Idea: Dehacked Beastiary? (or EDF?)

After recreating a ton of ZDoom Decorate monsters in Dehacked when working on Knee-Deep in KDiZD (KDiZD for doom2.exe, in case you missed the thread), I got the idea to create a set of Dehacked monster replacement wads and patches.

As Dehacked only allows for the replacement of existing states, things, sounds, etc., these would have to be created and distributed in pre-arranged sets of monsters, rather than individual monsters that can be mixed and matched like Decorate or EDF monsters can. Monster sets could vary in size, from 1-or-2-monster sets that only replace the SS Nazi and Commander Keen, to huge ones that replace many of the original monsters with new ones.

In addition to the monsters I've already ported over for Knee-Deep in KDiZD (which would have to be recreated in new standalone patches and sets), other obvious choices are the Afrit (Scythe 2/DVII-style, of course, not ZDoom-style), the Evil Marine from Scythe 2, etc.

So I have a couple of questions:

How many people would be interested in such a thing, for use in vanilla or boom-compatible projects?

What other monsters would you like to see ported? (Realistically)

How many people would be interested in actually creating and submitting monster patches to it? (If you think I would do something like this entirely myself, you are a crazy fool :P )

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EDIT: I'd also like to eventually make some EDF (Eternity) conversions of ZDoom Decorate monsters available for download somewhere. As of now I've only got the Shadow and part of the Hell Warrior ported, but it's more due to lack of effort than anything else. The Hell Warrior hasn't been completed yet, but I can say that the Shadow's behavior is 100% identical to its behavior in ZDoom. These would, of course, be distributed as individual monsters that can be mixed and matched just like Decorate monsters can be in ZDoom maps.

I would love to see something like that and I would probably use monsters from it quite a bit. However I only know DECORATE, and only a little bit at that, so it's doubtful that I'd be able to contribute very much (thought I'd like to be able to learn EDF sometime in the near future).

Which idea are you referring to wanting to contribute to? The Dehacked monster-sets, or the EDF monsters?

Well probably Dehacked for the moment, until EDF catches on more. However, having both or maybe just EDF would increase EE's popularity a bit, which I'm all for. So in short I support both formats, I guess it's just a question of which would be easier or more worthwhile to do. And at the current moment in time I'd probably be able to learn EDF much easier just because of DECORATE (I suppose there are some minor similarities). Of course if Tormentor just accepted EDF/Dehacked monsters then we wouldn't have to worry about this :p

As for porting over existing monsters, I'm not totally sure. Monsters like the Dark Imp's and some of the KDiZD monsters are really the only ones I can think of at the moment, and you've already done a lot of them in KDiKDiZD.

Now this is a pretty good idea :D

though I wonder could DEHSUPP monsters be allowed aswell? I know there's basically just 1 port out there, where this could be usefull, very usefull. but then again isn't EDF for just 1 single port aswell?

This could be limited to only monsters that have dehacked or EDF versions could have DEHSUPP versions aswell. if you'd want to keep a dehacked version of each monster in the beastiary.

esselfortium said:

How many people would be interested in actually creating and submitting monster patches to it? (If you think I would do something like this entirely myself, you are a crazy fool :P )

I would certainly create and submit a few, both DEHACKED and if possible dehsupped ones :P

as you cant mix and match dehacked very well, I'd probably make bigger monster sets.. and I've already made 1 such dehacked monster pack, so I suppose it could be in the DEHACKED beastiary, even if it doesn't consist of any monsters ported from the DECORATE beastiary?

Yeah, of course, completely original monsters are fine too! I was just thinking of conversions because there are already a ton of monsters in Tormentor's DECORATE beastiary, and a good bunch of them have some really high-quality sprites to go with them. As for DEHSUPP, I suppose that'd be okay, though I'm not a ZDaemon user myself. I'm guessing that'd be for ZDaemon coop wads?

