Whats the deal with the "Lost Soul Corpse"?

Among the entity list in DOOM there is an invisible entity of a "Lost Soul Corpse". Why is it there? What is it's purpose? Does it even appear in any original DOOM map?

Lost souls used to be shooters in early builds. Guess they got a thing for corpse at early stage.

It's also convenient to use as a marker, because they disappear at the start (Though you'll see an explosion if looking at them)

It can be put in any DOOM map editor, but doing so will cause the last few frames of it's death animation to play before disappearing. You can only see it if it's placed near the player starts, but placing it outside the player starts means you can't be able to see it.

My theory is that when id Software changed the Lost Soul behavior & design during the late stages of development, they broke the coding of the "Dead Lost Soul" decoration in the final version of DOOM.

It's unclear which unleaked build of DOOM they broke the coding of the Lost Soul corpse, but my guesses are a build between the Press Release Beta build and the build featured in the "A Visit to id Software" video or a build between the build featured in the "A Visit to id Software" video and DOOM Shareware 0.99 (or 1.0 to be exact), which is why you see this strange visual glitch. Pretty useless & sloppy don't you think.

So, practically - they have no purpose in the base game, it's just a leftover from an early version of the game. If one were to mess with this entity in DeHackEd - would it cause any problems?

Also, there are two "Bloody Mess" decorations that use the same sprite of the Doomguy Gibbing for some similar odd reason, not sure what id Software planned with the other "Bloody Mess" decoration, but my guess was likely those unused Doomguy death sprites that were released by John Romero back in 2015. Here's an image of the Doomguy sprites taken from The Spriters Resource to give you an idea, with the yellow box indicating unused sprites:

From Doomwiki:

Quote

There exists a thing type in the final version of the game, named MT_MISC65 (called "Dead Lost Soul" in DeHackEd), which produces the last few death frames of the lost soul. This dead lost soul was evidently left over from earlier versions of the game where the monster did leave a corpse, such as in the press release beta. This thing would have served the same function as the other decorative corpses (the imp and the zombieman corpses, for example). Some early mappers used dead lost soul things to crash the Doom executable when the shareware version allowed the use of PWADs, to encourage people to buy the game. This technique is also used by the map generator SLIGE.

Doom press release beta has diffent lost soul appearance and it leaves corpse when it dies. Maybe it's remanant from that.

1 hour ago, Ar_e_en said:

So, practically - they have no purpose in the base game, it's just a leftover from an early version of the game. If one were to mess with this entity in DeHackEd - would it cause any problems?

Not for the most part, although ZDoom defines this actor as inheriting from the lost soul for some reason, so if you turn it into a monster (or anything else that calls A_Chase), it will use the lost soul's charge attack unless another missile attack is specified.

1 hour ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Here's an image of the Doomguy sprites taken from The Spriters Resource to give you an idea, with the yellow box indicating unused sprites:

I've known about the unused split death for a while, but I haven't seen the headless death! That is neat.

9 minutes ago, Scypek2 said:

Not for the most part, although ZDoom defines this actor as inheriting from the lost soul for some reason

This makes sense. The original Dead Lost Soul literally just reuses frames from the real Lost Soul's death animation much like in the DECORATE/ZScript implementation.

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so if you turn it into a monster (or anything else that calls A_Chase), it will use the lost soul's charge attack unless another missile attack is specified.

Since the Dead Lost Soul has no missile or melee attack states defined by default, it's pretty much guaranteed that a custom monster in its place will specify a new one, so this should never pop up as an issue in ZDoom ports.

15 minutes ago, Scypek2 said:

I've known about the unused split death for a while, but I haven't seen the headless death! That is neat.

I'm referring to the two Bloody Mess decorations when talking about the unused Doomguy death sprites.

It's unused. There are two unused player gibbing frames as well, 892 and 893, which probably would have been used for the duplicate "Guts and bones" decoration. Thankfully these can be used as extra thing slots in DEHACKED patches with no detriment!

6 minutes ago, maxmanium said:

It's unused. There are two unused player gibbing frames as well, 892 and 893, which probably would have been used for the duplicate "Guts and bones" decoration. Thankfully these can be used as extra thing slots in DEHACKED patches with no detriment!

