Trying to create a patch that would make all pickable items affect items percentage

I want to create a patch that would make all items present at map start that can be picked up by player to count towards items percentage. Making all needed items count towards items % is trivial with WhackEd but the problem are the zombie enemies which drop pickable items making it possible for the items percentage to reach over 100% leaving my current patch useless.

Is there a way to replace the items dropped by zombie enemies with direct copies (while not changing any game behavior) with dehacked or any other way that would work with prboom-plus -complevel 2?

Pick 3 decorative things that don't get used often in maps - I recommend dead lost soul and the blocking hanging corpses from Doom 1. Change their properties, flags, spawn states and IDs to the ones of Ammo Clip, Shotgun and Chaingun, and check their Affect Item % flag. Now edit the real Ammo Clip, Shotgun and Chaingun: Change their IDs to the ones of the original decorations, otherwise keep them the same (not affect item %). This way, you've swapped the placeable objects. Pickable items placed in the map will spawn as affecting item %, but the ones dropped by zombies will not affect item %. It has a necessary side effect that if the original decorations were used in the maps, they would spawn as collectible items now (the ones *not* affecting item %) - but this is necessary, because the game would crash if it found unknown IDs in the maps, and you cannot add objects via DEHACKED, only use the existing ones, and there are no other free objects to use than the pickups.

Thanks a lot, works exactly as I expected and wanted.

Not very knowledgeable about this but I think those blocking corpses are used from time to time especially by newbie mappers so I went with Demon spawner and Demon spawn spot for maps without Icon of Sin and with SS Nazi and Commander Keen in case there is IoS in the map. Obviously not ideal but still good for my needs and at least I can tell more easily when something is wrong.

Hmm, is there really no way to add new objects/IDs in a way that would work with prboom-plus -complevel 2 or at least -complevel 9? Item respawn fog seems like an ideal object for modifying but unfortunately it shares ID with many other objects.

I'm attaching both finalized patches just in case someone would be interested:

Replaced: Dead Lost Soul + Demon spawner + Demon spawn spot

Keyboard_Doomer said:

Hmm, is there really no way to add new objects/IDs in a way that would work with prboom-plus -complevel 2 or at least -complevel 9?

Correct. There is no way DEHACKED could do it. Advanced ports support their own scripting languages to define custom actors, for example ZDoom's DECORATE - but those are obviously incompatible with vanilla or Boom.

Item respawn fog seems like an ideal object for modifying but unfortunately it shares ID with many other objects.

ID -1 actually means no ID. Objects with ID -1 cannot be placed in a map, they must be spawned during runtime - practically all of them are programmed to spawn upon some hardcoded happening (for example calling a codepointer to fire a projectile). ID actually plays no role after the map is loaded and objects are spawned to their initial locations.

So, I think you can edit an object with ID -1 to be placeable into the map - but keep in mind that its hardcoded behaviour will remain, as it's not tied to the ID, but to a "DeHackEd thing number" (0-136, according to the position in the thing list), which defines the thing type and cannot be changed.