scozdawg wrote:@AndrewBot

Doesn't the threaten behavior insinuate that the creature is aware of you?

He didn't have the threaten behavior, i just set him to aggressive.

AndrewBot88 wrote:Since you seem to be the master, DVD, I have a question:

In my latest mission, i built the floor, roof, and each of the walls separately (I used the same part over and over for the walls). I put a guy in there, not 5 feet away from me, and he still wouldn't attack. I could go up to him, push him, and he would still only stand there, growling and threatening me. Only after i started attacking him did he attack me back.

Is this just a problem with my game? Or should all the walls be made together?

Awareness is just one aspect of combat. The NPC must also find a path to the player. If you read page 6 of this thread, there is an example of how you build the building affects the collision surfaces (I don't fully understand that my self).

After attacking the NPC so he attacks you, if you move away does he follow?

Things I would try:
1. Remove the floor and used road or plaza decorations from the terrain editor.

2. Rebuild the scene testing after each step:
a. Remove the roof, walls, and floor. Test to see if the combat works.
b. Delete the NPC. Add the floor. Add the NPC. Test.
c. Add the walls one at a time. Test after each wall.
d. Add the roof.

3. Change the floor into a disguised gate.

AndrewBot88 wrote:Since you seem to be the master, DVD, I have a question:

In my latest mission, i built the floor, roof, and each of the walls separately (I used the same part over and over for the walls). I put a guy in there, not 5 feet away from me, and he still wouldn't attack. I could go up to him, push him, and he would still only stand there, growling and threatening me. Only after i started attacking him did he attack me back.

Is this just a problem with my game? Or should all the walls be made together?

Make your floors disguised gates.

I've found in my testing that the distance the floor is to the ground seems to influence things. Higher up the AI acts normal but close the ground the ai gets confused. Probably because it detects the ground and having navigation issues because of it.

A floor (at least the ones I was testing) don't seem to work well when close to the surface.

New problem with awareness I've been hearing about. Apparently some people have found that they will have captains where ai's trigger properly but other captains the ai's will not trigger properly. This seems to be particularly but not limited too the Valdi's messenger system.

Supposedly messengers will not trigger with some captains. I assume this is because the messengers for some reason are not detecting the captains bounding blocks in their awareness. Perhaps how the captain was built attributes to this issue? Or there is a bug that causes some captain models to not have proper bounding blocks?

Further investigation is needed. Seems to be a rare issue.

Double_Helix wrote:New problem with awareness I've been hearing about. Apparently some people have found that they will have captains where ai's trigger properly but other captains the ai's will not trigger properly. This seems to be particularly but not limited too the Valdi's messenger system.

Supposedly messengers will not trigger with some captains. I assume this is because the messengers for some reason are not detecting the captains bounding blocks in their awareness. Perhaps how the captain was built attributes to this issue? Or there is a bug that causes some captain models to not have proper bounding blocks?

Further investigation is needed. Seems to be a rare issue.

From what I can tell, visibility is line of sight from one creature's head to another creatures head. It could be that with short captains, the line of sight from the messenger to the captain gets blocked by the bounding box of scenery items. Then again, it could just be that the messengers are being triggered by IF AWARE OF, just fine, but because of momentum and pathing imprecisions, the messenger isn't passing exactly through way points and miss teleporters.

Or it could be that the captains are using sneak and so are effectively invisible with respect to IF AWARE OF.

I'm wondering if having multiple redundant messengers will fix the problem. I don't think they'd cost must complexity.

Well, I imagine it's not just short captains, but the messengers themselves are so small that it could cause a problem.

For example (sorry for the ASCII art diagram lol)


o = messenger


T = short captain

[] = wall

Imagine this setup:


__o_[]_T__

In that setup, the messenger is so small, it's not aware of the captain, even though the wall should be short enough normally. But, because the messenger is so close to the wall, it doesn't detect the captain at all.

I might test this out in a bit with varying height captains, short walls, and messengers. The messengers seem to work out best when their behaviors aren't so captain-based, but rather based off of characters/objects/events that stay static throughout adventure play... unlike unlocked captains' size.

DVDMaster wrote:

Double_Helix wrote:New problem with awareness I've been hearing about. Apparently some people have found that they will have captains where ai's trigger properly but other captains the ai's will not trigger properly. This seems to be particularly but not limited too the Valdi's messenger system.

Supposedly messengers will not trigger with some captains. I assume this is because the messengers for some reason are not detecting the captains bounding blocks in their awareness. Perhaps how the captain was built attributes to this issue? Or there is a bug that causes some captain models to not have proper bounding blocks?

Further investigation is needed. Seems to be a rare issue.

From what I can tell, visibility is line of sight from one creature's head to another creatures head. It could be that with short captains, the line of sight from the messenger to the captain gets blocked by the bounding box of scenery items. Then again, it could just be that the messengers are being triggered by IF AWARE OF, just fine, but because of momentum and pathing imprecisions, the messenger isn't passing exactly through way points and miss teleporters.

Or it could be that the captains are using sneak and so are effectively invisible with respect to IF AWARE OF.

I'm wondering if having multiple redundant messengers will fix the problem. I don't think they'd cost must complexity.

Some good theories. However I just concluded some extensive testing. I just tested over 60 captains in one of the missions that were reported to me. Each captain was quite different. From tiny to tall. Abstract to realistic. Ones that were mostly decorations. Even ones with invisible parts. AI and messengers triggered every time.

