Per Lee's request I'm putting this on the forums here for everyone to see as well as so he can jump in on as well.

Email is as such:
So I've got a project that's been sitting on the sidelines for months - a 'roguelike' toolkit that randomizes spawns, teleports, etc. One thing I *CANNOT* do is respawn enemies however. I have randomized their spawns sufficiently but the actual respawning of them after dying with the new AI module system seems impossible.

Shy of using the old AI system in lua, is there a way to implement this?


So guys, lets put our noodles together.
I recently had a thought with respect to this, notably could we maybe use something like ai_soldier_exit() to 'reset' the entity?

Anyone else have any ideas?

Can you not edit the ai so that in the init it creates a table with its starting xyz position, then in the exit fubction instead of destroying the entity, reset its health back to full and transport it to the coordinates in the table?

@Belidos : Agreed, this is the type of solution I would do for the respawn, though instead of using the exit, perhaps inflate the health to 1000+ and when it drops below 1000 treat that as the trigger to respawn with the original init positions and states. Anyone else have anything to pitch into a possible solution for the above?

Hi Lee, several of my old scripts relied on ordinary entities having scripts being 'always' active but something you've changed recently now means that if they get damaged such that their health reduces to zero the scripts no longer get called. I can fix this by just adding a call in the init function to set their health to some ridiculous value but could you maybe look into this, either have a way of specifying that an entity can't take damage or maybe restrict whatever you did to characters? (I assume it has something to do with the pre-exit changes you made for the ai )

As to respawning, I've adapted smallg's respawn scripts and they still work fine with custom characters that don't use the new ai modules.

I did pretty much what Belidos has mentioned a few years back with the ogre from the fantasy pack. The only difference being, I allowed it to die then re-spawned it afterwards on a timer. It was rough and ready, but worked as far as it goes. He re-spawned every 10 seconds at his initial spot when killed, if you were close enough or thereabouts. If I can find it out I'll post some info. Again not the soldier scripts, but it should work in a very similar fashion.

Thanks guys. I'm not sure if Belidos's fix will work for what I'm doing but it might get me there.

So you're essentially saying on init for the AI, store the x/y/z values for the character, health... hm. Is there no single 'death state' in the AI code, or is that the _exit code?

Ive been having tremendous issues with this exact issue. Thank you bolt for dialogue up. I've encountered many strange bugs as well trying to implement with legacy AI too where it would seem more easier to attempt.

I was finding once a character ragdolled all kinds of bizarre and unpredictable things were happening in my attempts to get them to respawn to either their starting position.



I've had zero problems with respawning before ragdoll, takes effect (using health tricks like that). Its just not very ideal as they vanish like a ghost after you headshot them. And if i were to avoid ragdoll and use an animated death, it just feels very late 90's early 2000.

Maybe an addition to the setup.ini to include the when enemies die and "vanish" they are not actually removed from the map entirely. Just hidden? I'm not sure how complicated this process would be to implement. Or maybe there is a better internal solution others can think of or Lee? I think if we do allow for enemies to still be "alive" while ragdolled it would add a whole new level of interactivity. For instance body looting and Preben's GG Loader AGK video showing body flinching when shot after dead and ragdolled.

I do like that enemies disappear after a certain time when the player is not looking at them. But its unfortunately there is no way to bring them back on to the map after this takes place during the engines exiting process.

My old script worked fine with ragdoll from what I can remember. I'll see if I have a video I can upload. It took hours of testing and trial and error before it did though!

The issue I have though with trying to work within the exit process, is you have a very short time frame to attempt to recover the NPCs before the engine removes them entirely from the map.



For example, the enemies here when they die , disappear within seconds within view of the player. For some this might be sufficient however its not ideal for me personally. With Game Guru I do like that enemies disappear when the player isnt looking at them for a period of time but its unfortunate they are completely removed off the map once that happens. Issue is once the enemy ragdolls you are really running on a clock that could eliminate them entirely.

Here's the video. I intentionally sped up the re-spawn speed when I did this, but it would be possible to increase it and even stop it if you are too close to the re-spawn point.

With apologies to slaur3n here is a video of the respawning scripts I adapted from smallg's originals for his cowboy game:



The characters are custom ones, the ai is adapted by me from the originals that came with the model and is similar to the old-style GG ones except that there is only one script shared by all characters and the name of the character determines behaviour.

Is this the sort of thing you are after?

if you're using the public preview you need to be using the preexit(e) function to do the core of the work for this sort of thing, exit(e) is only called once now.

Funnily enough I don't use either.

Shouldn't be too hard to change where the code is placed I would imagine I have only looked at the new AI scripts a little of late to help a request to hide the player, so certainly not an expert with them. The trick here is to control the spawns from the start and keep control with a little script I attached to a floor object. It is still rough and ready and literally spawns the exact object again, but could be updated to work with an ID.

If anything it would be nice if GG had the ability to use entity fade in and out calls. Similar to Bethesda's engines they use (Actor Fade). for fading entities out when they are in the distance rather than popping them in and out with show and hide. This would be helpful so when enemies die and we are using respawning methods where they player would be looking at the dead body disappear... it will fade out rather than teleport instantly out of view.

@ Teabone. Perhaps it would be worth mentioning this in the AI thread? You never know it might be added at some point

indeed, shout at preben and maybe he can make it into a shader for you - or a dissolve shader perhaps.