Samsara Add-on: Monster Mixer - 0.18a (Bloodyhell, an update!)

[Drakeman1234]

Might be Windows 8-related?

[WhoDaMan]

I am running Windows 8 and it seemed to work ok after I got the correct version of Samsara. Is your friend trying to run those 2 wads with anything else?

[Mycroft]

i have a few questions this time, abit less urgent then before but i'd like answers anyways.

i've been playing around with this for awhile and i've decided i would enjoy the game alot more by sticking to smm_randomcycle 1 so that any given level would be completely dedicated to a single monster set, however when i do this it never spawns anything from the marathon set, is there a way to force a given monster spawn for the next level? or if the marathon set is disabled for use in randomcycle is there a way to turn it back on? i attempted to play around with using the smm_[set] commands while randomcycle is on to see if i could bring about any kind of a noticeable change but to no avail.

in addition i find the enemies from hexen to be really underwhelming, centaurs and slaughtaurs are all over and at best i find them annoying, i want to turn them off but i WOULD like to fight the bosses from that particular game, is there a way now or will there be one in the future where we can keep the bosses of a given set as part of the smm_randomcycle or smm_[set] commands while ditching most of their lower tier henchmen? im bored to death of the likes of afrits, wendigos and dark bishops but heresiarch and korax could still prove an exciting challenge regardless of whatever lesser enemies are nearby.

in relation to that, will there ever be a way to modify the base enemies? i love fighting the flemoids for example but most of them are ridiculously easy to take out even with the base starting weapons, i would love it if we could make them beefier so it becomes more difficult to kill them, or if we could set smm_multiply up in a way where it only activates under certain conditions (for example, if randomcycle chooses the chex quest monster set, it activates smm_multiply 3 for their particular set or if it chooses the wolf 3d enemies it activates smm_multiply 2 whereas marathon, duke and doom enemies would remain at the default setting).

on a related note i really cant tell the difference between smm_fakehitlerfire 1 and 0, on both settings it still feels really really fast, i had hoped that the right setting would reduce the speed of his fireballs to about that of a cacodemon but either way they still move fast enough that i have to prioritize fake hitlers over all other enemies, even when he is near enemies which are supposed to be stronger such as mancubus, cyberdemon, spiderdemon or barons of hell i feel they pose the bigger threat, its nice to have enemies which pose a nice big threat to keep things interesting but i mostly play cooperative and alot of these maps are very cramped, even with 200 health/armor if dodging isnt a realistic possibility im just not going to be able to take them out before i die at least once, perhaps several times depending on what weapons are available to me at the time (i think i died to one like 9 times in a row in CChests pistol panic map), is there a way to slow it even further or am i just not doing something right?

lastly, i havent seen the recon patrol vehicles, protozoid slimers or turrets from DN3D, have i simply not come across them or do they not exist in this mod? some of the marathon enemies are missing too and the troopers never seem to fire the assault rifle at me, just use grenades.

nothing to really comment on, aside from everything i just brought up im having alot of fun with the mod so far.

[Shadowlink223]

however when i do this it never spawns anything from the marathon set, is there a way to force a given monster spawn for the next level? or if the marathon set is disabled for use in randomcycle is there a way to turn it back on? i attempted to play around with using the smm_[set] commands while randomcycle is on to see if i could bring about any kind of a noticeable change but to no avail.

Try "smm_banmarathon 0" because I have the Marathon set disabled both ways by default as they're bandwidth heavy so I want server admins to be sure they want them before turning them on (you shouldn't do this on monster heavy maps, offline is fine).

There's no means to force the next choice of randomcycle short of using all but one of the smm_ban[set] commands prior to the next map, but at that point randomcycle might as well not even be on :V.
Also, the smm_[set] commands shouldn't be used while randomcycle is active, just smm_ban[set].

in addition i find the enemies from hexen to be really underwhelming, - - is there a way now or will there be one in the future where we can keep the bosses of a given set - - while ditching most of their lower tier henchmen? - - heresiarch and korax could still prove an exciting challenge regardless of whatever lesser enemies are nearby.

