Monsters - General Remarks

Monsters

Classnames: monster_* (lots of these)
Purpose: Death & destruction
H2 Code: usually *.hc, or something like that
fields required: origin
There are lots of different monsters, see below for an alphabetical list, linking to pages where more specific information is given. In the Mission Pack there are more of them, and they have somewhat enhanced capabilities, as discussed for the various individual fields below. In addition to these fields, some monsters take additional ones of their own, as presented in their individual entries.

Monsters come in three grades, GRUNT, HENCHMAN and LEADER, distinguished by the fact that HENCHMEN sometimes leave mana when killed, and LEADERs sometimes leave artifacts; I haven't gotten around to specifying which they all are. In addition to this random and spontaneous spawning, monsters can be set to spawn particular kinds of stuff by giving them a spawning field (one of the cnt_* fields as discussed below).

Fields

origin value is a triple of numbers, where it is. Your editor probably handles this one automatically.
angle value is a number, direction monster faces. There's probably editor support for this one too.
targetname value is a name, monster wakes up when it's triggered, or disappear when killtargetted (not sure why you'd want to do that, but you can if you want to ...). A targetted monster seems to head off in the general direction of the activator, regardless of whether there is a line of sight to the activator; this can be usee to make more effective guards and sentries.
target value is a name, can target a path_corner entity, in which case, when the map starts, the monster proceeds to that path_corner, then on to the one it targets, and so forth. Or it can target other entities, in which case they are triggered when the monster dies (for example several monsters can target a trigger_counter, which will then fire when enough of them are killed. There can be both a path_corner and an ordinary triggered entity the same targetname-value, targetted by the monster.
cnt_* All of the usual spawning fields, with number values, whereby the monsters can be made to spawn things when killed, just like pots, etc. (They will also spawn things on occasion at random, mana if they are of the HENCHMAN class, artifacts if they are of the LEADER class).
health Some kind of health value (a number) is always supplied by default, but in the Mission Pack, it seems to be possible to specify the health values of most (all?) monsters.
experience Again, an experience value (experience points to killer) is set by default, but seems like it ought to be specifiable for some monsters but not others. I haven't looked into this carefully, attempts to actually do it haven't worked out yet.
spawnflags For ordinary H2 monsters, spawnflag 1 = AMBUSH will make a monster wake up only when it has a line of sight to you (if you use a weapon, for example), whereas without this spawnflag set, monsters will also wake up if they have a of site to another monster that is woken up.

In the PoP Mission Pack, spawnflag 64 = FROZEN will cause the monster to start out in a `frozen' state wherein it is translucent, and will only respond to actually be attacked. If a frozen monster is targetted, it will `unfreeze' when triggered, returning to normal with a breaking ice sound.

Various specific kinds of monsters have further spawnflags, and from the code it looks like a spawnflag 2 = STUCK should have some effect, and some others also appear, but I haven't managed to sort them out. If you can, please help!


Monster List


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