Wolf3D's spirit-hitlers fired a dense chain of little fireballs that moved really really slowly but were very very nasty to touch. You can almost look at Quake as being like a 3D shmup like Contra, where it's all about finding the non-lethal places to be standing at any given instant. When you look at it that way, there's a whole range of attacks waiting to be tried.

an Ogre that pisses on the player after killing them (thanks Romero).

I just want to say I'm glad they didn't put that in. 

All collision in quake is based on bounding boxes, so unless the monster held his shield perfectly vertical and axial and also it was a rectangle you couldn't really make that work. 

Fascinating discussion. Only thought at this time of night is re: the giant underwater enemy. Would it not make more sense to add something like this as a boss entity rather than a standard monster (given the somewhat specialised environment required and the gigantic nature of such a beast). Something kinda like Shubby, but bigger and with actual attacks (although I'm unsure whether making it mobile would be good or bad).

Hell, for that matter, why not start adding a range of original bosses? While I agree there are still some gaps in the monster load out, there comes a point where you're just adding gimmicks and the modelling/coding time is better spent on something else (hence, bosses).


Oh, and slow swimmer + ranged attack seems a better idea tbh, altho alternate skins and some simple ai changes would allow both fairly easily... 

If it's all implemented right, then it really should be about the intersection of that cone with the surface of the hitbox of the monster. So you could be inside the cone yourself but aim a shotgun shot into the back half of the hitbox and it would register. You just need to make sure that you use the impact spot not the player origin, which the standard QC isn't set up to deal with but can be written if you're willing to change t_damage. That's only a big deal because you'll have to change dozens of references throughout the code to it(!).

If the shield angle is going to change each frame, then it's probably best to have a vector field on the monster storing the normal vector of the shield. Each animation frame you can update it with a function that adds the monster's yaw to the known angle from the corresponding frame, and runs that through makevectors, into the storage field. That's also much faster for computation, it saves you doing makevectors for each call to t_damage in any frame, shotguns might generate multiple hits.

This does remind me a little bit of a quake mod I made back in the day where you hunted vampires. You had to actually aim for their heart with the stake in order to blow them up into dust, and it used a similar trick. Although in that case it was more checking if the point of impact was within a certain radius of the heart. The heart was located simply by doing a quick offset from the monster origin to the left and up a bit. It worked pretty well as I remember, especially considering quake has such crude boxes to start. One thing that made it work was that relative to the origin the heart didn't really move, a mobile shield might be more exposed. 

he's in a giant wooden badger 

i think the shield idea isn't worth it considering all the hackery involved.

personally, i don't even think it's that great an idea anyway. painkiller had monsters like that where you couldn't hit them if their shield was blocking you, and they were just annoying. i know, weak argument, but look at it this way, you'd only ever be able to use them in large areas. if you had them in a corridor, they'd be impossible to kill. 

I was thinking more along the lines of plaer death cams, like in Undying. Every enemy had its own little kill sequence. The skeleton sticks in the mind for ripping the player's heart out.

HL1 had these to a degree as well, the alien grunt feeding on the player's corpse.

So maybe when the player is killed by a zombie instead of (just) the message we'd see the player's corpse gibbing and leaving behind a zombie. 

 

loved the way that the monsters ran across the ceiling (and flanked you) 

The chop attack might be slow and avoidable but <...> Same with the Drole or whatever it's called. I'd rather that got fixed before new monsters were introduced.

Both of these have been changed in Quoth part 2. We shortened the melee ranges, reduced the runspeed of the dguard and the dmg of the drole tentacles too iirc.

Sorry to be a tad blunt, but you can blame necros for the earlier versions :P He had an almost relentless drive to make every monster a death machine, partly because he is so good at SP himself and partly because of inexperience. He'll have to forgive Preach and I for nerfing his creations for the sake of us mere mortals.


the Drole or whatever it's called

What is it with learning the names? It's written on the webpage. It's printed on the screen if one kills you. It's only five letters, and one syllable. Anyone would think you're trying to not learn them. 

couldn't a separate, impenetrable entity be attached to the front [or wherever] of the monster?

The SoA scorpion has an invisible bbox in front of it that, when damaged, triggers the monster to strafe. Preach brought this to my attention working on the Quoth base content, and fixed some issues the feature had. Maybe he can elaborate on its relevance to your suggestion.

All collision in quake is based on bounding boxes, so unless the monster held his shield perfectly vertical and axial and also it was a rectangle you couldn't really make that work.

The box only has to reasonably approximate the model. After all, the monsters themselves are only boxes when it come to weapon impacts, but we're all used to exactly whereabouts we need to shoot them, and don't seem to mind that it doesn't line up exactly with the polygons.


The design for this 'shield' business should, imo, be monster_juggernaut. A creature similar in appearance to the D3 pinky, also perhaps like the GW juggernauts of khorne. A brutish quadruped like an armoured bull/rhino, an organic tank-on-legs. Like the uruk-hai berserkers from LotR, they would be heavily armoured at the front only. Their behaviour fiend-like in that they would charge ( though not leap ) causing dmg and even pushback on contact, but very slow at rotating to change facing. A successful dodge by the player allows them to shoot at the sides or rear of the juggernaut while it slowly wheels around for another charge. The shield is not invulnerable, but perhaps reduces dmg by half and negates splash dmg, a la the cross of deflection.
There must be monsters of this sort in other games, surely...?