I do agree that they're not that great, but that's really the problem with trying to stretch a smaller monster set into a game that has more, same with the Chex set.

I'd have to figure out how to make the boss thing work without something breaking, but it sounds like it's worth looking into after I get the Quake set up and running.

Heresiarch and Korax aren't particularly exciting at the moment, at least imo, Heresiarch is just annoying to fight with the near constant invulnerability and Korax is missing a lot of his attacks from Hexen that I'll have to try and replicate manually, until then he's basically a Cyberdemon with way more health that's not as fast.

will there ever be a way to modify the base enemies? i love fighting the flemoids for example but most of them are ridiculously easy to take out even with the base starting weapons, i would love it if we could make them beefier so it becomes more difficult to kill them

I do plan on adding a few if not a lot more modifiers whenever I'm done adding monsters, just not entirely sure what they'll be right now.

on a related note i really cant tell the difference between smm_fakehitlerfire 1 and 0, on both settings it still feels really really fast, i had hoped that the right setting would reduce the speed of his fireballs to about that of a cacodemon

Not sure what's happening, but 0 is supposed to move even slower than that of a caco's projectile and even on 1 it's still slower. The speed for the 0 setting is 2, 1 is 9, and the caco projectile is 10.

smm_fakehitlerfire only tells the fakehitler actor which version of its projectile to shoot.

lastly, i havent seen the recon patrol vehicles, protozoid slimers or turrets from DN3D, have i simply not come across them or do they not exist in this mod? some of the marathon enemies are missing too and the troopers never seem to fire the assault rifle at me, just use grenades.

None of those have been added in SMM, the RPV I work on every now and then, but I have a hard time being happy with the results, I do want to get the assault commander out of the pain elemental slot, so it'll happen eventually. You can summon it manually to check it out ("summon ReconPatrolVehicle"), it's just not in the spawners at the moment.

As for the slimer, PresidentPeople suggested to me that I could possibly add replacements for the superturboturkeypuncher mode in Samsara, though I'm not sure if I'll end up doing that.

I'm not going to try and add every Marathon monster in this, but there are about 3 or 4 left (not counting the Skulltag replacements that I want to add eventually) that I want to add to the set, and most of them are just variants of existing ones. Troopers only use their rifles at close range.

[Armitage]

Hello,

I wanted to bump this thread with the intention of bringing up a critical issue. Why is the Maximus so god damn overpowered? It's not even funny, it has 5000HP, has an incredible rate of fire (one player commented is -Fast monsters enabled?), it's projectiles go all over the place with big splash damage and in most cases is near fatal, and to top it all off it replaces the Mancubus meaning it appears far too frequently. It's as powerful as a god damn Cyber, please seriously nerf this monster or swap it to a Cyb replacement because it's brutal and shows up far too often. Also the Duke3D Battlelord has weird movement, it sort of warps all over the place kind of teleporting on top of me in one instance.

[Shadowlink223]

I don't know how you ended up with a Maximus that has 5,000 health and replaces the mancubus, because it was coded to replace the Arch-vile and has 2,000 health. (still OP but that's why it's been lowered by a lot in the current dev version)

That version of the Maximus came out of Samsara itself, which is how it had such a high amount of health to begin with, but since it's basically a custom enemy, I won't mind toying with it until it's less of an annoyance.
As for the Battlelord, I've tweaked the speed so the movement is less jittery.

While I'm at it:
[spoiler][/spoiler]


From left to right: Yellow armored flemoid, Mage from Catacomb 3-D, High Guard from Rise of the Triad, Mother of All Hunters, and the Lava F'lickta.

The first 3 are for the Wolf SS replacement as the throwback enemies for their respective sets (Early Chex -> Chex, C3D -> Wolf3D, RoTT -> DN3D), and the last 2 are going to be used as rare spawns in the Marathon set that you can enable if you'd like.

I'd have more to show but I've mostly been doing a lot of sprite ripping so the Quake monsters can make it in eventually. If I get the other throwback enemies done, I'll release one last version before waiting until Quake is done.

