A Land Far Away

I may be a bit behind the times on this but I've been testing a load of areas on WHL and have noticed that all of my hostiles seem to be able to see and try to attack PCs/NPCs through walls or even blank tiles with no walkmesh. You can walk down a corridor and see things scrabbling at the walls of an adjacent room trying to get at you. Is this normal?
Yours, unnerved,
Teric

It's ALFA scripted Advanced Permadeath System.

No, actually.. I don't know...

There are both sight and sound perception events available to AI. It is possible for NPCs to respond because they hear a PC coming.

There are also walls that don't correctly block line of sight. Give them bows; if they shoot through the wall, that one's bugged. The fix tends to be to put a placeable (not an environmental object, a real placeable) wall inside of the wall that's causing problems.

Also, if you don't want things shot through (walls, boulders ect) As Zelk says do not make those objects environmental with a walkmesh cutter around them, but place them and bake them instead.

All environmental objects can be seen/shot through.

Some placeables can be seen/shot through. There's a checkbox for this in the placeable's properties (can't remember what it is called off-hand), but it is greyed out. Whether or not it is checked depends on its "BlockLOS" entry in placeables.2da.

So there is no way to change whether or not a placeable blocks line-of-sight in the default toolset. Setting BlockLOS to null in placeables.2da does not un-grey that checkbox.

So if a placeable does not block LOS when the builder wants it to, another placeable which does block LOS must be placed inside of it.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm not talking about placeable/environment object LOS, this is in interior tilesets through tile walls.
Zelknolf - the suggestion about hearing perception is possibly true, but again should that be triggered through walls into rooms with closed doors?

Example:

_______ __________
| |
X | | Y
| |
_______ ____________

X is a monster in a dead end corridor, Y is an NPC guard in a dead end corridor. The space between has no tile. Should X try to attack Y?

Edit: My bit of ASCII art has not come out as intended, lol

Yes, some of the tilesets are bugged with respect to blocking line of sight.

We have a set of Collision Block placeables in the ALFA haks that have no skins or visual appearance, but will block line of sight (and prevent the "shoot thru walls" problem). You may have to make your own blueprints for these, but the models are available - create a new placeable and look for the Appearances beginning SGK_CH_ in the properties tab. To view the shape and extents of the collision box, turn on C2 Data in the Collision button. I've been using the cube c.b. and scaling it to make long flat objects to fit into walls, etc. Note that in order to block line of sight you need to block it at walkmesh level.

Curmudgeon wrote:Yes, some of the tilesets are bugged with respect to blocking line of sight.

So I have to clad every wall in the mod with placeables? That's beyond insane.

It's only some walls in some tilesets. You're far better off to respond to bug reports with a placeable, as both tiles need to be bugged on that wall to cause the problem.

Right, I think I've found the problem (or at least cured it in two of the three places I could see it happening). I'm running the standalone server on the host which uses a smaller subset of the files in the data folder than a full install (and wasn't fully updated when SoZ came out). I found mention on the Bioware boards that you need the lod-merged*.zip and models*.zip files on the server to make the line-of-sight work which I didn't have. This seems like a believable fix as the problems were in very old areas that didn't behave strangely when running from a full install.

Yes, you must not strip out the server to a limited set of data files. This is a tricky gotcha unfortunately.

The model files contain the collision meshes themselves. Without having access to the models, the server treats the models as essentially transparent for mechanics calculations. Specifically, you'll probably see that :

* Interior tileset tiles are treated as though they didn't have collision data
* Statically placed objects that are marked as static appear to have collision data (because this is merged in during baking, on the toolset computer)
* Dynamically placed objects won't appear to have collision data
* Terrain will still appear to have collision data (because this is merged in during baking, on the toolset computer).

The dedicated server creator utility doesn't get this right. You shouldn't use it; I would recommend cloning an existing game install (just copy the files over) instead. This is what all of the production ALFA servers run to the best of my knowledge and is the configuration that you should use.