Disabling mechsects (spiders) in Ion Fury Full Version 1.0x

[dwtietz]

A month or two ago, I had met a person here in the discussion boards that had expressed the fact that he has arachnophobia, and this led him to the point where he had almost stopped playing the game completely as the mechsects (spiders) were causing him a great deal of panic, almost to the point of anxiety.

Recognizing that there are a great number of people that have such a fear of spiders, I set out to find a way to disable the spiders in the game so that he could continue to enjoy playing IF instead of turning away from the game completely. I'm not fluent in the con file scripting language at all, but I could read enough to formulate some ideas and within a day or so I had a fully functional solution for him.

That was with Ion Maiden EAP v4.1, prior to the full version release however, and I took a look this morning and realized that the solution I had found for him no longer works due to substantial changes that have been made within the enemies.con file since last January. So... Today I set out on creating a new solution for this problem (even if it only affects a minority of players).

[dwtietz]

I think that this new method is a cleaner approach anyway, and it's fairly similar to how I accomplished this before. While the code that I've inserted into the enemies.con file is aimed and designed to assist those with arachnophobia to remove the spiders from the game, I've expanded the option to make it easy to remove any, or even all, of the enemies.

I believe that as of this writing, the no enemies CLI switch is still not functional, so this little bit of scripting allows you to achieve the same results (or quite similar to doing the same thing); the enemies technically do still exist, they're just being killed at the moment that they attempt to spawn.

Within this code, there may be a couple of lines that aren't even required, although I haven't seen any issues so far whether a particular line is enabled or not.

[dwtietz]

For starters, I am going to assume at the moment that anyone that wishes to try this is already familiar with creating a scripts sub-folder in the game's main program folder, as well as being able to extract the enemies.con file from the group file and placing it into the 'scripts' folder and then renaming the group file back to fury.grp if required.

I'll mention right away that the code I'll be providing shortly won't actually do anything at all at first. There will be a few modifications that you'll need to do to 'activate' the code before it will start making any in-game changes, but we'll get to that later.

First things first. Open the extracted copy of enemies.con in Notepad (or your favourite simple text editor) and search for the following text:

appendevent EVENT_SPAWN

The very first match found should bring you to a section that begins with the following lines:

appendevent EVENT_SPAWN
ifspawnedby RESPAWN
{
switch sprite.picnum
case A_CULTIST
case A_CULTIST_STAYPUT
...

[dwtietz]

Insert a new line between the first line (appendevent EVENT_SPAWN) and the second line (ifspawnedby RESPAWN) and then paste the following lines starting at your new line location:

// START OF REMOVE ENEMIES CODE
switch sprite.picnum
// case A_ACIDYSPIT_SPLASH // I don't think I need this line for anything.
// case A_ARCHANGEL // Guy with no skin that teleports
// case A_BRUTE // Robot with the chopsaw arm (3 Lines)
// case A_BRUTE_TOP
// case A_BRUTE_BOTTOM
// case A_CULTIST // Brown robed enemies (3 Lines)
// case A_CULTIST_CROUCH
// case A_CULTIST_STAYPUT
// case A_DEACON // Flying skull/spinal cord
// case A_DIOPEDE_HEAD // Centipede like robot (2 Lines)
// case A_DIOPEDE_BUTT
// case A_DRONE // Flying skull drone
// case A_FIRE2_SMG // ???????? I don't think I need this line, it doesn't sound like it's related...
// case A_GREATER // Red robed cultists with masks (3 Lines)
// case A_GREATER_CROUCH
// case A_GREATER_STAYPUT
// case A_HESKEL_BOT // Dr. Heskel
// case A_MECHBOSS_TOP // a.k.a. WARMECH (2 Lines)
// case A_MECHBOSS_BOTTOM
// case A_MECHSECT // Spiders (2 Lines)
/* terminx 2019-08-29 at 12:53 PM
those spider things are actually called ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but everyone was like "dude you can't say that" */
// case A_MECHSECT_HANG
// case A_NUKEMUTANT // Zombie that throws body parts (2 Lines)
// case A_NUKEMUTANT_RISE
// case A_NUKEMUTANT_GDF // Zombie that has a blue shirt on (2 Lines)
// case A_NUKEMUTANT_GDF_RISE
// case A_PSEUDO_ENEMY // Not certain if I really need to kill this, but maybe...
/* Leo "DavoX" Pellegrini 2019-08-29 at 12:52 PM
Psudo lets you turn whatever you want into a boss */
// case A_SHOTGUNNER // Dudes with shotguns (3 Lines)
// case A_SHOTGUNNER_CROUCH
// case A_SHOTGUNNER_STAYPUT
// case A_TURRET // Turrets (2 Lines)
// case A_TURRET_BOTTOM
// case A_WENTEKO // The guy that looks like a dried out moose hide
/* DON'T TOUCH THE NEXT TWO LINES, THESE ARE JUST NOTES FOR MYSELF
case UNKNOWN // Mega Brutilizer created by A_PSEUDO_ENEMY?
case UNKNOWN // REVANANT. Figure out how to stop ship from firing rockets elsewhere? */
// killit
// break
endswitch
// END OF REMOVE ENEMIES CODE

[dwtietz]

If you were to save the file at this point and run the game you'll see that nothing has changed and all the enemies are still there, so now its time to activate the script so that it can go to work... The following two lines MUST be activated for this bit of code to be able to do anything:

// killit
// break

Activation of these lines is accomplished by removing the double-slash (//) at the beginning of each line, so these two lines should now appear as:

killit
break

[dwtietz]

Now that the script can start removing enemies, all we need to do now is remove the double-slash characters from the beginning of the lines of the enemies that we want to remove from the game. For instance, if all we wanted to remove was the mechsects (spiders), we would locate the following lines:

// case A_MECHSECT // Spiders (2 Lines)
/* terminx 2019-08-29 at 12:53 PM
those spider things are actually called ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but everyone was like "dude you can't say that" */
// case A_MECHSECT_HANG

and then remove the double slashes at the front of each line so that they appear as follows:

case A_MECHSECT // Spiders (2 Lines)
/* terminx 2019-08-29 at 12:53 PM
those spider things are actually called ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but everyone was like "dude you can't say that" */
case A_MECHSECT_HANG

If you save the file at this point and launch the game, there will not be any spiders. Or, keep disabling additional enemies as you'd like - You can even turn them all off and just go for a stroll around town all alone if you'd like to.

[dwtietz]

Re-enabling the enemies can be accomplished by putting the double-slashes back in, or by just deleting or renaming the enemies.con file that you've placed in your scripts folder.

Have fun with, or without, whichever enemies you want to be present in your game session.

[Fox]

Oh yeah, at one point we wanted to rename the Mechsects (that appear on Bombshell first) to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Unfortunately we found out that Steam would censor it. Bummer.

[dwtietz]

Originally posted by Fox Martins:

Oh yeah, at one point we wanted to rename the Mechsects (that appear on Bombshell first) to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Unfortunately we found out that Steam would censor it. Bummer.

XD

[Truck Stop Santa Claus]

Originally posted by Fox Martins:

Oh yeah, at one point we wanted to rename the Mechsects (that appear on Bombshell first) to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Unfortunately we found out that Steam would censor it. Bummer.

LMAO