This is an idea I had apparently come up with all of 3 years ago (in addition to the Heavy skill rearrangement and Alarming Cameras ideas that I’ve also completed), but it didn’t occur to me how to implement it until one night just as I was about to go to sleep, which of course roused me to go and check the feasibility in ShockEd and log the idea in a txt file. The purpose of this is partially to help guarantee organs for players who invest in the skill for damage bonuses (additionally, I have placed 1 guaranteed drop of each organ in 1.06 to alleviate the 30/75% chance for corpse loot to be cleared on Hard/Impossible), but it has the great side effect of giving researchers a higher chance of finding healing and psi restoration items from searching eggs, which feels very in line with the “scientific” playstyle. The other change of note in SS2-RSD 1.05 was the addition of loot chance scaling for organs with the Research skill. Pipe Hybrids and Rumblers will no longer wait for the player to come to a stop before attempting to attack, Rumblers use a greater variety of attacks with fixed hitboxes, the Pipe Hybrid’s laughably slow vertical swings are brought in line with their lightning fast horizontal swings, the lackadaisical Grenade Hybrids will now actually attempt to hit the player, Midwives back away from the player more quickly and ward them off with swift melee swipes, Cyborg Assassins, Shotgun Hybrids, and Monkeys are harder to lock down with melee stagger, and Spiders now use their leap as a lunging attack. My goal was to leave the core identities of each enemy type intact, but tweak their responses to allow them to better challenge the player. ShockEd’s Motion Editor is where you can add triggers for damage hitboxes, footfalls, and more In my case, I primarily edited the timescale of various behaviors to make the AI more aggressive and reactive, and also manually added damage triggers to several moves that had none using ShockEd’s built-in Motion Editor. For instance, one of the Pipe Hybrid’s melee attacks could be given to the Cyborg Assassin by simply adding it to the latter’s motion schemas with the appropriate tags. These motion schemas were decompiled by Shadowspawn et al, who produced a set of tools that allow other modders to add or replace motions, edit the motion schemas, and recompile their own motion database. Locomote, Attack MeleeCombat, RangedCombat) in the motion schemas that the AI can trigger to produce various behaviors. To remedy this, I had to delve into the motion database, which contains all of the enemy animations as well as their groupings with various tags (e.g. Most of the other melee exploits have to do with enemies failing to sufficiently respond to the player getting up close. However, I had to go beyond my comfort zone with NewDark’s DMLs and Squirrel Scripts to progress with other AI enhancements. It works rather well, and without noticeable loss of performance (after some much-needed optimizations). I found a simple way to fix this with a script - I run a timer on every melee enemy to check whether the player is in range (one vector subtraction/rotation, component-wise check) for an attack, and then extend their desired attack range by up to 14x until they actually go through with it. This is particularly noticeable with the Rumbler, who can be easily killed with the wrench and base stats so long as the player continues to backpedal in a circle. A key component of this some error in the AI programming that makes melee enemies unwilling to ever attack a player who is backpedaling, likely because they calculate the player will be out of range by the time the attack goes through (since they must stand still while doing it). If you’ve played SS2 as much as I have, you’ll pick up on strategies that easily neutralize enemies with melee, which eliminates their fear factor and skips the need for skill investment and resource management. System Shock 2 – Scary Monsters AI Enhancement 1.00 Some of it is based on learning new tools for the Dark Engine resource pipeline, some of it is due to exploring NewDark’s capabilities a bit further, and a lot of it is just design ideas fueled by other ImSims and helpful feedback from my players. I’ve made a ton of progress on some interesting features for System Shock 2 lately, spread across a few mods.
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