This blob basically became the Q1 medic - he's about 1/4 built in terms of code and needs the mesh reeporting to fix the Quake UV's.

He's got a reasonable health count (two rockets to kill) but also undead recovery - so five seconds after non gib death he revives.

His ranged attack is basically four zombie gibs - this needs to be fixed to be a scatter attack, making him more likely to hit but with lower average damage. Like all RMQ monsters he aims with Z in mind, so can hit targets above or below him.

He's weak against the chainsaw (which is the undead buster) which will gib him after some sustained sawing.

There is no infighting amongst undead.

The features not yet in:

Revival - eats corpses transforming the remains into zombies.

Eats heads, storing them as maggot ammo.

Devour - a very slow melee attack that causes massive damage. This is supposed to be defensive, used against players who melee other targets near the vomitus.

So the vomitus is a cross between an artillery monster and a medic - he's more interested in corpses as the player but will spam chuck when he's got nothing better to do. Rockets or the Cauteriser (Q1 Railgun) will work at long distance or the chainsaw up close - anything else will just have him revive like a zombie. His final specials are the maggot ammo (earned for eating heads, produces a handful of maggots on hit) and devour melee which is slow but a nasty surprise to any player being even slower.

Maggots are worth a mention since they follow the earlier comments about swarm creatures. We actually have something called trap_swarm which releases a cloud of wasps when activated which hit for 1 damage and ignore armour.

They move in a flocking pattern, and only lack one feature - to ignore the undead, which causes some goofy stuff. A 'fear' reaction in other monsters would be funny, but will have to wait

The maggots work more like monsters (movement only, they don't affect the killcount), but otherwise have the same profile 1 damage, ignoring armour. They basically crawl towards the player relentlessly. They can be shot, but if touched then the damage is done and the maggot removed.

Monster drops: We've got these with both armour shards and small health's (5) them all being linked model wise to the world type - medievel, base or runic.

An apothecary is an interesting idea, but for us it'd be repetition to have two creatures capable of revival. Another type for knights - Chaplain. Whilst alive he incites other creatures (all of whom get a special effect) to do more damage in melee and move faster. 

Vomitus in the title there. 

The apothecary is a personal preference, and it'd be cool if it made it into other mods, so I don't think the discussion was wasted (I'm going to be compiling it into a cohesive notepad doc here in a bit).

As for your mod, what about my earlier suggestion of the wall-crawling slug beast? Usually placed on really, really high ceilings, blends in with the architecture (which might require multiple colorations to work properly). Quick, quiet ranged attacks that do a slightly below-average amount of damage but can be fired in relatively rapid succession (making it dangerous to try to get a bead on it). Initially it doesn't move, but when attacked it will start to crawl down the wall toward the player, gaining speed as it loses health. If it reaches the player, it detonates for a large amount of damage. 

The attacks would be hitscan but they'd also lag slightly behind the player. 

it would be kind of cool to give a monster regenerating shields.

it would work just like halo or any of those ww2 games. shield points would go down as it took damage (this could be represented with a series of skins that progressively get darker or something (or with entity alpha getting more and more transparent)) but if the monster didn't take damage for maybe 5 seconds, it would begin to slowly regenerate back to full and the player would have to begin damaging it all over again.

you get 3 alternatives with that:
1. lots of shields, very little health.
pretty much when you get through the shields, it dies.
2. decent shields, decent health
probably the most annoying because it would both take a not-insignificant amount of time to take down the shields and then be expected to do the same for the health.
3. low shields, high health
the is probably the most favourable of the options available.
you are penalized for leaving the monster alone, but not as badly as in option 2. at most, you'd have to break through another 50 points of shields before getting back to work on the monster's health. 

Well we've got plans for a hanging (Voreling style) spawnflag for the Spawn . . . although I know that's not what you mean.

We have to be careful with new introductions since we're revising everything, but the wall crawling you mention could easily be applied to existing creatures - the maggot seems a reasonable candidate. The Fiend has been considered as well, but the organic buzzsaw is still tabled for now about how it will be remade.

Shields make me think again of a tank type enemy, though not necessarily mechanical 

 

I just had an epiphany.

The Apothecaries could be our turret monsters.

Say their ranged attack is slow and, perhaps, very lightly homing until it passes the player. It does LOADS of damage, but it's sort of easy to dodge. The attacking Apothecary, IMO, wouldn't move except to block the player from getting to the healer one -- but both Apothecaries would be capable of some pretty damn fast speeds when they DID move.

This makes one's role as "defender" more useful, as it can, with the right amount of speed, actually take long range sniper-rockets for the sake of the healer. Furthermore, it means that running away from the apothecaries isn't necessarily a working tactic because they'll follow -- and fast. This makes them multipurpose enemies, a VERY big danger. A pair of apothecaries and a room full of corpses could be easily equal to a gug or a full-on boss in terms of pure "WTFPWNtential".

