Doomsday Engine

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All monsters are not supposed to be set to fast with either
-fast or in nightmare mode.

It is only the Demon and the speed of projectiles which is
altered.

Retrogamer observed:

"I'm playing Ultimate doom in Nightmare difficulty with doomsday 1.9.8. Everything is fine except when i loaded a saved-game after a new game, I see strange behavior from enemies for example the fireball of Imp and the moving of Pinky demon is on normal speed. Is this a bug? (same behavior with doomsday 1.8.6)"

Requires re-testing as of build 560, this may now be fixed.

- labels: jDoom Gameplay --> Doom
- summary: Nightmare monsters sometimes not fast. --> [Doom] Nightmare monsters sometimes not fast.
- milestone: --> v1.8.5

The underlying cause of this is that game rules are not handled correctly, neither serialized properly to saved games or restored upon ending a network game.

This is actually a carry over from Vanilla Doom.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Some_game_options_not_preserved_in_saved_games

Yep, its certainly not specific to our port.

The Nightmare stuff not saved in save games, seems to be the same stuff that the BFG Edition is missing entirely.

The Nightmare stuff not saved in save games all comes from the same small block of code, that originally resided in game.c. This block of code controls the speeds of the Imp, Cacodemon and Barron/Hell Knight missiles on all skill levels. It also set’s the speed of the Demon in nightmare skill.

Heretic also controls its missile speeds in with a block of code in game.c, but unlike Doom, it saved it to save games.

This is also the case in Dday; Dday Doom doesn't save this information in a save game, but Dday Heretic appears to. In Dday both these blocks of code are next to each other.

Both these blocks also prevent modders from changing the speeds of the missiles included in these blocks of codes; they overrule all mobj definitons including Dday's ded files.

I'm wrote the above to suggest that Dday may actually already have the code largely ready to fix ths issue, in Heretic, and to point out another issue that stems from the same code.

Also to remind of the BFG edition if yourselves do wish to rewrite that block of code because as mentioned it's not in that edition (I am assuming that Dday will want to imitate the BFG editions small gameplay alterations).

Perhaps an integrated mechanism using DED 2.0 selectors and Game Rules?

Concept syntax:

Thing {
  Id = SERGEANT;
  Speed = 10;
  ...
}

GameRule "Fast" { # Selector
Thing mods "SERGEANT" {
  Speed = 20;
}
}

Monster behavior does fit very well into the game rules concept.