Arcade-like respawning on death instead of loading a save

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

I wonder if there's a way to build the gameplay about the main character dying and respawning at a 'respawn point' with certain consequences (like they get experience points or something else), instead of letting the player load a save. I know that it's probably impossible to block save/loading completely (would be neat, though), but I'd like this respawning mechanic to take place instead of automatically loading a save by pressing 'action'. Is it possible to implement?

[wildweasel]

I've seen a handful of mods implement it in various ways; the one I can think of is Vaecrius' Never Breaking Orbit: http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=53548

[Matt]

tl;dr give player a buttload of health (20k should be more than anything that one can expect the player to be able to take in vanilla short of a telefrag) or make them buddha, then in the player's pain state, once certain conditions are met (health below X, etc.) reset their health and give them an insta-use Chaos Device.

(NBO doesn't use the chaos device but instead records the player's position at start and warps them accordingly - makes for a smoother transition with less spaghetti up front to deal with the teleport fog, but does make it potentially buggier on some maps with elaborate transitions)

[Enjay]

I don't remember the details but I'm sure I've seen it done by essentially getting the player to start a single player game in multiplayer mode and then somehow activating checkpoints. I think some of Cutmanmike's stuff from years ago did it that way.

[TechnoDoomed1]

The Wolf3D TC should have what you want, as it has a life system and when you die the map is restarted after pressing the spacebar. Unfortunately, only the compiled script is in the data as far as I know, so no idea how they managed to do it.

[Nash]

MAPINFO AllowRespawn property won't do? You can easily script what happens after death and respawn, in combination with this map property.

[jpalomo]

Soft permadeath mod by Snarboo. The source is on Github.

[Mikk-]

MAPINFO AllowRespawn property won't do? You can easily script what happens after death and respawn, in combination with this map property.

Would be ideal, but wouldn't work for gameplay mods unless you redefine every MAPINFO entry for every level. For some reason it doesn't work on DefaultMap (I wonder why...?). It would make my Dark Souls mod much simpler if I could apply it for every map

[AFADoomer]

The Wolf3D TC should have what you want, as it has a life system and when you die the map is restarted after pressing the spacebar. Unfortunately, only the compiled script is in the data as far as I know, so no idea how they managed to do it.

The ACS source for the Wolf3D TC is available here, but won't help much in this case... The life system is buried in there, but there aren't checkpoints, it just restarts you at the beginning of the level (and restarts the level from scratch, unless you're in multiplayer).

[Arctangent]

For some reason it doesn't work on DefaultMap (I wonder why...?).

It does, it's just that DefaultMap only affects map definitions created after it.

[Mikk-]

Oh right. My mistake. How could I make that work for say, a gameplay mod?

[Major Cooke]

sv_singleplayerrespawn. It's been in for a while yet... no one's documented it. Fixed.

[Beed28]

sv_singleplayerrespawn. It's been in for a while yet... no one's documented it. Fixed.

The problem with that is that gameplay mods can't control that... the player has to set it themselves, which isn't the ideal solution.

[Matt]

Right now the way player death is handled is so deeply hard-coded that the only reasonable way you can do this without modifying the executable is to set up the illusion of death without actually killing the player.

On that note, ZScript makes it much easier to replicate the view-fall-to-the-floor effect, though I haven't tried getting the player to face whatever last hurt them.

[Jekyll Grim Payne]

I'm thinking of using it for a mapset, not a gameplay mod. Think Dark Souls, in essense.
Creating an illusion via Pain state or something sounds really good.
However, there is no way to truly block saving, is there?