Experiments Of Interest (Current: Monster Pickups!)

[Kinsie]

Sometimes I like to mess around with DECORATE and see if I can force Doom to do things it's not supposed to. Here, I'm going to place them here for people to look at, comment on, improve and use. Hopefully they help you with what you're making.

Experiment # 1 - Thieving Little Shits
Description: This uses projectiles and damagetypes to simulate pickups that both the player AND monsters can pickup.
Inspiration: Areyep's Wolf3D mods, paticularly the "greedy" secret level in which suicide troops would try to grab all the treasure before you... and would come after you once it was all gone.

In this case, it's limited to just the shotgun and zombieman as a quick example. While the pickup seemingly acts normally to the player (due to a little sleight of hand), to the zombieman it does exactly one damage (necessary for the effect to work Is there any way around this?) and gives him a shotgun to attack with.

This could be expanded pretty easily - the main idea behind this was for monsters to use health items, but I don't think there's any way for DECORATE healing without ACS assistance, and my attention span only goes so far. Besides, why have all those guns and artifacts around your evil demonic stronghold if you aren't going to use them? Right?

Possible ideas for expansion: Enemies picking up all sorts of items - some aiding them like weapons and healing, some just to keep them away from you like a dick. Maybe have some picked up items drop from the enemy upon death? It's possible.

[unknownna]

A really cool hack you've got there Kinsie. I'd like to see this expanded.
Trying to figure out how to not hurt the monsters.

If a zombieman drops the shotgun when he dies, the shotgun can be picked up normally by the player, but the next zombieman to pick it up just makes it disappear. Then he continiues using his normal A_CposAttack even if he shouldn't.
hmm...

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Code: Select all

ACTOR NewZombieMan : ZombieMan replaces ZombieMan
{
	damagefactor "ShotgunPickup", 1
	dropitem "Clip"
	States
	{
	Spawn:
		POSS AB 10 A_Look
		Loop
	See:
		POSS AABBCCDD 4 A_Chase
		Loop
	Missile:
		POSS E 0 A_JumpIfInventory("RealShotgun", 1, "Missile2")
		POSS E 10 A_FaceTarget
		POSS F 8 A_PosAttack
		POSS E 8
		Goto See
	Missile2:
		POSS E 10 A_FaceTarget
		POSS F 8 A_SPosAttack
		POSS E 8
		Goto See
	Pain:
		POSS G 3
		POSS G 3 A_Pain
		Goto See
	Pain.ShotgunPickup:
		POSS A 0 A_PlaySound("misc/w_pkup")
		POSS A 0 A_GiveInventory("RealShotgun")
		Goto See
	Death.ShotgunPickup:
		POSS H 5
		POSS I 5 A_Scream
		POSS J 0 A_SpawnItem("FauxShotgun", 0, 0, 0, 0)
		POSS J 5 A_ChangeFlag("SOLID", 0)
		POSS K 5
		POSS L -1
	Death:
		POSS H 0 A_JumpIfInventory("RealShotgun", 1, "Death.ShotgunPickup")
		POSS H 5
		POSS I 5 A_Scream
		POSS J 5 A_NoBlocking
		POSS K 5
		POSS L -1
		Stop
	XDeath:
		POSS M 0 A_JumpIfInventory("RealShotgun", 1, "XDeath.ShotgunPickup")
		POSS M 5
		POSS N 5 A_XScream
		POSS O 5 A_NoBlocking
		POSS PQRST 5
		POSS U -1
		Stop
	XDeath.ShotgunPickup:
		POSS M 5
		POSS N 5 A_XScream
		POSS N 0 A_SpawnItem("FauxShotgun", 0, 0, 0, 0)
		POSS O 5 A_ChangeFlag("SOLID", 0)
		POSS PQRST 5
		POSS U -1
		Stop
	Raise:
		POSS K 5
		POSS JIH 5
		Goto See
	}
} 

Edit: If you're a skulltag internal build tester, you can check this out:

http://skulltag.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12375

I made this friendly marine pickup all the weapons from doom except the chainsaw and the skulltag bfg10k. He jumps to the diffrent missile states depending on which weapon he picked up. However, he won't go from a rocket launcher to a shotgun because he always want to have the most powerful weapon.

[Kinsie]

Any other interest?

[bagheadspidey]

to the zombieman it does exactly one damage (necessary for the effect to work Is there any way around this?) and gives him a shotgun to attack with.

How about this - instead of making the pickups projectiles, make them monsters. Have them constantly retarget, and only target in a very small range. Use jumpifcloser to give the target some inventory if they are very close, and destroy itself.

Check out the decorate for the proximity mine in my latest NOTH add-on, it is similar to this except it explodes instead of giving the target inventory.

This should allow the pickup to "give itself" to monsters. For players, maybe you could use the "sleight of hand" you mentioned earlier, or you could possibly do something like this:

Have the pickup-monster spawn a normal player pickup when it spawns. The player pickup should be set to destroy the pickup-monster when it is picked up. Not sure off tops whether this can be done purely in decorate, or if acs would be needed...

