| The Couch Hottie
Join Date: Aug 2004 Shard: Lake Austin, Atlantic
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| Re: Improving Pet AI
MORE DEV POSTS -- Every orange text is from Patrick "Leurocian" Malott, Lead Designer, Ultima Online, EA Mythic unless stated otherwise... Quote:
Shouldn't the pet still get a swing in as a monster follows him when I tell him "all follow me"...
I don't want my pet to auto go into peace mode, and me ALWAYS tell him to kill something and re-tell him to kill something.
| You can tell your pet to guard while it's following you. This will put it in autodefend mode for itself and its master.
To turn off guarding, tell your pet to stop or kill/attack.
So for passive follow, you could do 'pet name' stop, 'pet name' follow me, and it will ignore attacks on you or your pet.
For autodefend follow, you could do 'pet name' guard, 'pet name' follow me or 'pet name' follow me then 'pet name' guard. It doesn't matter what order you initiate the guard command. While your guarded, autodefend should work as normal. The pet will follow you in this case, but will fight whatever attacks you or itself.
Hope this clarifies that.
---------------- Yeah one more clarification. If the players dies while the pet is in passive mode, the passive mode will be removed, and it will defend itself if attacked as normal.
---------------- Quote:
While I have reservations about the proposed changes as is, I don't see this happening. Wouldn't it more likely go
* all guard me, all follow me
* 2 monsters spawn
* all kill monster 1
* monster 1 dead,
* all kill monster 2,
* monster 2 dead.
?
| Correct. The previous example would not revert to a passive state. That would only happen if a passive command was initiated such as follow. In the previous example, after it killed something, and if it wasnt commanded, and the pet gets attacked, it would act normally and attack the aggressor. Then, of course, the tamer can decide to command it however she desires after that like normal. Quote:
That’s a good point about how this might effect monsters. I had not thought about monsters.
That may also answer the question of why Leurocian does not want to fix auto-defend itself; pets and “monsters” probably share the same auto-defend code so changing pet behavior would also change monster behavior.
| Correct. Monsters and Pets share this same code. At this time, we'd prefer not to make adjustments to that. Quote: |
For me, right now, the 'guard' command does not result in the expected behavior when more than 1 pet is out of the stable at a time. When I say "all guard me", and a monster attacks me, only one of the pets will attack the monster back. That one pet will consistantly be the one confronting monsters that attack me, while the other one does not respond to such attacks. When I was looking into this a while back, I found that it didn't matter if I used 'all guard me' or selected 'guard' from the context menu on the problematic pet, the behavior remained the same (my pets names at the time prevented using "petname guard me" because the pets' names all contained spaces).
| Yeah, there were other internal things with guarding that were not working properly. I won't get into the technical details of it, but I just tested having two pets guarding me and getting attacked. Both pets immediately attacked my aggressor, so that appears to be working correctly. Quote: |
Just last night I was hunting with one of the new dragons, had issued a kill command and then managed to get myself whacked. With the existing logic my pet continued to defend itself until I could get myself rezzed. With your new logic my pet would have stood there and died to the next monster that spawned. That would not be very bright behavior for a creature that, by it’s intelligence stat, is about five times smarter than it it’s master.
| Quoted from my original post:
Note: The pet will revert out of passive mode if the pet's owner dies, if the pet is stabled, traded, player character transfers, player and pet log off, etc. Quote: |
However, there have been times when, after issuing a kill command, I was attacked but did not die. Often that is the case. As I think I mentioned in another post, I am sometimes forced to beat a hasty retreat to avoid that dirt nap and some amount of time might pass before I can work my way back to my pet. In that situation wouldn’t the pet drop out of guard mode so that it can not defend itself?
| Ok. In your example, you told the pet to kill something. In that case, it would function as normal, auto defend, etc. It will not become passive unless you tell your pet to follow you, stay, stop, or come. If you want it to auto defend while following you, simply tell it to guard in the same macro.
Btw. There is absolutely nothing to be sorry about. I really appreciate you all hammering this stuff out. Once these changes go on public test center (no promises, yes I have to state that), then we will further evaluate them. I can't stress enough how important your feedback is.
Thanks! Quote:
If I understand the rest of your command structure correctly, the only mode that the pet would auto-defend in is guard mode.
So, putting those two points together, it seems that, after issuing a kill/attack command, your pet would no longer be in guard mode and would, therefore, no longer auto-defend. Am I missing something here or misinterpreting the actual functionality that you are proposing?
| The kill/attack command removes the pet guarding like it always has. It also removes the new passive behavior functionality for the pet as well. Quote:
Since we still haven't had a straight answer to this, I'm going to ask in a very clear manner, for Leurocian to answer.
* I order my pet to guard and follow me, it will now autodefend itself.
* I tell my pet to attack monster A, pet now in attack mode, autodefend mode is off.
* Pet kills Monster A, Monster B spawns and attacks pet, I DON'T give my pet any commands.
* What does pet do? Will it just stand there ignoring Monster B chewing it to death?
| No. The pet will attack monster B. Quote:
When you are improving Pet AI, is there a chance to change how pets and summons act to provocation?
Its anoying when you for example provoke Monters at the Dark Father and all summons and pets stop attacking him until you give the attack command again.
| Today on my sandbox, I tested a fix for this. I'm going to submit my fix so QA can verify it. We'll keep you posted.  |