[Empyre]

Have you fixed the problem with the caco replacement from Chex looking like a cyber when it dies? EDIT: ... when this is loaded along with naraka.

[Armitage]

Ok so N3on was over exaggerating or confused about the Maximus values and actor replacement.

For clarity I'm referring to this mean dude.

[spoiler]Ah make it go away D:

[/spoiler]


Thumbs up for the ROTT enemy, although I was hoping it would be the Triad Enforcer since they were really bad ass and took a hell of a beating to put down with both a short and long ranged attack. It was disappointing to see their diminished ability in the reboot :<

[Shadowlink223]

Have you fixed the problem with the caco replacement from Chex looking like a cyber when it dies?

That will be fixed in the next release.

For clarity I'm referring to this mean dude.

I know, he'll be nerfed in more ways than one.

Thumbs up for the ROTT enemy, although I was hoping it would be the Triad Enforcer since they were really bad ass and took a hell of a beating to put down with both a short and long ranged attack. It was disappointing to see their diminished ability in the reboot :<

Eh, I just picked what fit the role best, in both HP and ability.

[Shadowlink223]

Finally decided to release v0.18a! This will be the last release for this mod until I get Quake monsters finished.

Important note: SMM now uses CVARINFO and because of that, all cvar prefixes have been changed from smm_ to mm_ to avoid problems.

From 0.17b to 0.18

Fixes:
- The script for mm_randomcycle would sometimes outrun the spawners on monster heavy maps, it has been reworked so the spawners stand by until randomcycle is finished setting up.
- Changed the sprite name for the Super Cycloptis as it caused a conflict with Naraka.
- Fixed a loophole where BJ could kill Marathon monsters that were invulnerable to fire with his flamethrower.
- Fixed a problem with Doom monsters that wouldn't trigger A_BossDeath in single player while bloodyhell was enabled
Additions:
- Bloodyhell support added for the Wolf3D, Duke3D, and Marathon sets. (Modes -1 through 2 only)
- Throwback monsters for a few sets. Includes a yellow armored flemoid for Chex, the High Guard from Rise of the Triad, and the Mage from Catacomb 3-D
- Rare monster spawns for the Marathon set.
- Invisible monsters mode.
- Added mm_nobats for the Wolf3D set for those who don't like the gun bats.
- Added more brightmaps.
Tweaks:
- Reworked the Marathon difficulty system to be token based instead of multiple ACS calls so this will hopefully use less bandwidth
- Added +QUICKTORETALIATE to the Marathon set to improve monster accuracy.
- Lowered the movement speed on the Mini-Battlelord so it's less jittery.
- Major Juggernauts now fire missiles 2 times per attack state to match Marathon.
- Cyborgs from Marathon can now be stunned by sustained fire.
- The M2 Enforcer now replaces the Arachnotron instead of the Cyborg.
- Hunters now go boom on XDeath, dealing 61-90 damage.
- Juggernauts from Marathon cause a blinding flash after they explode.
- Wolfenstein SS now drops a weapon when killed. (Slot 2 for BJ, slot 4 for the rest)
- The big Maximus that replaces the Arch Vile in the Chex set has been nerfed quite a bit.
- Korax has been returned to his original health of 5,000
- Added two new puffs for the High Guard and M1 Juggernaut.
- All CVARs now use the prefix mm_ instead of smm_
- Removed the Centaur Leader from the Spectre slot in favor of a normal Centaur.

[Armitage]

- The big Maximus that replaces the Arch Vile in the Chex set has been nerfed quite a bit.

About damn time! =D

[Ivan]

Excellent release. I have a few suggestions for future releases:

- Introduce Zedek, Menelkir and Traductus to appear at certain monster drops to make the limited Hexen monster pool less limited. (For example, a reiver to spawn in place of an Arch Vile is very disappointing)
- A better movement emulation for Duke 3D monsters could be made. A few extra calls of A_Chase("", "", CHF_NOPLAYACTIVE) would probably help with the smoothness.
- Are these monsters still randomly capable of telefragging players? Last time I checked they could randomly telefrag people on maps other than map30 of 12 in 1 Survival. This should be fixed IMO. (Little note, they also telefrag other monsters which makes certain traps really bad)

That's all for now, keep up the good work!

