The Zombifier

This is an idea I have for another monster I'd like to make, a kind of lord-of-the-dead type villian.

Basically, the villain fires a projectile at the player, and when it strikes the player he dies (gibbed? No corpse?) and a special zombie takes his place. This special zombie will have to look like a generic green doom guy zombie. I'd have to figure out some way to have the projectile not spawn a zombie if it doesn't strike a player, but I'm sure that can be worked through with ACS.

Do any ACS experts think this is feasible?

I have one question: What do I care about a zombie being spawned when I am gibbed anyway? Is this meant for Coop?

Deathmatcher said:

I have one question: What do I care about a zombie being spawned when I am gibbed anyway? Is this meant for Coop?

Two reasons you might be interested:

1) It could make for an interesting player weapon, especially in deathmatch.

2) I want a monster to be able to do this.

bartwart said:

2) I want a monster to be able to do this.

In other words, if the projectile hits a monster, it turns them into a weaker, slower Zombie?

WildWeasel said:

In other words, if the projectile hits a monster, it turns them into a weaker, slower Zombie?

That's the problem. I'll need an acs script to coordinate all of this, and check to see if the projectile exploded on a player or not, because I don't want to turn a monster into a zombie. This might be possible, but maybe not. I've been looking at the zdoom wiki all night.

This could be cool for a boss, if you are killed by him, you are sombified, some sort of gimmik like in Hexen II when you are killed by the horsman Death.
But if you plan to use it for a monster that apear frecuently, then, mmm.. I don't know. For Deathmatch? It could be cool if the spawned zombies don't attack the player who spawned them, but I supposse that's imposible, so, it'd be an annoying weapon. And for coop, yes, it's a good idea, and can be pretty fun.

ZDoom can adjust the hue of sprites via scripting (I think) so it would be possible to spawn a "zombie" by creating a copy of the previously alive monster with a more "dead" looking hue. This way you could create zombie copies of all the monsters with relative ease rather than having to change the sprites manually.