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Egg Boy

Teleporting monsters

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I was wondering how you guys make monsters teleport into the map. I always do this thing with the wall where walking over a line lowers a wall that is behind a mid texture so the monster can see you and walk over the teleport line, but this is inconsistent at best. I thought maybe I could make walking over the line reveal a dummy doom guy that the monsters would see and make walk over the tp line in a completely different sector. But I'm not sure how well this would work.

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If you look at how IWAD maps often do this - Doom E1M9 or Doom II MAP16, for example - you'll see that these maps use sound rather than sight as a trigger; there are unobtrusive 'sound channels' that allow the sound the player makes elsewhere in the map to carry into the 'waiting room' where the monsters to be teleported are placed, waking them up and setting them milling about.  Then, when the trap is sprung, a walk or switch linedef allows access to the teleporter(s) in the waiting room and the monsters starts to teleport in.

 

Another way to do this is to take advantage of the way two facts operate together:

  • sound propagates by sectors; and
  • a sector does not have to be contiguous.

I don't know if this is used anywhere in the IWADs or what your familiarity with various PWADs is; the first example of this I can find off the top of my head is RUINBROS.WAD MAP07.  Sector 0 there is non-contiguous, with parts of it in the map, player-accessible body of the map, and other parts of it in various waiting rooms elsewhere, otherwise completely disconnected from the map, no sound channels or anything.  But because of the way sound propagates, any sound that reaches sector 0 in the main part of the map is also heard by monsters in or connected to other parts of sector 0 elsewhere in the map.

 

(It doesn't have to be sector 0, that just happens to be what RUINBROS.WAD has used.)

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Good explanation from @TheOrganGrinder. All I'll add is that if you absolutely need enemies to teleport into the map, and you're using the sound method, the easiest way to make sure they wake up is including a mandatory shootable switch.

 

The example that always comes to mind is Scythe 2 Map16, "Mr. X", where you can't leave the starting room without shooting a switch through the window.

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I dont know what you know already or don't know, but to put it in then most basic way id say, you might need to know a few basic principles and use them all together.

 

First, you'll need to understand how a basic teleporter works. Check out Doom's E2M1: Deimos Anomaly or the final area of Doom 2's MAP04: The Focus.

 

Second, you'll need to understand how monsters move. You've probably noticed through playing that monsters will always move towards the direction of the player, even when there are walls or other obstacles in the way. They aren't very good at find the path towards the player on their own.

 

Third you'll need to understand how monster hearing works. Whenever the player fires a weapon (including swinging his fist or slashing the chainsaw) all monsters that are not blocked by doors or two sets of sound blocking lines will be alarmed by the attack.

 

The trick is essentially to make a room the player does not have access to and fill it with the monsters you want. Put a working teleport in the room closest to the direction the player will most likely be on the map, and surround the teleport with some sort of sector based obstacle such as a door or a raised floor so the monsters cannot use the teleport yet. Use a walkover linedef action at the location you want the player to set off the trap to remove the obstacle blocking the monsters. Finally, you'll want to allow the monsters to hear you. In the example E1M9 cited above, there's a miniature "sound tunnel" that the player can hardly see but sound still passes through, which enables the monsters to hear the doom marines attacks without physically seeing him. Though the more efficient approach is to simply join/merge the sector with some other sector on the map the monsters would hear gunfire from.

 

if you open the IWADs in the doom editor there's a lot of cool stuff in there that's useful to replicate, but dont edit it or save your wad file!

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48 minutes ago, 40oz said:

 

The trick is essentially to make a room the player does not have access to and fill it with the monsters you want. Put a working teleport in the room closest to the direction the player will most likely be on the map, and surround the teleport with some sort of sector based obstacle such as a door or a raised floor so the monsters cannot use the teleport yet. Use a walkover linedef action at the location you want the player to set off the trap to remove the obstacle blocking the monsters. Finally, you'll want to allow the monsters to hear you. In the example E1M9 cited above, there's a miniature "sound tunnel" that the player can hardly see but sound still passes through, which enables the monsters to hear the doom marines attacks without physically seeing him. Though the more efficient approach is to simply join/merge the sector with some other sector on the map the monsters would hear gunfire from.

