Enourmous Creatures and You

[Stormbring3r]

Is there a way to fix the issues with creatures the size of a house chasing toons down corridors barely wide enough to fit said toon down?

Also.. Have a look at the static spawns and make sure no creature can spawn in an area it can barely fit in.

[Ithildur]

Some creatures have such enormous 'red circles' that it's almost impossible to manuever your pc near them; you end up clicking on the creature or worse still standing there flatfooted while being attacked if you try to flee/avoid them. It's rather poor design on the part of Obsidian; not sure if there's any way this is fixable. It is something I try to keep in mind when spawning huge creatures from the DM client in smaller areas (which is a really, really bad idea).

[Zelknolf]

The creature model (not its scaling) determines the amount of walkmesh it needs to walk around. That's "fixable," but... only kind of (NWN2 doesn't really have a concept of a ceiling as capable of restricting a creature's movement, though it does have a concept of a doorway being too narrow to fit through or a platform to small to stand on), and we've a pretty clear indication (see resized playable races model from ACR 1.88) that servers won't update their templates when given the tools to do so; lots of stuff that's generally regarded as good enough (and, to be fair, they are for most purposes) and thus not worth the effort of changing (that'll be different by perspective, but if it's super important to you, it's not that difficult to work on)

[Stormbring3r]

I took a screen shot of the issue.. Standard doorway into tunnel but because of the Shadowy Stuff in the UD you cannot see much of anything.. My Hin when standing in said doorway takes up 1/4 of it. Spider was so big that it basically was just shy of double the doorway size and moved impeaded down the tunnel (when it should not have been able to due to its size).

Don't get me wrong.. I am not griefing over Merry's death, so don't take it that way. I just think its unfair for the game engine to "cheat" and get away with it

[Rumple C]

From what i recall from pnp. Creatures can fit into spaces one size smaller than themselves by squeezing. So a (large) 4 square (2x2) critter can get down a 1 square corridor.

[Zelknolf]

Well, screenshots are useful if you need to prove that a thing happened, or if we're investigating a thing and need detail that you might not have noticed-- but that's not really what's happening here. We already know what the engine is doing and why. You saw it like that because spider models are quite small, even though they're scaled to appear rather large for whatever particular purpose they have. So when the engine looks up what looking like a spider means for the purposes of resolving movement, it sees that the "spider" line indicates that it doesn't have a very long reach and doesn't take up a lot of space, and doesn't do anything special with the information that the builder says it should be 5x its normal size (except, of course, send it to your client so it can be rendered as seeming enormous).

You'll also sometimes see this in reverse-- like get into a fight with stirges, and note how much space they take up, even though they appear very small.



I'm simplifying a lot of this, of course. If you do decide to take up any modding work, we'll have to hit the details pretty hard to make the products come out right.

[Castano]

If you work on this please consider balance. The AI will have creatures stand in the doorway trying to fit through while getting nailed by everyone on the other side.

[Ithildur]

Large enough creatures with high str/mass should have a chance to break through doorways at some point anyway; I don't think this is that big a problem as much as the difficulty of being able to move when near such creatures.

[Castano]

I don't think this is that big a problem as much as the difficulty of being able to move when near such creatures.

I've seen it done in game before where the creature was stuck in the door and killed - it cheapened the game for us.

[Ithildur]

My fault if I'm not being clear, but you misundertand my point as completely the opposite; I meant the problem of 'huge creatures shouldn't be able to fit through narrow doors' doesn't seem as big a problem (as PC getting 'stuck' near such creatures), because among other explanations it's possible for them to burst through doorways and such.

[Zelknolf]

Well, confusing semantics and such aside-- tinkering with the sort is the sort of thing that we should sit down and hash out the complications of if you want to work on it. It can be a cool and powerful thing, but like most cool and powerful things it can go horribly wrong-- and you might just end up with a big bad who decides to hump a doorjam instead of fighting the adventurers.

[Castano]

gotcha Ith. yeah I'm with you there are other issues to fix first.

[HEEGZ]

gotcha Ith. yeah I'm with you there are other issues to fix first.

this.