Flies like in Quake 2

[Sigvatr]

Anyone have any good ideas on how to make flies buzz around dead bodies like in Quake 2? Has anyone done this in Doom before?

[esselfortium]

I'm pretty sure that Quake2-style flies are one of the built-in particle effect types in Eternity. They're not used by default, but you can write up a pretty simple EDF mod to make them appear on the corpses of certain enemies (or of all enemies, if you want.)

Alternately, in either EDF or DECORATE or any other sufficiently powerful actor definition system, you could create a Fly actor and probably script it to fly around similarly to the particles in question, and have dead enemies spawn a bunch of them (or, probably, have them spawn a single fly-spawner thing, which then spawns a semi-random number of flies itself).

[Sigvatr]

esselfortium said:

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Would this be doable in a Boom compatible port?

[40oz]

You could potentially trade some of Doom's decorations (such as torches) to create animated corpses via dehacked. It's not gonna be easy though and will mess up maps that use those decorations.

[DaniJ]

Yeah its doable - use Doomsday's particle system which (I believe) has all the features necessary to replicate the effect.

[Graf Zahl]

Sigvatr said:

Would this be doable in a Boom compatible port?

No, not really. You'll need some way to define more complex things so whatever you do, it'll be port specific - and I wouldn't bother making something port specific just for such a (rather pointless) effect.

The lowest port where you even have a chance to do it would be MBF, which of course would mean it'd work in PrBoom, Eternity and ZDoom but then you'd have to use MBF-specific Dehacked extensions which are pretty badly documented (and rather underused.)

[printz]

Graf Zahl said:

but then you'd have to use MBF-specific Dehacked extensions which are pretty badly documented (and rather underused.)

They are pretty well documented if you have MBF with you.

But can they really be made to work in MBF? I kinda doubt it.

Do you think it would look good if such flies in ZDoom would be giant player sized sprites scaled down, just like that fly in the first Rage trailer?

[andrewj]

Immoral Conduct - Special Edition

It has flies on corpses, done with an animated sprite iirc.

[t.v.]

The Beastling in Harmony has flies over its corpse. It was originally made for a deh file (now it is intergated into the Dehacked entry in the wad file).

The Beastling replaces the zombieman which drops a clip of bullets when killed. The clip of bullets was replaced with animated flies (which appear after a few seconds). It is possible to give them a sound effect as well, although I didn´t do this.

When you do this for vanilla doom (with a deh file), keep in mind all clips in the game will be flies (but you can replace an unused item with the clips to include them again).