Revenant resizing

[wesleyjohnson]

Have started work on resizing the too tall revenant.
Trying to do this in a hurry because there was a hint of a impending release, and we need to get that head out of the ceiling.
I assume that I can resize the existing revenant frames without getting in trouble with someone ??

Did a GIMP rescaling (without blending) which looks OK, except that now the fireballs are coming out of its forehead.
Going to try again, but a few pixels taller.

It appears the id games version was oversize too. It has to bend over to fire, and the shoulder guns do not match with the single missile that appears.

I feel the need to give the revenant a weapon and some kind of ammo bag, so it does not pull stuff out of thin air.
Probably will give the revenant some kind of chest fired short barrel
missile launcher, mostly because anything else would force me to change it to be asymmetrical and then I would have to create left and right versions of all the frames.

[esselfortium]

Doom's Revenant already sticks into the ceiling by quite a bit. Is it that big of a deal?

[Mechadon]

You could just change its height via dehacked or something equivalent depending on the port your aiming for. Seems like that would be a whole lot easier to do than editing the sprites.

[Marcaek]

What project is this for? Also, I'm assuming you'll need to change the Revenant's height with a Dehacked patch.

[wesleyjohnson]

This problem has been noted before, it is not new.
The current revenant is 80 pixels high and the engine enforces a height of 56 pixels. This means it can walk into a corridor of 60 pixels with its head in the ceiling.
Shooting is difficult because shots go right through the upper half.
I have got really tired of blasting away at them and having nothing hit.

This is a FreeDoom sprite, to be included in the FreeDoom IWAD.

Using DEH to change the engine would only affect some engines.
It would no longer be compatible with the vanilla DoomII revenant and would not work with wads that were designed for a normal size revenant.

Really need to make the revenant match the default size as defined by
vanilla DoomII.

[wesleyjohnson]

Almost done with revenant resize.
Have reduced height by approx. x 0.70, but that varies as the original frames were not uniform.
Had to extensively edit the frames as some of them had distorted features, like an old version of the revenant.
Have to lighten the blackness just to have some differentiation.
Black upon Black is hard to work with.
Reduced the muscle bulges to fit a new design that this is a lightweight creature that they made into a missile guy. Otherwise looked like it should just jump across the room in one bound and claw (why have missiles).

The new shorter revenant looks good, and is still slender and wiry. Looks about the same until gets close and you realize it is not as tall.

More importantly, am giving it a missile weapon, so that it does not shoot missiles out of thin air.
This looks better because now it puts its hands up an aims at you, so the player can now see that it is going to launch a missile.
Also gave it some light splash upon missile launch.

Biggest consideration is because the original is symmetrical (and is confused as to which foot is forward) I did not want to introduce a handededness. So I hung the missile launcher from his neck on a chain. I am not happy with this look (looks like a tie), but the alternatives were worse.

[wesleyjohnson]

I have a submitted my shorter version of the revenant to incoming.
Because you cannot read incoming, I have made a copy of the skel.wad
available on SpeedyShare.

This revenant is sized at 60 to 62 pixes, which is correct for the engine 56 pixel physical size.
It is a refurbished version of black revenant, with the addition of
a missile launcher which is on a chain around its neck. Some missiles
are on its waist.
Had to spend considerable time adjusting proportions as the previous
black revenant was not consistant between frames.

http://speedy.sh/APKGw/skel-02-wad.zip

<a href="http://speedy.sh/APKGw/skel-02-wad.zip">Download at SpeedyShare</a>

Edit: The missile launcher is bite-activated. Those paws cannot use a trigger. That is why it fires from its mouth.

[RjY]

Thank you, I've downloaded this and will get it committed as soon as possible have now committed it.

Some hastily-taken screenshots for anyone who is interested to see what it looks like.

[hex11]

The new size is good, but it's still way too dark. In fact, if the monster is standing in front of a dark background, he's effectively invisible. I was playing through AV.WAD tonight and got to MAP03 where I ran into a few of those revenant-ninjas just after the yellow door. At first I didn't even realize they were there, until a salvo of blue balls locked in on me. But even though I then knew their general locations, I had a hard time visually tracking them in order to keep some hard cover between me and them.

In contrast, the original revenant has some white and light tan highlights, so it's much easier to spot:
http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Revenant

[fraggle]

Sounds like an interesting new challenge rather than a bug.

[gnudist]

hex11 said:

At first I didn't even realize they were there, until a salvo of blue balls locked in on me.

Gah! badthoughtsbadthoughtsbadthoughts

[wesleyjohnson]

I tried making it lighter on the second try, but it looked wrong, like it was silver instead of black. I went back and made them darker shades of gray.
I did lighten them from the originals, and gave them a light colored weapon. The chain and eyes should be visible.
I tested using map09, where the mines are also dark.
My conclusion was that dark hallways naturally hide dark colored monsters. Have to more careful.