Small thing that annoys me -- am I the only one?

[Cruduxy Pegg]

I only dislike it when it is used to pull up entire armies in plain view. Bonus point is any mod that adds any kind of grenades ( like a lot of multiplayer wads ) can turn a map into a snoozefest while you watch someone use a grenade launcher all day in the pits while waiting to respawn in survival modes. Sure it isn't vanilla and a lot of mappers only focus on vanilla modes but this one is my biggest problem with these pits.

 

Teleport ambushes with mixed monsters are also hilarious because they add an element of surprise the pits can't do. Teleporters can be super annoying to use well in big open field maps though.

 

Edit : By element of surprise I meant monsters appearing in random orders and timings, sometimes a long time after killing everything else. Equally infuriating if you are speed running haha.

Edited January 11, 2022 by Pegg

[EANB]

I’m guilty of overusing this, and yeah if it’s just a couple of monsters you should probably just set up a teleporter instead. But getting a large number of monsters to teleport in unison is very tedious to set up and I reserve the right to use it in those situations. 

[MFG38]

17 hours ago, Captain Keen said:

I'm sure basically every question/comment/poll you can imagine has been asked 20 times before.

 

Well yeah, but they're not literal copy-paste jobs of each other. That wasn't quite the point of my earlier post. I don't mean to accuse you of anything and I'm sorry if I come across as such, but what I meant is I feel like I've seen that OP word-for-word before. Hence the deja vu I said I experienced.

[Maribo]

2 hours ago, EANB said:

I’m guilty of overusing this, and yeah if it’s just a couple of monsters you should probably just set up a teleporter instead. But getting a large number of monsters to teleport in unison is very tedious to set up and I reserve the right to use it in those situations. 

Just want to interject (because I've been playing a lot of the Glaive series recently) and say that I think you use them in pretty reasonable ways, the only problem I've encountered with them is that some of them have their trigger linedef too close to the actual pop-up sector, so you can go too fast and end up bugging it out.

That's advice I'd spread to everyone who uses these: I personally think they're great, but double-check whether it's possible to break them. I have one I need to fix in the map I'm currently working on, so I'm absolutely not guilt-free of silly usage of this tech.

[mrthejoshmon]

Pop-up monsters are useful for having encounters not trigger early or by accident, I use them in large spaces to prevent things getting messy.

 

They're great for encounters you want to play out in a specific way without having to rely on sometimes finicky teleporters, however, as I learned from feedback during testing, having monsters jump up too close to the player is noticeably frustrating, especially to Australians, best bet is to telegraph it.

 

Basically, it's useful as a more reliable monster deployment than teleports and great for long distances but not so good up close.

 

Thinking about it, it is also useful to have the player hear and prepare for said ambush enemies (unlike teleports as they lack sight sounds).

Edited January 11, 2022 by mrthejoshmon

[Captain Keen]

4 hours ago, MFG38 said:

 

Well yeah, but they're not literal copy-paste jobs of each other. That wasn't quite the point of my earlier post. I don't mean to accuse you of anything and I'm sorry if I come across as such, but what I meant is I feel like I've seen that OP word-for-word before. Hence the deja vu I said I experienced.

 

Hmm. Not to get weird about things, but I have a type of photographic memory, and it's not always a good thing. Meaning, it's very possible I read a thread on here years ago before I had an account, and for some reason that was rattling around in my head while playing a wad with a popup monster, and as I typed my own opinion someone else's wording came into my head. This is rarely a problem but it's not the first time I've recounted something almost verbatim that I otherwise forgot about or had no conscious knowledge of prior. So I guess what I'm saying is... you might not be crazy!

 

6 hours ago, EANB said:

I’m guilty of overusing this, and yeah if it’s just a couple of monsters you should probably just set up a teleporter instead. But getting a large number of monsters to teleport in unison is very tedious to set up and I reserve the right to use it in those situations. 

 

Ok, I have a mapping question. I know it's harder to have monsters teleport in, because you have to 'house' them in the map elsewhere, but what if you had lots of monsters over water and they just lift up rather than appear? Plutonia does that trick, I know. To me, large empty rooms that suddenly have a billion monsters in them look glitchy. Is that any harder to code?

 

7 hours ago, Pegg said:

Bonus point is any mod that adds any kind of grenades ( like a lot of multiplayer wads ) can turn a map into a snoozefest while you watch someone use a grenade launcher all day in the pits while waiting to respawn in survival modes. Sure it isn't vanilla and a lot of mappers only focus on vanilla modes but this one is my biggest problem with these pits.

 

I think that's a fair point.

 

2 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

Basically, it's useful as a more reliable monster deployment than teleports and great for long distances but not so good up close.

 

Yeah, the up close stuff is usually where it feels like a glitch and not a feature to me.

[EANB]

5 hours ago, Captain Keen said:

Ok, I have a mapping question. I know it's harder to have monsters teleport in, because you have to 'house' them in the map elsewhere, but what if you had lots of monsters over water and they just lift up rather than appear? Plutonia does that trick, I know. To me, large empty rooms that suddenly have a billion monsters in them look glitchy. Is that any harder to code?

 

Monsters rising out the ground is just as easy. I might see if some of the pop ups in my next wad could be replaced with a rising floor without much impact, I didn't know people disliked them that much.

 

10 hours ago, Maribo said:

Just want to interject (because I've been playing a lot of the Glaive series recently) and say that I think you use them in pretty reasonable ways, the only problem I've encountered with them is that some of them have their trigger linedef too close to the actual pop-up sector, so you can go too fast and end up bugging it out.

That's advice I'd spread to everyone who uses these: I personally think they're great, but double-check whether it's possible to break them. I have one I need to fix in the map I'm currently working on, so I'm absolutely not guilt-free of silly usage of this tech.

 

I'll keep this in mind, though there isn't much you can do about players skipping linedefs because they're going fast outside of putting in redundant triggers. 

[Shibainumaster]

I think the wrost contenders for the usage of this trick are Speed of Doom's MAP23 and most of Hell2Pay.

[NaturalTvventy]

I agree that it's not usually a well implemented game mechanic. It's a bit glitchy and it seems like for a frame you can see the monsters in the floor (port specific maybe?) right before they pop up. It doesn't feel 'natural' and I agree that it breaks emersion. It also makes the player paranoid and slows gameplay down quite a bit. The worst is when a baron pops out right in front of your face. 

 

I have used instantly-appearing monsters in a couple of my maps (Boom Stick in the Mud and Toxic Containment), but by making use of Boom's silent teleporter special and occurring in dark areas or at a distance so that it's unnoticeable. I do also very much like the instant imps in DOOM's e4m7 at the soulsphere, so it can be done. It just needs to have a certain artistic touch.

Edited January 12, 2022 by NaturalTvventy