death jumps

[deepthought]

whenever i shoot something standing above me with a chaingun or a dragon claw, it jumps at me as it dies. why is that?

[printz]

Special code tells dying monsters who have been shot by an element below them will have a half chance they'll jump ahead, with a force even greater than them falling back.

[kristus]

If that is true, that explains the how. Not the why.

[RjY]

I can assure you it is true.

        // make fall forwards sometimes
        if ( damage < 40
             && damage > target->health
             && target->z - inflictor->z > 64*FRACUNIT
             && (P_Random ()&1) )
        {
            ang += ANG180;
            thrust *= 4;
        }

As for why, let us speculate: when you shoot a guy he always gets pushed backwards, so there's no chance of that kind of amusing "shoot a guy and have him fall forward off a cliff" type of death that are common in certain kinds of action movies. So they put this code in to make that happen sometimes because it looks cool and/or funny.

I imagine the fourfold increase in speed is done to make sure the guy actually goes over the cliff - monsters can't get all the way up to the edges of cliffs and it would look stupid if a guy falls over and doesn't quite make it over the cliffside.

[40oz]

Yeah I was sure there was some kinda code that allows that to happen. There's no reason for the monsters to do that unless it were so you could comically see them fall down a set of stairs.

[Hellbent]

40oz said:

Yeah I was sure there was some kinda code that allows that to happen. There's no reason for the monsters to do that unless it were so you could comically see them fall down a set of stairs.

one of the early memories of doom and going 'hahahahahaha! guy fall down stairs!' by the green armor on The Hangar.

[Encryptic]

I actually was wondering about that myself. Had it happen several times recently, which reminded me I wanted to ask about it. It seems like it usually happens if the monster was walking forward at the time they died, so their momentum gets carried over into the "fall off the edge" movement instead of just falling backwards.

Hellbent said:

one of the early memories of doom and going 'hahahahahaha! guy fall down stairs!' by the green armor on The Hangar.

Heh. Now I'm thinking of the landlord from Coming To America:

"Don't be pulling that falling down the stairs shit!"

[deepthought]

ah i had been wondering if it was some sort of some physics glitch or something in skulltag because i really never noticed it in the dos ports.

yeah that is funny, especially if the enemy flies through you... but how come that only happens to me if i use a chaingun or dragon claw?

[PRIMEVAL]

Chaingun probably has less of a punch than the other weapons. Probably same for Dragon Claw.

[Gez]

I just had that effect with the ethereal crossbow, so...

[Barking Sands]

I first discovered this "jump forward" action when using a DEH (DeHackEd) patch to set the "hit points" of every monster to "1" and set the "mass" of every monster to "15." Any monster on a ledge is likely to fly across the map if they are hit with any hitscan weapon. Exploding barrels actually had less of an effect on their flight distance.

[Use]

40oz said:

There's no reason for the monsters to do that unless it were so you could comically see them fall down a set of stairs.

I'm fairly sure this was a feature request for the engine made by John Romero, for this exact reason.

[hervoheebo]

For some reason, I find corpses sliding up stairs funnier.

[Clonehunter]

I always see that happen ^

Only rarely do I see anyone falling forward...

[Creaphis]

Interesting. I don't think I've ever noticed this in Doom, or if I have I just wrote it off as "random glitchy Doom physics," but I have noticed that killing stuff with the dragon claw in Heretic often gets you a face full of corpse. I guess the effect is more pronounced in Heretic as a single shot of a dragon claw is more powerful than one pellet in Doom, so thrust gets multiplied to a higher value. This must be another one of those artifacts of Doom code that really shouldn't be in Heretic.