It would be better to repackage the submissions to a PK3 archive, since PK3s are now allowed and are way better than WADs, if you don't know how to convert WAD archives to PK3s, then here is
a help page on the ZDoom wiki
.
As for the actor itself, the formatting seems to be pretty messy, the properties and name of the States block are all lowercase, except for the Alpha property on the slime ball projectile, they should be capitalized instead. The indentation for the states blocks is pretty weird too, it should be more like shown below:.
The projectile attack of the slime worm calls WORM F 0 five times, but you can shorten the code by just making a single line that calls the projectile firing frame 5 times like this:
WORM FFFFF 0 A_CustomMissile ("SlimeBall1", 40, 0, random(-10,10), 2, random(5,10))
Doing this for an attack that just fires the same projectile a bunch of times has the same effect, but makes the code shorter.
Also you may want to remove the A_ChangeFlag call that tries to change the SpriteFlip flag on the SlimeBall actor, because by just removing that flag change you can make this submission 100% Zandronum compatible. Currently Zandronum creates console warnings about SpriteFlip being an unknown flag every time it's called because iit doesn't have it.
However if you don't care for Zandronum compatibility, then I would suggest also replacing A_CustomMissile with A_SpawnProjectile, since the former is deprecated in L/GZDoom, and also having a single call in the slime balls' first frame that randomizes its' speed based on a set of predetermined values, instead of making several duplicate slime balls with different speeds. To do this you just need to use A_SetSpeed and
RandomPick
to create a set of values the projectiles' speed can change to, like shown below:
BOGY A 0 Bright NoDelay A_SetSpeed(RandomPick(10,12,14,16,18))
And lastly, the actor should have a predefined editor number to it, so it can just be drag and dropped to a project and used. It would also benefit from using
editor keys
to give it a proper name in-editor and categorize it under the monsters folder like the rest of the monsters.
Besides the code stuff, here are my "issues" with the monsters' in-game behavior:
- I think it's kind of weird that it uses the generic demon pain sound instead of a custom sound like the rest of them, the active sound is fine though since all vanilla Doom monsters use it anyway.
- The slime balls deal damage too fast, it would be better to increase how long it takes for their AcidLoop state to loop from 4 tics to 6-8 instead.
- The range on the slime balls seems a bit too low as well, increasing their speed a bit to give them a higher range would be better I think.
That's about all the criticisms I have about the submission so far.