Pain elementals

Is it possible to trap a pain elemental but allow the lost souls to escape? So that the player can fight the lost souls but not see the pain elemental.

You could possibly pen the PE in like so:

.._____..
.|     |.      _
 |  PE |----->|_|LS
.|_____|.     
..     ..

It wouldn't be able to move, but it could still produce Lost Souls due to them having a smaller radius. You could probably do something similar with floor and ceiling heights as well.

From tests I've done it's doable, but it never works as well as I'd like it to. The PE needs a large enough space that the lost souls can get out without a hurry, and still needs to be able to see the player most of the time so that he actually shoots them. Using a height barrier works much better than walls, but it's still not great. (Or so I recall, but a quick check on doomwiki says the two are the same height??)

The best thing I can think of for an infinite lost-soul generator would be some elaborate setup whereby another monster hurts the PE (or a group of them) somewhere out of view, and teleporters are rigged so that the lost souls teleport to where the player is but can't affect the PEs or antagonizing monster.

This just occured to me right now: I think if a teleport destination is not high or wide enough, a monster won't teleport? So you could arrange a bunch of teleporters into spaces that are big enough for a lost soul but not a pain elemental. That way the PE doesn't have to be too restricted.

EDIT: can't get that to work. Hmph.

The diameter of a pain elemental is 62. The diameter of a lost soul is 32. That's quite a big difference. Just cage the PE and make there a horizontal gap 60 or 61 units wide, into which he will spit his lost souls but can't pass through it himself.

The only problem you need to solve there is to make him actually spit in the desired place. Which may require to keep the player in quite a very specific position, or to have the cage with PE very far in a distance.

You can help yourself with some teleports, which would transfer the lost souls to the player, while pain elemental stays safe in his (hidden) cage somewhere far.

PEs can actually spit lost souls through impassible lines. It's not something I intended, but they occasionally do this in Fatsmack! and the lost souls work their way into the outdoor section of the map.

Yeah, lost souls can even be thrown out of the level's bounds, but it's rare. And it is only likely to happen when a pain elemental is killed near a wall, not sure if it can happen with his normal spit attack too. I once saw it in some video a long time ago, and also experienced it myself while fooling around Doom 2 MAP30 for a long time. I mean, I found a lost soul out of bounds there.

I've never seen one get spit into the void, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. In the PlayStation version (on the real deal or emulator, not the TC), you can actually see Lost Souls trapped in the void, the game renders them right through the walls.

scifista42 said:

Yeah, lost souls can even be thrown out of the level's bounds, but it's rare.

In the Playstation port; I found it to be quite common at times. I think the pain elemental should at least be destroyable in this map you're working on (maybe later on you telefrag him and you can move forward onto a teleporting linedef perhaps?), as some people might be annoyed by not being able to obtain 100% kills.

You can place a pain elemental in a cage, and if it shoots right from next to the cage, the lost souls will escape on the other side. But beware of ports which implement MBF changes (PrBoom+, Eternity). If the wrong setting is enabled, it won't work (it's there to prevent the lost-souls-spawned-out-of-map-when-elemental-dies bug).

I used this concept in Hell Bent E1, MAP01, using the trap the PE but leave space for lost souls method. It works but not as well as I thought because PE needs to see player

I goofed around with trying this, but decided that since lost souls don't count towards kill counts anyway it was just easier to throw a couple hundred of em in a closet and let them slowly tele out. I suppose you lose out on the visceral satisfaction of stopping the flow by killing a PE eventually instead of closing off tele lines or crushing the closet or something, but ohwell.

I guess this was the intention in MAP28: the Spirit World; there's a part where there are two pain elementals in a cage near the Spidermastermind vs. Arachnatrons part, but they successfully spit out a soul outside the cage one out of every eight times or so. After seeing that I assumed it wasn't easy to do.

I haven't played around with it much, but it could be a useful thing if it could be perfected.

The lost soul and Pain Elementals have different heights right? Maybe you could simply put it in a pillbox-like thing and have it shoot lost souls out the window. You could even use transfer heights and a middle texture to give the illusion that you did it with impassible lines. I haven't tested this hypothesis but it might be worth trying.

You'll be better off making a "new" pain elemental with a speed of 0. You can do this in dehacked if you want compatibility with most ports. If you also want pain elementals that do move around normally, use as a base something else (like the dead lost soul object or one of the redundant marine corpses).

That's actually a really good idea. Plus you don't have to mark them as counting towards the kill percentage, so you don't have to dispose of them. Hmm...

*Brain bubbles away merrily*

I wonder how the gameplay would be if the pain elementals learned that they don't need to see the player in order to shoot, so they shoot all the time instead.

Have a look at Doom2 Map28 to see trapped PE's firing Lost Souls at the player.

In Vanilla Doom, a quirk allows Lost Souls from PE's to be fired through impassible and monster can't cross lines. However Boom (and as a result Boom compatible ports) 'corrected' this behaviour.

Vermil said:

Have a look at Doom2 Map28 to see trapped PE's firing Lost Souls at the player.

In Vanilla Doom, a quirk allows Lost Souls from PE's to be fired through impassible and monster can't cross lines. However Boom (and as a result Boom compatible ports) 'corrected' this behaviour.

At least you can turn it off, though.

This was actually done in Map 28 of Doom 2...

printz said:

I wonder how the gameplay would be if the pain elementals learned that they don't need to see the player in order to shoot, so they shoot all the time instead.

Heh, I did this in an old mod ages ago. The results are catastrophically awesome. :P

With, or without the 21 souls limit?

Anyway, if they fire all the time, even before seeing the player, chances are they'd stay in the same place, sitting at the same angle. So they'd shoot their lost souls into other lost souls they already shot... And there'd be constant infight among the souls, which could be potentially harmful to the pain elementals themselves (they could take damage from an errant charging lost soul that missed its target).

By the time the player reaches the encounter zone, what was supposed to be a fight against a PE might turn out into a fight against 2 or 3 weakened lost souls.