Way too much on veteran. I think they left all those armours in, because nearly every single one of them was booby trapped with an imp or some shit like that - so removing them would have made the game easier on veteran.

By the way, another shit bit I need to point out. During one of the later levels of caverns you are walking across a rickety old platform ,suspended above lava. At one point, the platform is divided into a sort of figure of eight type layout by some pillars, and in one direction you can clearly see a pile of power ups. When I played this section I was fairly low on health, and so sauntered over to the power ups. As I do this, one of those shit teleporting mutant things appears next to me, and I back off. The next thing I know, the floor gives way and I fall through. THANKS, id.


Actually, while I'm on the subject of those shit "teleporting" mutants, what was the point in them? They only ever attacked whilst visible, and moved as normal whilst invisible, so I never really felt under threat from them. Also, they seemed overly similar to those weird multiple headed crawling guys with the exception that they moved a bit more slowly and could become pointlessly invisible for short periods of time. 

two demensions, helpless to which one they ex nihilated from, at least that is what I assumed. I maybe reading too much into it ;) 

Would it be better if they attacked while invisible? There's no indicator AFAIK as to where they are when they're cloaked, aside from sound, and as I may have mentioned not everyone has surround sound. I didn't notice that they could be hit while invisible either. Perhaps if they could be shot, and still cast a shadow?

The next thing I know, the floor gives way and I fall through. THANKS, id.

I fell through the floor in that same spot, but on my way over, before anything teleported in. This was about thirty minutes after I made my post about how fun instant death traps would be. :P 

i liked the teleporting monster... hm...

i think they could have been cooler if they were still hitable when invisible, and if hit would turn visible.

i'm probably a bit biased here though... 

I just think that those invisible guys seem a bit pointless. You can kill them when they are turning visible again - at this point they can't move anyway. If they phased in and out of existence it might be nicer. So They would run toward you invisible and appear with a moment to spare before they attack - of course, then it would be annoying if you couldn't hit them whilst invisible.

Oh I don't know. I'll just stfu. 

Especially if they still cast shadows while invisible. Of course, they'd have to be damageable while invis, just for balances sake. But it would be hella creepy to see these things blinking in and out, circling around you. 

So, they phase in and out while moving, are shootable while invisible, and possibly cast shadows as well?

/me writes that all down 

When I first saw them, I'd hoped they'd do some cool dancing fighting, kinda like demonic ninjas or something. Instead they were just rush in and wack you monsters, but were invincible for the rush in section, and had a delay in attack. BORING! 

recreating the spectres from the original doom? take like an imp or something, and put that glass shader on it that does that ripple post-effect in the framebuffer. 

It just really pissed me off the way you saw imps crawling around on the ceilings and walls during pre-AI animations, then as soon as they hit the floor they would just walk around without any more sophistication than the Quake 1 AI, with the exception of much better routefinding.

If the games monsters had very good AI, could use the scenery more effectively, reach you when you ran and hid in a crack behind a crate somewhere, or jumped onto something, and were used less cheaply and more effectively in groups then Doom 3 could have been truly amazing. As it stands, I enjoyed it, but I don't think I will replay it, as the other 50% just started to feel like hard work.

Also, I didn't use quicksave that much on the earlier levels, but by the end I was quicksaving after almost every monster because I couldn't be bothered to repeat any particular situation again. Not that I died very often anyway.

By the way, Lun, I found that the revenant rockets were easy to avoid. In addition to the fact that you can shoot them (like the cacodemon plasma,) there was usually some cover to get behind somewhere, even if it meant running away to a doorway someplace. The closed nature of the environments meant that only very rarely were you ever caught with no nearby cover anyway.

The big pinkies weren't a particular problem, but there were few situations where I was caught off guard in a small space by one spawning in when I had an inappropriate weapon selected. A lot of the time, I just made them chase me round an obstruction of some kind and leisurely beat them down. Would have been nice to see the smash through barrels and pillars from time to time.

The real problems for me was any bad guys with hit scan weapons and the whip guys. Pretty much everything else was fine (with the exception of all the cheap sceneraios id put in the game to suck my health.) 

