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I was playing Dissolution of Eternity again after many years, and I noticed that one of the "new" enemies, the so-called Hell Spawn ( https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Hell_Spawn ) seems to be missing from the game, more or less. I thought it was a cool concept to have an enemy which can clone itself like an amoeba, and that's part of what got me interested in playing DOE again. But so far, I haven't encountered any Spawn with "eyes" in their skins, and the green ones I've encountered almost never create a clone, except occasionally when I damage them. Most of the time, they just behave like normal blue Spawn. Yet oddly enough, the Guardians have no trouble at all spawning clones of themselves during combat.
My guess is that the game was supposed to randomly spawn either a green one with eyes, or a green one without eyes... but instead, it's only spawning the latter or a blue one. Does anyone know why this is? Could it be an issue with the port I'm using, QuakeSpasm 0.93.2? Last time I played DOE, I was using Darkplaces, but I don't remember if the enemy worked properly in that port or not (if it ever did.) I switched to QuakeSpasm so I could play more mods. Looks like it's tied to skill 2 (?) and randomized if they are not specifically placed in the level via a spawnflag. I am pretty terrible with the math here so not sure how often this would be.
You can view the code here. Thanks for helping clear that up. I guess there wasn't any bug after all, I was just too unlucky (or lucky, depending on your perspective) to notice the "mitosis" ability. That being said, having it only happen when going into its pain state may not have been the best coding choice, due to the fact all Spawns explode on death, thus killing the new Spawn of the Spawn. Plus, it looks like the "tbaby_mitosis" function itself is also randomized and won't always create a new Spawn when called.
Bit of a tangent, but the map Telefragged features a Spawn variant that splits into smaller versions of itself.
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/rrp.html romero published a list on his
base1 tim willits base2 tim willits base3 tim willits train paul jaquays bunk1 american mcgee ware1 american mcgee ware2 american mcgee jail1 tim willits jail2 tim willits jail3 tim willits jail4 christian antkow (xian) jail5 tim willits security tim willits mintro tim willits mine1 tim willits mine2 tim willits mine3 tim willits mine4 tim willits fact1 american mcgee fact2 american mcgee fact3 american mcgee power1 tim willits power2 tim willits waste1 tim willits waste2 tim willits waste3 tim willits cool1 tim willits hangar1 tim willits hangar2 tim willits strike christian antkow (xian) command christian antkow (xian) space christian antkow (xian) lab brandon james city1 paul jaquays city2 paul jaquays city3 paul jaquays boss1 brandon james boss2 tim willits I've wondered about this for the longest time and have never been able to find the info. Thanks, mh!
According to Petersen, Willits had his eye on id's upper echelon of management from the moment he became a full-time hire. After Romero was fired, Willits had coveted McGee's status as John Carmack's golden boy. According to this developer, Willits set his sights on eliminating McGee. Their feud reached a boiling point when McGee ran into trouble designing levels for Quake 2.
"American could tell something [was not right]," Petersen said. "So he went to Carmack and said, 'What should I do?' John Carmack said, 'Okay, to make your levels look better, go and talk to Tim.' And Tim Willits could make absolutely spectacular-looking levels. They were great levels. He said, 'Talk to Tim. Look to him to show you how to make your levels look really nice.'" Willits deployed misdirection to further attenuate McGee's status with management. When McGee submitted new and revised levels for appraisal, Carmack lost his temper and accused him of doing A when he had expressly wanted B. "American was horrified," Petersen said. "He said, 'Yes, I did just what he said.' Basically, what had happened was Tim Willits had literally told American the opposite of what he should do, to get him in trouble with John Carmack. And Carmack couldn't believe it. Who could be that dirty? He absolutely refused to believe that Willits had done it, but he had. That was Tim Willits literally tanking American McGee." Altho that's from the "Rocket Jump" book which presents an uncritical collection of self-serving retro-gossip from the id guys who, god love 'em, were largely a bunch of infighting egomaniacs. I'm a little sad to see it get picked up as ammunition for current Quake-community beefs.
I think history has been kinder to the McGee maps - any time I do a replay I always find myself enjoying the McGee and Jacquays maps most, whereas the Willits ones tend more and more to bland and formulaic. They do look very nice though.
The start of the warehouse unit isn't great. It's just a collection of linked rooms with buttons to open doors and a handful of enemies in each. Very uninspired. But I'd say it hugely improves after you get a little into the first map, and the second and third maps are probably as good as Quake 2 gets.
The weaker maps for me are the Torture Chambers map (get stuff in Cell Block A, then Cell Block B, then wander around badly lost in samey-looking corridors for far too long), the symmetrical Hangar map, the two Pumping Stations cause the Power/Waste unit to drag on, and there's something else in the middle of the Jail unit that's quite nondescript. I think some people find the Mines drags on a bit too long as well, and that's probably fair criticism. I mean, I've always assumed it doesn't and in all my years of playing it's never felt like it does, but I recently saw someone on Doomworld claim that Quake just uses a more toned-down RNG than Doom -- a claim no-one's contradicted so far:
Quake has less absurd RNG damage than Doom does, and I still think it's dumb when an Ogre takes 3 grenades instead of 2, or I need 5 to kill a Vore. Is there any truth to this? Have I been wrong all these years in thinking there's no RNG in Quake? I tried searching for information on this but couldn't find anything. The rocket launcher is explicitly random on a direct hit, doing between 100 and 120 damage. It then does fixed radius damage to everything else in the area. So there's a random element, but it can't ever lead to an ogre surviving three direct hits (he has 200hp, so two minimum damage rockets suffice).
Grenades differ because they don't have a separate damage mechanism for the target they collide with. They just do 120 radius damage to everything, even the entity they hit. The key to maximising damage is to hit the ogre close to centre mass. If the grenade strikes the bounding box more than 20 units from the ogre's origin, you do less than 100 damage. Do that twice in a row, and the ogre takes three shots. So there's no random number generation going on with the grenade, but it's subject to some mechanisms that can be arbitrary. For example, if you attack an ogre from the south-west direction, the corner of the bounding box is facing you, so your grenade can't get as close. If you attack from due south, you're presented with a flat face of a bounding box and the grenade gets closer before exploding. From what can see in the code: dogs, Fiends, both Knights, fish, Ogres, Shamblers, Spawn and Vore use some RNG for damage.
As far as dealing damage to them this is the only RNG that I can see: T_MissleTouch (rockets) damg = 100 + random()*20; There are more experienced coders who can probably talk about T_RadiusDamage a.k.a. splash damage which I assume has some randomness. Also shotgun pellets are in a random spread but not too sure if that affects the damage. Thanks for the answers and especially that detailed explanation, Preach!
By the way, would someone be so kind as to give me a link to the code in question? I assume it's on github somewhere, but I always get confused looking for things there. Doubt I'll be able to understand much of the code, but I'd like to have a look anyway -- presumable that's the first step towards understanding it.
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