Fire Serpents

Name: Fire Serpents
Difficulty: Easy - Medium
Summon: FireSerpent, FlameSerpent
Melee: No
Distance: Projectile
Type: Demon

Submitted: Doomedarchviledemon
Decorate: Doomedarchviledemon
Sprites: Exhumed / Powerslave, Raven Software
Sprite Edits: Doomedarchviledemon
Sounds: Doom 3, Hexen, Freesounds
Idea Base: The Chinese Dragon enemy from Gex: Enter the Gecko

Description: Spawned from the hottest depths of hell these fire serpents are immune to fire based attacks and spit hot fire at their enemies. The younger serpents shoot out slow moving streams of concentrated fire at their enemies. The older serpents shoot out longer and faster streams of fire that spread out to cover more area. The older serpent's body also produce hot lava droplets while it flies around which can harm those who are unfortunate enough to be standing underneath them. Luckily these serpents are fairly weak.

Consider this an apology enemy for taking so damn long on the worms. Wouldn't you know it, this enemy only took about a day to complete also. ::



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The segments don't hold together quite as well as the worms' do, but it's still pretty bad-ass! I like these types of more elaborate and ambitious monsters.

The segments not holding together as well is actually by design this time. Mainly due to the fact that I did not want those lava droplets to spawn in a constant stream, even more so than they already are, and make the game lag or make it an impenetrable wall of fire that would just kill/stunlock players and enemies. If it is too much of a distraction or is really not appealing to the eye I can have the segments spawn a little more often and lessen the amount of lava droplets to see if that might make things better.

Also that's the kind of monsters I like to create, just like that Helmet Head monster I am still wanting to make. I even have another monster in mind that I thought of before that Helmet Head one as well which is a part stationary and mobile boss level of monster this time. Though there are still a few things that are holding me back from making it, but I'll get around to it eventually! ...maybe. >_<;

I dunno, I really feel like the body segment density needs to be increased to do this one proper justice. With that in mind, can't you create alternate segments that don't spawn droplets? And just alternate between segments that do and don't drop the droplets?

That actually never even occurred to me when making this monster to make alternate segments lol. I went ahead and increased the amount of body segments spawned for both serpents and created an alternate non-lava-dropping segments.

Yes, I think this is a big improvement. Is it possible to have the monster spawn some segments behind it when it's idling? Otherwise all you see is the head until it starts moving, at which point it suddenly grows a body. (I think it would be acceptable if there was a "jerk" or inconsistency in the body structure when it starts moving, as long as it appears to have a body both when moving and idle.)

Sorry it took so long to get to this again.I have updated the fire serpents with a few of their body segments spawned behind them while they are idle. I also fixed the flames that spawn when their body segments do into their death state so that they spawn in the proper positions now. The fire serpent has three body segments when it is idling, while the flame serpent has five to show the player even more that there is a smaller, weaker serpent and a larger, stronger serpent.

For some reason the serpents seem to have much better situational awareness than most other monsters when spawned from the console--they ALWAYS seemed to be facing my direction when spawned, so I couldn't observe the idle tails. So I had to build a custom map to drop them into to test them out. For the most part they seem to work, but when I got close to the idling Flame Serpent, I noticed dramatic slowdown in framerate for some reason. This goes away once it "wakes up" and becomes active. I don't know exactly why this is happening while it's idle, but it seems to be tied to the lifespan of each idle tail segment. I think it's spawning too many segments on top of one another while idling (it has a 1-tic "idle" loop, and spawns 5 segments each loop, with each segment lasting nearly 100 tics--which means there may be up to 100 such segments stacked at one time). I don't know for sure if I'm right, but either way, shortening the lifespan of the idle tail segments ameliorates the issue. I initially tried dropping the lifespan of each segment down to 1 tic (the duration of its idle loop), but for some reason, they don't appear at all this way (offhand I don't know why). So I changed the lifespan of each segment to 2 tics, and this seems to work better. Of course, they also disappear faster once the serpent starts moving--but, in my opinion, it doesn't look bad. You might want to play around with the lifespan values of the idle segments and see what seems to be the best compromise between performance and appearance.

The idling Fire Serpent doesn't seem to affect the framerate in this way, possibly because it's producing fewer segments, with shorter lifespans each. I suspect, though, that if the Fire Serpent idles long enough, it may produce enough extra segments to cause slowdown when the player gets close, so you may want to experiment with those as well.

This is a pretty interesting monster.

It does look a bit strange to me that the body segments don't appear to move with the head when they are spawned. Would it make sense to have a set number of segments travel along the same path as the head?

The Fire Serpents have been updated and should no longer cause slowdown issues while idling. Hooray!