Monster Replacement Theory

My Dystopian Playground level features quite a horde of monsters if one enables a server to play that way. In ultra-violence, there are 39 fyredemons, 10 cacodementals and 216 shadow revenants. With the included cacolauncher weapon which introduces sour grape baby cacos into the game, there's plenty of mayhem in DM with monsters mode. The whole idea of having this insane amount of shadow revenants was to have them produce fireworks. This was Curtis' invention. I never imagined myself attempting to kill each and every one of them.

Yet, this is what I did.

First thing I did was increase the time limit of the server from my standard eight minutes to thirty. I figured it was impossible to kill them all even with this increase but allowed me more playing time for when I was actually having fun. But as I made more and more mad attempts at this futile task, I began to think, "Y'know, this might be possible!"

Next thing was to memorize the location of the more easily accessible BFG of the two I placed in this level. In deathmatch, I'm a former member of the BFG Haters Club. There's just been something about the BFG in deathmatch that I never could stand from a not-very-good player's perspective. I've totally appreciated the humor in deathmatch maps of others which mete out a punishment to the player who attempts to pick one up. It has an almost detente cold-war aversion to using nukes vibe about it. When I designed Dystopian Playground, I made one of the multiplayer starts have a BFG right in front of the player to grab but it's actually a ruse. The multiplayer start actually has a chaingun which has a mandatory pickup due to the player's proximity to the weapon, though its placement is designed to not be seen. As soon as the player moves forward towards the BFG, they trigger a thing-thrust line which launches the player up to the central island of the level. The pickup sound of the chaingun momentarily makes the player think they've acquired the BFG which was sitting directly in front of them before they got catapulted. It's a cheap parlour trick and really only good for the laugh once but satisfied my inner BFG haters' appetite. There's actually another BFG in the level which is slightly hidden but a good bone to throw to the BFG lovin' player.

Anyhow, in this case, the BFG would be central to my strategy and actually use the weapon for its original intended purpose; clearing monsters bulk-rate! Beyond that, the enslavement of sour grape allies to do one's bidding is also key to this war of attrition versus the shadow revenants. I don't even count how many times I die. The only thing that counted in my quest was the boolean of all shadow revenants killed. And I've achieved this great victory four times now with my best time actually being my first; about 22 minutes.

This leads me to one of many observations I've made since I began playtesting this wad file; more cacodementals please! I honestly didn't know how well my exploding bits of the cacodemental, and subsequently, the sour grape were going to turn out. I would go so far to say I'm ecstatic about the results. My first inclination would be to make a new wad file where I'd simply replace the insane number of shadow revenants with more cacodementals. But then I decided to try something else out instead. What I did was create a custom DECORATE script and save it as the only entry in a new wad file. I then, simply load this wad file along with (after) the dysto-pg.wad file. The DECORATE code:

     ACTOR Clonomental : Cacodemental replaces ShadowRevenant 
     {
     }

     ACTOR HellishBaron : BaronOfHell replaces Fyredemon
     {
     }

And, voila! I now have a server up and running which features 39 hell barons in place of the previous fyredemons and instead of shadow revenants, a whopping 226 cacodementals:

Notice that the curly braces are all empty. Since the monsters are already defined in the DECORATE code in dysto-pg.wad and I don't need to change anything about them, there's no need to fill anything at all here and the new monsters, Clonomental and HellishBaron simply inherit everything from the Actor classes they are based on.

Download: