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Csabo

Two more ideas

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Hi all,

Well as long as we are discussing new tricks and ideas, I have two more.

The first one is a "motion detector" kinda thingy. The idea is to make a few linedefs in a corridor, put a mostly seethrough texture on them with just a few horizontal lines through it (it could be translucent as well). This would represent the "laser beam". If you have played Duke Nukem 3D, you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, since the Doom marine cannot crouch or crawl, and it's not possible(?) to detect if the player jumps over the line, my idea would be this: if the player triggers a line, an internal counter is incremented. After a certain amount of time (maybe half of a second) the counter is decremented. If the counter ever reaches 2, the motion detector is triggered: we could release some guards or hurt the player, whatever. So basically the player would have to go through these lines really slow. It would also be possible to make an on/off switch for this (on the other side of course, so the player could turn off the mechanism on the way back). This, in my opinion, would make a great obstacle, something for the player to think about or be careful about, not just the usual running for keys stuff.

The second idea is this: make a door that can only be opened by a rocket launcher. I though of this lots of times, and I actually implemented it too. Haven't seen this trick in any WADs yet. Again, if you've seen Duke Nukem 3D, remember those cracks on the wall? That always told you that wall can be blown up. Unfortunately normal linedefs cannot distinguish between the projectiles. (Right?) So bullets, or even imp fireballs would activate a certain script too, not just the rocket launcher. So my idea was to put an invisible thing <B>behind</B> a linedef. The thing would have 1 hitpoints, easy to do with DeHackEd. The rocket's splash damage 'kills' the thing if the player hits the wall. The thing's death can trigger a script, and voila: we've blown up the wall. A little quake, and a nice explosion sounds, some sectors go up/down, and we have a new pathway for the player to continue. Firing at the wall doesn't help - the bullets don't hit our thing. The only drawback is that the BFG also works. Maybe that's not a problem - we can imagine that the explosion is just as powerful as a rocket (or just make sure that the player cannot get a BFG before getting to that point in the map).

Well, that's it. I hope someone finds this useful/interesting, and maybe even uses them in their own map.

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2 cunning ideas. I especially like the rocket explodable wall. A simple yet effective solution.

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The thing doesn't have to have 1 HP. For weak walls and glass, that would work, but for stronger walls, you could make it so that 2 or 3 rockets might destroy it. You could give the thing a pain sound of crumbling rock or twisting steel, set the pain chance to 255, and if possible, have the sound play at full volume, to let the player know that the rocket did some damage before the wall is destroyed.

This idea would also work for lights on the wall (darken the room when a light is broken). It will even work for ceiling lights, since the point of impact isn't a linedef that a rocket must cross, but a thing placed right below the light on the ceiling. When you break it, glass flies everywhere with the obvious sound, and of course, the room gets darker.

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Ultimate DooMer said:

I could use that rocket-only wall. As long as it works by putting an imp or some other weak monster behind the linedef.... (and remove the body as soon as the script goes off)


You could set up dehacked to remove the body (by making the end of the death sequence have a next frame of 0 and a positive duration). Or you could replace the final death graphic with an invisible sprite, or simply use thing_remove in your script to take away the body. Actually, now that I think about it, there's a total invisibility bit in dehacked.

Remember, you could use dehacked to create a killable monster with low HP from an item you did not plan to use anywhere in the game (eg the dead lost soul item). You could set it up to use pretty much any frames you wanted because the way you set up all the options in the thing editor would be important for this, not what it actually looked like. You could easily use the imp or trooper or whatever frames simply to provide you with idling, pain and death sequences to allocate sounds to. And with Zdoom now supporting additional sounds from the sndinfo lump directly in your dehacked patches, there would be no need to mess up other native doom sounds.

Also, it is now possible to spawn certain items from Hexen that can add to the explosion effect. Most people will be familiar with the stained glass shards, but dirt clumps and rocks are already part of Hexen too. All you have to do is include the graphics from Hexen and spawn the items as projectiles in your script. These have been mentioned on the Zdoom forum:

Here

http://notgod.com/phorum/read.php?f=12&i=4217&t=4217

and here

http://notgod.com/phorum/read.php?f=12&i=4257&t=4257


Nice additional ideas Ichor. The pain sound indicating the wall was crumbling - cool!

