Information:
Name: Beam Revenant
Difficulty: Medium
Connections: Uses the default Arachnotron plasma sprites in its attack.
Summon: BeamRevenant
Melee: Yes
Distance: Projectile, albeit a quick one.
Type: Undead, Cybernetic
Brightmaps: No
Added States: No
ACS: No

Credits:
Submitted: Who submitted it to the Beastiary?
Decorate: Captain Ventris
GLDEFs: Captain Ventris
Sounds: Id Software
Sprites: Id Software
Sprite Edit: Spectator
Idea Base: ZDoom Wars required sprites to allow players to tell Rail and Normal Revenants apart.

Description:
A Revenant with an alternate weapon. It fires a beam of energy, which is very fast moving but not perfectly accurate, so he won't be a complete murder-fest at long distances. Still, he deals a set, hefty chunk of damage with each hit, making him quite a dangerous fellow if he's unexpected.

Sprite:


Download Link:
http://files.drdteam.org/index.php/files/get/oPUZAXXhqi/beamrevenant.zip

Not bad, but the beam weapon doesn't look right on this guy's shoulder. It seems to bounce around to much.

Also, the beam of energy could be better. What if you used the projectile from the Plasam Beam?

"Bounce around"? You mean the imperfect accuracy, projectile offset, or the actual sprite? Because if it's the walking, then you need to talk to iD about the Revenant's swagger, not me. check the sprites, that junk follows along with the shoulder just fine - Revenants walk like they're in West Side Story. Imagine the Revenant snapping each time his hand swings out.

"Better" is highly subjective, but it also looks neat with the plasma projectile.

EDIT: Updated original link with a version that fixes the Beam Revenant having default obituaries.

Okay, first, I'd like to apologize about saying "Better". You're right, that is highly subjective, and I was being rude. Sorry.

I was referring to the sprites bouncing around. I know the revenant does have an awkward walk, and that's probably why it "Bounces around" as I said. I'll test it again and see how it looks in-game again.

Okay, I checked him out again, and you're right. The sprite does look fine, now that I look at it again.
Also, I like your idea about it using the plasma projectile sprites! I think those would look more "beamish" than the explosion sprites( But I'm not saying the Explosion sprites are bad or anything.)

The sprite edit for the cannon is actually pretty good (I like the little demon face on the end of it)--it's really just the amount of motion in the walk anim that makes it look a bit awkward. That might be the reason why the original Revenant's shoulder cannons are so small, in fact, so the motion is less noticeable. In this case, I think that calling each of his walk frames one additional time to "slow" the animation down (in other words, AAABBBCCC... instead of AABBCC...) helps ameliorate this effect somewhat; you might want to try it and see what you think. It won't affect his movement speed, as long as the frames are all called for the same number of tics.

As for the shot effect, how about trying a railgun beam, since the projectile's very fast, and he's already using the rail sound effect? You could just choose to have only the core or the spiral drawn if you don't want it to look exactly like a railgun trail, and you can choose to have the shot not pierce if you don't want it to over-penetrate. Just something to think about.

Increasing the frame calls did help a bit. I don't have him using an actual rail attack, because I didn't want a giant hitscanner, and the effect is stale, anyway. I never thought the particle effects fit in with Doom to begin with. This way, the projectile is theoretically able to be dodged at a decent distance, and looks pretty darn cool. Updated the first post with more frame calls, and a plasmagun projectile beam.

Okay, I like this one much better!

The walking frames look smoother (but not too smooth) and the beam looks a lot better in my opinion. The plasma looks great for the beam.

By the way, have you noticed that if you're standing far away from the Beam Revenant when he fires, the beam makes a noticeably different sound as it passes? Not a problem, I just thought it sounded nice.

Yeah, it sort of whizzes past you.

That's fair. You do need to be at quite a distance to dodge it due to its speed, but it's certainly a possibility with the current setup, especially with his aim variation (nice touch, BTW).

May I make a couple more suggestions regarding the beam?
1) I would increase the density of the beam trail. For FastProjectiles, an easy way to spawn a trail is to assign it a MissileType; you can just use the existing "Railtrail" actor as the Missile. This will automatically make the projectile spawn a trail as it flies. You can then comment out the "SpawnItemEx" function from the Revrailshot actor's Spawn sequence. (See Hexen's Sapphire Wand as an example.) I tried this out, and it looked pretty cool to me; you may or may not like the effect, but I thought I would suggest it just in case you did.
2) I'd palette-shift the plasma shots from blue to red. This would make them a bit more distinctive from the stock Plasma Gun effect.
This is all up to you, though. Regardless of what you do going forward, I like what you've got going on with this guy; I'm always happy to see new Revenants.

I actually like how the beam is sort of sparse. It leaves more room for interpretation, and gives more of a beaminess than the boltiness suggested with the solid trail. Additionally, I can't recall anything with a similar effect for a 'beam', so there's always that.

I had thought about it earlier, and now I've changed the beam to look like the Arachnotron's plasma balls, so the attack fits in with the default Doom monsters.

Updated with latest version. I also slowed down the animation of the beam parts so it lingers a moment longer.