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HenKonen

Methods to making underwater only monsters?

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I haven't stumbled onto a mechanism in the decorate scripts that would force an actor to remain only in underwater sectors and below the fake floors in fake underwater sectors.

I'm aiming to create more intimidating underwater sections to my maps, and it would be a nice touch to re-script some flying monsters into tough, hard-to-beat swimming monsters that would make one less willing to fight and more willing to escape the dark and grim water tunnels in which the creatures dwell.

Anyone else thought of this?

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Reminds me of the Sharkmen in Blood. I haven't played ZBlood, but it might also have the information you seek as well.

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glenzinho said:

There is a monster which is only found in water areas and doesn't leave the water. If you look at how the author has done it you may be able to figure it out.


There is no such thing as a monster that must stay underwater. The monster movement logic is not capable of handling this reliably. It's probably just some trickery with the map setup that prevents it from leaving the water.

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I believe Glenzinho was referring to HeXen's Stalkers, which feature in Temple of the Lizard Men 2.

For the uninformed, HeXen's Stalker uses a mob flag that keeps it to certain sectors; this is how it is confined to liquid pools in HeXen and also Temple of Lizard Men 2.

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What about putting Monster Block lines around the shoreline between land and entering water to keep them in the water?

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Vermil said:

I believe Glenzinho was referring to HeXen's Stalkers, which feature in Temple of the Lizard Men 2.

For the uninformed, HeXen's Stalker uses a mob flag that keeps it to certain sectors; this is how it is confined to liquid pools in HeXen and also Temple of Lizard Men 2.



What's more - in its submerged state it's merely an invisible sprite.

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If you are using Decorate, you can use A_JumpIf combined with waterlevel. So if the monster is on the surface or above, it will jump to a state where it is thrust downwards into the water again. This is not fullproof though.

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Graf Zahl said:

There is no such thing as a monster that must stay underwater. The monster movement logic is not capable of handling this reliably. It's probably just some trickery with the map setup that prevents it from leaving the water.

Floating monsters can't be given a height limit? The up and down style motion used by Strife floaters is very similar to what would be needed to bound the motion of a monster underneath (or possibly even over) a fake 242 plane. You'd probably want to set the threshold of upper (or lower) motion a bit below/above the plane in question, I think, so that its momentum would not carry it past the surface - unless the ability to slightly break the surface is desirable, in which case make it a flag?

I've done some thought about this before, I guess you can tell. Once EE has water zones I had intended to give it a try.

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I've thought about that as well. ZDoom already has a way to detect whether something gets out of water -- the UpdateWaterLevel function. From there it's a question of testing the new position, checking if UpdateWaterLevel says it's now less than the desired value (1, 2 or 3 depending on the actor flag I suppose), and if so aborting the movement.

Sure, it might glitch in some circumstances, but a lot less than when that actor logic is implemented with A_JumpIf(waterlevel) actor checks and Thing_ThrustZ calls.

I'd like to have, eventually, a deep water version of the Hexen stalkers. :)

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I've always wondered this myself, thought it would be cool to have a "Rotfish" type creature.

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Avoozl said:

I'd like to see the Dopefish in Doom as a water monster.


Any sprite artists there, this is your chance to greatness!

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Mr. Chris said:

What about putting Monster Block lines around the shoreline between land and entering water to keep them in the water?


The problem with that though, is underwater monsters have to have the +NOGRAVITY & +FLOAT flags to give them the illusion of being suspended in water, so there's still nothing essentially keeping them from rising up above the waterline.

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