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Enjay: I was intending to use Thing_Remove to get rid of the imp's body, but when I tried it I found that standing in the right place you could still hit the imp with a lead-slinger weapon. Still, I can get around this by placing the door at the end of a passage, then trying to kill it with a chaingun or something would blow you up....

I was always under the impression that you couldn't add new monsters without replacing existing ones, so I'd like to know how to do the 1 hitpoint thing. Is it just a case of changing the hit points of a piece of scenery from 1000 to 1 and unchecking the 'can't be hit' box, or is it more complex than that?

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That's what I did (used a piece of scenery). Here's my dehacked patch:

Thing 83 (Tall Gr. Pillar)
Hit points = 1
Mass = 5000
Bits = 4

This would be Thing ID #30 in the editor. Worked nicely for me.

Nice ideas! It looks like we've got the ball rolling :-)

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Damm Csabo keeps on coming up with teh awesome ideas and stuff.

That motion detector thing sounds like a pretty good trap...*smirks*

Might get to work making it.

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Ultimate DooMer said:

Is it just a case of changing the hit points of a piece of scenery from 1000 to 1 and unchecking the 'can't be hit' box, or is it more complex than that?


Yup, as Csabo showed.

My first option for doing this is to use the "Dead lost soul" item simply because it never appeared in any original doom levels, but is in the EXE. A free thing to edit if you like. I would probably copy across all the characteristics from a simple enemy, except the attack frames, and set it to have low hit points and be invisible. Then I would allocate sounds from SNDINFO entries that I had added to avoid messing up any existing sounds.

I have always assumed the dead lost soul item is a throw back to the beta days when the lost soul didn't just disappear at the end of its death sequence, but left a pile of bone shards instead.

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Enjay said:

Yup, as Csabo showed.

My first option for doing this is to use the "Dead lost soul" item simply because it never appeared in any original doom levels, but is in the EXE. A free thing to edit if you like. I would probably copy across all the characteristics from a simple enemy, except the attack frames, and set it to have low hit points and be invisible. Then I would allocate sounds from SNDINFO entries that I had added to avoid messing up any existing sounds.


I should be able to do that, but what about actually putting it in a level? (WA doesn't recognise it. Also, the frame in question - SKULK - is the last frame of the lost soul dying)

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Ultimate DooMer said:

I should be able to do that, but what about actually putting it in a level? (WA doesn't recognise it. Also, the frame in question - SKULK - is the last frame of the lost soul dying)


Yeah, the default frame is the last frame of the skull dying, but you can use dehacked to change the frames it uses to any frames you like. As a nice, easy, basic monster, I would give it the imp initial, first moving, injury, and death frames. All other frames would be left as 0. The frames it actually uses are pretty irrelevant. You just want something that can be put in pain and killed. And that is just so you can allocate a pain and death sound. To be clear (although I have said it before), Zdoom will allow you to put sounds from SNDINFO directly into your dehacked patch. All you have to do is define them.

Here's something that might work (untested):

Thing 116 (Dead Lost Soul)
Initial frame = 442
Hit points = 5
First moving frame = 444
Injury frame = 455
Pain chance = 255
Pain sound = your_sndinfosound_1
Death frame = 457
Death sound = your_sndinfosound_1
Height = 3670016
Bits = 4718606

As for putting it in a map, the edit number for the dead lost soul is 23, I dunno if WA allows direct inputting of thing numbers, or if there is some way of adding it to a config file, but 23 is the number you need.

As a by-the-way piece of info, I think SLIGE puts a dead lost soul in at the start of all its levels. Sometimes if you are facing the right way, you momentarily see the end of a Lost Soul death when you play a SLIGE map.

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Woolie Wool said:

We could have some Build engine code implanted into ZDOOM to create walls only destructible with the RL. Time to badger Randy Heit. :)


There would be absolutely no need to implement build code.

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Woolie Wool said:

With Build code you can make explodable walls that don't blow up all the way through, leaving smoldering holes in the walls.


With cunning use of sectors and scripts, you can already do that in Zdoom.

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