DeHackEd modified Pain Elemental unable to trigger walkover linedefs in GZDoom.

[DCG Retrowave]

My favorite DOOM enemy is the Pain Elemental because I think they look very adorable.  Last month, I began making various DeHackEd mods for vanilla DOOM (I play on my DOS PC :D) featuring harmless Pain Elementals, nicknamed "Funnies."  This morning, I started working on a currently unnamed mod where the player (Doomguy) adopts a funny Pain Elemental and must protect his new pet at all costs.  The Pain Elemental will be used to open doors and lower lifts that the player cannot reach without the Funny's assistance.  For example, a door that can only be opened on one side is only accessible through a monster-only teleporter.  Other monsters usually won't have access to these, so your pet is very crucial to completing each map!

 

The problem I'm encountering is that walkover linedefs for opening doors and lowering lifts aren't being triggered by the Pain Elemental in newer versions of ZDoom and GZDoom.  Odamex's ZDoom 1.22 works, but it appears that at some point, this functionality was altered.  At first, I thought this was an issue with floating enemies in general, since an Imp could still trigger the doors and lifts.  Next, I tried using both a Cacodemon and Lost Soul.  To my surprise, they triggered these actions flawlessly.  The only thing I've changed about the Pain Elemental is the face target function looping back to chase after the Funny stares at the player for ten ticks and unticking "Affects kill %".  A normal Pain Elemental is able to trigger the walkover linedefs like the Cacodemon so I'm assuming that ZDoom/GZDoom are treating monsters that don't affect the kill percentage differently.  Is there a compatibility setting I'm missing to change this or is this ability completely absent in newer releases?  I use the "Doom (Strict)" compatibility settings.  I can work around this if necessary, but I'd love to have the Pain Elemental not affect the kill percentage if possible.

 

Thank you for reading this message :)

[SilverMiner]

Try to replace PE with a monster removing countkill flag.

 

NewPain : PainElemental replaces PainElemental

{ -countkill }

[holaareola]

Hah, this is a delightful idea. But the practicality of waiting for a PE to float around and open doors for me with Doom's... I refuse to call it AI... doesn't ring quite as well as the premise.

 

I suppose it probably just needs careful design. Love the thought though, and I agree the PE is the cutest of them all!

[DCG Retrowave]

On 10/9/2020 at 4:40 PM, holaareola said:

Hah, this is a delightful idea. But the practicality of waiting for a PE to float around and open doors for me with Doom's... I refuse to call it AI... doesn't ring quite as well as the premise.

 

I suppose it probably just needs careful design. Love the thought though, and I agree the PE is the cutest of them all!

Don't worry, most maps will have 128 unit doors and other optimizations for him :) 

 

The house (a hub world) uses smaller doors, but that's the main exception :D

[DCG Retrowave]

On 10/9/2020 at 4:12 PM, SilverMiner said:

Try to replace PE with a monster removing countkill flag.

 

NewPain : PainElemental replaces PainElemental

{ -countkill }

I could mod the Lost Soul for this since they don't count for kills anyway.  The only issue is that I'm using all of the normal enemies aside from the SS and a standard Pain Elemental.  I'll figure something out or just forget about the kill percentage since this mod isn't really about killing stuff :D