Post by BlacklightVoid in Babel comments

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I was checking out "Babel" on "SCYTHE 2" to test the New BFG Feature, and I found something. BFG reacts only to Normal Monsters, but not to Custom Ones. Is your Mod sharpened only for WAD's with a "Vanilla" Bestiary?

And I was also trying to understand the work of a Loaded BFG Shot. Honestly... And why is it needed at all? Somehow, it was played normally without him.

I'm more concerned about her enemy tracking behavior. I had moments during the passage when there were Cacodemons and Cyberdemons around. I aim at the Cyberdemon, and the Big Ball flies away at the Cacodemon. Or at the End of E4 "Ultimate Doom In Name Only" BFG could not fix the target in any way to kill Spider Masterminds! Does it depend on the close distance to the enemy?

datanon310 days ago(+1)

>BFG reacts only to Normal Monsters, but not to Custom Ones.

Ah, you're right. It's a bit of an oversight now that I think of it. Technically, anything with custom monsters kind of needs a compatibility patch. I can probably make a Scythe 2 patch that will work, give me a little bit and I'll see what I can do.

The reason for this issue is because the BFG scans for "BabelMonster", not just "Actor" with monster tags, in order to speed up calculation and improve performance a bit, while also avoiding issues like accidentally hitting shootable actors.

>I had moments during the passage when there were Cacodemons and Cyberdemons around. I aim at the Cyberdemon, and the Big Ball flies away at the Cacodemon. Or at the End of E4 "Ultimate Doom In Name Only" BFG could not fix the target in any way to kill Spider Masterminds! Does it depend on the close distance to the enemy?

Yes, to some extent. It tries to weight their health and distance to avoid the reverse situation where you would end up shooting some big target a mile away but not the thing in front of you. I don't remember having these issues when I did those maps, but I'll go through them again, maybe something strange is going on with the new aim logic. As of right now, in order to fire, you need to be able to "see" a monster (According to GZDoom) and also fire a straight ray from your player's center to the monster's center (the general firing line) before the target is valid. There's a bit of strange logic on that second one to get around being able to shoot through other monsters, so it's possible something weird happened there.

Anyhow, gimme a few hours and I'll test all this out.

datanon310 days ago

Okay so I did the first one first, which was checking E4M9 on UDINO and, assuming you're talking about the two masterminds in the lava that shoot up at you near the entrance after you return, I could shoot them just fine with the BFG. See very poorly compressed video here https://files.catbox.moe/k46pvn.webm :^)

I also noticed a detail of the thing about trying to shoot the cyberdemon and hitting the caco, technically you should have hit both due to the way the gun works. If those two were the only things onscreen and only one was hit, somehow the BFG must have not seen a valid line to shoot the cyberdemon. I'd be very curious to know exactly where that happened, because I tried to find situations that could break the raycast aim check but it seemed very solid. If it turns out it's malfunctioning, I'll remove it right away until I can fix it.

Anyhow, time to see if I can make a Scythe 2 patch now.

BlacklightVoid310 days ago (2 edits)

No, the BFG worked fine on E4M9.

It worked hard on E4M8 at the moment with Spider Masterminds (Right along the way). It seems like they were right in my sights, but something prevents the BFG from firing. Perhaps it's not even your fault, but the creators of "UDINO" (There may still be bugs).

And what about the Cacodemons and Cyberdemons was on "E3M7: Limbo" at the very end of the Map with a bunch of Pinky, Barons, Cacodemons and Cyberdemons (Yes, this is crazy! I know!). Although, if we take into account the mess going on there, it is not surprising that the BFG Balls can fly the wrong way. There were, of course, such cases somewhere else on other Levels, but I will not name them, since I did not remember.

datanon310 days ago(+1)

Okay, I'll investigate those a bit more tomorrow to see if I can figure out what was going on. Specifically I'm worried about the unshootable stuff more than the target selection for now. The selection algorithm isn't perfect, but having a slightly illogical target selection in a mess of demons is a lot less bad than not being able to shoot them at all :^)

Ideally, I'll figure out something for both issues. Maybe I can add some weighting for aim offset as well, so it preferentially shoots things near the center of the screen.

datanon309 days ago(+1)

So there was indeed a bug in the BFG aiming that you could see on that map, basically the raycast was shooting too low due to me failing to factor in the target actor height when doing a LineTrace. Anyhow, I've fixed it on my end, mostly. There is a sweet spot where you can accidentally shoot a wall if you're at the right incline/decline so I'm going to try to resolve that before releasing a hotfix. I'll also see about the FOV-offset target prioritization thing, but if that needs a lot of tweaking I'll patch this first then work on it since this is a more pressing issue.

Very good bug catch, thanks.

datanon310 days ago(+1)

Well, the patch didn't take as long as I thought. When loading scythe 2, load Babel, then Scythe 2, then the "Babel Compatibility Patch - Scythe 2.pk3" you can find in the "Babel Addons and Patches.zip" download and you should have Afrits and Evil marines that can be shot with the BFG9000.

The Afrit still fires baseline Revenant shots (because I'm not sure of the balance with the new ones) but otherwise they should also use the new projectiles and have particles and such. Evil marine doesn't have extra gore on XDeath but that's mainly because I'm not sure how to do it in a non-messy way in Decorate right now. Might change it later.

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