 

This is basically what I already do, but I'm looking for ways to make teleport traps that happen upon picking up a key or flipping a switch. One solution I saw was scythe 2's map01 where I assume after you fire at the first few enemies in the map the monsters are awoken, but they're on a raised floor, which when lowered (triggered when walking over line defs surrounding a shotgun) the already awoken monsters walk over the line def that teleports them. But this is dependent on whether the player fires or not, meaning in a pacifist run this trap will never happen.

(forgot to mention that I would prefer to have the teleport sectors to be far away from the trap in case I need that space).

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12 minutes ago, Lo_Mein said:

But this is dependent on whether the player fires or not, meaning in a pacifist run this trap will never happen.

(forgot to mention that I would prefer to have the teleport sectors to be far away from the trap in case I need that space).

Question --^  Answer --v

On 7/6/2017 at 9:58 AM, Ryath said:

the easiest way to make sure they wake up is including a mandatory shootable switch.

 

The example that always comes to mind is Scythe 2 Map16, "Mr. X", where you can't leave the starting room without shooting a switch through the window.

The monsters can hear you from any distance, as long as there is an uninterrupted path., so you can have the teleport sectors as far away as you want.

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Yes, that is one of the caveats of the trick. As far as getting the player to shoot, there's an arbitrary method of putting a door in front of the player that is activated by shooting it (like the one in the start room of Doom 2 MAP18: The Courtyard)

 

I prefer a more subtle approach by using monsters like Chaingunners or Pain Elementals that can be a major hazard to the player if he doesn't kill them right away.

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17 minutes ago, Empyre said:

Question --^  Answer --v

The monsters can hear you from any distance, as long as there is an uninterrupted path., so you can have the teleport sectors as far away as you want.

I suppose I'm just being overly difficult, but I'm not interested in having mandatory shootable switches. I guess I'll have to keep doing it the way I've been until I find something that suits me. Thanks for the tips, guys!

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If you map in boom format you can simply scroll a monster on a teleporting linedef. If you arrange the teleport destination thing towards where the player is going to be when the teleport happens, you also get the sounds monsters do when they "wake up".

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14 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

If you map in boom format you can simply scroll a monster on a teleporting linedef. If you arrange the teleport destination thing towards where the player is going to be when the teleport happens, you also get the sounds monsters do when they "wake up".

Hey! That could work!

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Assuming you are using zdoom you can use map spots and thing spawn. It can be triggered with either linedefs, other actors or via script.

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6 minutes ago, hardcore_gamer said:

Assuming you are using zdoom you can use map spots and thing spawn. It can be triggered with either linedefs, other actors or via script.

I'm using boom. I'm trying to avoid zdoom mapping because not everyone likes to use it (I personally like to use GZDoom, but I don't map with its features in mind).

Also, in other news, I found something that works! Check this out, thanks for the suggestion nine inch heels!

Spoiler

pic.png.aa5a9c539bc6074ebeac29cd41eb2e89.png

The monster closet has a scrolling floor, however the sector in front of them has a ceiling just low enough that they can't pass under it. When the player walks over that line, the ceiling raises and the monsters cross the line that teleports them into their respective sectors.

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58 minutes ago, Lo_Mein said:

Hey! That could work!

I can tell you for a fact that it does work. The problem this method has is that it doesn't work well for higher quantities of monsters or it gets tedious to set up. So if you want some actual brawls to happen, you would need to warp some monsters in by scrolling them to then force the player to shoot, and follow it up with "traditional" teleport batteries to keep the heat up.

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Another issue with conveyors is that if the teleport location is blocked when the monster first passes over the line, they'll never get a second chance to cross it unless you do something really funky like silent teleport them back to the start of the conveyor closet if they miss their first teleport line.

