Boom - Prevent monsters from activating until a walk-over action

[meapineapple]

I have a kind of arena where I'd like a lot of monsters to appear in the perimeter as though they're an audience, and I don't want them to wake up until a walk-over linedef is hit. But currently, even though they don't hear the player, they do see the player and wake up. I could turn the monsters backwards, but then they wouldn't be much of an audience. How can I achieve this with Boom - player can see the enemies, enemies can't see them, until an action takes place?

[Scypek2]

This can be done in vanilla too, and without self-referencing sectors either. You can make something like this:

 

|         Monsters        |
|_________________________|
|\     Invisible wall    /|
| \_____________________/ |
|                         |
|           You           |

Raise up the floor of the wall sector, but not all the way, 1 unit wide gap should be okay. You also can't have the invisible wall's linedefs touch any actual walls, so either attach it by a single vertex like shown or don't attach it at all, just leave another 1 unit or so gap.

 

Once an invisible wall is constructed in such a way, there will be no HOMs or any other issues, as long as the player can't look at the top of the wall from above. But since it reaches all the way to the ceiling, that won't normally be an issue.

 

Then it can be instantly lowered with the "raise to lowest ceiling" action, like in Doom's E4M7.

 

A lot of what the "sky ceiling wall" does turns out to just be a property of sectors in general.

[baja blast rd.]

Look into action 242, the one that creates a fake floor and ceiling. 

 

Wire the setup up as you normally would: the monsters in the audience, the barrier sectors to obscure them, and the tripwire to remove the barriers, exposing the monsters. That is still the same. 

 

Action 242 changes how a sector is visually rendered, meaning the barrier sectors could be invisible to the player, the monsters inactive behind it but seen. 

In the map, you have a standard barrier in front of monsters: 

[Sector with floor height 256, ceiling height 256, and tag 1] へ(⚈益⚈)へ へ(⚈益⚈)へ へ(⚈益⚈)へ  

 

Off-map, you have a dummy sector. Let's say ground level is '64': 

 

[Sector with floor height 64, ceiling height 256] 

 

Pick a linedef adjoining the dummy sector, give it the tag of the sector we want to affect (here tag 1) as well as action 242.  

 

[boris]

You can do that with self-referencing sectors. Check out this post:

In your case you could remotely open that invisible door. You can't attack the monsters until you open that door, though.

[Nine Inch Heels]

Since you're using Boom, don't even think about fucking about with self referencing bullshit. Use action 242.

 

What it does is it displays a tagged target sector at the heights of the sector the action 242 linedef is "pointing into". So you can "box in" your "audience monsters" like you normally would, but the game won't display the sector height where it acually is. Having said that, the sector that is being displayed at a "false height" can still be "managed" as usual, meaning raising and lowering is still nice and easy like it always was.

 

Various ribbiks maps do this, for example swim with the wales map 02 can be used for reference.

 

lol @rdwpa half a second faster it seems... Didn't you learn that "nice guys™" don't finish first? :P

[meapineapple]

I was able to accomplish what I needed a lot more simply than any of that, on account of this being an outdoor area where I wanted this to happen. I brought a part of the sky ceiling down to block the monsters off, and didn't assign any upper textures - this way there is an invisible barrier - and then I assigned an action raise the ceiling when I want the monsters to start fighting the player.