Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-3547390-20180316142750

I never really messed with Glide, I assume you just drop the wrapper in. Of course, if it was that simple you would have already tried it :P

You don't know if they are hardcoded or not? I thought you played a couple unofficial expansions which added new enemies. It might be a random detail to remember if custom death messages were a thing, but it would help a lot.

See, death messages are a great way to base it off of. When you are told it is something different by the game, it is obviously something different, even if it was a minor change otherwise (see Ogre Marksman). It just is a matter of knowing the limits of the community. If we are going to be seeing thousands of modded enemies with custom dialogs, something with a simple graphic/sound change would of course not be the same. But if this is pretty much the best we will generally get beyond some very rare exceptions, then it would be a bad idea to base it around such.

Custom brushes/hazards are easy, anything treated as a separate entity by the level is considered worthy. But you run into the same problem with powerups and weapons... pickup messages. Those obituaries are a nice detail, but also will be an important factor in knowing where to put the dividing line.

Exactly. It all depends on the game. Thief, I could easily say a new enemy is a new enemy based on certain criteria. Unreal, the obituaries are easy to change, so I would easily base it off that. Both are really easy games to understand, they have internal editors that give off so much info. But Quake is just more confusing. Unlike the two aforementioned games, new entities aren't really defined in the editor but by modifying files. I don't know what is possible to be modified. Will we be seeing plenty of "player's ass was blown by Duke" or is that a pipe dream?

Obviously, a skin alone is not enough. The Grunt Duke is still a Grunt, I could never be fooled into thinking it another enemy, especially as nothing else is changed. Even if the sounds were changed, the model looking identical would make it too recognizable. But what happens when we get sounds and a model changed? Skins should never be the deciding factor.

Obituaries, I have a belief that they should be a deciding factor. But if everything but the obituary was changed, would that be sufficient? It all depends on how often obituaries are changed.

Behavior changes are nice, but sound and model alone can make something feel VERY different. It will give off the illusion of being a new enemy until you get a death message saying it is a "Grunt" and not "Duke Nukem". That is a bit of an illusion breaker and thus why this becomes a big debate... does it get better or is this what we should be settling for? If it gets better, we can easily say something saying Grunt is a Grunt, sorta like how I treat level geometry.

As you can see, I have ideas for most of it... but I don't know if we will be seeing a bunch of custom death messages or not. I am at a brick wall. A choice here one way or the other could result in a massive mess later on if it turns out we got it wrong. I wish you played Shrak, that would be a great deciding factor as that is a TC and could tell us the level we should be dealing with this stuff.

It probably will, but this is indeed a MAJOR part going forwards, probably one of the biggest things left to do. Reskins have their place on the Wikia, as do custom enemies, but all this in-between stuff is just a grey area that confuses me.

My assumption... I think Armagon and Dissolution were not made in any special way, they were essentially polished packs, but were examples of what could be done with Quake and anything that would have been hardcoded would not have changes made. I want to assume we will be seeing custom death messages, because unless they had special access beyond the basic individual, we should be finding anything found there elsewhere. Maybe very early on they were simple changes, sorta like Doom (remember KNIGHT, the MS Paint Knight?) and that by 1997 at the latest we should be seeing more drastic changes if not earlier. It would just be really weird if the TC still had Quake obituaries and the fact that it wasn't the most legal of products means I doubt they did anything more than the average person.