Pain Elemental failure to launch
I am using Build 439 on Win 7 Pro 64.
Playing through Doom 2 I got as far as map 09 (The Pit) where I noticed that Pain Elementals never completed the launch of their Lost Souls. They didn't even release any when they died.
I tried disabling all my add-ons but the symptom persisted.
Pain Elemental first appear in map 08 (Tricks and Traps), so I went back and found them working fine there! This is very strange.
I've tried warping to map 09 in case it was a save file problem, but the Pain Elementals continue to be pacifists.
Playing through Doom 2 I got as far as map 09 (The Pit) where I noticed that Pain Elementals never completed the launch of their Lost Souls. They didn't even release any when they died.
I tried disabling all my add-ons but the symptom persisted.
Pain Elemental first appear in map 08 (Tricks and Traps), so I went back and found them working fine there! This is very strange.
I've tried warping to map 09 in case it was a save file problem, but the Pain Elementals continue to be pacifists.
Comments
In Vanilla Doom, there is a check that prevents a Pain Elemental from launching a Lost Soul if there are already 21 or more Lost Souls on the map (likely for performance reasons).
Doomsday has an option to enable/disable this under the gameplay menu and by default has it on. This is because there are various Pwads that rely on the limit; one of the Hell Revealed wads for instance.
On higher skills, there are more than 21 Lost Souls on Map09 of Doom2. Whether Sandy Petersen deliberately breached the limit, wheter the limit existed when the map was designed and he forgot to update it, who knows.
I can hardly believe I never noticed it before despite having played Doom since the 90's.
Oddly it was Map09 where I first noticed that Pain Elementals sometimes launched their Lost Souls through walls, leaving them to endlessly patrol just outside the map like little Ancient Mariners.
The exiled Lost Souls could still be heard sliding along the outside of walls on the edge of the map and I think that was what originally prompted me to find out about the IDCLIP cheat.