiest way is to set it as a monster. This means completely random things that have zero business being monsters can end up in the pool. Brutal Doom is particularly awful with this as even things like gibs are considered monsters. I've added in a bunch of safety checks as a result. Normally I'm against these kinds of checks since it can break other mods, but some of these issues were so outlandish that I was confident either other mods wouldn't do it or were doing something equally as wrong anyway. Even with the checks some things can still get through the cracks, however, and there's not much I can do about that besides hardcoding a solution, something I won't be doing. Trust me, these mods are in a way more playable state than when I first tested them.