For the vanilla-compatible dehacked patches, I'm figuring there could be several variants for certain monsters, with different behavior depending on which monsters you're willing to replace. Any partially-replaced monsters (i.e. if the main attraction uses one and a half monsters' worth of frames, or replaces a couple of different monsters' projectiles with differently-behaving ones) could then have their remaining frames replaced with fully-functional simpler monsters, to prevent them from being a total waste of frames.

err yeah, I could port Beastiary monsters too, as long as the authors of the sprites don't mind dow..upgrading their monsters to dehacked :P

and yeah, dehsupp for coop wads, or in whatever one wishes to use the monsters in. too bad that no other port that has heretic support, supports dehsupp. (as these ports usually have something better than dehacked)..

as for dehacked monsters, I haven't really made much vanilla-compatible patches, and instead I have more experience with boom-compatible .bex patches.. so I suppose BEX is okay aswell?

As far as monster-related stuff goes, the only notable differences I'm aware of between vanilla Dehacked and Boom's BEX patches (not including the extra flags and stuff that were added in MBF, SMMU, and Eternity, which aren't part of the original BEX standard) are the translucent flag for things, the ability to set a frame's codepointer to null, and the ability to set a codepointer for a frame that has it set to null by default. Since the differences are pretty small, I'd prefer to stick with vanilla-compatible dehacked as much as possible, maybe with alternate bex versions of monsters like the Shadow, which are intended to be translucent.

Mechadon said:

As for porting over existing monsters, I'm not totally sure. Monsters like the Dark Imp's and some of the KDiZD monsters are really the only ones I can think of at the moment, and you've already done a lot of them in KDiKDiZD.

The other obvious candidates are the monsters from Demon Eclipse.

Since there's tons of text here, I'm not gonna quote anything, just post.

1. Tormentor667 only accepts ZDoom monsters with no replacements at all.
2. There's DECORATE stuff EDF can't do. On the other hand EDF things can run game scripts, which I doubt DEC is capable of. For this reason I think some complicated DECORATE monsters (like the Afrit) should be reinterpreted.

esselfortium, I am gonna PM you an EDF monster seemingly not possible with ZDoom. Just not now, I'm having crazy homeworks. Don't expect a megaintelligent boss thing.

Also, here's what I've ported for my EE projects: the Fallen (who's charging when gliding instead of strafing), the Archon of Hell (whose soul doesn't raise), Nami Dark Imp (having no fine control for its homing accuracy), Afrit (now he spawns sentient flames).

EDIT: How should the multi-attack monsters decide? Always the same chances, or should they vary depending on counters? (Like using a pseudo-mana system, but still putting some randomness)

I like the idea, still I think few would use the monsters that steal frames of more than one monster or from a weapon.

What about a Heretic/Hexen bestiary? Some new mods and wads for both games are being worked on in Zdoom and Skulltag forums.

printz said:

On the other hand EDF things can run game scripts, which I doubt DEC is capable of.

Wrong!

All of ZDoom's action specials can be used for DECORATE actors; this includes not one, not two, not three, but SIX ACS action specials. See these two pages on the ZDoom wiki for more info:

http://zdoom.org/wiki/Action_specials
http://zdoom.org/wiki/Thing_executed_specials

The major problem with doing a DeHackEd beastiary is that it would be a lot harder to be able to plug monsters into a WAD without causing conflicts than DDF, EDF, DECORATE etc. beastiaries.

I seem to remember an older Beastiary which had ONLY sprite sets which you could use for whatever you wanted in your wads. Creating a series of "ready made" dehacked monsters may be hard if somebody is already using dehacked on thier wad. I once stole Scuba Steve's lightsaber and flamethrower dehacked code and copied it into my own patch (using notepad) to 'add them to my wad'. And only later realised how amazingly lucky i was it didnt clash or muck up anything and result in a confusing mess

Well, yes, that's a definite issue with them. That's why if someone wanted to do any dehacked changes of their own, they'd be best off taking the monster/monster-set patch as a base, and making their desired changes to it, instead of trying to work it into an existing patch.

