KDiZD question

[Reisal]

I haven't seen any infighting between monsters since I started playing it late this morning (2:30am), has it been intentionally disabled or might it be some ACS or scripting to produce zero retaliation?

[Gez]

It has been intentionally disabled because there are ten thousand types of imps which have not been put in the same family for some reason so they'd all infight together; while in normal Doom imps don't infight other imps (smartasses with barrel scenarios in 3... 2... 1...).

There's a dehacked file in the pk3. That's all it does. If KDiZD was released today, it would be done as a MAPINFO option by the way, but that was not available yet at the time.

[Reisal]

Well yea I saw the different imps, but I am not sure what I would have to touch to reenable infighting between hitscanners and different monsters (IE Imp vs. Demon)

[esselfortium]

It was intentionally disabled due to some issues with all the new monster types killing each other off. There's been some discussion of alternate ways this problem could be solved, such as grouping the monsters into "families" that don't infight amongst other members of the same monster family (similar to how, iirc, the Hell Knight and Baron of Hell are in Doom II).

[TheeXile]

I always thought Hell Knights and Barons didn't fight simply because they use the same projectile unit ID or something...

[Graf Zahl]

It simply works better without infighting. It wasn't just the imps. There were several areas in the levels where all you needed to do was open a door, wake up all monsters, retreat and wait for the mayhem to end so you could enter an empty room. Not fun. The variety of different monsters was just too high plus the hitscanners tended to kill off everything once awakened.

TheeXile said:

I always thought Hell Knights and Barons didn't fight simply because they use the same projectile unit ID or something...

No, they don't infight because there's explicit checks to prevent it in Doom's original code.

[Vader]

There has been a long discussion about this issue when KDiZD was in the making and honestly, I'm not entirely happy about the solution that was chosen.
I think it would have been way better to rearrange the monster placement in a way to avoid most of the problems (wich is certainly possible!) instead of disabling infighting and thus taking away an IMHO major factor what makes Doom the great game it is.
Anyway, reworking the gameplay would propably have taken another few month, wich neither most of the team and propably a lot of potential players wouldn't have welcomed...

I'm positive things will work out way better with TSoZD though!

[printz]

Darki (DRKI e co) imps are cool, whatever you may protest. :)

And to answer your question: it's a console variable. Say "infighting 0" without quotes, after pressing `, to make it like Doom. And "infighting 1" to make it uber-infighting (everyone hates everyone if provoked, imps will scratch each other). KDiZD uses "infighting -1" so it resembles Strife. I'm surprised no one has answered the question yet; usually I am late to answer and get to post something entirely stupid.

[Graf Zahl]

Vader said:

Anyway, reworking the gameplay would propably have taken another few month, wich neither most of the team and propably a lot of potential players wouldn't have welcomed...

Considering what a pain it was to release KDiZD at all I somehow doubt it would have been done in a few months... :D

[Vader]

Yeah, propably true... everyone invloved was apperently sick of working on it at that time, myself included TBH :P

[Reisal]

Too bad there is no planning for TSoZD (The Shores of ZDoom), is there?

If I can find a way to classify the monsters into "families", I would be happy as I find the occasional infighting rather amusing sometimes.

[Vader]

Actually TSoZD is already being worked on... slowly, but progress is there!

[Graf Zahl]

Mr. Chris said:

If I can find a way to classify the monsters into "families", I would be happy as I find the occasional infighting rather amusing sometimes.

Yeah, it can be fun - but in KDiZD that was not the case. It really would have been necessary to redesign the monster placement in nearly all areas of all levels to make it work without harming the overall experience. I think you can imagine how long that would have taken for 10 large levels, especially when you consider that the motivation to work on the levels was extremely low at that point.

Two good places in the mod to see what infighting could do was the start of Z1M4 and behind the blue door in Z1M9. Both places where the monsters would have obliterated themselves without any of the player's intervention. Without infighting both places work nicely, despite a wide variety of monsters.

[CeeJay]

It seems that "Terminator" is the one most favourite of the monsters from the beastiary judging from peoples response so far (couldn't a better name have been choosen for it?). I like it too, it is very profesional and cool looking, a shame they author used the baron as a base though 'cos if it wasn't for the shape and legs it would look nothing like the baron and make it more original. I prefer original enemies over Doom-based ones.

[CeeJay]

Ignore my previous post, it somehow ended up in the wrong thread. Don't know how that happened.

[kristus]

So instead of deleting your old post you decided to make a double post?

[CeeJay]

I tried to delete it, but it tells me i do not have permission.

[Reisal]

Vader said:

Actually TSoZD is already being worked on... slowly, but progress is there!

Ooh, that's nice! I like the second episode as well, especially E2M2 through E2M6!

I found there is a dehacked file within the PK3 file that only has a "Monsters ignore each other" flag, which I could easily remove if I wanted to.

[40oz]

I don't even like infighting. Monsters take too long to kill each other. It's sometimes a good ammo saver to let a chaingun guy mince some revenants and cacodemons for you. It's also handy because it can keep all the monsters from targetting you the entire time, but for the most part, even when monsters are fighting i barge in and kill em both.

[Enjay]

When I first played KDiZD I felt there was something missing - though initially I didn't know what it was. Then I realised that it was the in-fighting. However, once I realised that it was a design decision and that's how it was meant to be, I soon got over it and just accepted that the rules were slightly different.

Once I had that mind set, it was fine, I knew what was happening and I could modify my playing accordingly.