Set up an infighting? [vanilla/boom]

[Memfis]

Has anyone found a way to reliably set up an infighting between certain monsters? Let's say I want the player to enter the room and see a cyberdemon fighting some barons. Is there a good way to do that? I imagine it would require placing them far away, ensuring that someone start shooting, and then teleporting them to another spot, but I wonder how foolproof would that be. Or maybe there is a better approach involving dehacked trickery or something?

[Linguica]

I don't think there's any good way to do it with vanilla. You can certainly do it with Dehacked though. There's a level in Batman Doom where they had a "gang war" happen in front of you by having monsters damage each other at the start of a level and then be teleported to holding pens to await your arrival (IIRC).

[Benjogami]

I thought it would be fun to try, so here's something. complevel 2, requires the player to have invuln, pretty much only works with a cyberdemon and some barons, but it's pretty guaranteed.

 

 

infightsetuptest.zip

[scifista42]

The only DEHACKED trickery that could make this possible is using a custom thing that explodes when the map starts and damages a nearby monster, the monster then goes after this thing (the thing must be shootable for this to work, and must have enough health to survive its own initial explosion) and gets teleported into a position where there is another monster between the thing and the first monster, so when the first monster fires at the thing, it hits the second monster instead, and now the second monster goes after the first one.

[zerolizer]

you could do this in the mapinfo, however it would affect the entire level and im not sure if mapinfo works with vanilla, i work mostly in UDMF and whats really cool is that monsters will fight even if they are the same species!!

[Pegleg]

3 hours ago, zerolizer said:

you could do this in the mapinfo, however it would affect the entire level and im not sure if mapinfo works with vanilla, i work mostly in UDMF and whats really cool is that monsters will fight even if they are the same species!!

As far as I know, mapinfo only works for ZDoom and successive formats.

[Pegleg]

16 hours ago, scifista42 said:

The only DEHACKED trickery that could make this possible is using a custom thing that explodes when the map starts and damages a nearby monster, the monster then goes after this thing (the thing must be shootable for this to work, and must have enough health to survive its own initial explosion) and gets teleported into a position where there is another monster between the thing and the first monster, so when the first monster fires at the thing, it hits the second monster instead, and now the second monster goes after the first one.

Could you accomplish the same thing in vanilla in this way:

1. Start in a room behind a closed door. On the other side of the door would be the monsters you want infighting and a barrel.

2. As you approach the door you cross a line that triggers a crushing ceiling to come down and destroy the barrel.

3. The barrel damages a nearby enemy, who retaliates (it would have to be one that shoots something, I think), but ends up hitting another monster on the other side of where the barrel used to be.

4. You cross another line that stops the crushing ceiling.

5. You open the door and witness the infighting carnage in front of you.

 

I haven't actually tried this, but I readily admit that, if it did work, it would be clunky and probably wouldn't work in every situation.

[scifista42]

8 hours ago, Pegleg said:

crushing ceiling to come down and destroy the barrel.

3. The barrel damages a nearby enemy, who retaliates

An enemy damaged by an exploded barrel will not retaliate against the barrel, because the exploded barrel is already dead.

[therektafire]

Yeah won't an enemy only attack another enemy because of a barrel explosion only if the other enemy attacked the barrel first?

[scifista42]

That too. What's more, for that to work, the other enemy would have to hit the barrel once without destroying it, then the barrel would have to be hit another time to be destroyed.