I thought of that approach, but the thing I don't like about it is that if you're looking at the monster from the side he could have plenty of exposed meat, but since you're still inside the cone none of the shots do damage. You'd need to be able to fire past the shield.

But the cone doesn't have to be 90� does it? Can't it be narrower, as narrow as the model implies?
I think you're thinking too literally about a 'shield' - just make the monster armoured at the front. Actual wood/metal shields would be too difficult to line up with quake's collision detection and tbh I think they're too medieval and not quakey enough. We have the death knight and reskins, isn't that enough generic medieval? :/ 

Only thought at this time of night is re: the giant underwater enemy. Would it not make more sense to add something like this as a boss entity rather than a standard monster (given the somewhat specialised environment required and the gigantic nature of such a beast).

Why would it have to be any larger than an ogre? Who said it had to be that big?
And no, making it a boss monster only reduces its use further.

What I intend is a monster that can be used to make a single underwater area dangerous to enter, but safe once that single enemy has been defeated. See the watery areas of e2m5rmx. A single 'bigfish' in one of those areas, patrolling back and forth in anticipation of feeding time, would make falling or diving in of greater consequence, but solved with a single combat of around fiend -> shambler difficulty.

Another location would be in a remix of e1m4, inhabiting the main pool and guarding the cavemouth that leads to the silver door.

At present, the only option for areas such as these is a shoal of rotfish, which is a totally different type of combat. Less dramatic and arguably less fun.
Why would an ogre sized fish in these locations need to be a boss monster?


Hell, for that matter, why not start adding a range of original bosses?

Well necros and I would like to have added other boss monsters to Quoth. Some obstacles though:

1. Making new models, and especially animating and skinning them, is a lot of work. Really, until you've tried it yourself you have no idea how much work it is. For comparison, making the gug was as much work as building red777, and necros was doing some of it too.
The vermis was actually easier - 6 days plus a weekend of feedback from RPG - but it is a noticeably simple design.
You want more complex than that, and we're going to need a good incentive and a long time to achieve it.
It's on the cards, but it sure isn't top of the deck.

2. Limited useage. Boss monsters do not have as much fun to be extracted as normal monsters. The vermis is supposed to solve the problem with chthon and shub in that it has no special method to kill, so there's more a mapper can do to make their use of the vermis different in their map. But it's still limited.
Boss monsters are only really going to be used as a one-off climax. Considering the above mentioned workload, it isn't an attractive ratio of work/usage.

3. Mappers want boss monsters that fit their personal epic vision. We could end up pouring time and effort into a boss monster that everyone promptly turns their nose up at. Time and effort that could be spent on other monsters or content. 

he's in a giant wooden badger

trigger_centerprint_pythonquote 

that big motherfucking fish in HL1?
when you first met in in a crossbow cage, then again by the dam... 

see posts 32 and 38 

Bosses are best left customized by the designer to whatever he's building, yes. We see fewer bosses that way, but not every map needs one (some have them anyway!) and the ones we do are usually better for it. 

hmmm - spitting underwater?

Something scarier would be a squid or octopus, with tentacles that whip or grab, maybe a trilobite? 

the quake engine wouldn't be able to do it convincingly. heck, even modern engines would have a hell of a time with it. i guess it would be a mixture of standard animation, IK and some of the procedurally generated stuff that's starting to see some use in games these days. 

Psst...I know that...that's why I pointed out the suggestion had already been made much earlier in the thread 

... as I don't think people have really figured out the Quoth menagerie yet. Or at least I haven't. I had a strange sense of relief in Ruined Nation when I saw a shambler. "Ah!", I thought, "I know what to do here!", as I ran right up to him and did the double-barrel shotgun shambler dance. I don't have the same reflexes for, say, defenders, yet (my best approach so far is to run around like a headless chicken and take the odd potshot until they're gone). 

enemies that
hide and try to get in your back.
fly sideways while shooting at you in bursts.
have to kind of projectiles, like fast + slow.

homing missiles that have a max turning radius and are pretty fast so you can evade them by going sideways and then forward. 

Check out this water boss http://www.quaddicted.com/anaconda.html (not the one on the screenshot). 

Sorry to be a tad blunt, but you can blame necros for the earlier versions :P

That's not blunt - I'll happily blame necros :D

the Drole or whatever it's called

What is it with learning the names? It's written on the webpage. It's printed on the screen if one kills you. It's only five letters, and one syllable. Anyone would think you're trying to not learn them.

Ummm. Well I don't tend to read the webpage much....and I don't tend to get killed by Droles much... And I have a small brain that can only fit certain information in. 

shit me right up.

Wouldn't work very well on a modern alpha-vis'ed map though. 

I prefer the fast-bitey concept than the slow projectile thrower. Given that this monster is meant to dominate a large area of water, you can't allow the player to easily plug it from a distance while only having to dodge a few projectiles. It could make for a lot of quite easy fights, and make the player lose respect for the monster. Something is required with the immediacy of a fiend that takes the fight to the player.
It doesn't have to be much faster than the player or it could even be a bit slower, just as long as it gets to you quicker than those lazy rotfish.

I was planning a rotten, zombiesque version of a deep sea angler fish.

Heh, that's exactly what I imagined, I just couldn't remember what those things were called.

Also the vermis could make a good kraken-like underwater boss, maybe if it was adapted to grab and hold players instead of throwing them.