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.

In Doom and Doom II, partial invisibility causes spectres to appear as shimmering beings, like a lens which distorts the area reflected through their translucent bodies, making them hard to spot in darker areas or against certain textures (such as gray speckled walls). However, in bright areas, they are noticeably visible, because their shimmering forms clearly contrast with the background.

In the PlayStation version of Doom and some source ports, spectres do not shimmer as described above, but are instead rendered as faded or semi-transparent demons.

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.

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, blood splats, impact animations, and backfire checks 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.