Change Tsoo mob logic

[srmalloy]

If it's possible to tweak them out separately, can the Tsoo Spirit Ink Archers be given the same positioning logic that the Knives of Vengeance DP mobs have? It seems weird to have them run up into melee range, then shoot you with a bow -- they should stay at range and shoot.

[Vanden]

And while we're at it, it'd be great if instead of shooting at players, they shoot at Blue Ink Men, before they can cast Siphon Speed.

[TheZag]

Making a custom mob for AE is as simple as choosing melee or ranged.  Choosing ranged will have the mob stay back and prefer to use their ranged attacks.  I assume its similar for regular mobs but would probably be accomplished through changing a bit of code instead of a checkbox in the UI.

 

[srmalloy]

13 hours ago, Vanden said:

And while we're at it, it'd be great if instead of shooting at players, they shoot at Blue Ink Men, before they can cast Siphon Speed.

That reminds me of an odd incident back on Live showing how target tracking worked for range attacks. I was in IP with my AR/EM Blaster shooting up spawns of Tsoo; one of the Ink Men hit me with Siphon Speed as I lobbed M30 Grenade at him. Them grenade went over the top of its arc and had started down as the Ink Man decided to bug out. The grenade made a sharp turn in midair to head back up again, arcing off into the distance, where both it and the Ink Man disappeared from sight. Approximately 15 seconds later, I got a defeat notice; since it was for the normal amount of XP, it wasn't someone else whacking a partially-defeated mob, it was the Ink Man unsuccessfully trying to outrun the grenade.

[Number Six]

@srmalloy It's not really target tracking, but sudden position changes do expose some of the underbelly of how the combat system works, especially with powers that use projectiles.

 

The instant you activate a power, the to-hit roll happens and if it's a hit, the effects are attached to the target. Since powers have animations, a delay is often added to the effect to make the damage happen at the right point in the animation. For powers with projectiles, there's also a projectile delay that's based on the speed of the projectile and the range to the target. So in your grenade example, the distance you were from the sorcerer was calculated to take into account air time for the grenade before it hit.

 

All of that is done as soon as you activate the power and is "locked in", regardless of what happens during the animation.

 

The grenade graphic itself is purely clientside; the server has no idea it even exists and doesn't care, it just knows it needs to apply damage to the target after X seconds. On the client, the projectile is actually tracked with a fixed speed. It already knows that it's a "hit" and not a miss, so if the target moves it has no choice but to change direction to follow the target. A teleporting target can actually expose a desync here -- because the damage delay was calculated based on where the target was when you activated the power, but the FX on the client tracks the target at a fixed speed, a sudden change in distance causes the grenade to take longer or shorter to get there, but the server still applies the damage at the time based on where they originally were. The point where the grenade hits it on your screen doesn't matter. Very slow projectiles like the frisb flying disc might never reach the target on-screen and just time out and vanish, but the effects still happen when they're supposed to.

 

I have some backburner plans that I'll bring back someday to enhance the FX system by adding a projectile deadline, so that the client can adjust the speed as well and make the "hit" line up when it's supposed to if the target moves. But that will only fix the timing; there's nothing that can really be done about homing grenades suddenly changing direction; that's just how the game works and we don't intend to redesign it from the ground up.

[srmalloy]

By that time, I'd been playing CoH long enough that I understood that the to-hit roll was made at power activation, and only things like interruptibility and the post-animation LoS check for snipes would cause a miss if the initial roll succeeded (and had experienced both the other side of being chased by an attack's visual effect and the gyrations of a visible attack following a running mob). What made that one incident memorable was seeing how the "successful hit tracks the target" code interacted with the ballistic trajectory of the grenade so that it made a sharp turn in midair to follow the Ink Man -- normally it's the mob moving around making it curve to the side as it descends; this was the only time I ever saw the range-to-target change fast enough to force the game to alter the grenade trajectory like that. Given the game code, it's going to happen that way if that situation occurs again, but given that I only saw it so noticeably once in the entire live run of the game makes it something to remember, not something that needs fixing. The Ink Man was defeated by my grenade, so there was no glitch in the game; it was just entertaining visuals watching it take off like it had a rocket booster.

[Luminara]

11 hours ago, Number Six said:

homing grenades

 

Want.

[Vanden]

9 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Want.

 

Number Six just explained that you already have them