Need an Opinion, Monster Useless When Stood On

[MS:C community]

I guess (hope) AI usage of the info_node entity is commented out somewhere, rather than removed completely.

Is there any way you could re-enable it (next patch maybe), just for testing purposes? I'd love to fiddle around with it.

 

[Thothie]

The MSC AI is all but completely disconnected from the classic HL1 AI, so it'll just ignore it. It'd take quite a bit of coding and scripting to get it to the point where it could make use of them, and not risk the circling train behavior, lest you covered every inch of the floor with em (and even then, you'd still get that, or worse, if you misassigned any one of them).

 

[MS:C community]

There's no "risking" any circling train behaviour (????) if node-based navigation is just re-enabled / reimplemented for testing purposes... No MS:C map in existence has node entities. Also, I don't recall ever seeing a zombie in Half-Life (or any HL NPC for that matter) "endlessly circle train" to get to me.

And surely it can't be worse than the current situation: If you're standing on a ledge, NPCs would much rather bump their head into the wall below said ledge ad infinitum because they simply can't walk ten meters to the side, where a ramp or a staircase is to walk up to the ledge.*

*and a common workaro... cheap hack to counter this is the famously stupid 'func_monsterclip staircase' that also eats up clipnodes.

 

[Thothie]

I'm saying it'd be a monumental effort to get it to testing level, all the script and code side navigation would need to be re-written from the ground up to get them to acknowledge the entity's existence, and, even if we did all that, it won't do what you're hoping for anyways. (And it won't help at all at eliminating monster-clip staircases, as that's a lag progression issue.) After all that, you get the circling behavior if the mapper screws up in the slightest. Not that our NPCs actually do what you're describing anyways - they always move to the last spotted location, then attempt to move to the actual location from there, attempting to whisker their way around objects as they go, it's only that they will only whisker so far before attempting to move to the current location again (particularly if they "hear" the player).

 

[greatguys1]

Probably shouldn't have said anything w/o a proof \/('-' )\/
I don't think there's much else to say about the chumtoad besides the choad in a bottle.
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[Thothie]

Well, I think you could make a decent patrol system built from info targets - just an active combat node navigation system is where ya'd get into trouble.

I got several throwable grenade type thingies now, just need to make one for the choads. Nondescript winter holliday duties interfering a bit today and tomorrow though.