[BW 1.69] AI BUG: Summons Factions, pets go hostile!!!

Bump.

We suspect the Bioware v1.66 patch may help address this, in some way.

-shad

Moved to the deferred bugs forum. Will retest after Bioware's v1.66 fixes that affect this.

-shad

Still around in v1.69.

-Dave

Summoning a Death Slaad in SRC is fine, until one of several things happens:

You try to open the locked door. You can't, because it's locked. Your pet goes into Bash Mode, and the guards instantly attack it. Sometimes.

You go into the obelisk room, while the pet stays in the entry room. A fight breaks out behind you. Sometimes.
This one's interesting for several reasons, because according to the combat logs, the *Slaad* is the one starting the fight. It may still be that the guards are actually the ones that go hostile, and the Slaad simply wins Initiative.
It's also interesting because you going into the other room will cause a Perception event to fire, because you've "vanished". This is also what happens when you transition between areas, where you see this bug a LOT: the pet stays in the area you just left for several seconds, and INEVITABLY gets into a fight with something. It's especially visible when it's not YOUR pet, and the caster leaves the area before you do.

Given how broken most of the AI is, and how broken nearly all BW engine calls are, it's no surprise that this stuff doesn't work properly. "Perception" changes nearly ALWAYS cause automatic attacks (cf YET AGAIN the variation of the Infinite Range TS Bug that makes monsters chase HIPSed and Invised PCs) and "secret" "I WAS ATTACKED" shouts [/b]even if they weren't[/b], and so much other Random Hackery that it's impossible to even GUESS at what it's actually doing.

Even though OnPerceive is a pile of garbage, the root of this problem is almost certainly a bug in the engine causing these "unowned" creatures to register as "Enemy" to absolutely EVERYTHING (or to consider everything an Enemy themselves) during those windows, regardless of what the real faction/reputation is, hence pets of one PC attacking other PCs. We might be able to work around it by explicitly checking the "feelings" of the pet's master for ONE of those cases, i.e. the AI running on the pet itself, but even that is a ton of work and may not help.

--

Curiously this bug NEVER happens with POFs. EVER. POFs are actually in the "Merchant" Faction - I have no idea why I put them there, but they work.
POFs are also Plot Characters though, and there are a fair number of checks even in the BW scripts that try not to send Invulnerable Creatures on rampages.

Summoned Hound Archons are in Faction 1, which is actually "Hostile" !
Summoned Death Slaads are in Faction 2, which is "Commoner"
"Merchant" is Faction 3

The *PC's* Faction is 0, which can't be set on anything in the toolset.

"Defender" is Faction 4, and has nothing to do with the PC really: it just means "if a fight starts, we'll join in and attack SOMEONE", where "someone" is typically "whoever they think started it", or any Hostile creature they see.

Hmm, pets are supposed to adopt the summoner's faction; which of those is BW and which is customized on DN? I know we've editted a lot of pets to fix BW issues with them [originally prompted by a buggy BW elemental summos that had the familiar convo attached [ie. you could feed them to heal them between fights], but I haven't looked at these in a long time.

Maybe the fix is as simple as moving a bunch of factions around? Do we see this bug with hound archons?

-Dave

Those are both "standard" pets. The Hound Archon is the one Vic originally reported the bug with, and the Death Slaad is just the first one I tried with Ali.

As far as I can tell, the standard summons are NOT customized, except for the Air Eles for the freeheal fix; and the feat summons that were buffed up.

OK. So Bioware's inconsistent. Scratch that idea.

-Dave