Ghost Player in SP

I was playing TNT (Final Doom) and on level 18, "Mill", there is a room that you can only get to by no clipping, that is dark and has a player in it, along with the same thing next to it. I am aware of the Player 1 meets player 1 thing, where one is just a ghost and gets hurt, hurting you when shot, but these guys are all in green, and are visible in SP, but don't act like that. Here is where they are, in the two rooms not connected to anything:
Click Here
(If you want to see a screenshot of the players, in the game, post that you do so, and I will upload it.)
What are they?!?!!!

That's not a question, bucko ;)

I have really not played tnt.wad alot (mostly plutonia).
But the player you is talking about, sound like a voodoo dull, made for kill the player, if you walk over some linedefs with a telefrag, or whatever...

Yeah, this isn't really a question as far as I can tell. Maybe the folks in the Editing forum can explain this a little better.

Now it's a question.

surely. that's what happens when you place a second player 1 start. how doom works is it will spawn the player (you) at the most recently placed player start and a carbon copy of you at all the other player starts corresponding to your player number. for simplicity's sake I'll only speak in terms on player 1 from now on.

alright, so the name for them that's been used through the years is voodoo doll. that's because essentially whatever happens to the extra player also happens to you. so if he gets hit by an imp fireball you will take damage for it, just like real voodoo! same goes for damage sectors like nukeage, slime etc.

on top of that voodoo dolls can pick up whatever the player can (health, ammo, powerups, weapons) and you will grab one. so if he gets pushed over a bfg by said imp fireball then all of a sudden you will have a bfg.

on top of that they can, like the player, also trigger linedefs. obviously they can't trigger any push or use lines, but getting pushed over a walkover line will have the same effect as if you were to walk over it yourself.

now here's where the weird stuff comes in. if you and the voodoo doll both get hurt on the same map by different sources then doom screws up and when your health gets to 0 but you don't die (I'm pretty sure that's how it works, someone feel free to correct me). you lose all your weapons and monsters will totally ignore you just as if you were dead, but you can still walk around and open doors and stuff.

for vanilla doom I dunno how useful they are, I can't recall ever using them when I made vanilla maps, but for boom they were exceptionally useful when placed in a dummy sector on a convayer. by having a raised floor in front of them lower when you hit a switch you could have them 'walk' over multiple lines and trigger many events (I actually invented that, believe it or not :P) at once all occuring seemingly with a single switch. pretty neat.

aside from that you could set up some weird tricks such as instant death stuff and many other funky things (for instance voodoos can telefrag stuff). check out cyberdreams for some creative uses of the voodoo doll in vanilla levels (it's in the doom2 megawads directory in /idgames).

That's what I thought, but it doesn't harm me when I shoot it, like voodoos usually do.

I've been wondering what would happen if you made one of these things dormant. I know dormant things can still be pushed around, but would it hurt if you or something else shot it?

Ichor said:

I've been wondering what would happen if you made one of these things dormant. I know dormant things can still be pushed around, but would it hurt if you or something else shot it?

You can make things dormant in regular Doom?!? How?

You can't in regular Doom. I was talking about ZDoom (and maybe Hexen).

Oh. BTW, why is my thread in Editing and Questions?

That link in Questions just redirects you to this one here.

Thanks. I'm going to close the one in questions.

nevermind. stoopidust thing i've ever done.

you can't make player 1 starts dormant in zdoom since they're not realy specific things, just a weird bug in doom (not corrected in any source ports for compatibility reasons). you can make the player unable to move with setplayerproperty(1, PROP_TOTALLYFROZEN) (or PROP_FROZEN which only disables their ability to move, but not look around with the mouse or fire weapons, jump etc) but he can still take damage.

also, if you have god (or invuln powerup) mode on then you can't hurt voodoo dolls except via telefragging (which will kill you hehe).

Cyb said:

so if he gets hit by an imp fireball you will take damage for it, just like real voodoo! same goes for damage sectors like nukeage, slime etc.

Nope - they don't get affected by damage sectors. (I tried that ages ago and it didn't work).

The only vanilla uses of them are for putting in open play as a kind of hazard (pretty cool if done correctly), for puzzles that involve pushing them around (like in my Heretic/ZDoom wads) and for vanilla timers (ie. sticking one under a crusher at a certain height and then setting it off)

Note that now (with 2.0.42) you can push them around with god mode on as well...

I've been wondering what would happen if you made one of these things dormant. I know dormant things can still be pushed around, but would it hurt if you or something else shot it?

You can't actually do anything to them that you can do to normal things - tagging, using thing specials on them etc. which is a shame cos it limits their use a little. (I tried using Thing_Destroy on them for the timers in LTSD and it didn't work, so I ended up telefragging them instead)

Ultimate DooMer said:

The only vanilla uses of them are for putting in open play as a kind of hazard (pretty cool if done correctly), for puzzles that involve pushing them around (like in my Heretic/ZDoom wads) and for vanilla timers (ie. sticking one under a crusher at a certain height and then setting it off)

You can have them collect things for the player (weapons, ammo and power-ups) by placing them in a sector that lowers so that they collect items that are next to them. There is no need to have the voodoo dolls visible to the player, or for the player to have to shoot them. This has been used quite a lot in some of the well-known megawads (Plutonia, AV and HR all feature it).

You can also rig it up so that a barrel explosion pushes the voodoo doll (without killing it) towards an item (or over a linedef, or onto a push switch, I presume). I've seen this used in some maps by the unflatteringly named Turdburglar.

Regarding zombies, from my experience, monsters do not ignore zombie players. You can see this for yourself in a demo I did recently for DSDA (it's called CaesZ040.lmp, and it's in a file called CaesP038.zip). [Yes, I know I pick up some health after becoming a zombie, but I was still being targeted while on 0% health.]

Can i have the screenshots of the ghosts?

Ichor said:

I've been wondering what would happen if you made one of these things dormant. I know dormant things can still be pushed around, but would it hurt if you or something else shot it?

Why would you need dummies in ZDoom? Anything that dummies do can be done with scripts.

I have used them in ZDoom to set off scripts that a monster activates so it will effect the player. For instance if a monster walks over a linedef which executes a script and you want that script to teleport the player, it won't work since it'll teleport the monster. So instead in a dummy sector either with a voodoo or the actual player (if it's a cut scene) lower a floor with the script the monster executes which allows the player (or voodoo) who is on a moving floor to cross another linedef with said script that teleports the player and does whatever else you need.

On top of that some of the older uses for voodoo dolls, ala in the secet map of ltsd, and in cyberdreams (and any other vanilla maps that use them in that way) can still be used.

Also you can't make the player dormant, not in the customary way you make monsters dormant anyway, and voodoo dolls are simply players, so that holds true for them. You could set their player property to totally frozen, but you can still take damage that way.

Nanami said:

Why would you need dummies in ZDoom? Anything that dummies do can be done with scripts.

...apart from using them as a means of instant death (ie. telefragging them) which cannot be stopped by cheats, powerups etc.

Ultimate DooMer said:

...apart from using them as a means of instant death (ie. telefragging them) which cannot be stopped by cheats, powerups etc.

Thing_Damage(0) or whatever causes instant death even if you have on god mode.