MBF Tech Support

First off, the most important question: What the heck is MBF, anyway?

Rez and myself are the two main tech support people for MBF. If you have a question not answered to your satisfaction here, you can:

Send it directly to us.

Post it on Usenet (I read all five of the rec.games.computer.doom.* NG's almost daily.)

These first two FAQ answers are responses we wrote up for the late Doomnation forums:


Q: How do you make a monster in MBF friendly using an editor like DMapEdit?

A: As far as I know, you can't in DMapEdit. To make an individual monster friendly, you'll need to use Deth or some other program that lets you punch in a number for an item's flags. Find the current flag number of whatever you want to change, add 128, and use that number. In Deth, select the monster you want to convert, press Enter, select Change Flags/Enter a Decimal Value. Add 128 to the number you see and punch that in. Hit Enter and save your map. That monster will be friendly. This should be the last thing you do on the map, because your old editor might remove the friendly flag.


Q: What does the A_RandomJump codepointer do? What type of effects are possible with it?

A: RandomJump allows you to make the code less linear - it randomly branches off one of two ways. You could give a monster two long-range attacks, like a weak one he uses most of the time and a strong one he only uses occasionally. Below is an example that makes an imp show the death frames of an SS Nazi one out of every four times. It could be used if, for example, you wanted a monster to die two different ways, so not every corpse ended up in the same pose.

Frame 457
Unknown 1 = 744
Unknown 2 = 64

[CODEPTR]
Frame 457 = RandomJump

Now for a more in-depth look:

Frame 457

(This is the first frame of the imp's death. No matter which branch is taken, you'll always see this frame.)

Unknown 1 = 744

(This is the frame that it will randomly jump to.)

Unknown 2 = 64

(This is the chance. It can range from zero/never, to 256/always, almost like the "Pain chance" entry in DeHackEd. The computer picks a random number from 0-255, and if it's less than Unknown 2, the computer goes to the frame listed in Unknown 1.)

[CODEPTR]
Frame 457 = RandomJump

So, either one of two things will happen. 64/256 (1 out of 4) times, it will jump to frame 744. The rest of the time it will ignore this and just continue on like normal (with the next frame you normally see in DeHackEd).

Note that this doesn't mean that every fourth imp will die like an SS Nazi. In the same way a coin doesn't turn up heads every second time you flip it, this is just a chance thing. You might breeze through Doom 2 MAP01 with this patch and never see an imp die like a Nazi, then most of the ones on MAP02 will. It's random.

As an Addendum: MBF's new codepointers, for the most part, do NOT work on weapon frames. Doom uses the misc1 and misc2 (Unknown 1 and Unknown 2) entries on the weapon frames, so if you try using them you will probably cause a crash.


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