Instant death after falling into a sky in vanilla-Heretic multiplayer?

I recovered an old Heretic map which consists of a building flying in the sky. This map is a pretty standard level, but there are a few parts where I want the player to get sucked out into the sky and die. I've come across a few problems doing this.

First, the sky in Heretic doesn't tile below your viewplane without tutti frutti, so what I've had to do to simulate a sky is make all-grey walls and flats for the scenes where you can look into the sky, and use some cloud textures in random locations so it doesn't look like a grey abyss. Which sucks because you land on a grey flat when you do hit the bottom, but oh well.

At first I tried making the bottom of the sky pit have lava damage, but you could tell you landed before you started dying. That looked and played ridiculous and I scrapped that idea right away.

So what I've done for now is make these areas into huge pits that take a good 10 seconds to hit the bottom. What happens when you fall out is that a crusher is triggered outside the level which will crush a duplicate Player 1 start and simulate suffocation.

The problem is this: the level has to be multi-player compatible, so I need to know how this trick would work in multi-player. The first problem would be that the crusher wouldn't stop without an insane amount of problems. The second problem is whether or not the dummy player in the crusher area will get respawned along with the original player when they respawn. The third is that you can't tell the game which player fell out, so either all or none of the players would die from these falls. Problems two and three could each result in a player falling out of the level during a multi-player game and being stuck in this fake sky until the rest of the players complete the map.

If it's not possible to have this work in multi-player, I figured I could make a duplicate version of the level next to the original, keep the architecture the exact same except for sealing off the sections where you can fall out, mark all the objects in the duplicate copy as multi-player, and have the entire original level crush after a certain point so that it would be possible to get 100% kills in a multi-player game (since you can't make monsters absent on single-player). That's a last resort that I really don't want to use, but I might have to do it if there's just no way to get the players to die after falling out of the map in multi-player.

Anybody know any tricks to get this death effect to work properly in multi-player?

It only works in single player.

Damn.

Nobody else knows any other way or trick to do this?

Nobody else knows any other way or trick to do this?

Is it even possible to make dummy player starts for all players in Heretic? But even so, how to distinguish which player has to die due to falling? And it definately does not work for deathmatch, as there are no dummy starts in that mode.

Your best bet would be to simply let the player die when hitting the floor after a long drop, even if that doesn't 'feel' right.

It's been a loooong time since I loaded up Heretic, so... does it have the ability to suspend sprites into the air, and can sprites be placed on top of each other? If so, you could make a 'sky pit' and suspend an invisible sprite halfway. When a falling player passes through this sprite you could make it deal out a fatal amount of damage.

Or simply use a source port :)

Is it even possible to make dummy player starts for all players in Heretic?

I'm not sure... never been able to try it in multiplayer. If it's possible in Doom, then it would also be in Heretic.

But even so, how to distinguish which player has to die due to falling? And it definately does not work for deathmatch, as there are no dummy starts in that mode.

Grrr :( Didn't even think of that one.

I had a feeling it would end up like this, but overlooking the obvious is my specialty so I always ask here before I dismiss something as impossible. I guess I'll go with the duplicate version.

Or simply use a source port :)

I may do a source-port version eventually. This particular map is actually gonna go in a 3-episode set which is totally compatible with vanilla Heretic, so requiring a source port for one level is kinda silly, and would turn off a few people from playing. Plus, vanilla compatibility is a good excuse to not have to update the rest of the levels =P