controlling monsters Created 21 years ago2003-05-21 23:21:19 UTC by Skeeve

Playing around with monster behaviors right now, and having a bit of a problem with monstermaker.

How can I get monsters created through monstermaker to follow path corners? I guessed it would be the target on release, but no such luck.

I am guessing my next wuestion would involve coding, but just in case. Is there a trigger or method to temporarily over-ride the AI?

For example:
Squad of grunts notice Freeman in a room. Can I get the squad to rush the room and into position, before allowing the games AI to take over?

This requires a tutorial in itself. The monstermaker [which is in the 'misc' section of the entity guide] is a great entity, until you try to spawn something like a grunt.
The Childrens Name (netname) property allows you to give monsters spawned by a monstermaker a Name (targetname). When the monsters have a name, you can target them with a scripted_sequence and get them to perform that sequence, I haven't tried path_corners with grunts, As far as I know they are only good for Scientists and Barneys. Grunts respond really well to Aiscripted_sequences and scripted_sequences, It is basically a way to override their AI, as long as you don't killtarget them, and then the seem to freeze.
So as to the rushing the room, yes I think it can be done with a series of scripted_sequences even if they are spawned with a monstermaker, but the guy who has done this stuff recently is SlayerA. Can you add to this Slay?

Thanks for the suggestions, I will give it a try in my test maps.

You're welcome. One thing I noticed is using the target field of the monstermaker didn't seem to work for targetting the monsters own sequence. Not sure why that is. I had to use a multi_manager to target the sequence after the grunt spawned in. It needed a one or two second delay in my tests.