Chaosforge Forum
DoomRL => Discussion => Topic started by: Ander Hammer on May 31, 2011, 00:30
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I got back into Doom 2 the FPS again, and while playing through mods and such I noticed something of a discrepancy (lol) between the FPS and the Roguelike.
In Doom 2, Revenants have a habit of running right the hell up to you and punching your face in... but as far as I've seen in DoomRL, they like to hang back and abuse their undodgeable missiles and try to avoid melee. Was this a balance choice or something?
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I'm going with "'orrible AI" as the standard reply. In spite of attempts to follow as faithfully to the source material as possible, we do find discrepancies like this.
The classic example is the OMGFAST Arch Viles in DoomRL as compared to the Arch Viles in vanilla Doom.
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By the way what are the odds of fixing that vile issue?[/badjoke]
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By the way what are the odds of fixing that vile issue?[/badjoke]
Really bad. [/badanswer]
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The arch-vile thing involves an issue that that a bunch of roguelikes have, even highly polished ones like crawl. Namely, no differentiation between monster attack speed and monster movement speed. In the original doom arch-viles moved fast as hell but the attack took forever to carry out.
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I think it'd be more balanced if revs spend less attention on firing missiles at your ass (just occasionally), and focus on punching you in the face.
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That's another difference that I noticed, though I spent more time fighting revenants than arch-viles and thus I thought about it more often. Revenants don't always fire a seeker missile (which doesn't always hit), and Arch-Viles need to 'charge' their spells. A chief part of FPS strategy against them is letting them attack you and ducking into cover to avoid damage. Oh, and they can't ress while moving and not practically in melee range... all of this reminds me of the issue I had with the mancubus firing a burst of three fireballs instead of three bursts of two, which could probably be implemented as a sort of chain-fire attack that can't be stopped until turn three and is always fired in the player's general direction regardless of LOS.
Why would different attack and movement speeds be an issue? It's already quite clearly implemented for the marine.
Edit: Oh yes, I'm also of the opinion that revenants would be a bit scarier if they came charging at you like barons, throwing their terrifyingly dangerous contribution to whatever's on your plate at a given moment.
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The issue is due to the way time and speed are implemented in most rogues. Instead of adding cost points to each unit for what it did to figure out turn order (metal gear ac!d was full of good ideas) many rogues will just assign each unit a fixed speed rating.
The reason the player gets special treatment is that there is only ever one of them. Keeping track of that data for every monster could take a lot of memory and would be a royal bastard to program.
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Not really. It would be a few more bytes per monster prototype, and the programming part would not be difficult, however it COULD be tedious to come up with the values for each monster. The tedium could be averted by just assigning default values in most cases and tweaking in the desired cases. In my opinion such speed differentiation is almost always worth it and is a relatively easy way to create more monster variation.