[All] Formations

[antz]

Hi Everyone,

A feature which all the cores is currently missing is formations.

This is where there is a 'Master' creature and several 'Slave' creatures who move around in formation with the master.

- The current system just places all the creatures near each other and as they patrol, they quickly become a jumbled mess.

Again other projects have various different systems... the Cmangos one is seriously flawed and limited.

The TC one is a much better effort, so it might be a worthwhile project for someone to attempt to port it to mangos.

[antz]

For some examples of this.... see Fozruk in Arathi Highlands

Most of the TBC instances.

[lfxgroove]

If we're going to port it from TC we should look at possible short comings, eg does it support creatures following creatures that follow creatures if that's ever needed? Would be a nice thing to get some kind of small requirements out and see if it currently fulfills them, if so we should just go ahead and have a go at porting it. Otherwise i think we should port and fix the needed extra things.

[antz]

From the small research i've done, this is used to allow the mobs to be linked together and move together - even when patrolling.

What we currently have is a mess, all the mobs move together to start with - then as soon as they turn, they quickly end up of up of each other.

I think the first stage is to port it in so that we can start to work and enhance it

[malcrom]

Formations in tc is not correct.

[saben]

To add some input on this, if it is ever implimented (I hope it is), one of the shortcomings of TC's formations is that they do not have a way to link creatures together outside of it. If two creatures are supposed to pull together, but are not close enough to aggro eachother, the only way to accomplish it in the DB is to add them to creature formations. This is fine for the majority of cases. However, if say a beast is patrolling, and he is surrounded by humanoids that are supposed to pull with him but are stationary, there is no way for them to pull together, while having the beast still patrol unless you have the humanoids patrol with him.

I dunno how mangos handle aggro chaining. I know on TC is enabled by creature type, so humanoids aggro chain humanoids type of thing. But if that is the case on Mangos as well, perhaps creature_linking should be kept in as well.

[Danator]

I can only say what you have to program theoretically because I am no programmer. For example we have a formation consists on 3 npcs. We need three paths in the three dimensional room the formation walks on these paths so that their distance stays always the same. So you have to know some vector calculation. Do I know it? Well I saw that you use the sentence of Pythagoras in the sourcecode. With something like that you have to work but I am no mathematician I dont know exactly the formel for that.

Then of course if a fight starts we have to program how the guys behave when the fight is over or one of the guys in the formation died etc. So actually for somebody who is fit in informatics and mathematics and the guys who programmed mangos are this obviously should easily program such a thing. Right?

And may be I will do it for you one day :D. But at the moment I solve other mistakes.