Feature suggestions; SVN build question

[Mordeth]

Hi,

Some feature suggestions:

While improving overall looks, I've been experimenting with new skies. And can't help noticing that skyboxes look so much more better. Eg. Shinna's DM maps are using them to great effect. Any chance..?

I've also been experimenting with enemies that drop down from the ceiling before attacking, using clear defined stages: 1) idle, sticking to ceiling; 2) alerted, and dropping down; 3) hitting the floor, crouched; 4) reverting to normal monster behaviour (moving, attacking). Especially (3) gives me trouble, since there's no way to catch when the Thing actually hits the floor. This can be tricked by having several variation of Things with a certain predefined timing for each desired height, but that's not something I like doing. But Heretic EDF does have something called FLOORHIT, which tells a dropping dead body to go splat when hitting ground. Is something like this possible in the form of a EDF jump, eg like the existing RandomJump but now "OnFloorHit"..?

Also, can someone put up a more recent version at the SVN repository?

Thanks in advance :)

[printz]

Did you try something along the Fall codepointer? The falling dying flying monsters are the ones able to detect the floor (so see how the cacodemon looks like while dying from a height). Also, doesn't the skybox portal feature already work? Sure it would be a good idea to make a skybox as a default sky image, so as not need to tag every single outside sector any more.

[Mordeth]

printz said:
Did you try something along the Fall codepointer? (...) Also, doesn't the skybox portal feature already work? Sure it would be a good idea to make a skybox as a default sky image, so as not need to tag every single outside sector any more.

The Fall codepointer is just part of a monster's death sequence, meaning that the 'solid' flag gets removed so the player can walk through the corpse.

Going to try out the skyportal, to see if I get the effect I want that way :)

[printz]

Mordeth said:

The Fall codepointer is just part of a monster's death sequence, meaning that the 'solid' flag gets removed so the player can walk through the corpse.

Right, I had the illusion that Cacodemons only bleed once they touch the ground. But I tested with ZDoom by setting sv_gravity low, and no, their frames stayed in sequence.

Try with a missile with gravity and zero speed. Make an invisible inert hanging monster shoot it on sight. Make that missile spawn the desired monster, on death. Should work.

[Mordeth]

printz said:
Try with a missile with gravity and zero speed. Make an invisible inert hanging monster shoot it on sight. Make that missile spawn the desired monster, on death. Should work.

Probably. But it also has some serious drawbacks: no checks if monster actually becomes stuck into something while spawning, and the 'monster' being inert to attack while falling down. Using real monsters and the codepointer HealthJump you can 'remember' damage done in various phases and plan the next EDF jump /spawn accordingly.

[printz]

Mordeth said:

no checks if monster actually becomes stuck into something while spawning, and the 'monster' being inert to attack while falling down.

Well, for that matter I make missiles the size of their spawned monsters. Dunno what you mean in the second part.

[esselfortium]

He means that if you shoot at the fake monster while it's falling, it won't have any effect on the health of the real monster, won't put it into its pain state or death state, etc.

[Quasar]

If the thing falling were a CORPSE and it had a crashstate, then hitting the floor would cause it to enter that state. The thing could then call the ThingSummon pointer and spawn the actual enemy. It is true that you would be unable to damage the object while it's falling, but that's a consequence of using a feature for something it is not intended.

States for things like this could be added indefinitely, so you have to draw a line somewhere. However, I'll consider this as a feature suggestion.

The crashstate is a feature added for Heretic support. It is used by the Heretic Imp to change states and spawn ImpChunk objects which it hits the ground. EE also uses this state to implement the state used by the player's skull that spawns when the player is gibbed. Heretic itself did not implement this in the same way and used a hackish sequence of multiple codepointers in a set of looping states instead.

EE does not share any of Heretic's crashstate-related glitches. Things cannot miss entering their crashstate under any circumstance I have yet identified, and things will not enter their crashstates more than once.