[SUBMISSION] Bullet Ant Venom

INFO

Name: Bullet Ant Venom
Type: Offensive
Type: Hitscan
Palette: WOLF3D/Doom Alpha
Summon: ItemSyringe
Use Type: Manual
Duration: Infinite
Added States: No
ACS: No

CREDITS

Submitted: Quantum_Dranger
Decorate: Quantum_Dranger
GLDefs: None
Sounds: IWAD
Sprites: WOLF 3D, Doom Alpha
Sprite Edit: Quantum_Dranger
Idea Base: Quantum_Dranger
ACS: None

DESCRIPTION

The end result of a project to create a cheaper form of execution for the money-strapped Phobos base, this syringe contains enough bullet ant poison to kill a human and leave an elephant reeling. The power of the most painful insect on earth can be seen immediately as anything the needle strikes is turned into a blinded screaming spasm pile.

LINK

http://www.m*diafire.com/file/t6hglrenmsqoo0m/Syringe.zip

IMAGE:

http://imgur.com/Mj24H53

Cleverly done. It only does about 1.5 points of damage per second, though, so it takes a while even to kill a Zombieman with one. The periodic forced pain seems like a more useful effect. That said, it doesn't look like the effect wears off, so I guess you could prick a Cyberdemon, run to a hiding spot, take a nap, and let him die of the poison in the meantime...

Oh, and would you be able to update the OP to contain a link to the preview sprite?

Thanks for alerting me, I added an image to the main post. As for the second part of your comment, I made the periodic pain explosion-type so that enemies immune to blast damage aren't affected. However, if the boss is weak to explosions (a la mother demon) it still inflicts the damage. Would there be a way of disabling the pain for enemies that have the boss flag but are missing the no radius damage flag?

Hmm, I don't think there's any functions or flags/properties that can calculate damage based solely on whether or not the target is a Boss. That said, I don't think it's necessarily bad or good if the Boss monsters take damage--it was just a scenario that came to mind. You could use custom damagetypes, but of course that would require each enemy type to be modded with immunity. Considering how arbitrarily the Boss and NORADIUSDMG attributes are used in community content, I don't know if it would be worth the work.

Not a bad concept, but here are a few things:

• With how little damage it does, I don't think it should force pain each time damage is inflicted.
• The syringe should update its position more often when it's stuck to the monster, so the desync in position between it and the monster is less noticeable when the monster moves.
• I think it should be limited do a certain amount of damage, instead until the monster dies.
• Bug: sometimes some monsters (it happened with zombies) don't receive damage from the syringe.
• In line 39 of DECORATE, why XF_HURTSOURCE is preceded by a minus sign?
• I see a number of duplicate sprites which increases the size of the file unnecessarily.
• Most of the sprites need to be converted to PNG.

That's it for now I think.

Thanks for the feedback. I added a counter so it doesn't last forever, made the position get updated more often, moved the syringe closer so that zombies get damaged more often and converted all sprites to png as well as removing all the duplicates. I didn't remove the minus flag as that protects the player from receiving explosion damage and the forced pain is kind of the entire point of the item.

Quantum_Dranger wrote: I didn't remove the minus flag as that protects the player from receiving explosion damage

If a function passes a flag by default, and you want that flag cleared, put 0.

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Edit:

Quantum_Dranger wrote: ... and the forced pain is kind of the entire point of the item.

It just doesn't feel right to me for a cyberdemon or even an archvile to flinch so often by it, while if you shoot them with weapons they seldom or rarely do.

Here is what I propose: painchance. Have the syringe projectile inflict a unique damagetype, and let the modders decide how to set up the painchance for their monsters.

About the whole damage implementation: I suggest you ditch the use of splash damage, as it's not that reliable as you saw from my feedback. "Okay, how to approach it, then?", you might ask. Well, there is a nifty set of actor flags which are the HITTARGET, HITMASTER and HITTRACER. If you set one of these on a projectile, and the projectile impacts an actor, that hit actor becomes the target, master or tracer of the projectile (depending on the HIT flag you set). This way you can forget about the seeker missile setup to get a tracer, and reliably do the damage by using A_DamageTarget , A_DamageMaster or A_DamageTracer (again, depending on the HIT flag you chose), which don't rely on range or distance.

Note that I don't recommend you use HITTARGET here, because projectiles already use that to keep track of their shooter.

Thanks for the idea. I'll implement it once I get my main computer back online, right now I'm on a pretty old laptop without editing tools.

Fixed.

This isn't a massive deal, but I think this could do with being renamed. "Syringe" is just not descriptive, it's lacking.