weirdest monster behaviour you have seen ?

Well, i hope i am not the only one to have seen some realy odd random monster behaviour at times. Sometimes so weird it becomes creepy because it seems to go against doom logic. If so, please share.

1. Today i was playing doom shareware 1.1 in dosbox just to experience the original shareware again. I was standing on a high ledge with an elevator on the other side. A shotgun guy moans and simply walks a few meters towards the elevator while not shooting me, lowers it, steps onto the elevator and started to wait. By the time the elevator was going to start i walked down and turned towards the shotgun guy to look at this weird dude acting all smart. He just stood there on the elevator. he did not moan but turned towards me on the elevator, so i shot him.

2. A former human sees me, turns around and walks towards a closed door. Opens the door and returns with a team of enemies to then open fire.

These random anomalies always create an odd atmosphere in this game.

Some behaviors get weird sometimes, but most of the time funny; like when monsters trail away from you when you're close to a wall, and they'll keep going quite a ways. Doesn't happen often, but when it does it's great. Becomes target practice at that point.

FireFish said:

These random anomalies always create an odd atmosphere in this game.

Did you know that monster behaviour is absolutely predictable? Linguica posted an easy to understand diagram of enemy logic here: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1342123

The weirdest behaviour I know is monsters sometimes getting stuck in doors (even locked doors) for no apparent reason - they would move through, but they just stay, infinitely trying to open a door which is already open, or which cannot be opened because it's locked. Or monsters in ZDoom maps who casually walk onto an elaborate sloped floor and become stuck. Both issues are results of bugs.

It was that one encounter with lone revenant who moonwalked around making MJ voices before noticing me

I remember this one time a Cacodemon took a shit on an Imp while an Arch-vile stood in the distance and masturbated furiously. I was never able to trigger that specific behavior again.

Technician said:

I remember this one time a Cacodemon took a shit on an Imp while an Arch-vile stood in the distance and masturbated furiously. I was never able to trigger that specific behavior again.

...

scifista42 said:

Did you know that monster behaviour is absolutely predictable? Linguica posted an easy to understand diagram of enemy logic here: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1342123

And yet you will not be able to predict the monsters at all tmes, you will be able to experience odd moments against what you should see.

Nothing is perfect, and the way they work i would not be surprised for them to end up in restricted pseudo random events, like that shotgun guy on the elevator.

I think that any monster behavior other than attacking the player on sight would count as "weird". Even when monsters infight it looks weird, especially when they have to pursue their target and simply walk about ignoring you.

scifista42 said:

http://i.imgur.com/CwcDU0D.gif

ewwwwww man

There are some maps where the monsters unlock doors for you, like this one for example:
http://doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom2/d-f/distrib.zip

Maes said:
> infighting

It's like the boss monsters can't even keep them under control. No discipline in the ranks...

I think this was quite cool.
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/attachment.php?postid=1344545

Looper said:

I think this was quite cool.
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/attachment.php?postid=1344545

What exactly?

scifista42 said:

What exactly?

Soldier opens a door in a speedrunning attempt. I can tell you, it doesn't happen very often, not with this door. The soldier has to back for a quite long way before he reaches the door. Usually that only happens in tight corridors or along a wall.

I wouldn't notice it if you didn't tell me, but I see, it's clear now. Congrats on... getting it to happen. :)

Waffenak said:

It was that one encounter with lone revenant who moonwalked around making MJ voices before noticing me

Don't you joke about monsters moonwalking.

This glorious moment is from Andy Olivera's TZ24-ARO.LMP which you can find in this collection. -skipsec 255 if you want to see it in the demo.

Absolutely bizarre. What causes something like that exactly?

When playing online, the desyncs between player and server can cause some VERY weird side effects, such as corpses sliding on the ground - your end thinks the monster died, but it isn't dead on the server end. Sometimes a monster will appear to be running in place, sometimes a monster will play the idle animation while moving, sometimes dead monsters still appear to be alive, but are just ghosts.. All because of lag!

In single player, the weirdest thing is getting flung away by enemies when you touch them, but that's just the collision detection, not behavior.

Ghosts.

Never experienced until "Alien Vendetta" map 13 "Suicidal Tendencies", when grabbing yellow keycard. When leaving yellow key area lots of archviles spawn and start resurrecting dead baddies. There's so many dead baddies it overloads the game engine and the resurrected baddies become invincible and walk through walls. Makes it harder. This happened with chocolate-doom and "Doom 2" compatibility switches.

scifista42 said:

Did you know that monster behaviour is absolutely predictable? Linguica posted an easy to understand diagram of enemy logic here: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1342123

The diagram actually shows it can be unpredictable. Looking at the horizontal distance (towards right of graph) shows a monster can choose either 4/5 or 1/5 move completely randomly.

Holering said:

Ghosts.

Yeah those are really freaky. First saw them here:
http://doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom2/v-z/wtrfront.zip
And then later in one of the Icarus maps.

There sure was a lot of mystery about the game back in those days. I remember playing this map co-op on home LAN and everyone wondering wtf is going on. Good times!

Holering said:

The diagram actually shows it can be unpredictable. Looking at the horizontal distance (towards right of graph) shows a monster can choose either 4/5 or 1/5 move completely randomly.

You do realize that there no such thing as "completely randomly" in Doom, right? The RNG itself is highly predictable, like a dice with prefixed outcomes. In short, if a behavior can be reproduced in a demo, it's NOT unpredictable. Sure, there's a 4/5 and 1/5 chance at one point, but even the outcome of that choice is predictable.

There are a few freak cases where behavior isn't readibly reproducible because of overflows and different memory content between different machines even in vanilla Doom, but those are few and far between, and not what we're talking about here.

I have seen a baron claw itself to death.

When you shoot upwards on a ledge and the enemy/barrel flies toward you, off the ledge instead of back.

It's not weird if it's intended behaviour, Du Mhan Yhu. If you're below an enemy when it gets killed, it has a random chance of being thrown backwards to emulate the "enemy falls over railing when shot" movie effect.

Caught an Arch-Vile jerking a Revenant once, but the Rev's bones had no beat, so an actual boner didn't ex... Wait, someone made a sex joke already?

Maes said:

The RNG itself is highly predictable, like a dice with prefixed outcomes. In short, if a behavior can be reproduced in a demo, it's NOT unpredictable. Sure, there's a 4/5 and 1/5 chance at one point, but even the outcome of that choice is predictable.

"Would the move succeed AND not result in doing a U-turn?". Okay.

Holering said:

"Would the move succeed AND not result in doing a U-turn?". Okay.

This condition, formulated like that, does not contain anything random requiring the use of the RNG, it's purely a geometric condition which occurs many times in the movement logic, so again, nothing unpredictble here. The 4/5 - 1/5 condition only occurs after a very specific sequence of events, and it does rely on the (predictable) RNG.

Edward850 said:

It's not weird if it's intended behaviour, Du Mhan Yhu. If you're below an enemy when it gets killed, it has a random chance of being thrown backwards to emulate the "enemy falls over railing when shot" movie effect.

I have learned something new today.

The best is that even barrels will randomly throw themselves forward off a ledge for some reason.

That's because barrels occupy a little explored, liminal niche in Doom's bestiary, halfway between decorations and monsters. It can get pretty lonely there sometimes.