Enemies on small ledges or plinths are useless?

[Hidden Hands]

I have no idea how to fix this bug, but in my second MAP02 there are these tall plinths that stand at about 200 in height and on each one is a monster. The problem is, when the game starts they just walk around slowly doing nothing but making their ACT sound until you shoot them, and then they just move around faster on the spot. They don't shoot or anything. The plinths are designed to be a good sniping spot for enemies but they are completely useless enemies up there. Any advice on how to fix this?

I'm using DOOM in ZDOOM (UDMF) format and GZDOOM Builder.

Thanks in advance.

[Rachael]

1) The enemies need room to move around.
2) Having a ledge that is the width of the enemy's radius is not enough - it needs to be slightly wider.
3) Remember that enemies are squares on the map, no matter what direction they are facing. Enter the console and set "am_cheats 3" and then look at them closely on the automap. That means if you're creating diagonal ledges, the ledge must be even wider.

[arookas]

Taking a quick look at p_enemy.cpp, I think the problem lies with the internal step counter (AActor::movecount) used to randomly change directions while navigating. It appears monsters can only missile attack if the movecount is zero. As the monster is trying to navigate away from a steep ledge or constantly changing direction from not having very much room to move around, this causes the movecount to be non-zero almost all of the time; thus, your monster will almost never attack from afar (melee seems to be unaffected by movecount).

Like Eruanna said, try giving the monster more room (either by reducing the radius of the monster or increasing the plinth's radius) to move around so its movecount can reach zero more often.

[Nash]

This is why I love the open source ZDoom community. Learned, scientific answers instead of misleading guesswork. :D

I was very frustrated with this problem too and I resorted to make my monster do more A_Chase calls to shoehorn them to be more "aggressive" but of course that's a crap solution. Thanks Arookas. :D

[Graf Zahl]

One of the nice things of scripting is that people can take this function and make all the changes they like to it to create different attack pattern - once everything relevant has been exported or exposed.

[Reactor]

These are the cases when I prefer to use turrets and enemies with turret-like characteristics.