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baddream

more difficult UV? (monster reaction time)

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I just came back to Doom after some years, played a few (6) levels in Nightmare difficulty (Ultimate Doom), and decided it was too difficult for now. But then when I tried Ultra Violence, the slow reactions of the monsters started to bother me. The monster reactions had been much faster in Nightmare, and now seemed unrealistic, monsters taking walks when the target is clear at sight, and so on...

So my question is, how can I play Ultra Violence with the monster reaction time of Nightmare? I use jDoom/Doomsday source port, and play Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom (from Collector's Edition).

EDIT: I have Windows XP, if that makes any difference.

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I'm not really that interested in the "fast" modification (which is why I put "monster reaction time" in the subject line).

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But -fast does give the monsters the same reaction times as in Nightmare.

It also makes projectiles faster and alters the frame times for the demon/spectre.

If you just want to change the reaction times without altering the projectile speeds, etc., then you will need to use dehacked (set reaction times to 1, I think). You can search for info/tutorials on that.

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Thanks, I'll look into the Dehacked.

EDIT: I changed all the monster reaction times to 1 (with whacked), but they still seem a bit lazy compared to Nightmare. I know the editing works though, since I tried changing hitpoints and that works.

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Just noticed that WhackEd says about reaction time: "this is how fast the thing will wake up." So it's not reaction time I'm interested in, after all.

In Nightmare, the sergeants, for example, keep shooting at me, and not wandering around walking while shooting only occasionally (as in Ultra Violence, regardless of the reaction time). WhackEd doesn't have any parameter that seems like it might affect this.

So now my question is, can Nightmare be played without the respawning monsters, somehow?

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baddream said:

Just noticed that WhackEd says about reaction time: "this is how fast the thing will wake up." So it's not reaction time I'm interested in, after all.

In Nightmare, the sergeants, for example, keep shooting at me, and not wandering around walking while shooting only occasionally (as in Ultra Violence, regardless of the reaction time). WhackEd doesn't have any parameter that seems like it might affect this.

So now my question is, can Nightmare be played without the respawning monsters, somehow?


It seems what you're looking for are the -fast properties, minus the increased projectile speed and demon/spectre speed. I don't think it's possible to do this without a source code modification. You may want to add it as a feature request in prBoom or prBoom-plus.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom-plus
http://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom/

Or you could try to code it yourself. I would imagine it's doable.

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baddream said:
Just noticed that WhackEd says about reaction time: "this is how fast the thing will wake up." So it's not reaction time I'm interested in, after all.

Don't worry, just ignore what it says there, the reaction time is what you're looking for. If you don't believe me, just test it. Nonetheless nightmare also gives the fireballs of Imps, Barons of Hell, and Cacodemons a greater speed (I think it was 25), and decreases the duration of all the frames of the Demon/Spectre so they move and attack faster. If you really want Nightmare without respawning, fast is your thing (since it makes the changes noted above as well). Nightmare gives double the ammo, though, but without respawning monsters that shouldn't be necessary.

There may be a tiny difference between fast and nightmare otherwise. I remember we tested with a Scythe demo where fast + respawn + hacked double ammo desynched a demo recorded in nightmare mode. Maybe the reaction time is 0 in nightmare and 1 in fast mode, but I'm not sure.

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Gee, you're right, Myk. Sorry guys! Somehow I hadn't noticed that the monsters were sped up in Nightmare, etc....

OK, tried it, works. The command in jDoom is "game-fastmonsters 1" (in the console in-game, and without the "").

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There's a difference between monster behavior in nightmare and -fast mode. In fast the monsters will take a step between shots while in nightmare they will keep shooting.

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More problems... The whole "fast monsters" thing seems to work inconsistently in jDoom/Doomsday. I suppose that's why I didn't notice that imps' fireballs flew much faster in nightmare: they didn't when I played it earlier. But when I tried before I posted my last post, they did. In UV with the fast-monsters command, they sometimes do and sometimes don't. I've noticed three different speeds for the fireballs. Something like slow, rather slow, quite fast.

Using WhackEd to edit the projectile speeds might solve this problem, so could anyone tell me what those speeds are supposed to be?

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Baddream, in the original engine loading a saved game, for example, would lose some properties, such as fast mode, unless you added them on the command line. Maybe that's what's happening? If, on the other hand, there's a random inconsistency while you're playing without interruption, maybe there's a bug in JDoom.

xit-vono said:
There's a difference between monster behavior in nightmare and -fast mode. In fast the monsters will take a step between shots while in nightmare they will keep shooting.

Yeah, it sounds like I was right then, as a reaction time of 1 should allow them to move a step or so before shooting again.

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All this talk about using WhackEd to do things that Doomsday's own ded format can do (reaction time, speed, state duration etc).

To find the Dday's original ded's to base off (since I doubt you'd want to overwrite the originals), look in "Data/Jxxxxx/Jxxxxx.pk3" (1.9 beta's) or "def's/jxxxxx" (earlier versions). They open in any text program.

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Vermil, I tried emeditor and notepad, but didn't work. In any case, I would still need to know the values.

