Unseen enemies have different behavior in vanilla

[Former user]

Enemies seem to be more aggressive - as in opening doors and otherwise taking the initiative - than they were in the original game.

For example, I tried playing E5L4 in both DosBox and ECWolf 1.3.2 on Windows 10. Go straight ahead, make a left, and then make another left (opening the door to the yellow key room). In ECWolf, the enemies from the room with the blue key door will start following you, whereas in DosBox they stay put.

[Braden Obrzut]

Need to continue to investigate but this may be a really strange coincidence due to the better random number generator. The exit elevator and the start room share a floor code so the SS in there wakes up and opens the door. This door will never close due to the way the AI works, so you’ll wake up everything in the final room eventually and only then can it close.

It looks like with vanilla/wolf4sdl the dogs in the exit room move in such a way that they’ll block access to the locked door. Anyway once the enemies exit that room it’s likely you’ll wake up the enemies you’re talking about.

[Braden Obrzut]

Found it and learned something new about the Wolf3D engine. So the engine tracks if an actor is “active”. This controls if the actor’s AI is run when not in a connected sound zone. So a pathing enemy is always active for example since we want it to move when it can’t hear the player. However standing enemies will only react to your sound if the sound zone is connected and as soon as that connection is lost they will stop in place until restored.

Alternatively the renderer can see the actor and it will be marked active permanently. This is where things get a little tricky for me because I can’t let the renderer decide if the actor is active otherwise multiplayer won’t work.