[SUBMISSION] Divine Shadow

MagicWazard wrote: I meant having the main projectile spawn multiple smaller projectiles upon impact. Like a cluster bomb.

I don't think that's what players expect once a BFG ball explodes?..

MagicWazard wrote: Admitting that you apparently forgot one of the cornerstone mechanics of BFG behavior, despite making it the focus of the primary attack, is pretty much an admission that the projectile implementation needs to be re-examined. And, "actual people"? That sounds like a passive-aggressive way of trying to dismiss my opinion (as an experienced Doomer and ex-professional game designer). I'll assume no offense was intended by that and move on.

It's an admission that I'll have to reimplement the tracer attack so that it actually targets the ball, unless I actually can imagine a good and clean way of making another weapon that doesn't allow the player to evade easily. Cluster bomb doesn't count, cluster bomb is just "stay away from ball explosion".
You certainly didn't play this monster in the original map. This is what I've meant by people who actually played it. Incorrect wording, perhaps. Sorry. Not trying to dismiss your opinion, but IMO you're exaggerating primary attack power except these unexpected tracers in wrong direction. Unexpected tracers are really evil, somehow that wasn't noticeable before.

MagicWazard wrote: Yes, but when he summons about 3 dozen projectiles all at once, with no warning, and each one can do up to 200 points of damage (BEFORE A_BFGSpray damage is added), that's really putting an awful lot of burden on the player to "EVADE" them all, and penalizing him VERY harshly (probably killing him, in fact) for failing to evade even one out of the approximately three dozen projectiles. You're even stating yourself, in a roundabout way, that you expect this attack to kill the player.

Yes, if he doesn't hide and wait for 5+ seconds until it ends. Well, okay, probably I should reduce tracer damage and some warning is required. No idea what though. Will have to think.

MagicWazard wrote: Again with the passive-aggression. Maybe you'll edit it, maybe you won't? That's not the gung-ho attitude that gets things approved around here. Well, if you don't want to edit this monster any more to address its glaring power issues, then I can just reject it and be done with this whole discussion; if you don't want to respond to criticism, then we're under no obligation to accept this. If you're willing to dial back the overpowered attacks, then we can give this some real consideration.

mrnhnrm. Sorry for the passive-aggressive posting, It's not because of you, it's because I thought I'd just drop the wad here and go away, and didn't expect to return to working on it ever. After all it's something that was released ages ago (well, months, but in Doom modding that's ages).
Also I didn't want to outright promise fixing it because it will basically oblige me to fix it. Hence "or not".
Not trying to insist on immediate addition (or closing) either.


Besides, I'm not so much proud of the scripting which is relatively easy, but of the uniqueness of the monster, and don't really want to strip that away for the sake of making it easier. Less damage, ok. More scripting and work, ok. Fundamental logic change — not ok. IMO. After all with generic archvile you have to hide while it attacks too

To start balancing this, here are a few suggestions:

• Remove the tracer attack from the small projectile.
• Lower the damage of both big and small projectiles. The big one needs this desperately. You can't just take the normal BFG projectile and add homing capabilities to it while keeping its high damage output the same. It throws its balance off.
• Something needs to be done about the whole "projectile explodes when it touches something". Because if there is something in the way when the monster spawns the projectile, it explodes immediately, giving you no chance to avoid the tracer attack, which is unfair.

Good call on lowering the monster's health. That was needed.

While I agree with everything previously mentioned about this monster there is one thing that is bothering me that hasn't really been mentioned yet. In my opinion I feel that having an Arch-vile shooting BFG shoots is really unfitting. Even as a sub-species of an Arch-vile it still doesn't look like it fits with each other. The reason being that the BFG shot is mainly associated with technology that uses plasma, such as the BFG gun, and those who have played Doom will more likely than not associate that specific shot much more with tech than demonic powers. This demon is flesh and bone with no visible hints of tech anywhere on its body but can still create a BFG shot without the actual BFG or other machines that use plasma as ammunition? I can understand if the demon was shooting a large BFG shot sized fireball or something similar since that would make more sense because, as a demon, it would naturally have the ability to use fire and other demonic powers without the need of technology and thus would be much more fitting. This also applies to the BFGs coming out of the ground, which I must say I do like that mechanic.

The name is also a little misleading. When I read the name of the monster I was expecting some kind of spirit demon that utilized spiritual and demonic powers. This might be a nitpick but for me names can play a pretty big role.

ZZYZX wrote: mrnhnrm. Sorry for the passive-aggressive posting, It's not because of you, it's because I thought I'd just drop the wad here and go away, and didn't expect to return to working on it ever. After all it's something that was released ages ago (well, months, but in Doom modding that's ages).
Also I didn't want to outright promise fixing it because it will basically oblige me to fix it. Hence "or not".
Not trying to insist on immediate addition (or closing) either.

Well, it's common for submissions to sit around for months at a time before they are accepted or rejected. And that oftentimes has to do with how much free time the submitter has to work on revisions. That's OK. So if you were fighting back against revising the monster simply because you weren't sure you were going to be willing or able in the immediate future, you don't need to worry about that--the monster can sit in the submission queue for a while until you find the time or motivation to work on it some more. We won't close it out simply due to inactivity for a few months. We're more concerned with the end result than how long it takes to get there.

ZZYZX wrote: Besides, I'm not so much proud of the scripting which is relatively easy, but of the uniqueness of the monster, and don't really want to strip that away for the sake of making it easier. Less damage, ok. More scripting and work, ok. Fundamental logic change — not ok. IMO.