If the issue exists, I cannot recreate it. So it may just be a rare system specific bug. Which is the worse kind of bug because for a bug to be fixed it needs to be reliably reproducible.

If anyone has had this issue and can reproduce it please post the captain that you used so others can test.

Prometheus09 wrote:Well, I imagine it's not just short captains, but the messengers themselves are so small that it could cause a problem.

For example (sorry for the ASCII art diagram lol)


o = messenger


T = short captain

[] = wall

Imagine this setup:


__o_[]_T__

In that setup, the messenger is so small, it's not aware of the captain, even though the wall should be short enough normally. But, because the messenger is so close to the wall, it doesn't detect the captain at all.

I might test this out in a bit with varying height captains, short walls, and messengers. The messengers seem to work out best when their behaviors aren't so captain-based, but rather based off of characters/objects/events that stay static throughout adventure play... unlike unlocked captains' size.

Theoretically speaking, I believe you would be correct in that situation if what DVDmaster says is correct about how creatures detect each other. Care should be taken with such setups.

Double_Helix wrote:Theoretically speaking, I believe you would be correct in that situation if what DVDmaster says is correct about how creatures detect each other. Care should be taken with such setups.

Here's a thought (don't know if this was mentioned before), can the eyes on the messenger make any difference? Not really the "type" of eyes (although, maybe that too?), but the placement or number of them? I don't know if line-of-sight actually takes eyes into affect or not but it might be worth some testing. Could explain some things. Just a theory. Well, maybe even more of a question.

iiiHuman wrote:

Double_Helix wrote:Theoretically speaking, I believe you would be correct in that situation if what DVDmaster says is correct about how creatures detect each other. Care should be taken with such setups.

Here's a thought (don't know if this was mentioned before), can the eyes on the messenger make any difference? Not really the "type" of eyes (although, maybe that too?), but the placement or number of them? I don't know if line-of-sight actually takes eyes into affect or not but it might be worth some testing. Could explain some things. Just a theory. Well, maybe even more of a question.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't actually matter at all what type of eyes a creature has, or how many. In fact, I don't think it matters if they even have eyes, because if you download and play with vladi's messenger tutorials, you will notice that his "bote" messengers have no eyes at all. So, awareness isn't actually dependent on what we as humans consider sight... it's strictly defined by the awareness radius we set, whether the messenger even has any eyes or not.

Edit: As an added example of this, I have creatures with no eyes that I have used as NPCs in some of non-shared adventures. During Test Drive, they can still "see". That is to say... they still react to other creatures within their awareness radius, even though they don't have eyes.

Edit 2: Nevermind that... the Phaleen do have eyes. God... been so long since I played with them in CC. Sorry. However, the bote messengers have no eyes.

One also has to consider what happens when the character walks around with stealth turned on. My captain has stealth 5 and I can walk up to and bump into any NPC and he does not notice me. If I attack, I become visible. But I can talk to, give, and throw grenades without ever becoming visible. From what I can tell, taking damage (stepping on a mine), makes the character visible too.

Any messenger AI will fail if it depends on AWARE of PLAYER if the player is invisible. It might fail on AWARE OF ITEM if that item is held by a stealthy character -- I haven't tested this.

Depending on how dangerous the adventure, I often do as much as I can while invisible. Sometimes, I get get all the way to the final boss before having to become visible (completely ignoring all the minions).

[quote=Double_Helix

Some good theories. However I just concluded some extensive testing. I just tested over 60 captains in one of the missions that were reported to me. Each captain was quite different. From tiny to tall. Abstract to realistic. Ones that were mostly decorations. Even ones with invisible parts. AI and messengers triggered every time.

If the issue exists, I cannot recreate it. So it may just be a rare system specific bug. Which is the worse kind of bug because for a bug to be fixed it needs to be reliably reproducible.

If anyone has had this issue and can reproduce it please post the captain that you used so others can test.

Double_Helix wrote:New problem with awareness I've been hearing about. Apparently some people have found that they will have captains where ai's trigger properly but other captains the ai's will not trigger properly. This seems to be particularly but not limited too the Valdi's messenger system.

You can also have problems when captains move while and NPC is acting and the movement causes the NPC's behavior to abort (and for some reason they don't restart). For example:
PICKUP OBJECT ALWAYS
GIVE OBJECT to PLAYER ALWAYS
IDLE DANCE ALWAYS

If the NPC starts to give the object to the captain and the captain moves away, the NPC can sometimes get stuck in the middle of the give and you can't reset the NPC. THe NPC just stands there, he doesn't dance. Approaching the NPC does not retrigger the give. Sometimes if you wait long enough (15+ seconds) , the NPC will reset.

Sometimes you can fix this by using:
GIVE OBJECT PLAYER TIMER 10 SECONDS
This will make the NPC give the object and try again every 10 seconds.

Thanks for the info on those possible messenger issues DVDmaster. (so hoping for a patch to clean some things up)

I had someone specifically point out the problem on the "how to use physics" demo that I edited for Vladi. They said that they had one captain work fine, but two others that for some reason would not trigger the messenger.

I downloaded all his captains and plan to test them. I did run my own tests with a variety ( little over 60) captains made by different people with very different configurations and couldn't recreate the issue.

Please have a look at it though. You should have it in your demos sporecast.