Improving Hunting

[Sir Henry Curtis]

My mod is currently using Highlander's hunting mod. You can obtain the full source from Age of Machinery's source.

The deer are spawned on the map as horses and are made to flee from the player with (agent_set_scripted_destination). Unfortuantly the deer cannot completely elude the player because of the map boundaries. Even if the player runs out of ammo, he can just start the hunt again until all the deer are gone. I'm trying to make it so the deer flee when they reach the edge of the map and are counted as "dead" (except when calculating the meat obtained), so that the player can't always get all of them eventually.

I tried moving the buggers underground with (agent_set_position), but it doesn't work. I tried setting their health to zero, but that doesn't seem to kill them. It's just as well, I suppose, as it would be rather strange to see a deer approach the edge of the map then suddenly fall dead.

Any ideas as to how I can remove these deer (that are, in fact, horses) from the map?

 

[jik]

hmmm.. good idea, but maybe you can give a time limit?  or after you move a specific distance from your starting point, state the the deer sprint away and are untrackable.

I don't have any other ideas...  it could be that you need to change the way the hunt works.  Maybe make the player on foot.  give a specific time before the deer are spooked, then a time limit to end the hunt.  Chasing them down on horse back would be too easy.

You can maybe base how much time they have before spooking the deer by one of the skills.

 

[SPQR]

Those really are some good ideas. I really enjoyed hunting in Highlander's mod. When he released the Gladiator mod some time ago.. he also had fishing in there. It was pretty awesome.  It would be nice if we could get that back again too.

 

[Sir Henry Curtis]

Ah, thanks. Those are good ideas, as always, jik. After the player has made the deer to flee by shooting one or getting too close, I'll continually check the distance between the player and the closest deer. If the deer get far enough away, they escape, the hunt is over, and the deer party is removed completely. In that way, the distance of escape and the speed of the deer will be the timer.

Another thing: I'm going to try and get AI troops to shoot at them by putting invisible enemy troops inside the deer. I'll let you all know how that goes. The only problem I see with that is that the collision boxes of troops might be too big, but I'll keep checking the health of the invisible troops and adjust the deer's health accordingly.

 

[Jubal]

I'm looking at imroving hunting a bit too. Does anyone have any ideas for how it could be made more dangerous? Hunting boar should be a bit fo a challenge, not just chasing them down with a warhorse and a nomad bow.

 

[jik]

SHC,

Since the deer are horses (I asume) could you not just mount invisible troops on thier back?

Jubal, you could have a random timer to have the boars turn and do a charge attack.  Give them a high charge bonus.  Just some thoughts.

As to fishing, how was that done?  Just stand by the water?  Was it kind of a mini game?

 

[MartinF]

I'm looking at imroving hunting a bit too. Does anyone have any ideas for how it could be made more dangerous? Hunting boar should be a bit fo a challenge, not just chasing them down with a warhorse and a nomad bow.

Yeah I agree with this but the problem is that there are no usable animations for the boars attack.. you could make them rear up but that's a little lame.

So Jinnai's option is probably the only feasible one.. make them charge. Although if you're on a horse, you don't get charge damage.

Sad but true...

Fishing is a neat idea.. a mini-game would be the best option but at it's simplest you could use a trigger from the 'weapon' (fishing pole) and it could work like fishing in EQ or UO, just chuck the line out there and wait what comes up. You can use a script which is called from the trigger (ti_on_attack I think it is), hell you could even use a whole skill if you want to go crazy

mini-game would be somewhat more difficult.. you'd have to use some sort of presentation with slider bars. If you tug on the line too much, the bar goes into the red and the line breaks, not enough and the fish jumps off, something like that.

God I feel old when I mention things like Ultima Online, hehehe

 

[SPQR]

In the Gladiator mod fishing was a quick jump to scene.  The scene was the player in a small boat armed with a pitchfork stabbing at the fish as they swam by. There were 3 x types of fish as I recall.  It was a lot of fun.  It would be good if that made a comeback..  

 

[Sir Henry Curtis]

SHC,

Since the deer are horses (I asume) could you not just mount invisible troops on thier back?

Wouldn't the AI aim too high?

 

[Jubal]

Well I was considering moving the player onto foot anyways... I'll think about it. Also I'm gonna want to be able to injure the boars with spears, not just archery as in the current version.

I am prolly gonna add a hunting skill, affecting things like how close you can get to animals without being detected, and how much meat you get from the animals maybe.

 

[SPQR]

sounds good.  Hopefully, it one day will be able to evolve into an arena event.  That would be nice being able to add some animals to the mix.  ie: Rhinos and the like.

 

[Jubal]

I've got the boars running towards the player, but they dont' seem to be charging really, they just walk up and get shot....

 

[jik]

make sure that they are defined like horses, not people.  Alsom make sure they have a charge value.

 

[MartinF]

and I would think that movement speed factors in. If they're not fast enough, they're not going to do any charge damage anyway.

As it is, the problem is that if they 'attack', they won't run over the player so I'm not sure if it's possible without using some AI coding for their behavior: get player_agent location, pick a spot just past that location and move to scripted destination, something like that.

Either way they'll need to be pretty bloody fast or the player can easily sidestep and avoid them

 

[jik]

or you could have them do an attack (without animation).  Have the range be really short so they have to be right up to you...

I have yet to play with AI, so I don't know how it would really work.

 

[Jubal]

Boar slow down when they get shot too... I'll looky into an attack, and also does anyone know how to make the damn things vulnerable to spears? Only range seems to work atm.

 

[bjorne.]

Doesn't horses disappear when they are running around and then reaches the edge? Can't you use the same script?

 

[Jubal]

Hm... That might be worth a look, trouble is what then happens if they run straight to the edge and you can never catch them?

 

[jik]

Hm... That might be worth a look, trouble is what then happens if they run straight to the edge and you can never catch them?

You have to define the entry points in the scene.  Make them relatively close to the center of the scene.

If you want this to work right, you need to set up the scene as well as the misson_template to do what you want.

 

[dariel]

Hi all,

Update on the hunting in training fields idea - I finally got it working, with some help from Highlander and fix to my own stupid typo which made the deer invisible.   

If anyone's found a way to make the deer 'get away' after a certain amount of time, could you share the code to do it?

Also, has anyone been able to implement hunting dogs or beaters? I was thinking hunting can be turned into a group tactical exercise by hunting as a team - your character will still be the killer, but if you could have troops or 'dogs' (using horse meshes? *big* dogs!) herding the deer where you want them via the minimap that would be a fun way of trying to keep the deer from running away too soon.  Ideally the deer would be scripted to run away from any approaching troop, and if you could have two teams of beaters (archers and infantry) they could pincer the deer herd toward the center where you can get at them.  (BTW I always hunt on foot to make it more sporting So I commented out the 'start mounted' line in the hunting menu).

Another idea I had is to check if you wiped out the entire herd at a particular hunting lodge.  If you did, the deer never respawn again in that lodge.  Is this possible? Can individual training fields be detected the way individual towns are?