A_PainAttack spawning projectile monster inside calling monster

I have no idea if it would help, but I vaguely remember something which may help.

Archvile fire is replaced with a revenant missile, given negative speed and calls A_Chase (Codep Frame = 176) for several frames which moves backwards because of the negative speed, thus away from the player, then calls SpawnFly (Codep Frame = 788) to spawn an enemy.

All right, so what if you have your missile call A_Chase for several frames (experiment with the amount of frames needed) before calling A_PainAttack?

1 hour ago, Stabbey said:

I have no idea if it would help, but I vaguely remember something which may help.

...

All right, so what if you have your missile call A_Chase for several frames (experiment with the amount of frames needed) before calling A_PainAttack?

This seems more about dehacked, I am using DECORATE (probably should have specified, also yes I am going to learn zscript eventually get off my back) and, by appearances used it exactly like how it's called in the Pain Elemental definition. I'd like to know how it actually works in the future but in the meantime I got equivalent behavior from A_SpawnItemEx

That's an odd thing to have happen -- I've done a similar enemy in Heretic and had no problem just using A_PainAttack.

My code has always been a little bit more complex, because it's chosen randomly between a couple different enemy variants, switched to an alternate attack based on range, and now that it's in ZScript it's got some additional complexity and polish to it. But here's what it looked like back when it was in Decorate:
 

 Missile:
    STLI A 0 A_JumpIfCloser (164, "Missile3")
    STLI A 0 A_Jump (128, "Missile2")
    STLI A 5 A_FaceTarget
    STLI B 20 BRIGHT A_PainAttack("HereticImpLeader2", 0)
    Goto See

There's really nothing special about it at all. I wonder if it's actually the "NoSkullAttack" flag that's causing you trouble? The Pain Elemental's attack was kind of designed around that, so if you want simpler enemy spawns that don't throw the spawned minion at the player, you could probably just use something like A_SpawnItemEx, which I think lets you set an offset relative to the spawner and useful stuff like that. (oh, nevermind, you already did that)

10 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

There's really nothing special about it at all. I wonder if it's actually the "NoSkullAttack" flag that's causing you trouble?..

Yeah I am not sure, 3/4 of the time it should be spawning one with it. I did implement it with A_SpawnItemEx but heres the code if you can figure out how I fucked up?

ACTOR MetaGargoyle : HereticImpLeader 7108
{
  Health 160
  Radius 16
  PainChance 128
  DeathSound "misc/teleport"
  States
  {
  Missile:
    IMPX D 6 A_FaceTarget
	IMPX E 3 A_FaceTarget
	IMPX E 3 A_Jump(64, "SpawnFireG")
	IMPX F 6 A_SpawnItemEx("GargoyleSpawn", 36, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, SXF_TransferPointers | SXF_NOCHECKPOSITION)
//	IMPX F 6 A_PainAttack("GargoyleSpawn")
	Goto See
  SpawnFireG:
//	IMPX F 6 A_PainAttack("GargoyleLeaderSpawn", 0, PAF_NOSKULLATTACK)
	IMPX F 6 A_SpawnItemEx("GargoyleLeaderSpawn", 36, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, SXF_TransferPointers | SXF_NOCHECKPOSITION)
    Goto See
  XDeath:
  XCrash:
  Crash:
  Death:
    IMPX G 0 Bright
	{
	  A_Scream;
	  A_NoBlocking;
	  A_SpawnItemEx("MetaDeathPuff", 0, 0, 8);
	}
	Stop
  }
}

GargoyleSpawn and GargoyleLeaderSpawn are just copies of HereticImp and HereticImpLeader with different death states so they dont leave a corpse

In the original code it looks like the spawned actor was given a pre-step based on both the radius of the calling actor, and the radius of a lost soul specifically. Also, the spawned actor would be immediately given 10k damage if it failed to move (this is how lost souls die in the walls instead of just getting stuck). Is your actor stationary by any chance?

Anyway, using the generalized actions is almost always a better practice regardless.