So do people think it's stupid, or...?

A while back I had made this patch in WhackEd, after I learned it was pretty user-friendly (I download much, much more than I've ever modded, though map editing is fun). I had searched and searched and checked out a lot of cool mods, but I could not believe that nobody had released a mod that does what I had thought of. It's so...obvious. And hey, maybe that's exactly why no one did it. I changed the Lost Soul death to a rocket explosion. I thought it was great. I mean, you didn't want to kill them if they got too close, which they inevitably would sometimes when they attacked you all of a sudden, because you could die! Did anyone else ever think of that or try it? Maybe I should make it again and put it out there, see if it takes off. I mean, I haven't done that yet because I figure I'm still a novice and if anybody wanted that effect they could easily do it themselves, but what do you all think?

I kinda like the idea, though maybe not as strong as a Rocket explosion as that may be too strong.

The strength of the blast would need to be toned down, otherwise clearing a room of Lost Souls would become too easy - kill one and watch the chain reaction. I wonder if they could be used like self-propelled barrels to provoke monster infighting?

Perhaps they can be immune to their explosions?

Now this is one cool idea.


Making a Lost Soul immune to their own expolsions is probably the way to go, though I really like the idea that other monsters could be damaged by a Lost Soul explosion. That way, a good player can use Lost Souls as mobile barrels. Get them in among a group of monsters, and kill them, and it's kablooey time.

Heheh fun idea. I've always wanted to see a gun that fired lost souls that only attacked enemies.

There's a monster on realm667 beastiary that does the same thing. It's a recolored lost soul called "Terror"

I made this thing a while ago which does the same thing except that their attack also causes them to explode and they spawn 3 more lost souls when they die. Not quite as practicable with those added features, but...

Funny enough, I made a patch a few weeks ago that made Pain Elementals give off barrel explosion damage upon death. I thought this was a good way to rebalance them, making it that you can no longer just run up into their faces and melee attack them to death without risk of being hurt, and it finally gives them some sort of direct attack.

^^ I think that's what Brutal Doom has. Hehe, another reason for Kikoskia to hate PE's. >:]

That's an awesome concept, I wouldn't mind those.

How about a melee state for the Pain Elemental to bite you? Doing the same damage as the Cacodemon.

I don't know if I'd be skilled enough to reduce the damage or make Lost Souls immune or anything like that. If I had to guess, I'd say that's something that could be easily done in ZDoom, a port I have barely touched in my time playing Doom. In any event, I figured the bare-bones idea was enough to change up the dynamic of the game; yes, you would be able to take out a whole group of them by killing one AND you could use them like moving barrels. But there would still be the element of trying to keep your distance when you kill them, when their attack sends them hurtling toward you--I figure that's one of the reasons they're the only enemy in Tower of Babel besides the Cyberdemon. Hell, what I might do is make them more aggressive and intelligent, though really the bare-bones idea seems pretty balanced. I dunno. People can use it as a base in any event.

There was an invasion map made for skulltag which had a second version of lost souls called suicide souls which explode when they ram into you, they are distinguished from the normal lost souls with their black color but their flames are still the same color but I personally think they should have made their flames either green or blue. :P

Would that not make the Pain Elemental spitting out lost souls at point blank range and a dangerous monster?

This prompted me to have a tinker with Whacked for the first time and I tried to implement what the OP detailed (a cool idea I think as well).

A couple of things I noticed.

-Making the PE explode and LS explode would certainly make players avoid a close encounter as killing a PE at close range usually means they are cornered and so some LS that are spawned die immediately and so the player gets multiple doses of the EXPLODE pointer. This also has the effect of killing or weakening the remaining spawned LS.

-An option I played with was as mentioned above give the PE a melee attack. I used the demon bite code pointer and rigged some states up to show it biting but avoid spawning a LS. but not before I realised this needed to be done and had numerous LS explosions for the PE melee attack *L*.

-the other thing was to make the PE hurt the player if close when they die but not explode to avoid a chain reaction with spawned LS. I again used the demon bite code pointer in the PE death sequence.

-t

they already kill each other relentlessly, this would just make it more hectic :D

traversd said:

-the other thing was to make the PE hurt the player if close when they die but not explode to avoid a chain reaction with spawned LS. I again used the demon bite code pointer in the PE death sequence.

I circumvented this simply by making the EXPLODE pointer come up several frames before the final batch of Lost Souls are spawned; the explosion is already finished before they are loosed from the PE's corpse.

I hadn't thought of making them actually bite the player. I wasn't sure how to make it bite without spawning a Soul.

Nice, guys! If you could make that available to use, traverd, that would be great. It sounds like you've created something I can only dream of doing at the moment. I'm a fine idea guy, but my technical skills are limiting, so I don't think much beyond them.

rabidrage said:

Nice, guys! If you could make that available to use, traverd, that would be great. It sounds like you've created something I can only dream of doing at the moment. I'm a fine idea guy, but my technical skills are limiting, so I don't think much beyond them.

What I've made-up seems to have some (big) problems.

Issues are:

If LS explodes on death it pretty much decimates any pack of LS and or PE (think the gas-bags in Heretic)

There is also some issue that I'm not sure why it happens but if I make LS explode on death or "bite" on death (to hurt player but no-one else) some LS become ghosts and you can no longer hurt them, but they can hurt you :o(

Giving the PE a melee attack is about the only change "bug free" but now that a PE can harm another monster they end up fighting the LS they spawn to the death *L*

Seems like something more indepth (ACS?) would be needed to address the above and be more like the suggestions in this thread I'm afraid :o/

-t

Yes, it's a really stupid idea.


It should obviously be a BFG explosion instead.

Haha, that would be pretty freaking cheap. Funny as hell, but soooo cheap. Maybe with a .deh to increase the player's health. I mean, I used to make wads with teleporters that would teleport you into an exploding barrel, so I don't totally avoid cheap, but that was something you had a chance to survive.

Isnt it possible to add properties like whacked via DECORATE?

seen codelines adding BLOODCOLOR so I guess explosions upon death is possible aswell, but how do u actually control blast damage?