[Ninety-Six]

I got really sick and tired of how pathetic AWO's final boss is. And the main flaw was visible to even casual players: When he flinches, his retaliatory attack is the flamethrower, regardless of how far away the player is. You can literally stand in one place and hold the trigger down on the devastator and win.

Well, after so long of dealing with that I decided to do something about it. After tinkering with it a bit, I've managed to switch the boss code around so that his retaliation is to spawn fireflies instead (though your mileage may vary on if that's "better" or not. At least it forces you to move around a little), and I've also adjusted his normal attacks to try and make sure those still work as intended (based on player distance).

AFAIK this will only work in eduke32. I'm not even sure which other source ports support AWO to begin with, but what I do know is that this definitely won't work with WT itself. Because WT sucks it doesn't actually take into account any CON changes for some infuriating reason.



Now, I will say upfront that I am not a con coder by any definition. I basically just reverse engineer small things and test them until it does what I want, and this looks like it does what I want. Maybe there's a few sound bugs somewhere, that's kind of hard to test, but I'm expecting some issues somewhere so please report them and hopefully I'll know how to fix it.

 EPISODE5BOSS.CON (8.01K)
Number of downloads: 137

[Jim]

And here is a fix that gives the boss a long ranged attack. I didn't make it, but I forgot the author's name.

Attached File(s)

•  EPISODE5BOSS.CON (7.91K)
  Number of downloads: 120

[Ninety-Six]

 Jim, on 14 January 2023 - 03:53 AM, said:

And here is a fix that gives the boss a long ranged attack. I didn't make it, but I forgot the author's name.

I thought he already had one? Where he would shoot an incinerator projectile identical to your own, lava pool included.

[Jim]

The one I uploaded gives him a continuous missile attack, almost like a death laser in a sense.

[Jim]

I wonder if it is possible to replace the missile sprites he fires with an explosion sprite. This way it will look like he has a long ranged flamer attack, which is what he was supposed to get in the first place

[Ninety-Six]

 Jim, on 21 January 2023 - 10:43 PM, said:

I wonder if it is possible to replace the missile sprites he fires with an explosion sprite. This way it will look like he has a long ranged flamer attack, which is what he was supposed to get in the first place

It isn't possible to just extend the range of the flamethrower he already has? That was actually one of my first ideas but the con code may as well be written in Korean for as much as I can make out of it (which is why I resulted to changing around his attack priority; that mostly just involved swapping state names plus a few tiny changes to compensate). Still, it seems like that would be easier as opposed to having it summon a completely different projectile and dressing it up as another.

[Ninety-Six]

Okay I got inspired. I completely scrapped what I had done and started over. I wanted to try and see if getting that fireball shot would be a better retaliation. It wasn't, and I didn't know how to change the range.

But then I had an idea. I saw something I missed the first time around. I saw the part of the code that dictated what the retaliation was, exactly. No more name swapping. So I made it his run state. Then I tweaked some distance values for his attack triggers, and buffed his speed. I now have version 2.0. If mods could do something to append any of this to the OP, that would be fantastic.




So the end result of all my experimentation is a monster whose response to pain is to try and rush you down and actually get you in range of his powerful flamethrower before using it. I've made him slightly faster to allow for this, though a full Duke sprint is still just enough to keep you alive. If you're not in range, he will much more commonly spawn fireflies, or use the fireballs to make the ground more dangerous.

I also did something that might not be the most popular decision: I gave him double the health. My justification for this is that despite all these changes, if you just kept your distance and unloaded a full devastator against him, none of his close range adjustments matter. So just to try and force the player into some vulnerability, I made it so that you would need about a full devastator and a half to bring him down. In my opinion, it still doesn't make him too hard, I'd say the Queen and the Battlelord are still harder just due to how they're designed, but I tried to change him into a close-range monster that actually tries to capitalize on it, as opposed to being literally less effective than a single solitary pig cop.

If the health is a problem, then don't download the USER.con file i guess. This was also entirely tested and balanced around his fight specifically in Hollywood Inferno. Use at your own risk as far as custom usermaps go.

Regardless, I'm now much happier with this project and outside of any further bugs, I call this done.

 EPISODE5BOSS.CON (8K)
Number of downloads: 131

 USER.CON (52.86K)
Number of downloads: 116