Illarion.org

Nitters, can you make the gate sentries attack monsters on sight?
Like, put in some AI like allignment Good/Evil to the monsters?

Seriously the guards who pick their nose, mumble, and tumble around look rediculous. I mean, they do look rediculous, not even funny. What makes them silly is that they do nothing.
They have to serve some kind of purpose. Script up allignment code and have guards mobile, helping people who are running away from monsters.

Sure guards can be relatively weak, so that players still have to defend people who lure monsters in town. I mean, spawn a guard, say every half hour, make him able to at least weaken a monster or something. Maybe give him trainable skills, so he can improve like players can.

Wouldn't that be a worthy challenge to code up?

There is no AI in our game. We have to code something new from the beginning.

Sure there is a little bit of AI.
Monsters do attack players right? And cows and rabbits dont.
That's your starting point right there.

So a monster has an aggression value - aggressive or not.
Right?
So just add third value - allignment? Then you could have all kinds of fun stuff going on. Like wolves chasing rabbits through the forest, etc. Would bring a lot of more life into wood-wandering experience.

Or maybe you divide the mobiles into monsters and animals.
In that case, add a new mob type - guard, and have their aggression variable active towards those with type "monster".

Of course, the problem is that you most likely dont have an algorithm to calculate tile path towards anything thats not a player, but I wouldn't see it as a big problem, right? Since the game is tile based, each tile keeps an info of what's on it, or monster has coords. So do path trajectories from monster to monster and you can have mob vs mob combat.