Don't sell yourself short on the scripting. ACS scripting isn't what most people would call "easy", and isn't something everyone can pull off; it's obvious you know your way around with the language. And it is commendable that you would put that extra effort in just to give some extra flavor to how the projectiles are summoned, rather than just using a built-in action function. Little details like that don't go unappreciated, believe me. And for the most part, I don't think there's much that needs to be changed as far as fundamental logic goes. Basically, as Blue Shadow summarized, the problems are primarily with attack damage and BFG tracers. And as doomedarchviledemon pointed out, it could use a more fitting projectile sprite than the BFG ball.

Personally, the only real logic change I think might be required is simply adding a bit of a delay before the mass projectile spam. I'm thinking he can summon some kind of circle or symbol on the ground for about a second-and-a-half or so where each projectile is going to spawn before the actual projectile is produced; this will visually alert the player to the incoming barrage. The upside to that is by giving the player more advanced warning, you could potentially reduce the amount of time he "holds" the projectiles before releasing them--since the player got a bit of extra early warning before the projectiles were spawned, the projectiles can therefore be released a little earlier to compensate. That's my suggestion.

1. Removed tracers from all projectiles.
2. Lowered health even further (Baron level).
3. Fixed projectile renderstyle (not sure why it was Translucent before).
4. Decreased large projectile damage.
5. Increased small projectile damage, but made it less random.
6. Increased speed for all projectiles.
7. Increased circle attack projectile count (because no tracers).
8. Implemented circle attack warning (r_maxparticles is the worst thing ever done to ZDoom).
9. Increased vile's speed.

I no longer die a lot while battling this, I'd say easy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2P-le_aSWY
Although putting 2 Shadows on single map becomes really, really hard due to both using the circle attack a lot.

As for the monster name, it's a reference to this . The Divine Shadow isn't "shadowy". And his attacks are green.
I have another idea for a fireball monster involving particle circles, but that will be completely other thing, not related to this one.

It's a lot better now! Although I don't think it needed more health reduction. I found 2500 hitpoints to be fine considering it's meant to be a very high-tier or boss-tier monster.

The pentagram effect is very cool!

ZZYZX wrote: I no longer die a lot while battling this, I'd say easy

You say it's easy, I say it's more balanced and less cheap.

A monster that's physically small like the archvile feels really weird when it has high HP, idk.
I also thought that 15+ supershotgun shots at a single vile is very boring. Since the monster doesn't have tracers anymore and supershotgun can be used while killing it (with old version you'd just get killed the moment you get close enough).

Besides, with tracers removed, the tier is now somewhere between hard and very hard instead of very hard+. Even closer to simply hard I believe. I'm bad at monster balancing anyway, since I'm more of a duel player than coop/SP. More opinions welcome.

Been watching this thread for a while, after seeing the video with the recent changes, it looks like a really decent challenge, especially if the player isn't prepared for it & it's placed as part of a group of enemies that might ambush you or at the end of a level when health & ammo might be low.

I'd agree that a large amount of health (3000-3500) should be added, bosses obviously have large amounts of health, powerful attacks & need to take a beating from everything you've got to go down, to me, that challenge is a lot more exciting & rewarding after it's been killed . It also makes sense to give it a higher amount of health seeing the delays between attacks, this allows the player a great chance to counterattack and it's no fun if it dies too quickly, this monster has a great mix of attacks like the primary homing shot to make it harder the player to just run in, stand next to the monster & wipe it out with a BFG or similar weapon, which (for example) is one of the most annoying things about the Spider-Mastermind is that despite it's large health cap, you can still easily run up to it & take it down almost instantly.

It's not often, you get the chance to really slug it out with smaller monsters like Archviles, Barons & Mancubi because once you've figured their attack pattern out- the fights over before it's started.

Updated archive. Gave it 3500 health. Now it again requires either very long SSG beating or usage of higher end weapons.
Gave it 50% resistance to BFG tracers (but not ball, simply because there is no damage type for it). Since the vile is small and fast, it now requires significantly better aim to hit it with BFG.

Moved the pentagram script to CLIENTSIDE for future Zandronum support (4.0, I believe, as even 3.0 doesn't have SpawnParticle).
Implemented gross hack for pentagram line width, as software renderer and GL renderer have different understanding of particle radius argument in SpawnParticle.

Still it's fairly easy to circle around the vile and just spam plasma to kill it, not suitable for boss level.
I currently see 4 possible ways to make the fight more dynamic.
1. Implement small teleport jumps of the monster (random).
2. Implement targeted teleport jump of the monster (behind the player, like lizard captains in Duke Nukem). And random too.
3. Implement Crysis 3 boss ceph-like attack (drags the player to the monster, holds him midair, if the player doesn't deal some damage OR cause pain state, blasts the player with generic attack, which is like 35-45 damage).
4. Implement minions and spawn them with Doom3-like pentagram using already implemented DrawPentagram(). Minion nature is to be discussed. Or not. (no idea if anyone here has interest in it).

The main problem is that like I said already I'm a duel player and I see no fun in spamming plasma for 15 seconds, take 0 damage and have the boss dead.

Personally, I think the thing is nearly perfect as-it-is now. I don't feel like it really needs any additional attack types, tricks, or minions. Both the large homing ball and the small mass projectile attack are enough to keep the player on his toes. And I definitely like the pentagram effect as a warning; it's very well-executed. (I need to take a look at the script and see how you did it--I'm very curious.)