dehacked patch for archvile resurrecting cyber/spiderdemon?

[invictius]

Is such a thing possible, or is it hard-coded into the source code? I'd very much like to do this on some maps.

[Gez]

They need to have a corpse state with a duration of -1, and to have a resurrection state. It's the latter requirement that they fail.

You can give them resurrection states, but you'll have to borrow the frames from something else of course.

[printz]

Until then, you can simply set the Respawn Frame to the same value as the First Walking Frame.

[purist]

Do any monsters have anything other then their death frames in reverse for resurrection? It's odd that resurrections have their own frame states instead of just reversing their death frames. I'm not a programmer though, so what do I know.

[Ribbiks]

I'm imagining the horror of a pack of AVs capable of rezzing other AVs

[invictius]

Not something that can easily be applied to any wad without editing, then?

[Enjay]

The biggest issue is finding enough spare frames in the frame table to use the full animation. There are about 5-8 frames in the table that you can access without affecting the game. You could also make the resurrection frame sequence relatively short frame-wise (or shorten the resurrections of less important enemies, or do tricks like make Zombiemen, Shotgunners and Imps share some of their gib frames) so you could get it functioning without too much fuss.

[Quasar]

purist said:

Do any monsters have anything other then their death frames in reverse for resurrection? It's odd that resurrections have their own frame states instead of just reversing their death frames. I'm not a programmer though, so what do I know.

You'd have to add a back link to state_t, as the only link it has is one to the next state. Otherwise, walking the state table backward is horribly inefficient. You'd either end up hacking it to just assume death states are always consecutive (bad design), or searching the entire state table for a state that refers to the current state as its "nextstate" value - and hope there's only one such state.

[40oz]

I made the Pain Elemental have a -1 corpse frame so that it can be summoned back to life by archviles and respawn in Nightmare. The Pain Elemental already has resurrecting state even though it's not used in game. I haven't bothered with the Cybie or Spider Demon though. That sounds like a royal fuck you if an arch vile did that.

Enjay said:

The biggest issue is finding enough spare frames in the frame table to use the full animation. There are about 5-8 frames in the table that you can access without affecting the game. You could also make the resurrection frame sequence relatively short frame-wise (or shorten the resurrections of less important enemies, or do tricks like make Zombiemen, Shotgunners and Imps share some of their gib frames) so you could get it functioning without too much fuss.

It's nowhere near impossible though. I converted Perkristian's smooth weapon sprite animations to .BEX using all the SS Nazi's frames, and some frames from the item respawn fog. (I changed the Item respawn fog to plasma shrapnel since they look kinda similar.) That was all it took and the differences are very subtle.

[Enjay]

Absolutely. If you start trimming things out of the game (the SS guy is a common candidate) you can actually do some pretty extensive things with dehacked. I used it once for a mod that didn't have an archvile so instantly all his frames were available (and he has loads of them) and so were all the resurrection frames from all the other enemies too.