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^ This is why it's always good practice to have a "back-up" system in place when using conveyor-based deployment. There are many ways to back-up a belt system, including more teleports and/or more belts attached to the first leading to different teleport-places. My recommendation though would be to use Doom's sound system to your advantage. Conveyors require sector movement anyway; might as well use that sector movement to open a sound tunnel. No early deployment, no trapped monsters :)

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Another way around. If you're doing boom format map, just simply made a monster floor trap thingy :D 

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My method is rather simple and works in all formats (I think) Your teleport 'cages' are sharing the same sector as the first sector the player will be FORCED to shoot in. which will wake up all the monsters. The teleport linedefs are behind a wall that the monsters cannot access right away. Once the player goes over a certain linedef, or hits a certain switch, the wall will lower and the monsters will be able to access the teleport.

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28 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

My method is rather simple and works in all formats (I think) Your teleport 'cages' are sharing the same sector as the first sector the player will be FORCED to shoot in. which will wake up all the monsters. The teleport linedefs are behind a wall that the monsters cannot access right away. Once the player goes over a certain linedef, or hits a certain switch, the wall will lower and the monsters will be able to access the teleport.

Yes, it works in all formats. And there's many ways of doing some teleport madness with monsters via common actions or scripts :).

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43 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

My method is rather simple and works in all formats (I think) Your teleport 'cages' are sharing the same sector as the first sector the player will be FORCED to shoot in.

Not to be rude, but the experiment zero maps I have seen from you so far could all be done pacifist if it wasn't for the fact that you force players to kill certain monsters, because you have them hooked to kill switches in map 03. I'm not sure about the other maps, but m03 is where I've seen you use a "deadman's switch" for the first time.

EDIT: Thinking about it, I'm not sure about it being a deadman's switch in map03 of your WIP, could also be a timer, but it looks more like the former to me rather than the latter.

 

Also, your method "breaks", if the player gets past a certain section without shooting, when there's something that blocks sound to the sector in question, like a closed door, for example. So technically, players who know how your setup works can sneak past a certain point without shooting, to then mow down whatever comes their way, while still not "triggering" your teleport traps, because things didn't wake up.

 

At that point, you will need for your teleport batteries to have "ears" on several locations throughout your map to make sure the odds of waking monsters up in time are as high as possible, which then is not so simple anymore, because your batteries need more and more "ears" to function as you want them to. What's more is that this method makes the use of sound blocking linedefs potentially more difficult, because there's a possibility that your map design kind of gets in its own way at some point.

 

Another point that is to be considered about having everything "awake" from the get-go is that the more things you have waiting to teleport in the more it will stress the engine, which consequentially implies that this method is best suited for low to medium monster counts, while it can become an issue for higher quantities.

Edited by Nine Inch Heels

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27 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

My method is rather simple and works in all formats (I think) Your teleport 'cages' are sharing the same sector as the first sector the player will be FORCED to shoot in. which will wake up all the monsters. The teleport linedefs are behind a wall that the monsters cannot access right away. Once the player goes over a certain linedef, or hits a certain switch, the wall will lower and the monsters will be able to access the teleport.

No, my cages don't share the same sector. I was looking for a way to trigger teleportation without having to shoot. The conveyor belt method works perfectly. But I've seen your strategy. I found it in Scythe 2 on map01, actually! The map forces you to shoot a door that leads to a shotgun, line defs surrounding the shotgun make the floor in the demon cage lower to the nearest floor, where after walking over a line def, they teleport to a certain sector. Like I said, I wanted to do this without forcing the player to shoot, and I found a solution. But your way is just as valid as mine, I was just looking for a different means to attain the same effect.

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21 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

I can tell you for a fact that it does work. The problem this method has is that it doesn't work well for higher quantities of monsters or it gets tedious to set up. So if you want some actual brawls to happen, you would need to warp some monsters in by scrolling them to then force the player to shoot, and follow it up with "traditional" teleport batteries to keep the heat up.

Yeah, if you see my post right before the one you made, you can see I got it working! Thank you so much for solving my problem! But I do understand that you might need to follow it up with more teleports. Thank you for the tips, you've been extremely helpful in this thread.

