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What Is Wrong With Monster Design In The First Place??
Quote from Lunaran about Kiltron's D3SP map:

It still suffers from all of the things I see wrong with the monster design in the first place, however. No SP map can escape that without accompanying coding.

Do you mean D3 or any SP game, Lun??

Either way, what's the feedback from the floor - is monster design in most FPS games (or perhaps just D3) fundamentally flawed?? If so, why/how, and what could be done to improve it??

Bonus points if you manage to discuss something other than just "Improve AI".
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... 
well, are you talking about the actual teleport killing where it gibs what was on the position?

or are you talking about the teleport flash?

if it's just the flash, you can easily place that in with:
spawn_tfog (self.origin);

if you want the teledeth box to remove itself after the first touch, then you can put a remove(self) or SUB_Remove() into the touch function at the end, so as soon as it's finished the killing, it will go away.

also, a note, the method i described above for checking if it can become solid or not only works for monsters that walk. swimming and flying monsters don't work... some limitation of the code because walkmove requires the FL_ONGROUND flag set, which it obviously isn't for flying monsters. i briefly talked to FrikaC about this... apparently, you can trick it with setting the FL_PARTIALGROUND flag or something, but didn't really experiement with it.


as a final alternative, you can make a findradius look for any monsters within a certain radius. the findradius is more robust than walkmove, but more complex.


... now, back to the regular d3 monster design thread... 
Necros 
Yeah, i'm quite familiar with the ins-and-outs of QuakeC, it's just that I guess I wanted to leave the teledeath in for "realism" or something. I guess I can take it out no problem, seeing as the walkmove check is pretty safe.

Interesting point about walkmove not working for flymonsters - it's called in ai_run_slide(), which is used by the scrag, so i dunno.

Btw, isn't it about time we a had a permanent QuakeC thread? Considering the number of Q1 mappers here that dabble in QC, i'm sure it would be useful.

anyway, back to Doom... 
Wait, One Last One: 
well, i didn't really explain properly... walkmove is half broke.
it will move the monster, but the actual check is busted, so using walkmove in an if (walkmove) won't work and always returns true, no matter what. 
 
The death knight should telefrag whoever's in his way, except the player. I'd find that to be a cool monster. 
necros: aha. that makes sense.

scampie: what, you mean a monster should gib if he crosses the path of a cloaked deathknight, even if the deathknight isn't uncloaking? That would look freaky, but possibly make balancing combats a bit difficult. 
No 
I mean the deathknight should actively attempt to "uncloak" where other monsters are, and gib them. Just a fun idea, and really, it's that what it's all about? 
The Idea 
of a deathknight cloaking and just strutting through a wave of tiny imps as they gibs under his wake would be pretty fun.

as for actively uncloaking where monsters are... why would it do that.

It seems more in character for such a huge beast to act as if the other baddies aren't even there and aren't even worth the time to check if they're around before he shoots,frags,kills etc...

/me imagines waves of zombies being thrown into the air... 
Hmm 
I think the hellknight tossing other enemies aside would be far cooler than just gibbing them. Just use the ragdoll to send them up and slightly backwards and play the swipe animation at the same time.

Imagine a seeing hoard of zombies shambling towards you and then a couple of hellknights charging through them to get at you :) 
We Should... 
recreate the battle of Helm's Deep with imps...
yeah. THOUSANDS OF IMPS!!!# 
Metlslime 
consider it done.

^_~ 
What, Like This? 
That Excites Me. 
Seriously.

Yes, in that way. 
Czg 
Wow.. defeating thousands of imps just using double barrel shotgun is really challenging... If you are able to survive to this battle, I just can say bravo !! 
Meh.. 
imps in doom weren't that hard. thousands of spider masterminds, on the other hand... 
Extreme Scrag Hordes Show Shortcomings In Flymonster Movement Code 
Ok, I did some more extreme spawner testing, this time using Scrags. I found that after a while, the hordes showed up some serious shortcomings in the flymonster movement code, possibly related to the infamous "Scrags fly through walls" bug.

http://kinn.spawnpoint.org/randompics/scragmerge1.jpg
http://kinn.spawnpoint.org/randompics/scragmerge2.jpg
http://kinn.spawnpoint.org/randompics/scragmerge3.jpg

Sweet dreams >:D 
yeah, that's about right. x.x 
Kinn, The Great QuakeC Code Spelunker 
his legend will live on long after the PC is gone 
Lol HeadThump 
Well, if someone can show me an engine out there that has fixed this issue, I'd probably be so excited, I'd end up "Spelunking" all over my keyboard. 
Hellboy's Attempt 
Being so freaked out by the movie I tried to wrap the thing out of it's vertices and screwed it out so far.
Must say it still has a nasty 1462 triangles, and 771 vertices but for a start I can live with it.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/gnerk.jpg

Further more I'm afraid it will look a lot like the demon fiend as its shape has a lot of it.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/gnerk.mpg

lol! 
Um 
ok? 
Ah 
Hope I didn't disturb anyone. 
Oh The Huge Manitee! 
Kinn's Fly Monster Test 
The infamous scrags fly through walls bug was fixed in DarkPlaces years ago, I don't recall anymore how I fixed it, I made many bugfixes to the collision code, might be worth comparing the sv_move.c code if you want to patch another engine, it may also involve fixes in SV_Move in world.c (mostly the proper combining of trace_t results). 
Doom3 Gameplay 
Doom3 gameplay seemed to consist largely of the following situations:
1. Seeing imp-like things (who cares if they're imps, wraiths, twin-headed things, or whatever) and running up to them as they spawn and firing the shotgun at point blank before they can begin an attack, causing them to vaporize in one shot.
2. Hearing one or two imps spawn behind me (if two they were at diagonals) and whipping around to the exact direction of the sound (thanks to Zalman 5.1 headphones) and firing before I even saw the turn occur, and turning forward again to move on before they even finished vaporizing.
3. Seeing a pinky and waiting until it got close enough that I knew I could only get two shots off with the second one being at nearly point blank, then holding fire and watching it vaporize on the second shot.
4. Seeing a hellknight and thinking "big imp" and running up and circle strafing it with the shotgun blazing until it vaporized from 4 shots.
5. Hearing cherubs (the winged babies) or Trites and planning a route of retreat and basically holding fire until they were all dead as I retreated, sometimes taking a couple hits where they were particularly defense, choice of weapon being either plasma, machinegun, or shotgun.
6. exchanging pistol or chaingun shots with lost souls (yes I really did use the chaingun on lost souls at times, with every shot hitting it's a decent use of ammo) or cacodemons.
7. firing and taking cover repeatedly.
8. dying and quick loading repeatedly on nightmare hoping to get lucky (particularly when dealing with zsec, chaingunners, pistol zombies that I didn't expect, and those tentacle guys).

The only parts I liked in the game were when it stopped throwing monsters and let the spooky ambience sink in.

Fights are the least tense parts of Doom3 for me, it's basically a series of arena battles (like Serious Sam) and it won't throw any surprises at me while fighting (unlike Serious Sam).

There is a complete lack of freeform roaming battles that keep you on the run and scared and wishing for a respite.

Doom3 seems to purely use monsters as roadblocks. 
Tricerops Tribolitus 
Yeah, what's right with monster design in the last place?
Another try, texturing isn't yet done. I think it is still too "blocky".

http://members.home.nl/gimli/gneirk.mpg 
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