[Shadowlink223]

I removed the TELESTOMP flag from the Hexen monsters(I noticed I forgot to put that in the changelog).

I'm still trying to decide how I want to handle the class bosses because I'm very picky about "muh accuracy", but I may tell myself to get over it in this case and remove the A_ClassBossHealth function if I take your suggestion and put them in the arch vile slot.

As for the DN3D monsters, I'll see what I can do, I'm kind of paranoid about bandwidth ever since I added the Marathon set, and I have no idea how much impact A_Chase has.

Edit: I just now learned that strings longer than 2048 characters are something you can't do, so I put up a new file that should fix things. samsaramonstermixer-v0.18a.pk3

[Ivan]

Oh and the Maulotaur's death animation is pretty wrong, might want to fix that too.

[rescue86k]

I was wondering if you could make a separate version for the monster assets, taking out scripts, so that monsters have to be preplaced. It would be useful for map making with Samsara Theme in mind.

As for scripts, my only suggestion is make the randomizer choose between "sets" of monsters (the duke nukem set, the marathon set). Having it completely random/ no pattern, makes the map look and play without theme, like a randow. It feels weird. I personally love the collection of monsters, and just wish the scripts were more "themed", organized set of monsters, changing per play through. So... like...

Level 1= Marathon
Everyone fails and dies, 1 life.
Level 1=Duke Nukem
Everyone fails and dies, 1 life
Level 1= Poisonous Theme (all poisonous looking monsters will spawn)
--
Level 1= Demons Theme (Choose all demon like creatures from all games to spawn for the theme)
--
Level 1 = Robot Theme (Many units from Strife, Duke Nukems sharkbots, Marathon Drones )
Level 1 = Human Soldiers Only Theme (Partial Mix of Strife and Doom, Wolfenstien, and Marathon Humans , maybe others.

Just spreading ideas how it can be fun to expand the scripts this way.

[Medicris]

Play with the cvars listed in the first post a bit, they're hidden in a spoiler window called Notes and CVars. "smm_randomcycle 1" will accomplish what you mean by choosing one set every map and filling all enemy slots with them (all Marathon one map, all Duke the next, etc). If you don't want Randomcycle to choose a set (ex. Doom), you'd enter "mm_ban[set] 1" (ex. mm_bandoom 1).

As for "themed" monsters like you said, nothing quite like that now.

[Drakeman1234]

Okay, so, something i've noticed. The mod crashes Zandronum if you try to load it without skulltag_actors.pk3. Because of the mod's support for runes. This is not implicitly loaded by Zandronum to my knowledge.

[Shadowlink223]

I was wondering if you could make a separate version for the monster assets, taking out scripts, so that monsters have to be preplaced. It would be useful for map making with Samsara Theme in mind.

I have been considering on seeing if I could give each of the monsters their own DoomEd(?) number so they could be used in a map editor. I don't think I would need to make a separate version just to do it either.

As for the rest, mm_randomcycle exists for randomly swapping sets between maps, as Medicris stated. I'll think about the theme idea, but I don't think it'll happen unless all the slots can be properly filled.

Okay, so, something i've noticed. The mod crashes Zandronum if you try to load it without skulltag_actors.pk3. Because of the mod's support for runes. This is not implicitly loaded by Zandronum to my knowledge.

The mod only breaks when I run it under 3.0 without skulltag_actors, but works fine in 2.1.2 without it. I checked the files for 3.0 and zandronum.pk3 is missing skulltag_runes.txt. It seems that going from 2.1.2 to 3.0 skulltag_runes.txt got moved from zandronum.pk3 to skulltag_actors.pk3.

If that's still the case when 3.0 is finished, I'll either try to figure out a different implementation or just scrap the runes entirely since I don't even know if people run mm_pinataparty at all.