Damaging Bosses?

[Colson]

Ok, so I'm making a pre-final boss level in a mod, and I need to do something.
What I want to do is place a boss, but I don't want the player to fight the boss directly. I need the player to hit a switch or enter a sector to damage the boss. Is that possible/how do I do that? I still want the boss to be able to attack, but the player not be able to directly hit them by jumping on them.

 

[danie]

Make A SOC!

 

[PHCC]

You can make a sector around the boss that blocks only the player, but not the boss. To do that, use a custom FOF.Then, make the boss shoot something on the ground that makes the ground open and close(disappear and appear),and then, the player have to go back to the top before he get drown(Space countdown),but he have to go in the center of the level(where the boss is), and when he hits the boss he is pushed away from there(the sector have to be intangible from inside, if this exists). This is basically the way that the player will do to hit the boss, but to the boss hit the player, you can make the boss shot in all directions, or create other robots to fight the player. This is just an opinion.

 

[Colson]

You can make a sector around the boss that blocks only the player, but not the boss. To do that, use a custom FOF.Then, make the boss shoot something on the ground that makes the ground open and close(disappear and appear),and then, the player have to go back to the top before he get drown(Space countdown),but he have to go in the center of the level(where the boss is), and when he hits the boss he is pushed away from there(the sector have to be intangible from inside, if this exists). This is basically the way that the player will do to hit the boss, but to the boss hit the player, you can make the boss shot in all directions, or create other robots to fight the player. This is just an opinion.

That's not exactly what I'm looking for, but it might work.
I'm actually looking for a way to use a sector to damage the boss when the player steps in, or SOC a thing that when touched or destroyed, damages the boss.

 

[Princess Plushima]

All you really have to do is SOC something to blast an invisible missile at the boss.
Your best bet for that would be for the switch to be a SOCced thing with the same flags as a monitor.
In that thing's deathstate, have it spawn an invisible intangible object. On the state immediately after that object's spawnstate (Since getting objects to do things on their spawnstate is stupidly complicated) have it A_FindTarget 0 (The player) then A_FindTracer the boss. Then A_CapeChase, with Var1 set to 1 (Causing it to teleport to its tracer, the boss) A_SetObjectFlags to take on the flags of a missile, then A_MoveRelative to get it moving (Since missiles don't deal damage if they're stationary)

If I didn't mess up horribly somewhere, that should basically cause them game to act as though the player had shot the boss when the switch thing is 'bopped'

And hell, there's probably a sector type that can deal damage to enemies that I don't know about. Hopefully someone with better understanding of level design can tell you that.

 

[Liliam]

Crumbling FOFs can hurt bosses, so that's another way of doing something like that. You could have a floor with a bunch of respawning FOFs which the player has to run over, making them fall down on the boss and hitting it in the process. =P

 

[Colson]

All you really have to do is SOC something to blast an invisible missile at the boss.
Your best bet for that would be for the switch to be a SOCced thing with the same flags as a monitor.
In that thing's deathstate, have it spawn an invisible intangible object. On the state immediately after that object's spawnstate (Since getting objects to do things on their spawnstate is stupidly complicated) have it A_FindTarget 0 (The player) then A_FindTracer the boss. Then A_CapeChase, with Var1 set to 1 (Causing it to teleport to its tracer, the boss) A_SetObjectFlags to take on the flags of a missile, then A_MoveRelative to get it moving (Since missiles don't deal damage if they're stationary)

If I didn't mess up horribly somewhere, that should basically cause them game to act as though the player had shot the boss when the switch thing is 'bopped'

And hell, there's probably a sector type that can deal damage to enemies that I don't know about. Hopefully someone with better understanding of level design can tell you that.

Good thing I have some knowledge of SOCcing, because this might just be the method I'm looking for!

 

[Nev3r]

In case you want to use sector-based buttons, I'd like to suggest a little variation of what Draykon said, which would allow you to do so.

Instead of using a monitor, you could make an enemy and place it somewhere outside the level, in a dummy sector. Pressing the button would make the dummy sector crush the enemy. Its death state would trigger what Draykon explained. This way, you can intercommunicate the level itself, and the things inside it.