ZDoom

Warm Reception is an add-on for GZDoom that alters enemy behavior on level start.

With this mod, you can either make your life harder by aggravating every enemy from the start, or effectively disable hot starts.

Download
Source code
Acknowledgments

Options

• Wake every enemy on a level, or
• Don't change original behavior, or
• Turn away enemies that look at you at level start, or
• Turn enemies to you at level start.

This mod is a part of m8f's toolbox.

Very neat. Does this wake up deaf monsters? I can see this being good for maps without a ton of enemies. I can picture someone using this with a thousand monsters wondering why their fps is now 2.
It's a shame it takes gzd 4.4.2. I'm a hold out - still on 4.3.3.

Now it can wake up deaf monsters.

Version 0.2 released.

Changelog:

• lower GZDoom version requirement to 4.3.3;
• fixed turning enemies away;
• added an option to wake up even enemies in ambush;
• added an option to imitate hot starts.

Cool! This is the kind of mod I attempted myself to make some time back, but my extreme lack of zscript skills put that to a halt. One issue I found is when running this with mods* that replace enemies via 'randomspawner' at map start. It seems that this mod runs all its stuff before the randomspawners have a chance to act, so none of the monsters are affected. To go along with that, I would also assume that any monsters spawned after map creation would not be affected, so thus I would have to ask if it's possible to also extend this to affect those as well?

*Edit: More correctly, 'mod', since I haven't tested this with any other's yet. For the record, the mod in question was "RPGVariations".

Thanks for reporting!

Fixed in v0.2.1.

Works perfectly! Definitely going to be on my list of defaults from now on. Thanks for the quick fix!

Could there be one more option, to outright remove enemies that are in a player's line of sight at level start?

Sure thing. Out of curiosity, what's the use case of this option? Forced cold start?

Version 0.3 released.
Changelog:

• added an option to kill monsters at start;
• added an option to remove enemies at start.

Cold starts, yeah. Mostly for Hideous Destructor (yeah, I know I know...) as monsters tend to immediately start looking around, meaning that even facing away they can aggro to you within seconds. With how deadly HD monsters are, that can be an instant game over if the player doesn't get the chance to find cover.

Thanks for the add! This is going straight into my autoload now.

I can nix HOT STARTS! AT LAST!

And I can set it so they all know you're here, so they drop the pretense and begin operations. This, combined with Rachel's FLIP, should make every downloaded WAD and PK3 new again.

I looked all over trying to find a mod like this. Would it be possible to make this Zandro functional?

This is a game changer for me. Like 00face, I also did not know this existed, and 'thought' I'd searched high and low for something like this to get rid of hot starts.

Anyway, many thanks to you m8f. Many wads that were not playable (with certain weapon mods) for me now are.

00face wrote:I looked all over trying to find a mod like this. Would it be possible to make this Zandro functional?

Zandronum isn't designed for this kind of scripting. If this is even possible, it would require a complete rewrite of the mod. I think it's easier to turn monsters away by manually editing maps than to make a Zandronum version.

Darn, I just want a mod that makes all the monsters active on map start. Maybe one day Zandro will update

m8f wrote:.

I think i found a bug that was not documented as it is a bit of a weird encounter.

If you pick the option of killing the enemies at start, whatever type they were will not be able to spawn if more are incoming later. For example you can test this out by summoning the same type of zombie from console and they will just die.

Can this be fixed by any chance?