Resurrecting monsters in a map

[Dravencour]

So I have this idea in my head for part of a level I'm doing. I want to have dead monsters everywhere in a level, and then have an event (preferably in ACS) that will resurrect these monsters Archvile style so that the player will have to fight them.

 

Problem is, I cannot seem to get the Thing_Raise effect to work on monster corpses -- I'm doing a test-map and trying to make it so that when the player picks up the chaingun in the map, the dead imps in front of him will resurrect and go after him, but so far, this has not happened. I've tagged all the dead imps with the same tag, but it's not working. I think the main culprit of this problem is the fact that the monster corpses are a decoration, while an actual dead resurrectable monster is another Thing entirely. So, how do I pull this off?

Edited October 29, 2017 by Dravencour

[scifista42]

11 minutes ago, Dravencour said:

I think the main culprit of this problem is the fact that the monster corpses are a decoration, while an actual dead resurrectable monster is another Thing entirely.

Correct. Decorative bodies can't be revived.

11 minutes ago, Dravencour said:

So, how do I pull this off?

Put living monsters into the map, kill them via Thing_Destroy upon map startup, revive them via Thing_Raise later.

[Dravencour]

5 minutes ago, scifista42 said:

Put living monsters into the map, kill them via Thing_Destroy upon map startup, revive them via Thing_Raise later.

I want these monsters to already be dead when the map starts up. No death sounds, no death animations.

[Nevander]

Make the sector silent in the sector properties, then kill them all with Thing_Destroy and finally change the sector property back to non-silent. As for not seeing the death animations... well you're going to either need to do a FadeTo to obscure the vision or move the player start behind a wall so you don't see it happen.

 

Another possible solution would be to keep the decorations as is, but then when you reach the point in the map when it should happen, do a very fast 1-tic swap from every decoration actor to modified versions of the real monsters which spawn already in their death state and then automatically raise. That's a bit more work but it would be seamless.

 

Or do the modified actors but set them all to be disabled. Then just enable them in ACS instead of raising.

[scifista42]

I don't think you can make it so a monster would already be dead when the map starts up and also be resurrectable. You can at best make it seem so, by defining a new monster type in DECORATE with a custom death animation that instantly ends up in the normal death animation's last frame, and kill this monster upon map startup such that it will go to this custom death animation.

[Dravencour]

15 minutes ago, Nevander said:

Make the sector silent in the sector properties, then kill them all with Thing_Destroy and finally change the sector property back to non-silent. As for not seeing the death animations... well you're going to either need to do a FadeTo to obscure the vision or move the player start behind a wall so you don't see it happen.

 

Another possible solution would be to keep the decorations as is, but then when you reach the point in the map when it should happen, do a very fast 1-tic swap from every decoration actor to modified versions of the real monsters which spawn already in their death state and then automatically raise. That's a bit more work but it would be seamless.

 

Or do the modified actors but set them all to be disabled. Then just enable them in ACS instead of raising.

Number one sounds like a reasonable plan, though one that will take some doing to pull off, and will most likely necessitate having the player start behind some kind of wall. I already know how to do a cinematic-style fade-in.

 

Numbers two and three sound more like DECORATE scripting than ACS, to be honest. I do not know yet how to spawn monsters that are already in their death state, how to swap one Thing with another, or how to disable or enable a DECORATE actor.