Introduction
Id software have very kindly (accidentally perhaps) provided some spare frames that can come in very useful when working with dehacked. If you look at the F2 things page, you will see that most of the monsters have a respawn frame. These are the frames used when the thing is brought back to life by the archvile. Monsters, which do not leave a corpse, cannot be resurrected and generally do not have respawn frames. The pain elemental, however, does have a respawn sequence. This is never used in game and so the frames are ripe for using in simple dehacked patches. I will use them in some of the examples listed here.
I have never seen it happen during many hours of dooming, but it may be possible for a pain elemental to die as an archvile was walking past and be resurrected in the half second or so before its body disappeared. I don’t think this can happen however as I believe the animation has to have actually stopped before the monster can be resurrected. As the pain elemental’s animation does not stop until the body has gone, no resurrection.
Anyway if you are going to use these frames it may well be safest to go to the pain elemental page in the thing editor (F2) and set its respawn frame to 0.
To do this, make sure you are in the thing editor (that’s where you start), hit G to bring up the list of things and either find the pain elemental in the list or type 23 (the thing number of the pain elemental). Now use the left and right arrow keys to move to the frame allocation box and use the up/down arrows to move to the respawn frame. Hit enter and type 0 and hit enter again to register the change. If only a frame or two of the pain elemental respawn sequence is to be used, you could always just allocate a later frame from the sequence (eg 722) as the respawn frame. This would mean the pain elemental still had some respawn frames, but it would just be a shorter sequence. As I said, however, I have never seen a pain elemental respawn anyway.
