An Idea for the Coders

[Murdoch]

I have recently returned to playing some more classic games more frequently thanks to Blood: Fresh Supply resparking my interest. Not that I really stopped, per se, but I feel I have gained a renewed appreciation for the old school games. Downloaded Eviternity last night and had a good time with it. But one thing I both simultaneously love and hate about Classic Doom hit me and that is predictability. If I hear a sound from a certain direction at a certain volume, I can zero on it with uncanny accuracy. If I pull out the chaingun, I know the Cacodemon and Revenant probably won't get a shot off at me. I know how much damage a given enemy likely took with the shotgun depending on how many pellets it took, and how much more it will take to finish it off.

 

This is all fine and fun. It's like an old friend. I call it the Doom Dance. It's purely instinctual, even after all these years. But would it not be fun if some greater unpredictability  were thrown in the mix? It only makes sense that certain individuals in a given enemy faction would be tougher, faster, and less likely to react to pain than it's brethren. This why I liked Doom 2016 so much. It felt "Doomy" but the different environment and AI gave combat an air of unpredictability that I personally found quite exciting.

 

If my recollection of Doom's code is accurate, you have a master table of things including enemies, and the spawn routines reference this when actually placing a copy of said thing in map. I would be neat to see some variability (user configurable, of course) introduced. Like the ability to spawn with plus or minus 50% variability in health, speed, and pain chance? Imagine the surprise of hearing a familiar growl in the distance and thinking "OK that demon's not going to get me for a few seconds, I'll just grab this medkit and DEAR GOD IT'S HERE!!!"

 

Just a thought :)

Edited May 28, 2019 by Murdoch

[xvertigox]

This would be doable in DECORATE by using the random function. I haven't tried it but with glancing at the ZDoom wiki it looks like it'd be quite simple. I would try using inheritance and then setting the speed, health etc to be random within a range using the aforementioned random function and see if that works.

 

^{p.s this is the eTerntity subform, not eviternity ;p}

[Mordeth]

Nice to see you again here, Joel, welcome back :)

 

Moved topic to "source ports" for greater visibility.

 

 

[Gez]

In fact if you want unpredictability, there's a whole subgenre of mods that completely replace the enemies randomly. Here's one of the better ones. So you get like a dozen imp variants, so when you have a pack of imps, each one can be a different imp and some of them are stronger or weaker.

 

You can use the same principle to make a mod where the variant monsters still look the same, and their behaviors aren't drastically changed (no rocket imp or whatever) but you still have slightly stronger or weaker monsters.

[xvertigox]

I also like Colorful Hell as a randomizer.

[Murdoch]

@Mordeth Hi Gaston, been a while :) Hope you are well.

 

Some interesting suggestions. Will check them out thank you.

[Comrade Pingu]

I know this is an old thread but this just gave me an idea...

 

A lot of games like LoZ: Wind Waker and Super Mario 64 have randomizers that can randomize just about anything. Once I get good in DECORATE or ZScript that wouldn't just replace enemy spawns, but weapon and item spawns, along with texture and sound randomization. It would probably take a lot of work, but it could be a fun project. I'll try to get a git repo out for people to check out if I get it started.

[xvertigox]

35 minutes ago, Comrade Pingu said:

I know this is an old thread but this just gave me an idea...

 

A lot of games like LoZ: Wind Waker and Super Mario 64 have randomizers that can randomize just about anything. Once I get good in DECORATE or ZScript that wouldn't just replace enemy spawns, but weapon and item spawns, along with texture and sound randomization. It would probably take a lot of work, but it could be a fun project. I'll try to get a git repo out for people to check out if I get it started.

 

You could do weapon and item randomizers easily through DECORATE too. For the textures (and presumably, sounds) it can be accomplished via zscript. You could take a look at the fireblu mod and play around with that. I haven't done anything with zscript but I imagine there's a way to randomize the textures and flats rather than replace with specific ones.

 

I think the real feat would be in making it visually cohesive in some way. Rather than a totally random texture maybe any instance of STARTAN on the map is replaced with (CEMENT* or MARBLE* or PANEL*). That way it would have a consistent (albeit probably psycho) style through each map.

[Shadow Hog]

Although this is just shy of a month after the OP asked about it, "vanilla Doom monsters but occasionally one of them is stronger" sounds exactly like LegenDoom to me. It doesn't change the enemy spawns or anything, but certain enemies are randomly set to be "legendary" (in the sense of Bethesda Fallout games) and, when they would normally die, will suddenly reveal (with a specific sound effect and a little pentagram symbol beneath them) they had 3x the usual health for their monster type and get faster and more aggressive accordingly. Killing the legendary monster will drop a randomized weapon that can replace one of the slots of your usual loadout, all with one specific randomized upgrade over a stock weapon. The catch would be you can only carry one of each slot, so you have to pick-and-choose which perk you think will actually benefit you more in the long run.

[Spie812]

2 hours ago, Comrade Pingu said:

Randomizer stuff

 

Regarding randomized weapons and monsters, @andrewj's Populator might be of interest to you.

[Maes]

I'll just leave this here...

 

 

[Murdoch]

17 hours ago, Shadow Hog said:

Although this is just shy of a month after the OP asked about it, "vanilla Doom monsters but occasionally one of them is stronger" sounds exactly like LegenDoom to me. It doesn't change the enemy spawns or anything, but certain enemies are randomly set to be "legendary" (in the sense of Bethesda Fallout games) and, when they would normally die, will suddenly reveal (with a specific sound effect and a little pentagram symbol beneath them) they had 3x the usual health for their monster type and get faster and more aggressive accordingly. Killing the legendary monster will drop a randomized weapon that can replace one of the slots of your usual loadout, all with one specific randomized upgrade over a stock weapon. The catch would be you can only carry one of each slot, so you have to pick-and-choose which perk you think will actually benefit you more in the long run.

 

Thank you, that's more akin to what I wanted :)

[yorivdood]

Hi, check out my thread. it randomly replaces monsters both by similar type and completely randomly based on a cvar for vanilla maps (non-vanilla by placing scripts in each map and lumps in wad) and doesn't use the RandomSpawner thing. The code is fairly simple and is for all ports.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/106939-dehacked-decorate-random-monsters-replacer-by-type/?tab=comments#comment-1999223

 

Edited June 21, 2019 by yorivdood