ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Once discovered, can escorts PLEASE not walk over poison traps. Sometimes when they are backing away, they could easily step around a trap, yet go straight back over it, normally dyinh shortly thereafter.

Agreed. I just managed to get an Alchemist through a horde of enemies in the Old Forest, only to lose him to a poison trap. An improvement on escort AI in that regard would be much appreciated.

Or, give them a chance to deal with the traps: maybe a physical wild infusion rune, or for the lone thiefs, detect trap skill levels, which presumably would mean they actually do try to avoid them.

Most NPCs with detect traps currently don't avoid them & in the case of enemies are usually unaffected by them. Strangely they detect traps for you. " 'x' fails to disarm the trap " , " Prox's lucky foot twiches alerting him to a trap "

Kor Pul is particular nasty for escorts & traps. Lots of area effect traps, escort moves slowly, ever so slowly through the poison cloud or cold trap. Then he/she sees a hostile & steps backwards on to the trap again. Having them avoid known traps (isn't the code for this already there in auto-explore?) would make the trap detection skill a little more meaningful.

jenx wrote:Once discovered, can escorts PLEASE not walk over poison traps. Sometimes when they are backing away, they could easily step around a trap, yet go straight back over it, normally dyinh shortly thereafter.

Wow. Either this is far more common then I thought, or someone listened to my rant... Don't forget there idiocy in repeatedly walking back and forth over the same trap that they could diagonally step around WITHOUT slowing there ability to run away. I mean, if they step on a poison vine ONCE, and therefore become aware of it, why do they step back onto it again and again???

Many times have I answered that question, for the reasoning is obvious. They're injured, y'dig? Heavy concussion. Not thinking straight, at all

Or possibly massive drunk, who knows. There's plenty of potential fluff reasons they could be doing something as silly as a tango over a poison vine.

wobbly wrote:Most NPCs with detect traps currently don't avoid them & in the case of enemies are usually unaffected by them. Strangely they detect traps for you. " 'x' fails to disarm the trap " , " Prox's lucky foot twiches alerting him to a trap "

Good point. Prox, of any of the NPCs, should be preferentially stepping around traps, and he doesn't. As far as NPCs not being affected by traps, the code for this might be a bit screwy. I've seen it where traps seem to have no effect, and I've also seen traps actually do something - usually in Kor Pul. Not to mention that character slaves like golems also don't currently activate traps for no good reason than that the preferential avoidance code isn't available for them either. Which I don't understand at all: golems, if anything, should be the perfect cannon fodder for minefield mapping.

Of course, on the flip side if monsters avoid traps, how to justify them still not avoiding the thief-laid mines? There almost needs to be two separate maps that the game keeps track of: one for player-known traps, and one for monster-known traps. Presumably, each monster will become aware of all traps that any monster finds on a map, unless there's enough free memory to create one map for each NPC . . .

Just brainstorming . . . but it might be an interesting mechanic, if each NPC did keep it's own map, to have a player command to warn the escorted of traps that they may not have noticed - and for intelligent monsters (presumably with language) to be able to do the same for other intelligent monsters.

The only real problem I see with changing this, overall, is that you're asking escorts to be smarter than everything else in the game.

If everything else with tactical AI avoids traps, a lot of their strategic value either dies or becomes abusive(as you force enemies to not chase you by running over a trap, say).

Also, it's hard to imagine a way to make an escort not cross over a trap, ever, but at the same time always be able to path to their goal. Yes, it's frustrating to have one occasionally and memorably die by running over a poison vine repeatedly-I barely managed to stop one from dying that way myself. But the alternative is constantly digging out walls so that they can path to the goal, which is also pretty frustrating.

In conclusion: If this bothers you, just run the no-traps addon. >_>

SageAcrin wrote:If everything else with tactical AI avoids traps, a lot of their strategic value either dies or becomes abusive(as you force enemies to not chase you by running over a trap, say).

It depends on the specific algorithm. If it's a flat never-step-on-traps code, then I agree. But just pathing to preferentially avoid traps if it doesn't increase the length of a path should be fine. With my above-mentioned concerns about rogue-laid mines.

http://git.develz.org/?p=tome.git;a=com ... 1c9e8a23b8

Hooray!