[UPDATE] Haedexebus

Back to this dude, I felt it needed a good facelift since it also had a lot of junk code and terrible spaghettified-decorate (there was even an unused actor, thanks to Misery that PM'd me on ZDForums some days ago and made me notice it - well it was like 8 years I didn't touch it anyway ) Let's see what has been improved so far then:

• Crushed all sprites, reduce their size from 161kb to 157kb
• Converted doom sounds to ogg format
• Converted the actor to ZSCRIPT with new functions for attacks, and removed unused HFSpot plus FMaceBall actors
• Now maces bounces and the monster is more threatening
• Usually railgun attack is triggered once we are close about 512mp to the monster
• Corrected obituary name (it was UnMancubus instead of Haedexebus)
• Replaced deprecated stuff with proper modern code (A_SetRenderStyle for old A_SetTranslucent; thrustless A_Explode; bright calls with BRIGHT flag; FloatBob on/off; DONTHARMCLASS for old DONTHURTSPECIES)
• Renamed frames to match actor name (and so brightmaps)
• Brightmaps now use materials/brightmaps/auto folder, no more GLDEFS
• Put Attenuate on GLDEFS for better explosion light effect on modern ports (GZDoom and VKDoom mainly)
• Updated CREDITS
• Converted the whole thing to pk3 format

Aaand that's all folks.

Download:

Wow it's been 8 years already? Time flies, just like fatsos.... Thanks for the shoutout btw, I think that old Volacubus was one of my first R667 submissions back in those days

Nice work on the update, and I'm not sure how much you kept of the original behavior but I noticed a few things that could be improved imo.

The rail beam length is too short, he constantly uses it when too far away. Also if you don't strafe left or right the beams won't hit you at all and go right past you. Maybe give them a random spread inwards?
The ball attack is just the opposite, it has a random inward spread that sometimes causes the ball sprites to hit each other on their flight path which doesn't look good.

Thinking about this I got an idea, how about turning the mace ball into a bouncing grenade?[strike] Maybe simply use the three A_Fatattacks to fire them so they cover a wider area and bounce all over the place.[/strike]
Forget the classic fatattack, I forgot it fires from the middle of the shooting actor and there's no way to adjust the offsets. But the pattern is pretty easy to replicate in a custom function.

Ok I hope you don't mind but I was bit too eager to see how my idea would turn out so I made some changes to the attack functions and turned the fatmace into a bouncing grenade. If you like it feel free to use it or adjust as you see fit
Btw for this edit I halved the explosion damage to balance out the increased fire rate. And I added MISSILEEVENMORE for testing purposes, might be a little bit too much though ::

https://drive.google.com/file/d/126Tgm1a4M_EJzYeLSJREpQV2Z6i3gKtC/view?usp=sharing

edit: I just noticed there's another unused actor in the code, FMaceBall. It was spawned by the unused actor you already removed, and its death state uses some bigger explosion sprites that are otherwise unused. So I switched out the explosion sprites, now Fatmace uses the explosion of FMaceBall, and Fatmace2 uses the explosion of Fatmace. The smallest explosion is now spawned as debris.

Ah damn right, that FMaceBall was a leftover from the removed HFSpot actor... Originally it had attacks this creature (in my mind), one with bouncing spiked balls and another with throwing chains, using a similar behavior from Strife's Sentinel. Gonna test your changes asap, thanks kindly.

After Testing
I like a lot what you did with MaceBalls, though now the enemy is a painful threat on narrow zones, so I am gonna slowdown its triple attacks and randomly "decide" between 1-2- shootouts. Also FatMaceRight/Left have random instead of frandom set, which prompt to couple warnings on console (gonna fix myself).

Nice work on the update, and I'm not sure how much you kept of the original behavior but I noticed a few things that could be improved imo.

I have kept almost the exact original behavior, probably the SpawnProjectile feat changed something since CustomMissile had wrongn pitch calculation... Maybe.

The rail beam length is too short, he constantly uses it when too far away. Also if you don't strafe left or right the beams won't hit you at all and go right past you. Maybe give them a random spread inwards?

I recall that during development of this creature, me, MagicWazard and BlueShadow discussed about this matter, and it was done on purpose to allow players to find a pattern to dodge its railgun attacks. But let's see if I can improve it better (and put black trails again)

The ball attack is just the opposite, it has a random inward spread that sometimes causes the ball sprites to hit each other on their flight path which doesn't look good.

I think this was done with the limits we had in the past on coding, or maybe I have kept it as it was since the effect was nice and "new" for the time. Though I always preferred to have it as bouncing balls, which it is exactly what you did here.

Alright, I have put in again the railgun attack without many changes to it, but now it is used mostly when we are closer about 512mp to the monster. I have clean the code here and there (frandom on FatMaces, NOTONAUTOMAP over almost all actors, custom A_FatDebris on FatMace2, trimmed EOL spaces and indentations). I scrapped the idea to put some sort of "decide" behavior for choice between a 1-2- MaceBall attack, it just overcomplicate the actor after all.
I think it is ready to be updated this time, thanks a lot Devloek (and yes I have planned to update Volacubis as well in the future, unless you'll do it)

ozymandias81 wrote:

I have planned to update Volacubis as well in the future, unless you'll do it)[/i]

Go ahead, I don't think I'll update any of my old submissions anytime soon, unless they stop working after a game update or another serious issue comes up.

Updated