At the same time, a brave enough player won't have much trouble plastering both of them, adding a strategic layer to their encounters -- do you have enough health/the balls to axe them or enough ammo to scrap them at range?

With this set-up they work VERY well as end-of-episode minibosses. Have a gauntlet of normal enemies in a big room initially, setting you up for (after all enemies are dead) the appearance of two apothecaries, who immediately show up their rather frail appearances with punishing hails of returned enemies and slow-but-hard-to-keep-track-of balls of pure condensed pain. The panic... it's almost PALPABLE.

--Caitie, the -evil- game designer 

so, playing some nwn2... seems like the d20 games have some kind of flat damage reduction where, say you had 10 points of damage reduction, it would simply reduce all damage by 10.
if your attack does 10 or less damage, you basically don't do any.

it would be cool to implement something like this on a monster where the NG would be completely ineffective, as would shotguns of both types (you'd see the grey bullet puff particles instead of blood) but the SNG would work with reduced damage. it would also reduce the effectiveness of the LG since it's damage is delivered in a constant stream. over time, more damage would be reduced from the LG or SNG than from rockets which deliver large chunks of damage slowly. 

One of the issues with flat damage reduction is that it makes rockets the far and away most efficient choice for tackling the target, when they are already the weapon of choice a great deal of the time. I suspect this is why the shambler takes reduced damage from explosions instead. The flat damage reduction could be used intentionally like that though, if you wanted to create a monster which prompts players to use up lots of rockets, in order to make a later horde combat more difficult. Like zombies, but without the ability to kill many at once.

One final technical issue you need to overcome is the part of the shotgun which combines several damage updates into a single hit. If all the pellets hit the same target, then you end up with 1 call to t_damage inflicting 24 damage, not 6 calls inflicting 4 each. Perhaps the best way to resolve that would be to add a third variable, multi_hitcount, which is incremented by 1 each time a hit builds up, and reset in all the right places. Your damage reduction code then needs to spot when that is non-zero, and reduce damage by reduction_factor * multi_hitcount.

If you wanted to create a monster which was resistant to low rates of damage, but more vulnerable to high tier weapons, you could employ limited, fast rate regeneration. An example monster could have 150hp, along with a pool of 400hp it could regenerate back up to that starting value. So it always dies after 550 hp of damage, but if you can deal damage faster than it regenerates, then you can kill it in much less.

At 60hp/s regeneration, 2 consecutive rockets or grenades kill it, and 6 cells should also do it in. But constant fire from the nailgun would take 5 seconds to take one down. The regeneration also means that you have to focus one down in order to kill it, the benefit of using a high tier weapon is lost if you allow it time to regenerate. Rockets lose some of their power against a group of these enemies, as most splash damage will be regenerated anyway.

The problem is that this is quite a complicated mechanism, and you might have to worry about player feedback. Otherwise they might get the impression that these monsters just have random amounts of health. If you encounter them with low tier weapons, you might feel you've learnt that these monsters have 500 hp, and then when they start dying to 2 rockets you'd end up confused. Would borrowing the health kit sound, or some recognisable variant of it, and playing it in pain animations be a good start? 

reading those comments about a worm that would consume someone from the inside out made me wish i had thought of this before:

it would have rocked if you could put a entity key on a voreling so that it would search for large corpses like ogres and shamblers near it when it's spawned.
it would move to them and go inside them and hide there so if you're backtracking through an area with a bunch of dead monsters, these things could burst out when you get near (with a nice little shower of blood and a squelching sound of course).
it could even periodically play a chewing sound like it's eating the organs and stuff in there. 

We've got lots of plans for corpses.

In Quoth could cause problems with the corpse fade flag though. 

that is a tremendouis idea. 

I had an idea for a monster a while back that was basically a maggot kind of thing that would crawl into an enemy corpse and start consuming it and then eventually pop its head off as it got bigger and would use the monster's body as its own.

Somewhat similar to how Resident Evil 4 and 5 had those centipede creatures pop out of a zombie's head if you shot it. 

working on a mod called AWESOME QUAKE and it pretty much contains all of the ideas shared in this thread already TBH.

Plus Helicopter-Ogres. You'll see ... you'll all see. 

i say: fuck yes, for helicopter ogres! 

To 'Better than Awesome Quake'. 

http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/awesome

relation ?? 

 

 

I'm betatesting my level and the funny thing arises I can't kill my monster by gibbing it.
It hadn't occured to me as I always shoot them to death, and then they're finished.

When I blast bones with my rocketlauncher its head keeps attacking me untill I'm killed.
Suddenly it has become untouchable.

Must have to do with the qc. Can't imagine bones read these posts. 

+1 for helicopter ogres. 

lets help a DarkYoung, not an Endboss, but well..,

http://members.home.nl/gimli/dark.gif

one go on its way. 

YES~!!!!! 

even though i remember it being invisible but here is picture

http://www.3x6.net/vhoorl/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/yog-sothoth_couleur.jpg

(cept i imagined it with feet sense it was trudging through the woods knocking down the trees and/or town)