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Re: using sound blocking lines to allow monster closets to hear the player throughout the level: as long as you use exactly 1 sound-blocking line between each of the joined sectors/sound tunnels and the monster closet, the monsters within the closet will be able to hear the player anywhere where sound is connected, while monsters in other parts of the level will still not be able to hear the player fire in earlier parts. However this of course still runs the risk of pacifist trolls ;D Gotta make players shoot somehow... pressure is the most inconspicuous way to accomplish this but the ole barrel-wall or shootable switch technically does the job too.

 

This situation is something to consider whenever placing monsters outside of the map area that the player can access. Mechanics break; always have a solid back-up. What's true of mice and men... 

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1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Not to be rude, but the experiment zero maps I have seen from you so far could all be done pacifist if it wasn't for the fact that you force players to kill certain monsters, because you have them hooked to kill switches in map 03. I'm not sure about the other maps, but m03 is where I've seen you use a "deadman's switch" for the first time.

EDIT: Thinking about it, I'm not sure about it being a deadman's switch in map03 of your WIP, could also be a timer, but it looks more like the former to me rather than the latter.

 

Also, your method "breaks", if the player gets past a certain section without shooting, when there's something that blocks sound to the sector in question, like a closed door, for example. So technically, players who know how your setup works can sneak past a certain point without shooting, to then mow down whatever comes their way, while still not "triggering" your teleport traps, because things didn't wake up.

 

At that point, you will need for your teleport batteries to have "ears" on several locations throughout your map to make sure the odds of waking monsters up in time are as high as possible, which then is not so simple anymore, because your batteries need more and more "ears" to function as you want them to. What's more is that this method makes the use of sound blocking linedefs potentially more difficult, because there's a possibility that your map design kind of gets in its own way at some point.

 

Another point that is to be considered about having everything "awake" from the get-go is that the more things you have waiting to teleport in the more it will stress the engine, which consequentially implies that this method is best suited for low to medium monster counts, while it can become an issue for higher quantities.

It's not a deadmans switch, if you're refering to the area with the first two cybruisers its set to a 30 second delay on the door. And you aren't being rude, you're being honest which I can respect. I'd be interested to see a pacifist run of my maps.

 

And yes, if you're going to get past an area without shooting then it doesnt work. But you could always set it up like...map07 of Valiant, Mancubian candidate, where you have to shoot a switch in order to start the level.

 

@Lo_Mein I'm glad you got it to work!

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31 minutes ago, Phade102 said:

But you could always set it up like...map07 of Valiant, Mancubian candidate, where you have to shoot a switch in order to start the level.

Yeah this is pretty much what Fonze already adressed. It is a foolproof way of doing things for sure, at the same time it's not very "elegant". Imagine starting all maps of a set with a shoot-switch, just because. At some point I'm sure people may find that annoying, for single maps it's probably much less of an issue though.

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Just now, Nine Inch Heels said:

Yeah this is pretty much what Fonze already adressed. It is a foolproof way of doing things for sure, at the same time it's not very "elegant". Imagine starting all maps of a set with a shoot-switch, just because. At some point I'm sure people may find that annoying, for single maps it's probably much less of an issue though.

Agreed, absolutely. It wouldn't take long to realize the exact reason that you're shooting that switch. I prefer to be more discreet.

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On 7/7/2017 at 9:52 PM, Lo_Mein said:

I suppose I'm just being overly difficult, but I'm not interested in having mandatory shootable switches. I guess I'll have to keep doing it the way I've been until I find something that suits me. Thanks for the tips, guys!

Shootable switches usually suck, yeah. You can have a normal switch and put a Chaingunner in front of it with monster blocking lines to keep him there. If you make sure the player cannot somehow activate the switch from his sides or something weird like that, then you are set to go. Make sure the player cannot bring other monsters into the room to kill the Chaingunner with infighting.

 

A normal player that doesn't try to abuse the map will just shoot the Chaingunner and activate the switch.

 

I guess you can use barrels that the player has to shoot to clear the way, just make sure he can't use monsters to destroy the barrels. The good thing is that even the fists make sound, heh.

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