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bgraybr

Extra Frames for Death...

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I didn't notice that the enemies in Doom were billboarded until I ran into a room and noticed that the dead demon in the corner always faced me. I messed around for a minute, and noticed that every enemy in the game only has one death animation. This looks terrible for certain enemies (the Cacodemon, Cyberdemon, Spider Mastermind). Also, dead enemies are never blocking, which again looks bad on some of the larger enemies. So anyways, how would I go about adding extra frames so that you can tell which direction dead/dying enemies are facing?

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Well, you'd have to draw all the other rotations yourself, of course. Making them usable once they were drawn is as simple as placing them in lumps with the same root name (TROO) and frame letter (A) as the sprite you're replacing, but with the 0 at the end of the lump name replaced with numbers from 1-8 to designate their angles.

If you specify two numbers (like TROOA1A5 or something like that), the sprite will be used as-is for angle 1 and will be mirrored to create angle 5.

Also, dead monsters are non-blocking for a very important reason: it's possible for a monster to die in the middle of a doorway, blocking your passage preventing you from continuing any further in the map.

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I've considered doing rotations for all the dead monster sprites, but after some testing I thought it came out pretty badly. It certainly worked even on a vanilla level, but in a room full of dead monsters, circle strafing around them creates a lot of "activity" on the floor which is kinda distracting. Having a single sprite remain stagnant really reinforces the fact that what you killed is dead.

However, I am in favor of making the actual dying animations have rotations while the the very last frame has none, I've considered doing this for doom guy to use in deathmatch wads.

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I swear I've seen an angled Doomguy death somewhere before, but I can't for the life of me remember where. Some old DM wad somewhere, likely.

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Death frames, if a corpse remains, should transition nicely from angled to not-angled. This can be done by "spinning" the actor in its death.

The thing is that you make the 2-8 rotations copies of the 1 rotation, and make the angles not correspond to what they "should" normally correspond. In just three frames, you can bring 0-rotation in a gradual manner.
1->1->1->1->0
2->1->1->1->0
3->2->1->1->0
4->3->2->1->0
5->4->3->2->0
6->7->8->1->0
7->8->1->1->0
8->1->1->1->0

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EarthQuake said:


Eww it's cool but it's weird in deathmatches especially since when a player dies he turns to face the person that killed him, which often results in the sprite spinning around on his knees in mid-animation.

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This all a pretty cool idea for a large 'mod' wad. If I was any good at attempting to make some grphics from scratch, I would do this now!

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EarthQuake: Yep, those are the ones -- thanks for the link, there. At least I know I wasn't hallucinating for once. :P

Yeah, I do suppose it would work a slight bit better if it wasn't for the auto-spin. Didn't think about whether or not the player sprite would actually rotate since there usually aren't any death sprite rotations. Does the corpse keep spinning around if the player stays and watches his killer for a while? :P

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I'm not sure, I only tested it with bots, they respawn after about a second, but it was weird watching them rotate while sliding on their knees a full 180 degrees when I shot some of them from behind.

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40oz said:

I'm not sure, I only tested it with bots, they respawn after about a second, but it was weird watching them rotate while sliding on their knees a full 180 degrees when I shot some of them from behind.


A hacky fix I can think of for this would be to make the player invisible and spawn a static "dead player" item on death, facing in the direction the player/bot was facing when shot, one that wouldn't rotate. Quite hacky though, and probably impossible in vanilla Doom.

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