Questions about making custom pickups with Dehacked Extended

[LordShadowZ]

I've been messing around with Dehacked Extended and learning how it all works, and while I've figured out how to add sprites and make custom monsters, I've reached an impasse with custom items and I have some questions.

 

I'm trying to make a non-replacing custom armor bonus for a potential WAD targeting Boom compatibility. I have the item flagged as a pickup and it appears properly in-game, but it doesn't work. It doesn't get picked up at all in ZDoom and it crashes DSDA. (P_SpecialThing: Unknown gettable thing)

1. How do I properly setup the item so that it gets picked up and adds an armor value other than 1? Can this be done with Dehacked or does it require some other method?
2. Additionally, how would I have the item trigger a custom sound on pickup that doesn't replace the default sound?
3. Is this even possible to do outside of ZDoom format? I'm a complete noob to modding WADs and I haven't had any luck finding info to help me out.

[Edward850]

I don't believe this is possible to do with any version of dehacked. Pickups are identified by their sprite name (the initial 4 letters), so changing the sprite to something not in the standard set means it's no longer a valid pickup, and this is complicated to expand upon because at its core Doom's inventory mechanics are extremely rigid (here's Woofs P_SpecialThing as an example, which implements MBF21 but as you can see is pretty much unchanged from vanilla Doom). Only ports that allow adding to characteristics of pickups (i.e adding inventory types) can thus change this behaviour, as they need to change the pickup behaviour from the outset. This would be ZDoom's decorate format or Eternity's EDF format.

Edited May 14, 2023 by Edward850

[LordShadowZ]

Alright, I had a suspicion that it probably wouldn't work. Oh well. Thanks for the help.