Weird Ambient Unit Quirk - Is this normal?

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Baak
Posts: 1109
Joined: Sat Mar 20, 2004 6:26 pm
Location: Mything

Post by Baak »

I recently encountered a quirk on a map that had ambient units where the following behaviour happened:

* Team 0 could "see" from the eyes of the ambient units

I've seen this happen before if the mapmaker fails to set the following:

* Fear: mons class is "Ambient Life"
* Loathing: unit palette entry checks "is ambient life"
* Loathing: unit palette entry has Team # of -1

What's weird to me is that these ambient units are not really part of Team 0 - that is, they don't contribute to the team's % of units nor do they show up as blue dots, etc.


After much banging about, I discovered that this behaviour goes away by doing *one or the other* of the following:

* Fear: mons Visibility set to "None"
* Loathing: unit palette entry checks "is uncontrollable"

Note: Doing one or the other of these things makes the "Team 0 sees from ambient unit eyes" go away.

My question is: Is this the way it's always been?

I ask this partly because it seems rather odd to "see" from the units but not own them, and partly because we discovered the ambient JarJar units in the Leggo III Tagset have this behaviour now on Proving/Killing Grounds (they replace those annoying Cheering Peasants). Seems unusual that they wouldn't have noticed the effect, although it is subtle when testing multiplayer because you'd never notice it until there is more than one player and someone starts as Team 0 *and* an enemy moves near the ambient units.

Thoughts? Comments?
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