Yeah, those 2 identical gibbed player corpses were pretty weird too. 

50 minutes ago, TheMightyHeracross said:

Since the Dead Lost Soul has no missile or melee attack states defined by default, it's pretty much guaranteed that a custom monster in its place will specify a new one, so this should never pop up as an issue in ZDoom ports.

It will be an issue if you want a melee-only monster. An extremely specific issue, but an issue nonetheless.

Who knows what kinds of extremely niche dehacked problems I have yet to discover.

28 minutes ago, Scypek2 said:

 

It will be an issue if you want a melee-only monster. An extremely specific issue, but an issue nonetheless.

 

Who knows what kinds of extremely niche dehacked problems I have yet to discover.

I hadn't thought about that, so out of curiosity I whipped up a Dehacked patch which replaces the dead Lost Soul with a replica of the Pinky demon. Even with no overriding "Far attack frame" defined in the patch, the demon does not attempt to use the Lost Soul's attack frames. Open ZDoom and summon "DeadLostSoul" to see for yourself.

Patch File for DeHackEd v3.0
Patch format = 6
Doom version = 19

Thing 116 (Dead Lost Soul)
Speed = 10
Width = 1966080
Height = 3670016
Pain chance = 180
Mass = 400
Bits = 4194310
Initial frame = 475
First moving frame = 477
Injury frame = 488
Close attack frame = 485
Death frame = 490
Respawn frame = 496
Alert sound = 41
Attack sound = 52
Pain sound = 26
Death sound = 64

On closer inspection, ZDoom's dead Lost Soul actually reinitializes the actor using the Skip_Super keyword, so the dead Lost Soul does not actually inherit the real Lost Soul's states at all. So fear not, you can use the dead Lost Soul in Dehacked patches as you please without worrying about ZDoom compatibility issues.

ACTOR DeadLostSoul : LostSoul
{
  Skip_Super //No Lost Soul attack or chase frames
  States
  {
  Spawn:
    Goto Super::Death+5
  }
}

3 hours ago, Ar_e_en said:

So, practically - they have no purpose in the base game, it's just a leftover from an early version of the game. If one were to mess with this entity in DeHackEd - would it cause any problems?

1 hour ago, Scypek2 said:

 

It will be an issue if you want a melee-only monster. An extremely specific issue, but an issue nonetheless.

 

Who knows what kinds of extremely niche dehacked problems I have yet to discover.

The only potential issue with replacing the dead lost soul sprite with something else is that every time you a lost soul, that thing will pop up.

I think I recall @Aurelius saying that he replaced the dead lost soul with a tree, and it worked great, except that every time he killed a lost soul, a tree would pop up and slide backward across the map. If I'm misremembering this, hopefully Aurelius will correct the record. While there are potentially narrative ideas in the killing of lost soul producing other things, that's the only issue I think you would have to be careful about.

4 minutes ago, Pegleg said:

I think I recall @Aurelius saying that he replaced the dead lost soul with a tree, and it worked great, except that every time he killed a lost soul, a tree would pop up and slide backward across the map. If I'm misremembering this, hopefully Aurelius will correct the record. While there are potentially narrative ideas in the killing of lost soul producing other things, that's the only issue I think you would have to be careful about.

Please let this be true! This is a beautiful little gem that must be nurtured!

1 hour ago, Pegleg said:

 

 

The only potential issue with replacing the dead lost soul sprite with something else is that every time you a lost soul, that thing will pop up.

 

I think I recall @Aurelius saying that he replaced the dead lost soul with a tree, and it worked great, except that every time he killed a lost soul, a tree would pop up and slide backward across the map. If I'm misremembering this, hopefully Aurelius will correct the record. While there are potentially narrative ideas in the killing of lost soul producing other things, that's the only issue I think you would have to be careful about.

Remember that the dead Lost Soul's spawn state is literally the same as the last few frames frame of the Lost Soul's death animation. Not just shared sprites, literally the same frames in the game data. So if he directly edited those frames, he would also be editing the real Lost Soul's death animation. The better approach would be to replace the dead Lost Soul's spawn state index directly a different frame, such as one of the unused pistol or super shotgun frames, and edit that frame to display the tree sprite.

