Speaking of reactions... would it be possible to replace the dead glowing one explosion with an invisible grenade PlaceAtMe'd at the spot to induce fleeing behavior in NPCs?
You mean in addition to the knock down? Yeah that's possible, will add it to the todo list.
Not sure how easy this is to tweak.. but a couple things
Old oleny sewers, the death claws in them need to be reduced in size. I had a couple of them spawn that were larger then the tunnel entrances. This made it so they glared at me, instead of ripping me a new one.
Broken steel -- Old oleny again, some of the deathclaws just spawn to large for the area, causing them to get stuck.
Ok will take a look. What I might do is just limit their max size if they're in an interior.
Hmmm... Is there any way to increase the time that an actor will search? They seem to give up the search pretty quickly, even with a maxed out sound level. I'm in amongst them now, and my detection level goes up to Caution when I drop a detection event, even with an active stealth boy.
Yeah. As always, nothing is ever simple in Fallout 3.
So I played with detection events also, and got the same results you did. Interesting, but not really what I had hoped for. So, with six hours of testing and the judicious application of a codeblock and some AI packages, I've got something that looks like this:
- At a range of 6000> NPCs will, once a comrade is hit by a weapon, run and look for cover (so not just on death, but the first sign of trouble).
- At a range of 3500> and <6000 NPCs will, if they have line of sight to you, notice you and come after you.
I gotta say it really changes the dynamic of combat. No more taking pot-shots at range willy nilly. Lets face it, if you can see them they can see you and they have ears, so if you shoot them at range they're not stupid anymore, they'll head in your direction.
What I've currently got them doing is explicitly seeking the player out, however I'm about to change it to use an activator that they seek out at the position where you actually fired. This way they may come and seek you out but will go to your last known position, allowing you to move on and then surprise them when they come to where you
were 
It's all working pretty well but it required more work than I hoped. I try to add as little as possible script wise to actors, but this requires a code block to constantly run checking wether this effect is triggered, and adding/removing the packages at the appropriate times. To minimise this it's got a return exception and, as described above, only kicks in at all for actors more than 3500 away so it's only going to trigger in long range fights -- and this is the range at which NPCs (or at least Raiders I was testing with) are seemingly able to fire back at the player once hit. Quite literally 3600 = stand there running side to side but not shooting player, even though they have LOS while 3500 = suddenly 'seeing' player and shooting back. It's far too short a range, they all must be myopic or something. I don't understand why Beth codes such annoying defaults -- and a good part of my six hours testing was tweaking around 13 different game settings that 'might' affect this minimum, with no luck (if anyone knows otherwise let me know).
I've got RL work to do for the next few days so I'll have to finish this off and some other changes for a release later next week. However when I get this particular feature finished I'll upload another beta -- I've only been testing with Raiders so we'll need some more expansive testing. Also to consider: who should be affected this way? Currently I'm thinking NPCs and SMs as above, Feral Ghouls just the latter (no hiding, they'll just come after you) and animals... might depend on their aggro and confidence. Anyway, something to think about.
» Fri May 27, 2011 7:00 pm 
