Zandronum

So, I've this this little problem here with my friend's monster mod here.

He has infighting disabled for some of his boss monsters. He's afraid that'll make the monster randomizer too easy when the big hard bosses have much less health than expected.

My question for y'all?


Can there be an attack only initiated during infights?


Let's say this Cyber variant here only fires rockets at the player.

If we incorporate infighting into the variant, and he starts to get pissed off at this friendly fire, let's say he then uses an attack he only uses on non-players (excludes player placed turrets, etc) that has some massive AOE damage. (I also suggested some sort of Wraithverge attack that has a stray wraith emerge from his back side to hunt down players and dish out some medium, medium-high damage.)

I want this to keep the player from thinking he's safe, and keep him STILL under pressure that he'll be killed by the Cyber variant during infighting.

There's several methods to this, but I think the best for this situation and for Zandronum use is to give players and player-based monsters a dummy inventory item ( not CustomInventory, Inventory; the former is automatically removed from an actor's inventory if it has no use state ) and have the attacking monster call A_JumpIfInTargetInventory at the start of its Missile state, jumping to the player attack states if the target has that dummy item, and otherwise continuing to its infighting attack states.

You can give the dummy item either through scripts, Player.StartItem ( though only for players, obviously ), and / or the first tic of the Spawn state. The one issue with this method is that if the attacking reaggros during its attack states, it'll still use the same attack even if it switches from player to infighting and vice-versa. A way to get around this that you can do if both attacks share the same animation ( including timing ) is to instead call A_JumpIfInTargetInventory before each attack is launched rather than at the start of the Missile state.

Would you call this method the most effective or the easiest to incorporate?

Thanks

A bit of both, really. Checking the target's qualities through ACS is more precise, but if you just want to flag certain actors as player related and others not then the dummy inventory method more fits your goals.