Drowning rats

[grayman]

This is a question for a coder or a modeller.

 

A rat's mouth is about 4 units above the ground when they're running around. Their origin is on the ground.

 

But a rat can drown in 3 units of water.

 

I looked at the code and it uses the spawnarg "mouth_offset" when it determines whether an AI is drowning. That's supposed to be a vector offset from the head's origin, but it's not set anywhere, as far as I can tell. It's not in the def file for the rat, which is where I would expect to see it. I think it's supposed to be defined there by the modeller.

 

I bumped 6 rats' health to 1,000 hoping that would help, but after about 10 minutes, 2 of them were dead in the water. They seemed to spend half their time in the water and half their time up on the floor surrounding the water. But the amount of air time they were getting didn't seem to help.

 

As a workaround, I'll give them atrociously high health, but maybe someone can say why this is happening.

 

Thanks

 

 

 

[Springheel]

Not sure, but there should be a spawnarg to stop AI from drowning...zombies don't drown, do they?

[Mortem Desino]

can_drown 0/1

 

Keeping them out of the water will probably take some clever AI thread or a special AAS Obstacle specifically targeted at aas_rat.

[grayman]

Not sure, but there should be a spawnarg to stop AI from drowning...zombies don't drown, do they?

 

Checked a zombie and he has "can_drown" "0". Didn't know this existed.

 

I put it on the rats and now they don't drown.

 

This is a good workaround as long as they don't wander into water deeper than 4, where it'll look like they're supposed to drown.

 

Thanks.

[grayman]

can_drown 0/1

 

Keeping them out of the water will probably take some clever AI thread or a special AAS Obstacle specifically targeted at aas_rat.

 

 

I think the water situation is okay now, but they still get stuck on ramps or stairs, and sometimes up against a wall or monster_clip. Can't block them off, because there's no rat_clip. But I'm willing to put up with that, since they're in a sewer. Sewer = rats and water. If they get stuck too often, I might try some script trick to nudge them into moving again.

 

 

[Baddcog]

Well, you can set them to patrol also.

 

animal_patrol 0 (?)

(it's in the def, I think that's it but I'm trying to install mint 9 right now.) That (1) makes them follow the scripting to make them randomly circle around. Greebo made that for the rats as default.

 

 

Then put them on paths, just like T2 and other AI. Then they WON'T go in water unless you make them.

 

Alternately there's monster clip too. But I guess you said they get stuck on that too.

[grayman]

They're actually pretty nice in the water. They hop and scoot around and make ripples when the water's 3 units deep. Any deeper and you don't get the ripples.

 

If TDM had a cat, I could put cats on the stairs to keep the rats off.

[LEGION]

If TDM had a cat, I could put cats on the stairs to keep the rats off.

 

Would love to see that in the future.