Alert all monsters?

In doombuilder, zdoom(doom in hexen format), how can I alert all monsters on the map? I want them to all move towards the player.

You could try making the monsters so they can hear you, but you'd be required to shoot to wake them up.
You can also try Thing_Hate, but you would have to tag all monsters that will be affected.

You can call NoiseAlert in an ENTER script but of course, if you want them all to wake up simultaneously you have to make sure that map spots with the correct tid are placed everywhere.

In plain Doom, with Dehacked, you can make all monsters become aware of player's presence after the first shot, regardless of position. To do so, make the Initial frames lead to the First moving frames, instead of looping back. For example, for the trooper frame 175 will point to frame 176 (first moving), not back to 174 as it did before. Similarly the sergeant's frame 208 will point to 209, not 207.

printz said:

In plain Doom, with Dehacked, you can make all monsters become aware of player's presence after the first shot, regardless of position. To do so, make the Initial frames lead to the First moving frames, instead of looping back. For example, for the trooper frame 175 will point to frame 176 (first moving), not back to 174 as it did before. Similarly the sergeant's frame 208 will point to 209, not 207.

I believe that has weird side effects when playing multiplayer (good for single player though), and different ports interpret this method differently iirc, so you may get weird results across different source ports.

@printz: I'm pretty sure that method can crash the game, due to monsters being able to call A_Chase when they might not have a target yet.

You could try Thing_Hate in a global script with thing tag 0, if that doesn't work you'd have to tag everything to do that.

esselfortium said:

@printz: I'm pretty sure that method can crash the game, due to monsters being able to call A_Chase when they might not have a target yet.

Since you like tweaking while using vanilla Doom too, I might believe you. To be clear, I meant not editing the frame references from the thing table, but editing the next frames from the frame table. Maybe you got it the first time, but for me that method worked. Do you think that it seems to act ok, but after a few tries/levels, the Venetian Blind Crash appears?

EarthQuake said:

You could try making the monsters so they can hear you, but you'd be required to shoot to wake them up.

That'll work. Just make sure that you have a start sector where the player has to shoot a switch to open the door (or something to that effect). All monsters will have heard the shot and start moving towards the player.

Or put barrels in a hall that you have to shoot, or something.

Sigh...

9 answers and 8 of them don't give a proper solution. He said 'ZDoom (Doom in Hexen)' which means that any vanilla hacks don't even need to be considered. ZDoom does offer proper means of alerting monsters from a script!

Isn't there a Doom in Hexen linedef action for alerting monsters? Though I don't know if it gets all of them.

StoneFrog said:

Isn't there a Doom in Hexen linedef action for alerting monsters? Though I don't know if it gets all of them.

Yes, it's called 'NoiseAlert'. If you want to get all monsters in the entire map you have to place some mapspots throughout the map to ensure that the sound gets everywhere.