Just curious, but how did you find the assasins in HL? I fucking hated those bitches. The fights were fairly good fun, but the way they moved so fast was annoying, especially as I only ever encountered them in dark areas.

Still, I'm sure that sort of AI would have been cooler in Doom 3 than the following:

*spawn (preferably behind the player)
*wander toward the player non-threateningly
*dissapear at some random position on route
*walk along as normal, but now INVISIBLE!!!
*reappear somewhere near-ish the player, but not so near to actually provide the player with any feeling of being under threat.
*walk toward the player some more
*eat some buckshot
*walk toward the player
*die 

have shadows on invisible monsters... the monster goes to another dimension but the shadows stays? 

Check this effect out:
http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=46438
I think that would look downright sexy on a monster. 

don't remember them honestly. I quit playing the game part way through because I hated it. 

Yeah, leaving a shadow would look kinda weird...but I think it would be a neat addition anyways, to have those 'blinkers' just bemone invisible but still physical. It would certainly make them more threatening than they are now, where they disappear, reappear a few seconds later, and they're immobile while they're phasing in. They should just instantaneously blink and still be present, and that would be much cooler, imho.

If you put that blur shader on them, I would personally shit my pants. 

Can a moderate please change the icon to the DOOM icon, cheers, word. 

I just hit the fucking reset button again!!

Metslime FFS get rid of it, it's utterly useless...


Anyway, the point was: Wraiths aren't invisible nor do they turn invisible, they disappear entirely and respawn elsewhere and I liked them because the constant teleporting was unnerving. 

I thought the Wraiths were a waste of time. Teleporting was too slow to do any good, because you could kill them when they were in their "frozen" teleport state, and they never teleported behind me. They're basically just maggots with a bad ability. 

They don't teleport and respawn elsewhere, they move while invisible. I went over the code for the wraith last night - the functions called are literally hide() and show(), plus a bit extra for the silly effects. They still move normally.

Apparently it was such a critical design decision that they also be nonsolid while hidden (so you can walk through them ... ?) that they had to make them stand still for a few hours while reappearing for collision purposes, then had to apply the spawn effect to try and hide the fact that the thing is completely still for so long.

I commented out a few lines and rendered the wraith a hell of a lot more effective right off the bat. It cloaks on the fly with a quick version of the death sizzle, and reappears the same, without stopping. This is fun! 

So they are invisible and non-solid whilst they move??

And for the purposes of the player, how exactly is that different from them disappearing entirely and reappearing?? 

actually, i thought it was stupid because it clearly looks like it's teleporting, yet you can still hear the footsteps when it's invisible. didn't make sense, and plus the monster was dead easy to kill. just wait until it starts reappearing and give it a nice buckshot. 

That's interesting. After reading your info on the wraiths, it struck me that I had created an almost identical monster in QuakeC years ago - a variant of the Death Knight that I haven't used in a release yet. He basically cloaks by becoming invisible and non-solid, but still uses normal movement ai. After a set time (or when in melee range) he uncloaks. Because of the way Quake's movement code works, he will never willingly move through another monster, but others may walk through him. A collison check is thus necessary for him to decide to uncloak, but I still haven't perfected it - he still gets telefragged a little bit too much for his own good :P 

you can use the same trick id used on the zombies to detect when it is ok for them to get back up and become solid again:

<Q>
self.solid = SOLID_SLIDEBOX;
if (!walkmove (0, 0))
{
self.think = zombie_paine11;
self.solid = SOLID_NOT;
return;
}


walkmove(), although a movement function, it can also be used to determine wether it can mvoe or not. if it is false (0), then it can't move, otherwise it returns true (1).
this should never result in telefragging and is pretty fast. 

i borked the tags. :\ 

very useful info - thanks.

However, I always did a very thorough line-tracing bbox check which seemed foolproof (although your method looks much faster).

The problem was not the collision checking, it was related to the lifetime of the teledeath box; there was always a chance that something could touch him in the 0.2 seconds before the teledeath removed itself ^_~

I guess I could just not spawn the teledeath, but I just get the feeling it should be left in...