Talk:Cacodemon

From DoomWiki.org

Revision as of 10:12, 23 January 2008 by 69.51.157.227 (talk) (Fleeing AI)

Fleeing AI

Uniquely, the Cacodemon seems to distance itself from the player when attacked; I often find myself having to chase Cacodemons which have moved away. Is this a property of the Cacodemons' artificial intelligence, or is it just a side-effect of being pushed backwards by the force of my bullets / rockets etc? Someone with the source code in front of them might be able to answer this.-Ashley Pomeroy 18:10, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)

The latter is true. There's much less friction in air after all ;) TheDarkArchon 21:16, 28 Nov 2005 (UTC)
On another note, why is the AD&D link into the Doom wiki and not Wikipedia. TheDarkArchon 21:19, 28 Nov 2005 (UTC)
Possibly because AD&D had other influences on doom / quake and therefore could have a local article... however in it's absence I've changed it to be a wikipedia one. -- Jdowland 23:28, 28 Nov 2005 (UTC)

This is true, the reason it distances itself like that though is because the executable file does not specify a close attack frame, only a distance attack one. ^^^ The above statement is incorrect. The cacodemon does have a close attack frame. And even if it didn't, the cacodemon would still try to get closer nevertheless. It is because of the fact that there is no friction in the air, so you can tend to push them all over the place. -Wagi 69.51.157.227 15:12, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Hit points

It seems that Doom 1 and 2 differ in Cacodemon hitpoints - in Doom 1 it takes 3 rockets to take down fresh Cacodemon, when in Doom 2 it goes down just after two. Another possibility is that direct rocket damage is different in Doom and Doom 2, but the difference should be mentioned either here or at rocket launcher page. This was noticed comparing original DOS Doom 1 and 2 games. Source ports won't show this difference as damage and hitpoint information isn't stored in Doom IWAD. -- KrzysiekK

I've just fired up my old DOS versions of the Doom games, and also Zdoom, and I can't see a difference. The cacodemons in E3M1 and the ones in Map08 both seem to take the same damage - two or three rockets smack in the face. I assume somebody who could understand the source code would be able to answer this once and for all. Mind you, I could swear when I was young that it only took two shotgun shots to kill a demon, whereas running levels on Zdoom it seems to take three shotgun shots, but that could just be because I have got worse with age. -Ashley Pomeroy 21:19, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
And I've compared them both with v1.1 of Doom, which is much the same. I assume the reason why my punches and shots seem so weak nowadays is because I no longer use IDDQD in order to blast the monsters at point-blank range. From what I remember Doom.exe and Doom2.exe are almost identical except for pointers to textures specific to each game; Doom2.exe was spun off from Doom v1.666, and some of the Doom2 monsters and code were in v1.4 and v1.5 of Doom. -Ashley Pomeroy 21:04, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Actually, Doom.exe and Doom2.exe are exactly identical. The exe in Final Doom was slightly different. It is possible cacodemon hitpoints have been lowered before the 1.666 patch, though.

Pixel and Hissy

It says Pixel finds Hissy cute. Could romance be blooming? Someone needs to do a fanfic or a pic. It just needs to be. Anyone agree? Tyciol 20:06, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Running away

Ashley Pomeroy noted above that "uniquely, the Cacodemon seems to distance itself from the player when attacked". Is this a property of the Cacodemons' artificial intelligence, or is it just a side-effect of being pushed backwards by bullets? If the latter is true, it needs to be explained in the article by someone who knows about Doom's physics engine. Ashley Pomeroy 22:14, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Gender

I have always perceived the Cacodemons as female, for reasons that I explain elsewhere. The rest of the monsters are hard and lean, whereas the Cacodemons are soft and blubbery, like a woman or a fat man. They seem more cartoonish than the other monsters, a bit out of place, perhaps because they are based on other media. It would be fascinating to know what was going through the creators' minds. Ashley Pomeroy 22:14, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Cacodemon in other games?

I'd like to bring the wiki's attention to Cacodemon's Barbecue Party in Hell, over at http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/cacodemon/

Cheers. -- J. Random Ressearcher

As long as its not being sold for money, its fine, and they do not need permsission to use it. Hell, I can think of several games online that include these guys. The first-person-shooter tutorial for Game Maker has Cacodemons in it. If your comment was based on the theory we should include that game in the article, most likely not, because it is a non-notable fan-created game.—Darthtyler http://images.wikia.com/swfanon/images/1/18/Scuba_Diver.gif Talk 20:35, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
Currently, fan games do not have to meet a standard of real-world notability to be included on this site.  (See the policy, which admittedly is a little terse.)  If the content of the game is primarily Doom-related, it gets an article.  Otherwise, if it includes any Doom reference at all, it can be included in the article about that subject.  For example, Chacal 3D, which I doubt has ever been played by more than 100 people, has an article, while Hengband is mentioned in the Cyberdemon article.  If you know of several games that include such content, feel free to add a note about them (preferably while they still exist)...
If licensing issues could be explained in one sentence, as you are doing above, then surely Wikipedia would not have to conduct long debates about them all the time?    Ryan W 23:16, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
"Cacodemon's Barbecue Party in Hell" can be added to Fan-made Doom games, but may not need to be mentioned here.
On the subject of "notability," I hope everybody uses common sense and draws a line where it seems fit. I started to write a virtual pet game called Cacopet sometime around 1998. It used Doom graphics and was supposed to allow you to raise a pet Cacodemon, like a sim game. Although it was distributed on a website it was hardly finished and had almost no functionality - Plus it was probably only viewed by a few people, and installed by fewer. Certainly not nearly enough to be worth noting here. Zack 00:15, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Your Cacopet story sounds like this story by Fraggle.  I hope both arguments eventually lead to notability guidelines, because I think some form of written criteria would be helpful, although in this case I could understand the position that releasing a fan game makes it notable.  Writing a game is generally a lengthy and difficult task (much more so than creating a one-map PWAD), and history teaches us that a public upload can never be entirely redacted.  :>    By contrast, common sense says that merely playing or modding doesn't make a person notable — that's why this site exists after all, because everybody and their dog has at least played, and modding is unusually straightforward in the Doom engine.    Ryan W 01:47, 2 January 2008 (UTC)