Killer Dog

Killer Dog
Animated Mac Dog.gif
Bio
HP	1 (Non-Mac Family)
Points	200
Wake	DOGBARKSND
Death	DOGDEATHSND
Weapon	Bite (sound: DOGATTACKSND)

Killer Dogs (also known as German Shepherds, Guard Dogs and popularly as just Dogs) are enemies in Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny. A canine of the German Shepherd (Deutscher Schäferhund) breed, this enemy has a biting attack and only one hit point, which makes it very easy to kill with any weapon, even the knife. They can however, be nuisances in groups. Against a prepared player, even large packs of dogs are unlikely to do any damage before being killed, so their cost to a player's ammo supply is actually the only concern. This is easily remedied by backing up (ideally into a narrow hall or doorway) while killing them all with the knife.

In the mission packs their breed is changed to that of Doberman but the attack pattern is the same.

In the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D, they are replaced by giant mutant rats. Dogs also make a cameo appearance in Doom RPG as enemies called Hellhounds.

Damage calculation

Damage done by a dog's bite is calculated in a simple way. rand is a pseudo-randomly-generated integer between (and including) 0-255. The rand function is called more than once in a formula, producing a new integer each time.

${\mbox{base damage}}={\begin{cases}\lfloor rand(2)\div 16\rfloor ,&{\mbox{if }}rand(1)<180\\0,&{\mbox{if }}rand(1)>180\end{cases}}$

Note the floor function around the division—due to the use of bit shift rather than true division, the output is rounded down. This allows the player's health to never stray from being a whole number. The maximum damage (255/16) is therefore 15 rather than 15.9375. The minimum is zero, even with a successful hit.

As with all damage to the player, the actual damage received is one-fourth of the base damage if the player is playing at "Can I play, Daddy?" difficulty. Save for godmode, the two are otherwise equal.

Gallery

Post-SNES sprite.