Timers?

mosby1 · May 2015

What's the latest preferred method for timers? I was using some simple drop-timers (having a single mob encounter patrol off a platform into a cave intersection hole. Works great when testing, but not when published.

Do I need to use combat timers now? Thanks...

gornonthecob · May 2015

Remember that the mobs used for timers will only spawn in the encounter is within range of the player. You can check to see if the player will be in range by checking the LAYOUT overlay.

So, if you want the mob to appear outside of the map when the player enters the room, and then proceed to walk off a cliff, the player needs to trigger that event while inside the mobs Encounter Area.

mosby1 · May 2015

Ah, thanks. I thought it was within 256'. Guess I'm going to have to go back and change all mine.

I wonder if I can "trick" it a bit - by having mobs on both sides of the player (but far away) - so the encounter area is near the player... hmm...

Strange how it works perfectly in the editor, but not when published. Ah well.

essenti · May 2015

There are some things that have changed with mob behavior.

The range is still 256 feet, with a caveat that it expands to 280+ feet if the PC is combat thanks to the new larger social aggro range.

Mobs won't necessarily path off a cliff, they will find the nearest safe spot, but only on the live server.

For pathed drop timers, I use floors that are angled so one end dips below the deathplane to achieve timers.

For stationary drop timers, I place a floor 1 foot below the deathplane. That way the mobs won't relocate to a safe location, since there is geometry below them.

essenti · May 2015

As a side note, traps work okay for killing mobs as triggers again, but you can only have three traps in close proximity to each other.

With three traps, it takes about 2.5 seconds to kill a level 70 mob from my testing.
About 6.5 seconds for a single trap.
And about 4.5 seconds for two traps.

You could combine this with guard / hard mob kills to speed it up I imagine.

gornonthecob · May 2015

essenti would know better than me. I have only used 1 timer in my entire Foundry career. :P

reiwulf · May 2015

oh the new traps are indeed great for timers, what traps do you use?

essenti · May 2015

I used an imp portal since it can't move with a spike trap

reiwulf · May 2015

ah, cool. I guess it doesn't spawn imps unless you're closer, or the imps could spawn away from the trap.

essenti · May 2015

There is only the imp and the trap, so imps shouldn't be spawning. However, the new imp portal changes do not require the imps to die to trigger the "component complete" event, so they are effectively not an issue so long as they remain locked in their box

eldarth · May 2015

essenti wrote: »

As a side note, traps work okay for killing mobs as triggers again,

Oh! Traps are scaling with level AND causing an injury? I don't think I noticed that.
Are traps now a set percentage of max hitpoints?

essenti · May 2015

Yes they are, though the spike trap still gets people stuck, and racks up a full red body of injury and kills a player when a player does get stuck... but great to use on an imp portal as a trigger, not so much for traps that a player might run into =/

mosby1 · May 2015

Thanks for all the suggestions. I spent the weekend trying a lot of different timer options. I had too many problems trying to use patrol/drop timers. The mobs just were not following the path (even when i put up walls to constrain them. I also tried using multi-mob encounters so I could place some mobs on each side (so the player would be in the activation region), but that caused too many problems. I was having timer mobs spawn into my main map (even though I had walls to prevent it).

I ended up using a combination of trap timers (pretty much as described above, though I did have imps spawn into my play area when I tried the portal - so I ended up using single-unit guard encounters). If I just wanted to kill the mob quickly, I used spike traps.

But I found that plague-cracks do very consistent damage, about ~5% of the victims health each second. So it didn't matter which mob I used as the victim. Since they stack, I could control the timer duration by using different quantities of cracks: 1 for ~21 seconds, 2 for ~14 seconds, 3 for ~7 seconds, etc. (I needed fairly consistent/accurate times for some patrolling/interacting NPCs.)

I have the traps set up about 75' from the player, and they seem to work well.

eldarth · May 2015

mosby1 wrote: »

The mobs just were not following the path (even when i put up walls to constrain them. I also tried using multi-mob encounters so I could place some mobs on each side (so the player would be in the activation region), but that caused too many problems. I was having timer mobs spawn into my main map (even though I had walls to prevent it).

Yeah, annoying. I had mobs "jump" through about 50' of "non-room" space on an interior map to get to my PC about 60' away. I put a couple invisible rings around the hidden mobs and that seems to have taken care of it.

In my Cult of the Dragon contest entry my "underground" mobs were spawning 100' ABOVE their platform onto the terrain.

I spend more time "fighting" to adjust to whatever non-helpful "help" Cryptic implements for mob AI for timer/logic workarounds. Very annoying.

Timers?

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