Man's Best Friend - The Helper Dog and You (And How To Make Any Monster Friendly in a Boom-Compatable Source Port)

[act]

The Helper Dog is a thing added initially in the year 1998, in Lee Killough's source port MBF. Since then, in spite of very little usage (As far as I'm aware.), the Helper Dog has been added to many, many source ports. From SMMU to PrBoom+, the feature found its way into many commonly used source ports.

To begin, let's see the prefacing paragraph from its DoomWiki Article.

Quote

The helper dog is a feature that originated in the MBF source port, created by Lee Killough to demonstrate friendly monster AI. The helper dogs use retouched sprites from Wolfenstein 3D, as well as some of the Wolfenstein dog's original sounds.

 

Source Ports That Are Compatible With The Helper Dog

• Marine's Best Friend (And by extension, Woof!)
• The Eternity Engine (And it's predecessor, Smack My Marine Up)
• Doom Retro
• PrBoom (Which includes PrBoom+ and DSDA-Doom)
• EDGE
• ZDoom (Which of course also means GZDoom, QZDoom, and LZDoom.)

How To Use The Helper Dog

Using the Helper Dog is simple. First thing on the list is to use the Boom: Doom/Doom2 in Boom Format. The next step is to create a thing and give it the DoomEd ID "888", which in-game will be a Helper Dog, assuming it's one of the above Source Ports. However, you'll quickly realize that it'll attack you if you don't check the Friendly flag. But you may notice that the flag doesn't appear!

In order to correct this, we need to do something horrifying. Editing the files of our Doom Editor.

The first step is to go into the directory of your Doom Editor. Then, inside of that directory, you'll find a folder called "Configurations". Inside of this folder, there's another folder called "Includes". Within that, is a file called "Boom_misc.cfg". Inside of there are the definitions for all those different thing flags. Opening this file inside a text editor of choice will reveal the list for the thing flags. Initially, it'll say the following:

// THING FLAGS
thingflags
{
    32 = "Not Deathmatch";
    64 = "Not Cooperative";
}

To correct this, we must make a thingflag under 128. This will tag the actor as "Friendly". So simply replace the above text with the following:

// THING FLAGS
thingflags
{
    32 = "Not Deathmatch";
    64 = "Not Cooperative";
    128 = "Friendly";
}

Now, restart Ultimate Doom Builder.

Now you can tag the dog as a friendly thing, meaning he'll defend you by attacking hostile monsters.