EDIT: Here is a simple patch that will harmlessly replace the dead Lost Soul with the unused gray stalagmite, without interfering with the real Lost Soul's death animation:

Patch File for DeHackEd v3.0
Patch format = 6
Doom version = 19

Thing 116 (Gray Stub)
Width = 1048576
Bits = 2
Initial frame = 887

51 minutes ago, Pegleg said:

I think I recall @Aurelius saying that he replaced the dead lost soul with a tree, and it worked great, except that every time he killed a lost soul, a tree would pop up and slide backward across the map. If I'm misremembering this, hopefully Aurelius will correct the record. While there are potentially narrative ideas in the killing of lost soul producing other things, that's the only issue I think you would have to be careful about.

This is indeed true. When I was working on Remnant, and being the dehacked amateur I was at the time, I found a lot of people saying that the Dead Lost Soul is a prime candidate for a replacement decoration. So I decided to put a tree in it's stead, on state 600 (which was the only state for the Dead Lost Soul thing). And since I didn't want my tree to disappear, I set the duration to infinite. Little did I know that the Lost Soul in fact moves onto to that state as it dies, as was stated above. Hilarity ensued when I killed the first Lost Soul after the replacement, watching a tree pop out of nowhere and slide across the floor.

My girlfriend suggested I turn it into a feature, making every monster sprout a tree as they die. It would've certainly given the forests in that map an eerie origin story.

An odd little fact about the Dead Lost Soul actor is that if you turn it into a creature via DeHackEd, the creature retains the Lost Soul's obituary in the ports that support it: this isn't unique to that actor, all the other monster corpse decorations do the same thing, but it's interesting regardless.

15 hours ago, Pegleg said:

I think I recall @Aurelius saying that he replaced the dead lost soul with a tree, and it worked great, except that every time he killed a lost soul, a tree would pop up and slide backward across the map. If I'm misremembering this, hopefully Aurelius will correct the record. While there are potentially narrative ideas in the killing of lost soul producing other things, that's the only issue I think you would have to be careful about.

DeHackEd is the gift that keeps on giving..

I know I'm like a month late to this party, but I was looking into stuff like this within the last couple days.  There are a couple Dead Lost Souls placed in E2M5.  Not sure if they're anywhere else.  If you were to give something else their DoomED number in Decorate, you could have something else appear there without messing up the Lost Souls' death animation.

On 7/18/2021 at 12:12 AM, rabidrage said:

I know I'm like a month late to this party, but I was looking into stuff like this within the last couple days.  There are a couple Dead Lost Souls placed in E2M5.  Not sure if they're anywhere else.  If you were to give something else their DoomED number in Decorate, you could have something else appear there without messing up the Lost Souls' death animation.

I checked it out - you're right! I found 2 in the bottom-middle around a staircase and 1 on the bottom-left! Why would the id guys put them there?

I just remembered something - in FreeDoom: Phase 1 (tested on version 0.11.3) on e2m9 - not only is there a Soul Corpse in the level, you start the level facing the Corpse! You can actually see it in front of you for a brief moment!

That's pretty weird.  It sounds like they just want to give you some opening pyrotechnics.  As for me, I'm totally gonna use the DoomED number to make something different show up in E2M5.  It's a great way to introduce new things without editing levels...too early in my mod's development for that.  So essentially it gives the player a taste of what's coming.

On vendredi 18 juin 2021 at 8:40 PM, Scypek2 said:

Not for the most part, although ZDoom defines this actor as inheriting from the lost soul for some reason, so if you turn it into a monster (or anything else that calls A_Chase), it will use the lost soul's charge attack unless another missile attack is specified.

Inheriting from the lost soul was needed for DEHACKED support since this is the only way in DECORATE to get it to use exactly the same states as the, well, dying lost soul. Instead of using identical copies of these states.

I guess nobody ever bothered to report the inconsistency with missile attacks, this would be trivial to fix by adding Missile: Stop in its state list.

On 6/18/2021 at 1:46 PM, roboticmehdi2 said:

Doom press release beta has diffent lost soul appearance and it leaves corpse when it dies. Maybe it's remanant from that.

Although they changed the Lost Soul, you can still see this look in the final game, as the Invulnerability powerup's face is that of these beta lost souls, and I do think that this is the reason why this redundant thing still exists.