Giving Mage Powers to Beastmen?

[Jnon]

I wanted to create a "shaman" beastman AI with the same ranged fireball and melee spark attack as the "archmage" AI. Initially I tried just placing an archmage and swapping head/model/vocal set, but that resulted in a beastman with no melee attack chasing me around and doing nothing.

I'm assuming this is tied to animation problems... the beastman model has no animation for using mage attacks, and so no attacks happen. But I know nothing about the spawnargs, so I wonder if it's possible to create any arrangement of spawnargs allowing beastmen to cast fireballs etc as mages. Does anybody know if this is possible or not?

[joebarnin]

There should be a way to do this, I think. I’ll take a look tomorrow 

[datiswous]

On 4/15/2026 at 6:31 AM, Jnon said:

but that resulted in a beastman with no melee attack chasing me around and doing nothing.

Did that give any console errors?

[Jnon]

5 minutes ago, datiswous said:

Did that give any console errors?

Good question, let me look into that and see what comes up

[Jnon]

Okay, turns out it actually half works. My initial test was in a close-quarters indoor area, but doing it again in a wider outdoor environment, the long range fireball attack works when he's far enough away. However, if I close the distance and he switches to melee, he just runs up to me and stands there doing nothing.

The console only shows the following error message:

WARNING:Framecommand 'sound' on entity 'shamantest', anim 'run', frame 11: Could not find sound 'snd_rustle_run'

Doesn't seem related, but that's all that comes out.

EDIT: I tried screwing around with more spawnargs related to melee, but with no success. Giving him a sword is possible, but he never uses it. Just swings at me with an imaginary sword doing nothing. I'm sure I'm missing something, but I'm not familiar enough with what spawnarg does what.

A second test involved giving a regular sword-wielding manbeast the def_projectile fireball, which kind of works... he only ever uses the fireball if the player is out of reach (like stone throwing by regular guards), but defaults to melee exclusively if it can pathfind to the player.

I saw spawnargs related to attack distance and such, and I'm sure tweaking those could possible make a sword manbeast default to fireball more frequently if I knew what they were.

Edited April 16 by Jnon

[joebarnin]

I came at it from a different angle - I started with the manbeast and gave it mage attack abilities. It's not as streamlined as I would want it to be, but it seems to work. Drop the attached file into your FM\defs folder, and add a atdm:ai_magebeast to your map. Hope it works for you.

tdm_ai_monster_magebeasts.def

[kingsal]

That def looks pretty good, here are some additional spawnargs you can mess with to get something you like: 
 

     "draws_weapon"                  "0"

    "bone_focus"                    "Head" // This is where they aim from, pretty specific but could be useful for monsters

    "unarmed_ranged"                "1"

    "fire_range"                    "700"

    "def_projectile"                "atdm:projectile_bloater" // see tdm_projectiles for a list 

    "attack_cone"                   "70"

    "attack_accuracy"               "0.8"

    "projectile_spread"             "0" //only for multiple projecitles 
"projectile_speed"                   "300" // 200-400  is kind of average rock throw, 800+ is gonna be like an arrow

    "num_projectiles"               "1"

    "outofreach_projectile_enabled"         "1" // This is what enables guards to throw rocks and such at you when you are in a place they cant reach


Btw having "unarmed_melee" "1" and "melee_range" "40" means the beast will still try to punch you if you get too close.  You might want ot mess with that to get the behavior you want. Ive disabled it before by setting melee_range to 1 ( iirc setting 0 has adverse effects)

Projectile speed seems to be a good thing to tweak to get the gameplay feel you are looking for. The default fireballs are pretty good but it just depends on how you are deploying these guys. 
 

Edited April 17 by kingsal

[Jnon]

Thank you both! I just did a test of joebarnin's def beastmage and it does everything the archmage can do, so this is perfect. I'll try tweaking it further with kingsal's spawnarg suggestions as I work on the map and playtest how he responds to in-mission situations. And I'll be sure to add a credit in the FM for both of you, much appreciated.