Dehacked is easy to use. I don't see a Dehacked bestiary to be useful enough. Most mappers will probably just copy the graphics, convert some of them to Doom format and make their own .Deh with them.

NiGHTMARE said:

Wrong!

All of ZDoom's action specials can be used for DECORATE actors; this includes not one, not two, not three, but SIX ACS action specials. See these two pages on the ZDoom wiki for more info:

http://zdoom.org/wiki/Action_specials
http://zdoom.org/wiki/Thing_executed_specials

I was referring to ACS specials activateable with CodePointers ("Action Functions"), on each attack or pain state for example. Can they?

printz said:

Dehacked is easy to use. I don't see a Dehacked bestiary to be useful enough. Most mappers will probably just copy the graphics, convert some of them to Doom format and make their own .Deh with them.

I was referring to ACS specials activateable with CodePointers ("Action Functions"), on each attack or pain state for example. Can they?

Yes, I believe there is a codepointer that will execute a specified ACS script whenever that frame is reached.

Here's the monster I said... I don't know how to do remote damage in decorate...

As it does look, you know why I said "no biggie", but I never saw it used, so I think I should post it here (instead of only PMing), so everyone sees it: beta lost soul

Also:

My Eternity port of Eriance's Archon of hell...

of Eriance's Fallen

If the thread starter's making a collection he can take these.

Cool! The beta lost soul's death animation is kind of messed up, though, with the bones hovering in midair for one frame and then disappearing. And I haven't checked your Archon of Hell against the original decorate version, but the attack projectiles look a bit odd to me...

To contribute myself, here's my Eternity port of Vader's Shadow.

Give me EDF or give me DETH! :O

printz said:

I was referring to ACS specials activateable with CodePointers ("Action Functions"), on each attack or pain state for example. Can they?

Erm... where ele besides the state definitions could they be executed?

kristus said:

Give me EDF or give me DETH! :O

Here, take both! :O

esselfortium said:

with the bones hovering in midair for one frame and then disappearing.

Originally the bones were just standing there, but I thought it was too messy.

printz said:

Originally the bones were just standing there, but I thought it was too messy.

I imagine the lost soul was to fall to the ground after being killed. However, the Lost Soul in the final version still floated through the air when going through its death frames.

You can try and imitate the Cacodemon death - where it starts falling to the ground while it's dying.

Is there some sort of code that makes the Lost Soul an exception to gravity? If I recall, even the Pain Elemental falls to the ground when it starts dying.

Eternity, ZDoom and others have codepointers for not falling on death. But originally these monsters weren't falling, their bony corpses were just standing in air. Their graphics offset wouldn't let them fall properly anyway. And I don't want to change the graphics and behaviour, in my way they'd become too different, if not too powerful. The suspended corpse effect was the only outrageous imperfection, the rest is tolerable. It's up to the EE mapper to change it to their taste. I should specify this in future docs.

EDIT: I'm probably going to post another monster or two. essel can get 'em if he makes a repository (but plz credit me for the porting and their original authors too, especially). Too bad I lack my own homepage to make my uploads persistent.

There is an exception in the code for the Lost Soul dying. It, unlike most flying monsters, does not have its NOGRAVITY flag removed.

EE generalizes this behavior with the flags3/Bits3 bit DEADFLOAT.

In a normal DeHackEd patch you cannot access this flag. In a BEX patch, you can provide it thusly in a Thing definition:

Bits3 = DEADFLOAT

In EDF, you can just provide it to the cflags field along with the thing's normal bits:

thingtype foo 
{ 
   cflags = COUNTKILL|FLOAT|DROPOFF|NOGRAVITY|DEADFLOAT; 
}

And now comes the huge question for me: What the heck is EDF?

Eternity definition file. So if you want to mod for Eternity, not ZDoom, you'd have to use those. And if you ask what the fck is Eternity, it's a more vanilla-like counterpart of ZDoom.

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For now, get the BelphegorClone (orig'ly by Nanami and Carnevil). G'night.

I approve of this idea, though the only problem i see is that dehacked can't make new monsters from scratch, it has to replace something right?