Dehacked: replacing monsters

I'm trying to substitute some of the less usable monsters like the SS Nazi and useless Commander Keen with some other form of monsters, kinda like in Scythe II.

I have Whacked2, and some basic knowledge of .bex, and how to insert it into my wad as a dehacked. I haven't tried making new monsters with it yet.

The Nazi has about 50 animations, and the Hexen cleric has 73, Commander Keen is reserved for another monster. A couple of questions:

1) Is it possible to cram all of those cleric animations (73) into the Nazi sprite slots (50) while keeping Boom-compatibility intact?

--- --- ---
From Scythe II's dehacked:

Frame 798
Sprite number = 52
Sprite subnumber = 32774
Duration = 8
Next frame = 774

Pointer 424 (Frame 766)
Codep Frame = 174
--- --- ---

2) What is a sprite subnumber?

3) How does a pointer work?

Doom Marine said:

Is it possible to cram all of those cleric animations (73) into the Nazi sprite slots (50) while keeping Boom-compatibility intact?

Generally, no. Most ports don't "know" about the Heretic details and cannot access them through DEHACKED. Zdoom can, if you include an altered DEHSUPP lump with your WAD. However, this is not advised as may tie your WAD to specific versions of Zdoom and there are better ways to do it with Zdoom anyway (DECORATE).

Doom Marine said:

What is a sprite subnumber?

This number is which determines which one of the pictures in the sprite series will be shown for that frame. If Sprite # is 29 and sub sprite is 0, the POSSA graphics will be shown. If Sprite # is 29 and sub sprite is 1, the POSSB graphics will be shown and so on. You do not specify which of the angle viewpoints for a thing will be shown. If doom is showing POSSA, it will automatically display the correct view angle picture relative to the player for that frame.

The high number in your example indicates that the sprite will be shown at full brightness. If a sprite is to be shown in that way, 32768 gets added to the sprite sub number.

Doom Marine said:

How does a pointer work?

This defines a special action to be performed for this frame. It could be something simple like walk, or it could be turn to face the player (or other target), or launch a fireball etc. I'm not sure about Whacked but in DEHACKED itself to change a code pointer you hit enter and then type the number of the frame that normally has the code pointer wanted.

As a simple example of changing a codepointer. If you go to frame 454 ( the frame where the imp launches its fireball) and change the code pointer to 539, the imp will now launch the baron of hell fireball when it attacks.

If you are familiar with BEX, code pointers can be changed more easily and with greater flexibility using BEX mnemonics.



I have a bunch of DEHACKED related stuff at my site (where most of the above was copied and pasted from). Click the home page link from this post if you want to read more. The tutorials are old, but most of the information is still good.

Doom Marine said:
1) Is it possible to cram all of those cleric animations (73) into the Nazi sprite slots (50) while keeping Boom-compatibility intact?

To do so you have to get the extra 23 frames from other places, so you'd probably have to sacrifice some Thing, or at least simplify some. One place you can start taking frames from is the Pain elemental's resurrection frames (doing without the extremely rare possibility of ghost Pain elementals). You mentioned Commander Keen, as well, so it seems you'd have enough frames. With Boom it is not too hard to rearrange frames, once you make them available, since you can use any frame anywhere, irrespective of whether they had pointers or not (unlike in Doom).

Another thing is that the behavior of the monster will have to be within DOOM's (Boom's) mechanics; you won't be able to use any Hexen specific behavior unless there is an equivalent in DOOM. Still, it's kind of lame (also legally wrong) to rip a monster directly from Hexen, especially when there are various user made (or heavily modified) monster sprites available. Some stuff by Vader, for example, is very good, and possibly more fitting for a DOOM wad.

Also, if you do use the Nazi, you might first want to swap it with a decoration or something like that, unless the new monster will be using a bullet shooting weapon, because the Nazi Thing always drops a bullet magazine when killed.