Monsters being affected by point pushers

[printz]

From MBF to ports either based on it or which have copied specific features from it, an oddity has been enabled.

Point pushers are able to move monsters. In Boom they never were, but from MBF on they are. The problem is that I can't find the option to disable this ability. If there is, it's either unobvious or hidden. Anyway, I set all Doom compatibility flags in Eternity to YES, and all enemy AI stuff to Doom's behaviour, but there was no option for it: point pushers could still move things. I did see a flag about friction, but none about winds/currents.

It'd be good an extra compatibility flag which checks point pushers' ability to move monsters, so Boom maps run on Eternity work as in vanilla Boom.

ZDoom behaves fine with this, maybe because it has little to do with MBF.

Note that constant pushers (sector based ones) haven't affected monsters, so they're no problem.

[andrewj]

Well there is nothing in BOOMREF.txt that says that point pushers/pullers only apply to players.

However the PrBoom code confirms that in BOOM those forces only apply to the player:

static boolean PIT_PushThing(mobj_t* thing)
{
  /* killough 10/98: made more general */
  if (!mbf_features ?
      thing->player && !(thing->flags & (MF_NOCLIP | MF_NOGRAVITY)) :
      (sentient(thing) || thing->flags & MF_SHOOTABLE) &&
      !(thing->flags & MF_NOCLIP))
  {
    pushing code yada yada....
  }
}

[Quasar]

This was an intentional change made by Lee Killough, one of several. He didn't feel that BOOM's omission of these effects on monsters was satisfactory and thus "fixed" them, and since they were new features anyway, he didn't consider compatibility to be important.

BOOM demo compatibility is already impossible for other reasons in EE, so I haven't so far considered it a high priority. Also, it is difficult to envision a circumstance where turning this on/off has an enormous impact on the playability of a map.

I'll consider supporting a toggle on it though, since it has been requested.

[printz]

Quasar said:

Also, it is difficult to envision a circumstance where turning this on/off has an enormous impact on the playability of a map.

Since monsters' speed is minimal, they have tough chances getting out of the field, unlike the player, so they become rather static there, and easy to rockets.

I'll consider supporting a toggle on it though, since it has been requested.

Thanks.