Spectre


 * For information about the Spectre enemy from Strife, see Spectre (Strife).



Spectres are the partially invisible brothers of Demons. Except for their appearance, they are exactly the same, and in fact may be thought of as Demons who have permanent blur artifact power. In the Doom II manual, their description is: ''Great. Just what you needed. An invisible (nearly) monster.''

Spectres do not have sprites of their own; the Demon's sprite must be edited to change them. The engines handle spectres in two ways, either "shimmering"/"spotty" or translucent.

In Doom and Doom II, partial invisibility causes Spectres to appear as "shimmering" beings, like a lens which distorts and reflects the area seen through their translucent bodies, making them hard to spot in darker areas or against certain textures (such as grey speckled walls). However, in bright areas, they are noticeably visible and "spotty".

In the PlayStation version of Doom and some source ports, Spectres do not "shimmer"; rather they are rendered as faded and semi-transparent.

There are some tricks that can help make spectres more visible: their shimmering outline is much easier to see with the inverted colours of an invulnerability sphere, for example, and they feature a normal blood-splatter effect when hit.

Appearance statistics
The IWADs contain the following numbers of Spectres: