[UPDATE] GateKeeper

Thought I'd point the dark flame breath is way over powered its cool but it can kill pretty much anything like the moloch annihilator demolisher terminator and overlord maybe all vs him

The breath attack has actually been significantly decreased. It now deals 2-16 damage and a cyberdemon can take a little more than five hits from the breath weapon before dying. It still hurts the player for a decent amount but will not kill them if they so much as touch it. I feel that any kind of Ripper attack needs to have the damage set really low because it hits so many times that the numbers will add up anyway. There's no real need to have a powerful ripper attack in my opinion.

I agree. A high damage Ripper attack is just going to kill you almost instantly (learned that the hard way, with some of the guys I've made in the past lol :ouch:) , just sets the monster up for areas that must have at least 1 invulnerability power up or a massive amount of space to hide which just gets frustrating instead of challenging.

Looking forward to seeing the updated version. Enemies like this sadly get overlooked often, but using The Gatekeeper as a "Final Boss" in a Mega Wad quintology (still a WIP, first time getting a custom set of maps/enemies to work outside GZDB), which has a mix 'n' match of Doom & outside source monsters/weapons from Duke 3D, Doom 64, Strife & custom made.

Yeah, rippers are always a tricky proposition. So many variables that can affect their functionality. Given that Hexen only had like 1 ripper attack, and nearly all the entities were of the same relative size, it's understandable that the core functionality gets a little sketchy if you deviate much from there. I guess you can put +NOBOSSRIP on the projectiles, for starters, and/or try putting a RipperLevel value on the projectile and "encourage" the modder to meet or exceed it for "bosses" with RipLevelMin/RipLevelMax values.

Just wanted to check in to see if there has been any update regarding the cube issue mentioned on the previous page.

Are the lost souls he summons supposed to attack him?

I have not worked on this guy since I left it here in its current state, but I can say that no, the lost souls are not suppose to be attacking it when they spawn. I believe the lost souls have the same issue as the projectiles that the cubes shoot where they are, for some reason, targeting it instead of the player by default.

I imagine that this issue could be solved with that 'parent child' relation function somehow but the last time I tried to implement that with another monster I couldn't figure out how to do it correctly. I'll take another crack at it sometime when I get inspired again and see if I can figure it out. Unless MagicWazard has made any changes yet?

So apparently if a projectile fires a second projectile, the new projectile targets whoever fired the first projectile, not who the first projectile was fired at.

https://zdoom.org/wiki/Actor_pointer (see "Projectiles" header)

I don't know why this is the behavior, but it's sometimes used (read: "exploited") to create orbit or boomerang-style effects. You can change the pointer of a projectile when it's fired to alter this behavior (it's the last parameter in the function), but I'm not sure offhand how best to do this, especially since it'll have to be done over and over each time a new cube is spawned. The easiest workaround may be to have the cubes produced through A_SpawnItemEx instead of a missile attack function, since spawned items can retain their master's target pointer using SXF_SETMASTER to produce a "relationship" to the spawner.

Also, I notice that the "BlastZ" attack state falls through into the "SoulSpawn" state. So in other words, every time the cube shoots a plasma, it will also spawn a Dark Soul, but not the other way around. That doesn't seem like it's intended.

Is this abandoned?

Nah, I just haven't been in the mood for a bit to mess with Doom mods too much. But I will work on this later this week. Probably after Thursday or so. I certainly don't want to abandon this. Sorry for the lack of updates but I'll get on it again soon. Ima make a note on my computer right now!

Alright, so I went ahead and changed the initial spawn method in See from A_CustomMissile to A_SpawnItemEx while adding the SXF_SETMASTER flag. I have also fixed the cube issue with BlastZ immediately followed by SoulSpawn.

However, I am still getting the issue of the cubes targeting the Gate Keeper, even with the SXF_SETMASTER flag added. I noticed that the cubes use the A_CustomMissile to re-spawn itself so I thought maybe I could change that to an A_SpawnItemEx as well. But then the cubes no longer orbited around the Gate Keeper and they still target the Gate Keeper. Am I setting the SetMaster incorrectly or is this just how it is no matter what?

Updated Gate Keeper can be downloaded on first post.