Bullethell Nihilanth
36Bit of a doodle, yes, but I wanted to do a short vid on a random thought I had. A relatively recent conversation got me trying to experiment with ol' Nil to see if I can make the fight more engaging by messing around with the model's QC events and frame timings. Managed to learn some interesting tidbits in the process, and while what I've done is still not perfect, it is a bit closer to what I was hoping Nil's fight would entail. More Untitled's Touhou Doom, less stop and go hidey-ho.
The projectiles Nil throws, both standard and teleporters, are spawned from various attachment points around his rigging. While I could slot in more events to spawn more in a single attack, the projectiles have hitboxes that can collide with each other. I have to modify Nil's attack speed in order to get his hands to swing around more, allowing for more projectiles to be thrown in a single move. Of course, comes the concern of what to do for the teleporters.
While perhaps unintended, the teleporters that Nil punts are possible to defuse if you counter it with any other entity. I don't mean shooting at it with standard smallarms, I mean using something that spawns an actual tangible object that the teleporters can zap in your stead. Rockets and hornets are easy choices, though even things like grenades and other throwables might work in a pinch. With all of this in mind, the fight becomes significantly more involved.
You can't just hide behind the spikes, as Nil's significantly heavier attacks'll zip past 'em like hot knife through butter. You have to constantly longjump to avoid the standard attacks, swap to weapons like the hornetgun to defuse the teleports, occasionally changing again to deal with the adds, all while damaging Nil so you can get a break to smash the crystals. Getting teleported away is less of a punishment and more relief from all the frantic doohickey.
About the only thing I'm still figuring out right now is that helpless state at the very end that Nil enters once you damaged him enough. Not entirely sure if it's the entity limit being hit, causing Nil to no longer spawn any more projectiles, or if perhaps the state of the code only allows for one projectile to go through. Sometimes Nil just straight up destroys himself while floating around, which is rather amusing after a particularly grueling fight. Dunno how to fix that just yet.
Still though, I think what's available is interesting enough for the moment. Decided to upload the modified model here for interested parties. If you're wondering what's with the Xen lights near the trampoline, that's my Xen addon from a while back. The one where I tried to rebalance the whole section and speed up some of the slower bits. Might be curious to some thinking of replaying the original levels with slightly less of the nonsense.
Mods Used:
Xen Addon: https://www.mediafire.com/file/leghhsax11tj2m7/z_xen_addon.7z/file
Danmaku Nihilanth: https://www.mediafire.com/file/tuf2ibdgvovn5wi/z_nihilanthdanmaku_addon.7z/file
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