[SUBMISSION] Haedexebus

[INFO]:
Name: Haedexebus
Difficulty: Medium
Connection: Fatso, Blood
Summon: Haedexebus
Melee: No
Distance: Projectile (2 types)
Type: Demon, Cybernetic
Brightmaps: Yes

[CREDITS]:
Submitted: Ozymandias81
Decorate: DeVloek, Ozymandias81
GLDefs: Ozymandias81
Sounds: 3DRealms, FreeRadical Design, Eriance
Sprites: yuraofthehairfan, zrrion the insect, Eriance
Sprite Edit: Ozymandias81
Idea Base: An hellish simple variant Volacubi-like monster for Doom

[DESCRIPTION]
After been jailed by a Cyberdemon for betrayal, a Mancubus lived so long in the depths of Mount Olympus on Mars, until a day encountered some Mindflyers that gnarled and morphed him into an horrible abomination: the Haedexebus.
Provided with Hellforge Cannons, it has 2 different types of projectile attacks: a new custom railgun attack with bloody tracers with limited range and a really dangerous maceball that spreads minimaces while exploding onto targets.
Not such a big threaten monster to fight alone, but when it fires maceballs or in packs it's really fearsome to deal with.

[PREVIEW]



[DOWNLOAD]


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Pretty nice overall! I like that his projectile angles are randomized, so he doesn't have a set pattern like Mancubus. His overall threat level is good too. And the sprites are great for the most part. I've got a couple of minor criticisms I'd like to offer up:

*He's got lots of duped frames. His A and B frames (front and back) are identical, as are his C and D; and, all of his rotations (2/8, 3/7, and 4/6) for movement are identical. If you don't feel you can actually provide edits of all the frames, then maybe just using TEXTURES to assign the duplicate frames would be more efficient than actually including duplicate sprite data. Plus for the front/back frames, since they're just mirrored, I think you could just name them A1C1 and A5C5 so they'll self-mirror during animation.

*His death animation plays a little too quickly, in my opinion. It should probably be slowed down a touch.

*I'm not 100% sold on a couple of the Duke 3D sounds; the roaming sound is OK, but "suck it down" seems a little out-of-character (and gives me some unsettling Romero flashbacks). I would also change the roaming sound behavior so it doesn't play every loop--it gets a little repetitive with its current behavior.

Otherwise I think this is very nice, even with the duped frames and stuff. There's not enough Mancubus variants out there, and people need to make more (and I'm as guilty as anyone, since I have an unfinished one that's been on my hard drive probably 3 years now).

Thankx MagicWazard for your suggestions/criticisms.
I try to be clear as you for answers:

DUPED FRAMES: I'll take a look deeply onto such considerations of yours, I simply didn't think as you the same for frames rotations as one (that's strange, while my favourite beasts are usually barons like...).

TEXTURES USAGE: I don't think to use them because, if I'm not wrong, there are not many beasts on repo using such tricks.

DEATH ANIMS: I had a bad feeling with such fast anims, so with your considerations I found confirmations of it: I'll slowly them on next updates for sure.

COMMANDER SOUNDS: While adding sounds for this creature, I was really in a hurry to find some fitting sounds for UnMancbus, so i decided to fit Duke3d's Commander sounds (that monster is really silly IMOH, but so beautiful ), just what my mind remebered on that moment. It will be a bit hard to find some fitting stuff, but I'll invest some time on researching them. For the "suck it down" it's only a limit of mine: I'm italian and pretty deaf, only now I know what exactly it says

In the end, I'm planning to add different speedy fireballs + some sort of railgun fires.
Also, I'm really sorry to not to be a sprite artist: I don't have any skill on changing/add some more anims to UnMancubus, they're just polished & PNGOUT'd version of zrrion's graphics

Eriance should be added to the credits for the sprites, since they're based on the hell-themed mancubus from his now-abandoned ( ) Demon Eclipse.

ozymandias81 wrote: TEXTURES USAGE: I don't think to use them because, if I'm not wrong, there are not many beasts on repo using such tricks.

Using TEXTURES is fine. And If someone wanted the sprites as lumps, SLADE can easily take care of that with a simple export.

@Blue Shadow
Added Eriance credits to OP, didn't know he was involved with such sprites :roll:
Otherwise, I'll see how to use TEXTURES with sprites because I never use them in this way.

A bunch of fixed/additions here and there, just updated the same file in OP:

- Added Eriance inside waded CREDITS
- Added new custom railgun attack as Missile2 state (randomly called)
- Added some more GLDefs for railguns
- Added new railgun sound from FreeRadical Design
- Added A1C1/A5C5/B1D1/B5D5 sprites, removed old ones
- Fixed death anims speed
- Fixed that roaming sound behavior, now it's only a see sound
- Converted original wave railgun sound into an ogg one with Audacity (81kb to 17kb!)
- Removed "suck it down!" sound - no more random roaming sounds
- PNGOUT'd brightmaps
- Decreased height/radius values a bit in order to prevent general stucks

While I don't know exactly how to use TEXTURES with sprites, I think that UnMancubus is done for now.

The railgun attack only does 2 points of damage per shot--I think that's probably a typo (maybe it was supposed to be 20?). Plus his rail attacks don't hit the player very often. Perhaps relatedly, the flags field has a value of 1, which I don't know is meaningful (the flags all have names and I don't know if they translate to numbers or not)--but the aim flag, which is right next to it, has a value of 0. Maybe aim was supposed to have the value of 1? Or was the flags value intentional?

Nevermind MagicWazard, I've done above fixes in a hurry, so I forgot to polish some stuff.

1) The attack: yep, it's a typo because it comes from an attempt of mine using multiple instances of the same anims to do damage, but I wasn't feeling really comfortable with such idea.
FYI now it does 20dmg x shoot, while with multiple instances was the same (GGGGG (2, etc.))

2) The flags stuff: yes, as parameters says they're integer, 1 is still accepted, but it wasn't my intentional to silence the shoot! BTW, I've included named flags (RGF_NOPIERCING, I think it's int 2) instead of int values, in order to be more polite

3) Aim defs: fixed, now the value is properly defined (BTW sometimes the aim is not pointing precisely to the target, and that's intentional now :roll:)
Just take a look to maxxdiff value .

Thankx anymore a lot Wazard! OP files already updated!

PS: Is that Blueish Fatsubi your mostly post-poned Mancubus recently mentioned? Seems so japanese and cruel in the same time...

MagicWazard wrote: the flags all have names and I don't know if they translate to numbers or not

The "names" are actually numbers; constants . For instance, RGF_SILENT means 1.

The wiki intentionally doesn't list the associated values to the constant names, so as to encourage modders to use the constant names themselves, as they're more readable, especially if you're combining flags.

Thanks for your clarifications Blue Shadow, they are always useful and necessary to improve our skills in modding.
Anyway, I've done some small fixes to UnMancubus now:

- Decreased maxxdiff value from 8 to 2 (it's widely straight, but non-zero in order to not break playability in general)
- Converted all .voc sounds into .ogg sounds: 23kb saved
- Removed an unused and old row inside death state: StopSoundEx was useless while I didn't have any sounds to be stopped :roll:
- Decreased alpha value to the Blood trails of the custom railgun attacks (from 0.8 to 0.6)

If it's not considered necessary to include TEXTURES lump, I think that UnMancubus is finished and ready to be submitted to repo.

BTW, OP file updated, as always