Support enemies suck in FPS games. It's difficult to present what they are doing and for them to put pressure on the player, because the nature of FPS games is that if you can see something, you can shoot it. Support enemies work better when you can see what they are doing, but can't necessarily do anything about it right off.

I've always been drawn to the idea of having magical barriers where monsters can shoot out of but players can't shoot in (until they find and take down the magic barrier generator)

I don't know if this can be done in quake though. Anyone know? 

Though I don't remember which map it is. I have it in my quake folder somewhere but I'm busy doing something else right now. 

@Daya, that was a Kona map and the same particle effect is used on the Death Captain in Quoth. There is even that enforcer model with the shield energy bars going up and down that switches on/off.

I have tried several times to make a shielded enemy for Quake and every time the person testing it just keeps shooting until they ran out of ammo or the damage eventually overrides the shield on/off sequence.

Shielded enemies in Quake are completely counter initiative to the game. No one likes or expects shielded enemies in Quake, they are often referred to as extra health buff. I am sure people will still keep on trying to make them and eventually realize Quake is just about shooting things, not waiting for shields to lower.

@Kinn, yes you can do this, create a model with a trigger collision hull and intercept it in all the projectile functions. If you are using the AD base check what I did for void triggers, they are in every projectile impact function and other stuff (breakables, gibs etc) 

That's not what I mean.

I mean, imagine a big hole in a wall covered by a forcefield - it's solid to the player and it blocks his projectiles, but he can see though it.

Monsters the other side of the forcefield can see the player and shoot through the forcefield at the player. 

Damn, that would work I guess.

Impossible to intercept hitscan with SOLID_TRIGGER though, right? 

Impossible to intercept hitscan with SOLID_TRIGGER though, right?
Yeah trace will ignore triggers, unless you give them some collision. You could let the player walk through the barrier (check pre/post client functions) but monsters have no such (luxury) function. Its really all or nothing with Quake, a shield stops everything or nothing.

You could approach from a different direction, let the monster create a shield infront and then throw projectile over the top. So players have to use grenades for arc/bounce instead. Something I was thinking of doing with blue flail knight, create a yellow shield infront and then spin the flail round in the air throwing grenades! 

Zer Enforcers were always a favourite addition because of the shield mechanic. Same with the Quouth uber-death-knight. Both shields were suitably obvious of course. 

can't tell if sarcastic or serious. 

the demons that have the quake staves in ne_ruins can shield other monsters.
the shield also removes some portion of health (down to 1 hp) from the monster so that eventually after repeated shielding, the monster is left with 1 hp and dies right after the shield breaks.

i used .alpha and a sphere model that tracks the monster and flashes when they take damage.

i think that was a better monster than the resurrecting angel. 

what people is doing for Doom these days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq_NmGmI8eI 

Serious, HTH, xx 

Not sure I like some of the piss-weak sound effects from that wad. Doom had very good sound design already. Also, not a huge fan of the high-res textures, I think the original low res aesthetic was fine as it is.
It still looks ok though, I like the song in the wad. 

5th, yes, no need to change the sounds, some of them are like nail on a blackboard. But the music is fantastic. The level is beautiful. I understand what you say about HD textures: it's ugly when they try to bring ultra-realism to a cartoony game. In this case I think it was done right, it added quality blending with original textures very well. It didn't deranged from the original feel. 

Is the music in the video the same as in the .wad? Because that's from American McGee's Alice, which had a fucking awesome soundtrack. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q0VNPREq2o 

although the latter's shield was sometimes glitchy/unpredictable, I actually felt it added something new to enemy routines and freshened up gameplay.
Serious. 

The Death Lords shields are fine because they work without any problems.

The Mega Enforcer is broken to the point where there is no correlation between the shield visual and the actul shielding effect. 

I'm realizing that every time I switch to a conceptually different programming problem, I become a dumbass.

For example, I've never had any trouble coding the Quake's GUI, and I even ended up rewriting most of it. But recently I've implemented a mouse-driven interface to navigate through the palette and experiment with some color transformation algorithms, only to realize that I was overcomplicating the task because the classic key/button-driven interface is equally efficient.

I should have quickly realized that before, but I didn't. And that wasn't the only thing. In the last couple weeks, my first iterations of the color generation algorithms were utterly moronic; even though their conceptual designs were fine, their implementation took more effort than it should have and lacked trivially basic programming skills, so it was awful to work with.

It's like I forget how to code when the task is conceptually different. It kinda scares me because I have no trouble with far more advanced tasks like texture mapping.

And I realize that all this tends to make me work towards whatever I feel that is the most difficult task at the time. I'm always trying to overcome my own stupidity. But if this is somehow making me more stupid, perhaps there's something very wrong. 

I think a mouse driven interface for Quake would be a nice addition. 

(and by extension Quake1 in a way)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q 

There's actually a reason, I'm eventually going to implement a kind of scene inspector tool to help with some experiments on rendering, since the number of onscreen vertices, edges, surfaces, etc can become overwhelming for a keyboard-driven interface� I guess.

But for the palette stuff there was no need.