[Ghastly]

Use jumpifcloser to give the target some inventory if they are very close, and destroy itself.

Would a melee state and meleerange work just as well (and instantly when the target gets in range)? If I understand correctly, by the way, how will you get it to target both the monsters and the player?

[Zenon]

I'd like to see more, What other experiments have you got in mind?

[DoomRater]

I thought you could make items that could be picked up normally by monsters? If that's the case, no hackery would be required.

Er, wait, that should read monsters that can pick up items.

[Xaser]

Not as far as I can tell. Plus, even if there was some way to assign monsters the ability to simply "remove" items from the map (using a flag usually only set for the player or something... didn't DEHACKED have something like this?), it wouldn't actually allow the monster to use weapons/heal.

Still, this is a *great* idea that I can see having some use... also, how's about we take a quick idea from Descent II (ROTT, even) and use this to possibly create a "thief" monster? Imagine a zombieman that can take the plasmagun right out of your hands and blast you in the face with it. ;P

'Course, that design borders on ACS trickery, though I'm sure it can be done with a little know-how. If I wasn't such a lazy git, I might try it myself.

[bagheadspidey]

possibly create a "thief" monster?

Hasn't Neoworm already done this? I thought I saw him mention it somewhere but now I cant find it =/

[Ryan Cordell]

That was a literal thief, from the Golden Axe games.

[unknownna]

Sorry for the bump.

Using DamageThing with a negative value you can heal actors. You can even make monsters pick up health. In the skulltag forums, I uploaded this friendly marine. He is able to pick up health bonuses, stimpacks, medikits, soulspheres, megaspheres and all the weapons except the fist, the chainsaw and the bfg10k. I'm maybe going to create a berserk state as well, but we'll see.

I also made the marine start with 100 hp and work his way up to 200.
This has a few side effect though.
Made the stimpacks and medikits stay if he picks them as he often picks them up when he really shouldn't be able to. He gets the hp, but they stay until you pick them.
They disappear normally when you pick them though.
I also made the megasphere only heal the marine with 200 hp. It has a special property that causes non player actors picking it up to crash skulltag. so I had to do this. Works normally when you pick it up though.

The wad doesn't work with zdoom as it uses some skulltag resources (weapons, sounds etc), but the idea of approach works fine with zdoom as well.

[Enjay]

There was a little monster in the old dungeon crawling game "Dungeon Master" that used to run up to you and laugh. As he did, he would steal a random item from your inventory then run away. You had to chase him down and kill him to get your item back. Something like that would be cool in Heretic/Hexen and would even work in Doom as he could steal a weapon or ammo. In fact, it would e easier in Doom because there is less to steal. I've tried to find a pic of the monster but can't track one down.

It was quite a clever enemy because, although he did no damage and had low hitpoints, you'd end up trying to target him quite quickly even if a more threatening bad guy was near because if the little guy got close he would take something and then run off into the gloom and you knew you'd have to spend some time chasing him down and possibly running into danger as a result. He would sometimes even steal the weapon that one of your characters were actually using so all of a sudden you'd be empty handed.

[Enjay]

I found a picture of the cheeky little swine:

[LordK]

Heh, I always hated that little bugger. He wasn't a big nuisance if you knew to expect him, but his quickness and the labyrinthine nature of DM's dungeons meant that he still succeeded in his thievery quite often.

In Heretic/Hexen/Doom the maps have more open spaces, so a thief monster needs to be even quicker, or stealthier, maybe partially invisible.

[Kinsie]

There was a little monster in the old dungeon crawling game "Dungeon Master" that used to run up to you and laugh. As he did, he would steal a random item from your inventory then run away. You had to chase him down and kill him to get your item back. Something like that would be cool in Heretic/Hexen and would even work in Doom as he could steal a weapon or ammo. In fact, it would e easier in Doom because there is less to steal. I've tried to find a pic of the monster but can't track one down.

It was quite a clever enemy because, although he did no damage and had low hitpoints, you'd end up trying to target him quite quickly even if a more threatening bad guy was near because if the little guy got close he would take something and then run off into the gloom and you knew you'd have to spend some time chasing him down and possibly running into danger as a result. He would sometimes even steal the weapon that one of your characters were actually using so all of a sudden you'd be empty handed.

Yes! A monster like this would be interesting.

Rise of the Triad and Quake Mission Pack 1 had a similar concept: Monsters that would nick your current weapon (and in ROTT's case, use it on you) if you got too close. Certainly an cool idea that can be done well.

Heh, I always hated that little bugger. He wasn't a big nuisance if you knew to expect him, but his quickness and the labyrinthine nature of DM's dungeons meant that he still succeeded in his thievery quite often.

In Heretic/Hexen/Doom the maps have more open spaces, so a thief monster needs to be even quicker, or stealthier, maybe partially invisible.

Quake Mission Pack 1's thief monster (the Gremlin) handled this hurdle by being agile - jumping over barriers and hordes of monsters and chasing after you. Not sure what they did once they got your stuff though - I never let 'em get close enough