Question on Guards

[jillmatik]

Ok so I was messing around with the two guards at the West Freeport Gates.

I noticed that they too were just chasing mobs around, not doing any damage. So I ran this bat into town and started this huge guard train behind me and the bat... when all of a sudden, bat dead. Who killed him? Brother Jentry.

So I used the Jentry as a point of comparison and the only difference I could find really was that Jentry had an NPC_Faction_id of 1403 while the guards had 18884. So I changed the two front guards to npc_faction_id of 1403 and drug a bat in.. nothin.

Turns out that now they only attack a mob if another guard of npc_faction_id of 18884 is also chasing the mob. But these guys on 1403 actually damage the mob and kill it where the others don't.

I don't really know how all the tables link together npc_types npc_faction and npc_faction_entries to make this happen. But maybe someone with a little more understanding on these tables can take my observations and make some sense out of it. I do know that npc_faction_id of 1403 will attack and kill a mob if one of his buddies is also pissed at this mob.

[Carnage_ou812]

Wouldn't a blanket way to fake it be to add a new player faction and then have the guards assist the player faction like the other NPCs do the guards?

I realize that race would never be an issue then and that DE guards would help even halflings. Not perfect but possible?

[cavedude]

The problem is with npc_aggro. If it is set to 1, the mob will aggro but won't do any damage. If it is 0, the mob will assist only but deal damage when it does. The solution I came up was to set all guards to npc_aggro 0. Then, duplicate every guard with an invisible un-named mob on the same faction and npc_aggro set to 1. That way, the invis mob will attack the mob and deal no damage. Then, the guard will assist and kill the mob. Since the dup is invis and unnamed, the player doesn't even know it is there. It also does slow the server down a bit.

[jillmatik]

Alright thanks again for the suggestions. Sounds like this is what Killhand was talking about before. I'll throw up some invis mobs near the guard locations and see what happens.

Thanks
J

[cavedude]

Well the real trick is npc_aggro. Having the invis mob is just so it looks nice in-game.