Was just curious about fastest possible monster speed...

[Chewyninja69]

Basically what the subject says. I know that the -fast parameter makes monsters/demons move faster, but is there a way to make them even faster? Or is -fast the quickest they can go?

[MFG38]

If messing with DeHackEd or DECORATE isn't an option, then yes, I do reckon.

[joe-ilya]

Does teleportation count?

[Doomkid]

What speed is "too" fast for an actor to move, does anyone know? Like at what speed does collision detection become broken? It might be a cool gimmick wad having every enemy move as fast as possible.

I hate how enemy frame durations have an impact on speed as well as the numeric value though.. Makes getting everything to a consistent speed unnecessarily annoying. because you have to change the friggin' frame length tics..

[scifista42]

With DEHACKED or DECORATE, you can increase any monster's Speed property or decrease duration of its walking frames, both of which will make the monster faster. If you set the duration of monster's walking frames to zero, the monster will move literally infinitely fast. It will almost certainly crash the engine, though.

[Gez]

Doomkid said:

What speed is "too" fast for an actor to move, does anyone know? Like at what speed does collision detection become broken?

As soon as a monster's speed becomes greater than their radius.

Note that monster speed is the size of a step they make. The actual speed as perceived by the player depends on that value and the frequency at which they make steps (which they do whenever they call A_Chase). Technically monsters can have infinite speed if their chase states are made to last 0 tics. Note that having an infinite 0-tic loop is a good way to freeze the engine.

[Maes]

[Jaxxoon R]

Gez said:

Technically monsters can have infinite speed if their chase states are made to last 0 tics.

I'm now imagining a Big Rigs-esq demon accelerating infinitely until he hits plaid and rips a hole through to the primordial void between realities where the elder self-replicating machine elves reside.

[Maes]

Jaxxoon R said:

I'm now imagining a Big Rigs-esq demon accelerating infinitely until he hits plaid and rips a hole through to the primordial void between realities where the elder self-replicating machine elves reside.

Then, you will be the demons.

[Chewyninja69]

Thank you to all that replied. I really do appreciate it. One more question about enemy speed: is it possible to standardize monster speed across the board with all monsters like in the video Maes posted?

[Maes]

I'm not sure I understood what you mean, but if you meant influencing all monsters in the same way as the Demons in that video, no: it's a bug which only affects Demons and Specters.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Demon_speed_bug

Edit: FWIW, that's the first time I see the "good" Doom wiki (doomwiki.org) coming first in a google search.

[Chewyninja69]

Maes said:

I'm not sure I understood what you mean, but if you meant influencing all monsters in the same way as the Demons in that video, no: it's a bug which only affects Demons and Specters.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Demon_speed_bug

Edit: FWIW, that's the first time I see the "good" Doom wiki (doomwiki.org) coming first in a google search.

Yeah, that's what I meant: 'influencing all monsters in the same way as the Demons in that video'. I was watching Tatsurd's Epic 2 -fast monsters run on Youtube last night and it got me to wondering if there was an even higher possible speed for enemies in Doom. I think it would be awesome to see.

[Maes]

Chewyninja69 said:

I think it would be awesome to see.

And I who thought that jokewads/terrywads/screamerwads had already beaten that to the death, and then some.

[Chewyninja69]

Maes said:

And I who thought that jokewads/terrywads/screamerwads had already beaten that to the death, and then some.

So, it has already been done? I honestly wasn't aware of such. Aside from playing most of the Doom games (save for the Sega Saturn version and the Doom RPG on mobile phones), my experience with Doom WADS comes from what I've seen on Youtube; so I apologize if I'm not aware of such things.

[Maes]

I think this falls squarely into the territory of "cheap laughs" we all used to have when we first touched DEHackED: the most common was just to make weapons super fast and powerful, make a "BFG9000000" that did some ridiculous amount of damage and sent cyberdemon corpses to the other side of the map etc., and of course fucking around with Thing speeds.

Such shenanigans were funny for the first five minutes or so. Perservering became the mark of a jokewad. Especially monster speeds, IMO, are hard to use to alter gameplay in a balanced and interesting manner. Making monsters slower? They are already as slow as it gets without getting annoying, especially compared to the player (which, IMO, is overpowered in terms of mobility). Making them faster AND having faster reaction times, OTOH, rather than balancing the gameplay makes it unfairly hard. At least I don't know of anyone who has managed to strike a balance in this respect.


BTW, movement speed is a different concern than frame durations and reaction times, so you can have monsters that move quickly (many units per frame), but have normal reaction times, or monsters with very rapid reactions that however still move around normally.

A good example of the former is in the STRAIN TC: it has some specially modified "imps" (actually, if I recall they were a Mancubus state table edit. Go figure) which move around VERY rapidly in bursts, but have an extremely delayed multi-fireball attack. No idea what that was about.

A good example of the latter are how most monsters act in Nightmare or -fast mode: they have faster reaction times and attack more frequently (extremely annoying with hitscanners), while only Demons/Spectres also move around faster. Also some projectiles are speeded up, but not all of them.

[Chewyninja69]

Maes said:

A good example of the former is in the STRAIN TC: it has some specially modified "imps" (actually, if I recall they were a Mancubus state table edit. Go figure) which move around VERY rapidly in bursts, but have an extremely delayed multi-fireball attack. No idea what that was about.

A good example of the latter are how most monsters act in Nightmare or -fast mode: they have faster reaction times and attack more frequently (extremely annoying with hitscanners), while only Demons/Spectres also move around faster. Also some projectiles are speeded up, but not all of them.

Those Imps in Strain are badass, lol. It's unfortunate, though, that they have to attack with slow-moving projectiles. How cool would it be if the projectiles were ALSO fast moving? Haha

[BaronOfStuff]

Maes said:

A good example of the former is in the STRAIN TC: it has some specially modified "imps" (actually, if I recall they were a Mancubus state table edit. Go figure)

They were modified Arachnotrons; the Mancubus was edited to become the 'Demon Lord'.

/pedant

[Maes]

BaronOfStuff said:

They were modified Arachnotrons; the Mancubus was edited to beckome the 'Demon Lord'.

/pedant

Ahhhh correct. That's why they also had no melee attack. They looked really weird though: they would run with propeller-feet towards the player, then freeze for an awkward second before attacking.

[baja blast rd.]

Spiderdemons can run 98.7 mph when on cocaine.

[AD_79]

rdwpa said:

Spiderdemons can run 98.7 mph when on cocaine.

Are you sure they run?