Vanilla crusher that doesn't squish corpses

Any thoughts on how to implement a crusher in vanilla that doesn't go low enough to crush the corpses, so that Arch-Viles don't resurrect the corpses as ghosts? You could do it in Boom with voodoo scripting and generic ceilings, but I think Boom fixes this bug anyhow? (PrBoom+ at least has an option to disable it.) The only option I can think of is just to make sure all the AVs get killed on the first crush.

Question inspired by trying to play D2RELOAD's MAP09 in Crispy Doom, it's kind of impossible from pistol start if you contain the invasion in time. (edit: not impossible if you kill the viles first.. but anyhow the question still stands.)

I don't think you can do anything to prevent crushers from crushing corpses into gibs in vanilla. But I think you can modify the pool of gibs state in DEHACKED to make it loop itself with a positive duration instead of ending up with duration -1, then the Archvile should be unable to resurrect them.

You could make a dehacked patch that would prevent arch-viles from resurrecting crushed objects.

Arch-viles only resurrect corpses whose animation has stopped. Crushing something results in its state being switched to 895. State 895 has -1 duration, meaning it's the end of the line. Change it to anything else (except 0) and loop the state on itself - it will result in the corpse being perpetually animated, even though the player won't see any difference.

plums said:

Question inspired by trying to play D2RELOAD's MAP09 in Crispy Doom, it's kind of impossible from pistol start if you contain the invasion in time.

Isn't that the map that's supposed to be played in "stealth mode"?

Huh, interesting solution, I like it. Thanks. I might even add that to my autoload stuff to just never worry about ghosts again.

MAP18 is the stealth one. MAP09 is where you're on a timer to re-route an invasion of enemies into a containment area. If you don't navigate the map and hit the right switches in time, enemies start teleporting in all over the place. If you do re-route the invasion, they instead all teleport into a large area where you can activate a crusher to kill them all. Except if you start the crusher too early, AVs will resurrect a whole lot of ghosts and then you're pretty much done for.