Myk, it's not the savegames. When I start a new game in UV, and write the command in console, sometimes the fireballs are fast, sometimes not (it always works in other respects, though). Also, when I simply start Nightmare, sometimes the fireballs are fast, sometimes not.

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You might want to report that to the Doomsday team, as that seems to be a bug.

The speed of the missiles is 20. I'm not sure which frames of the Demon are given a duration of 1. Possibly all of them except the death frames.

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Thanks! How about Baron fireball? Its default speed is 15 (imp fireball's is 10). What are the monster speeds in -fast? Defaults seem to be mostly 8. Demon and spectre have 10.

I'll report the possible bug...

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I tried editing the imp-fireball speeds using WhackEd: no effect. There must be some bug in Doomsday regarding those balls. Everything else I've edited with it has worked.

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xit-vono said:

There's a difference between monster behavior in nightmare and -fast mode. In fast the monsters will take a step between shots while in nightmare they will keep shooting.


Umm.. It's always been the same with me.

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baddream said:
Thanks! How about Baron fireball? Its default speed is 15 (imp fireball's is 10).

They all go to 20.

What are the monster speeds in -fast?

That's not affected. The demon is faster because each of its action frames it reduced to a duration of 1. You have to go to DeHackEd's F3 (Frames) editor to chage those, reached best from the F2 (Thing) editor.

JohnnyRancid said:
It's always been the same with me.

It's not as simple as the monsters not taking any steps in nightmare mode, but there is a difference. I was just testing by recording a demo on ultra-violence with fast and respawn and double ammo for each ammo thing you pick up, and after editing the demo's header info to read as true nightmare, it desynched, apparently because the monsters got slightly more aggressive, like they attacked immediately when they saw me, as opposed to in a fraction of a second as they did in the fake nightmare mode. I can't yet make out the exact difference from looking at the code, though.

I did notice that demos with fast and respawn have varying values (more than 0) attached to each mode, while nightmare (which behaves more or less as if both fast and respawn were applied) uses 0 in those places.

I can't find the thread where this was discussed last time (related to a recording in a Scythe level).

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I can't seem to get a user account for the Doomsday forum, so could someone else report the bug?

Here's what I would write:

_Inconsistencies in Imp-fireball speeds_

I've been playing Nightmare, Ultra Violence -fast (activated through the in-game console using a different command), and Ultra Violence with various Imp-fireball speed modifications (made using WhackEd2). In all of these three cases, the fireball speeds are often incorrect (usually 10, when should be 20). I haven't used savegames. With Chocolate Doom, these things work as they should, so I strongly suspect that the problem is in the jDoom/Doomsday source port, and it may not be limited to imp fireballs, but may concern other projectiles as well (I only experimented with the first levels of Ultimate Doom and Doom II).

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DaniJ is one of the Doomsday developers. He might see this thread sooner or later, but you can also alert him about your posts through a private message.

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That was precisely where I couldn't get a user account to post a bug report. It says they send a confirmation email in 24h, but it's been at least 36h by now....

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@myk: About the difference between UV-fast and NM, the monsters in UV-fast take several steps before attacking after first sight, whereas in NM they attack immediately or take one step (1 out of 5 times approximately). Also, the monsters take one step in between attacks more frequently in UV than in NM, somewhere in the range of once every 4 attacks (UV-fast) and once every 20 attacks (NM).

The number of steps before is not a function of reaction time, is it? Anyway, the actual coding that causes the difference must be something like the code that makes -fast monsters attack more frequently. Perhaps that code is written separately for -fast and NM (including small differences)?

This was tested in ZDOOM 2.0.96.

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Terra-jin said:
About the difference between UV-fast and NM, the monsters in UV-fast take several steps before attacking after first sight, whereas in NM they attack immediately or take one step (1 out of 5 times approximately). Also, the monsters take one step in between attacks more frequently in UV than in NM, somewhere in the range of once every 4 attacks (UV-fast) and once every 20 attacks (NM).

From what I see, after the initial moment, the behavior seems the same.

From what I can read from the source, there's a check the engine makes so that monsters won't attack twice in a row, and this is ignored in fast or nightmare modes. Maybe additionally the reaction value is ignored (set to 0) in nightmare mode.

The number of steps before is not a function of reaction time, is it?

Yeah, it doesn't seem to be. The reaction value seems to refer only the monster's initial reaction time.

This was tested in ZDOOM 2.0.96.

I didn't see much of a difference in ZDoom (v2.1.7) at first glance, but for pure guaranteed Doom behavior it's best to use Doom, Chocolate Doom, or somesuch.

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Hmmm, I don't have Vanilla DOOM to make sure, but I'm definitely seeing a difference in the frequency of the monster taking a step in between attacks, at least in my version of ZDOOM.

During the see state of the monsters (A_CHASE), I assume the engine decides when the monster attacks by waiting a certain number of tics after each initial A_CHASE session start. This number would be greater if the monsters enters the see state from the look state, and the number is smaller in -fast mode and (apparently) even smaller when in NM.
So then we have a certain number (or rather a set of random numbers) for each 'behavior mode' (normal, -fast and NM).

At least, that's my theory.

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