Surprising monster behavior.

[Igor9]

I was playing tnt.wad with Eternity 3.31b2 and I got to map04 - wormhole. I met this archvile:

http://www.freewebs.com/igor9/archvile.png

and he chased me all the way down the elevator, down the stairs and into the corridors beyond, occasionally stopping to resurrect some of the dead monsters along the way (see from last panel to first). Is this behaviour common in the original doom exe or is this something to do with the monster options that BOOM first introduced? FYI, I have enabled all the monster options in eternity i.e. monster remember target, infighting, back out, avoid hazard, affected by friction and climb tall stairs. If this is due to BOOM, I suppose any ports that have BOOM compatibility can also have this kind of monster behavior right?

[Coopersville]

An Archie will follow you anywhere, even with regular DOOM 2. They can even open locked doors. There isn't one in that screenie, tho.

[Vegeta]

This is a joke, right?

[Little gangster boy]

I have completed All the Doom's 1,2,And Final doom i cant waite 4 doom 3 to come out it will take my a wile befor i complet that.

Any way i dident now archvile's could open locked doors shit
that how i hide from them i go though a door and waite 4 him to piss off.
Good i lernt somethink new today

[DooMBoy]

Yes, Archviles can open locked doors.

[Grimm]

That sounds like a very, very, VERY useful piece of code to have. Anyone know if there's anyway to change it in DeHackEd?

[Linguica]

A way to change what?

AFAIK the archvile opening the locked door for you on monster condo is because the other side of the door doesn't require a key, and the archvile moves fast enough that it's possible for it to bump up against the door and momentarily stick through it enough to be able to hit the other side. If the door was locked with a key on both sides like it should have been, the trick wouldn't work.

[Erik]

Linguica said:

A way to change what?

AFAIK the archvile opening the locked door for you on monster condo is because the other side of the door doesn't require a key, and the archvile moves fast enough that it's possible for it to bump up against the door and momentarily stick through it enough to be able to hit the other side. If the door was locked with a key on both sides like it should have been, the trick wouldn't work.

correct, the arch-vile cannot open locked doors unless they are normal doors on the back side.

[Graf Zahl]

Erik said:

correct, the arch-vile cannot open locked doors unless they are normal doors on the back side.

And in that case ALL monsters can open them (if they are fast enough). No magic behavior for the arch vile.

[Ichor]

Besides, if an Arch-Vile could open locked doors, it would defeat the purpose of using a locked door, since you could just sneak right in before it closes instead of going through half the map to search for the key to that door.

[pritch]

Little gangster boy said:

I have completed All the Doom's 1,2,And Final doom i cant waite 4 doom 3 to come out it will take my a wile befor i complet that.

Any way i dident now archvile's could open locked doors shit
that how i hide from them i go though a door and waite 4 him to piss off.
Good i lernt somethink new today

They can't, heh, so forget that piece of mis-information.

And you have thousands of pwads to play and beat before doom3 comes out :P

[deathbringer]

Ive managed to get shotgun guys, former humans and imps to open 'locked' doors because they where normal on the other side before XD

Another suprising bit of monster behaviour i managed ti get once was i was playing DSV3 with the allies on, but playing it in legacy so that all the creatures which are supposed to be allies are actually enemies (because it doesnt have MBF compatablity), so anyway i closed the game, deleted the allies wad and started again, and there was a baron which was attacking me as i saved, and when i loaded the baron (which is not there in non-allies mode) was still standing there, it was just non-solid and couldnt move XD

[The_Aeromaster]

Is there different AI settings for the original Doom monsters? It might be just me, but the arch-vile always seemed alot more intelligent than the other monsters.

[Ichor]

It might be the fact that he can hit you even if he is behind other monsters. That, and his resurrection ability.

[Grogglogobofink]

pritch said:

And you have thousands of pwads to play and beat before doom3 comes out :P

6500 between doom and doom2 to be more accurate :) not bad if you think about it, that's almost an average of two new wads a day over the last 10 years.

[pritch]

Really? Bah, I think I need to re-download the ftp or something.

I count only 4000 in my collection :\

[Fredrik]

It's indeed amazing how many maps have been done for Doom. How many games can compete with numbers like that :)

[Grazza]

pritch said:

I count only 4000 in my collection :\

Not all wads ever made it into the cdrom.com archive. You can get more here and here (the four "Games starting with ..." folders), amongst others. And maybe someone somewhere has a back-up of the CompuServe Action Games Forum file libraries - apparently there was an average of about 3 new wads per day uploaded there in 1995 and 1996 (I find that figure plausible). Some overlap, of course, but not as much as you might expect.

On-topic: Yes, getting monsters to open doors for you is quite a common trick, but it's quite rare that they open them from the "wrong" side. Off the top of my head, I can only recall the instance in Monster Condo (BTW, a coop NM demo has recently been uploaded to compet-n using this theme), but surely there are others.

Regarding Archie intelligence: remember that other monsters don't retaliate when an archie attacks them. This gives the archie a good deal of extra freedom, and spends less of his time attacking other monsters. Heh, I recorded one demo recently where I got an arch-vile to suicide thanks to his own splash damage. He didn't look too intelligent then. :)

[Linguica]

The_Aeromaster said:

Is there different AI settings for the original Doom monsters? It might be just me, but the arch-vile always seemed alot more intelligent than the other monsters.

Actually the archvile DOES have different AI than the other monsters. If you screw around in Dehacked you will find that all the other monsters have a certain code pointer used for their walking sequences, and the archvile has a different code pointer. I think this is just because the archvile resurrects dead monsters though, I think the actual walking algorithm is the same otherwise.

[The_Aeromaster]

I'll bet archies could understand complex math.

[Grazza]

Bah, that doesn't require intelligence :)

[The_Aeromaster]

My point being the rest of the monsters are slow^

[Nanami]

Linguica said:

Actually the archvile DOES have different AI than the other monsters. If you screw around in Dehacked you will find that all the other monsters have a certain code pointer used for their walking sequences, and the archvile has a different code pointer. I think this is just because the archvile resurrects dead monsters though, I think the actual walking algorithm is the same otherwise.

That codepointer is to check radius to revive monsters.

Anyway this is a weird thread. All monsters follow you even if you're in weird places, they all know where you are and head your direction even if you're 293483205832950 rooms away.

[Grazza]

Nanami said:

they all know where you are and head your direction even if you're 293483205832950 rooms away.

Wouldn't the engine crash in that case?

[Nanami]

Heh, I wasn't being literal. =P

Anyway, run into a level with IDCLIP and IDDT and wake up as many monsters as you can and then run into the void somewhere. You'll notice how they all flock toward your general area.

[The_Aeromaster]

I'm aware of that... but when ur 293483205832950 rooms away, the other monsters get lost, the archie always finds his way.

[Dark Fox]

404

[Igor9]

yeah I deleted it.