Increasing Attack Power

I want to increase an enemies attack power. Is there a line I can add to my DEHACKED patch that would do it or do I have to use Bex? If I have to use Bex could someone tell me or at least post a site where I can learn HOW to do so.

Heh

You can't change clawing damage, but you can change fireball damage by editing the damage value.

However, you can put two fire frames right next to eachother (one with a length of 0) and effectively double the clawing damage.

Nanami said:

However, you can put two fire frames right next to eachother (one with a length of 0) and effectively double the clawing damage.

Yeah, that's how I do it. It works fine for hitscan attacks - making a shotgunner into a supershotgunner etc, or for melee attacks like the demon bite or the revenant punch. However combined attacks that use the same pointer to do different things depending on how close the player is may end up doing something odd when spawning 2 fireballs at the same time (dunno, never tried it).

Just whilst I'm mentioning this stuff, you may at some time be in a situation where you think "that's OK, I'm only using a the imp pointer as a close attack and using something totally different for the far attack". However, you can still sometimes get the imp distant attack in those situations:

Imagine you move in close to punch your hacked monster. The monster starts its close attack sequence, getting ready to claw you. You recognise the attack sequence so pull away quickly. Between the monster starting the attack sequence and the actual "fire" frame arriving, you have increased the distance between you and the monster enough that the code checks distance and realises it's too far for the close attack and so throws a fireball instead. That way, you end up getting a far attack action from what started off as a close attack.

OK, I looked at the page Doomboy posted and didn't find anything under the Bex examples to upgrade the attack power of long range attacks. That's all I need. Is it by anychance just attack = (Number goes here)?

To change how powerful a projectile is:

Thing 32 (Imp Fireball)
Missile damage = 6

Problem is I don't want the fireball itself to be more powerful. I just want a tagged monster to have a higher attack power. WITH SCRIPTING! Or at least something that will increase the attack of a tagged thing.

OK, so now I don't understand. You want to make a distant attack more powerful but do not want to make the fireball more powerful. What exactly is it you want to increase the power of?

The damage done by fireball attacks is determined by the missile damage of the projectile, not the monster. All you could do to the monster would be to make its rate of fire quicker or something.

The rocket damage is very high because it has a missile damage and does radius damage when it explodes - you could add that to another projectile if you wanted. You could also make a projectile rip through enemies and there are other options you could play with, but most affect the projectile and are not monster specific.

If you want to make hitscan attacks more powerful, you can't - they are fixed. You can fake it using Nanami's suggestion though. The one exception to this is the monster railgun in zdoom. The damage this does is determined by the missile damage you give to the monster firing it.

There is no way I know of to allow you to increase the damage dealt by a certain monster and not the others of the same type. You could use dehacked/bex to create your own monster that looks similar to the original but has your enhanced attack, but that's about it.

OK, I think I'll just increase the rate of fire, because if I made another imp, then there is still no way to make the imp fireball shot from that imp cause more damage then the fireball from the other imp. How "exactly" do I increase the firing rate for an imp. Please give me just the line I would need to add to my DEHACKED file to use this.

There isn't a single line to do this. Increasing the firing rate could mean a few things - eg making an imp fire a volley of maybe 3 fireballs each time it fires, or possibly doing something like the arachnotron does - keep firing until line of sight is broken. Either way, you'd have to find some free frames in the frame table to construct your new firing sequence, and then allocate it to your new enemy (which can use all the other normal imp frames - walking etc).

An alternative is to set up an imp that uses the baron attack instead of the imp one - that does more damage. I've got an example of that on my site too http://www.btinternet.com/~Enjay001/dehex06.htm There is a description of the hack, and a downloadable example there.

The example uses green imp graphics (needed for the dehacked colour shifting) which are then colour shifted back to brown for the normal imp and grey for the "super imp". You could easily do away with the replacement graphics and colour shifting stuff and have all your imps brown instead. Using the normal brown sprites does not stop you changing the colour of individual imps using scripting (like Cyb has done in a number of wads, most recently Void).

Ok that is exactly what I intended to do. I'm making colour coded imps, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Right now I intend to make these two

Black Imp = Stronger (More HP)
Red Imp = More Powerful Attack
Yellow Imp = Faster

Yeah know that kind of stuff. I'll try and figure out your example if I can, but if I can't I'll just ask.

EEK! My Imp is all wierd. I followed the instructions in your info, but something wierd happened. I think it disregarded my changes to the frames. Maybe I deleted something I shouldn't have... I'll go look.

Yeah I accidently removed the lines that describe the frames in my DEHACKED file. It works perfectly now. I now have a nice red imp to replace the crappy old grey tree.

Actually, if you are making this for ZDoom, you have another option. If you replace things with monsters in DeHacked they no longer act like same species (your red imps will attack your yellow imps, etc).

If you place imps with different tids, you can give them color translations via ACS and then change their health and speed (unfortunately you can't yet change their attack power, though).

Here's an example I just whipped up. Gray imps have 500 health and black imps have double speed. The best thing about this process is you can combine speed+health increases, and also have as many variations as you want without replacing anything in DeHacked.

http://nami.mancubus.net/imps.wad

Or you could even add the following to your dehacked file to stop monsters in fighting completely (only monsters hit by hitscan weapon crossfire will take damage from other monsters, and even then they don't retaliate).

Misc 0
Monsters Ignore Each Other = 1

Everything, but my Red Imps will not attack each other I suppose, unless I put that line into my monster. Where exactly do I put those two lines anyway Enjay?

EDIT: I hope to make it so Imps and Red Imps won't harm each other. Is that even possible if they are two different thing types?

Nanamim your suggestion would work if Zdoom could increase attack power, but unfourtunatly... it can't. My Red Imp uses Enjay's example of a Super Imp to get it going. So evedently it doesn't work. If only there was a way to make an imp "think" it were the same species.

You know in dehacked there is a misc section under the F4 button? Well things you change in there get saved to a misc section in the patch. This is marked by the line Misc 0. Just stick it in at the end of your file, it should be OK there. It will affect your dehacked imps too. All enemies, whether real or dehacked creations will obey this flag.

It's worth pointing out that this can end up with the occasional odd effect - eg a Zombie standing in a stream of plasma from an arachnotron and not getting hurt.

It's also worth pointing out that now you have done a few things using BEX style code (from memory there was a little in the imp example, and the ignore flag is a zdoom specific addition) your patch is no longer compatible with the original dehacked program. This is because you have put things in your patch that were added to dehacked support long after dehacked was written. If you load your patch into dehacked, it will complain about the lines it doesn't understand, and simply remove them from the next version of your patch that you save.

I figured that out back when I was doing scale operations. I simply start DEHACKED with a clean file everytime and add anything from the new patch to one big one.

You may find this useful... I can't remember the exact syntax, but you can use an include statement in a patch and zdoom will understand it and include a second patch. So you can keep your working dehacked and bex stuff separate until you consolidate them into a single file for sticking in your WAD for the finished product.

I think it is as simple as:

Patch File for DeHackEd v3.0

# Note: Use the pound sign ('#') to start comment lines.

Doom version = 19
Patch format = 6

INCLUDE dehfile.deh

Thing is I have several copies of my files. I have their current working version in my DTCA folder, and I have others for testing in my gigantic Testing folder. It works quite well.

Unfortunately that extra DeHacked line makes it so ALL monsters ignore eachother. I wish there was a way to make certain monsters ignore others, or a way to set what "species" a monster is (like how barons and hell knights are the same species) so they don't fight.