Spectre


 * For information about the Spectre enemy from Strife, see Spectre (Strife).



Spectres are the partially invisible counterparts of demons. Except for their blurry appearance, they are exactly the same in behavior and attributes, and thus may be thought of as demons who have a permanent partial invisibility power. In the Doom II manual, their description is: ''Great. Just what you needed. An invisible (nearly) monster.''

Spectres do not have frames of their own, as the Doom engine uses the same information used for demons to account for them, which means the monsters share sprites. The different engines handle spectres in two ways, using either a shadowy shimmering effect or colored translucency.

Spectres appear as "shimmering" beings, like a lens which distorts and reflects the area seen through their translucent bodies, making them hard to spot in darker areas or against certain textures (such as grey speckled walls). However, in bright areas, they are noticeably visible and "spotty".

In many OpenGL source ports, as well as in Doom 64 and the PlayStation version of Doom, spectres do not "shimmer", but are instead rendered as near transparent. This is because the partial invisibility effect is very difficult to reproduce using such a renderer. EDGE, however, emulates the effect.

In Doom 64 specifically, inactive spectres are initially rendered as opaque demons with a green tint, becoming translucent upon detecting the player. Upon death, they revert to an opaque state again.

There are some tricks that can help make spectres more visible: their shimmering outline is much easier to see with the inverted colours of an invulnerability sphere, for example, and they feature a fully visible blood-splatter effect when hit.

Note that although bad guys aim versus a player with a partial invisibility is eratic, that there aim isn't similarilly eratic when they are targeting a Spectre (i.e through infighting).

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, and blood splats are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.

Appearance statistics
In classic Doom, the spectre is first encountered on these maps:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of spectres:


 * 1) May be encountered earlier if the secret level is played.