Hello Sector,
In case you missed Rahn Dee's post on public, we have an exciting new feature! But first a bit of history. When starting out on Starmourn, Tecton and Garryn took special care to make sure there was codedly little division between mobs and players. Today that vision bears fruit in the form of mobs with full-fledged PvP AI, currently in a prototype stage and available at Omni.
These bots are the best approximation I could whip together. They are missing some things and cut some corners. For instance they ignore cover entirely like normal mobs. But they take normal subsystem damage like a player, are immune to crits, they mend when they feel they have to, they use class heals, they change their wetwiring priorities, and they will use class skills to pursue an instakill route depending on their personality.
Personalities include:
B.E.A.S.T.: "Sunderbeast" attempts to bring your muscular down, then use spoolup to Sunder you. "Plasmabeast" will attempt to stack blazing and burns in order to Incinerate you.
Engineer: "Intengi" will attack you with electric abilities and its burrowbot in pursuit of Heartbreaker. "Muscengi" will load you up with shards to Squash you. Engineers have real bots, turrets, and gadgets to get the job done.
Fury: "Bleedfury" will stack bleed on you to inflict serious pain and attempt to Throw you. "Heartrendfury" will hit your muscular and internal subsystems to reach Heartrend.
Nanoseer: "Mindseer" will do the normal annoying mind stuff, in an effort to land Mindmelt or Breakdown. "Voidseer" will attempt to stack Frozen to land Shatter.
Scoundrel: Only one personality at the moment, "Intscoundrel", will bear down on your internals in an effort to Forcefeed, but keeps an open mind to your Sensory subsystem and the Execute condition.
Difficulties include:
Easy: They won't pursue you, interrupt you, or pull you from flight, and they don't have very much health.
Normal: They pursue you, interrupt you, and pull you from flight, have a modest amount of health.
Hard: They pursue you fast, have more health, deal more damage, and take less damage.
Brutal: They pursue you at lightning speeds, have huge health pools, deal absurd damage, take far less damage, take less subsystem damage, and deal more subsystem damage. Good luck!
There are multiple ways to interact with these bots in the arena, including:
- ARENA BOTSPAR <personality> <difficulty>: Starts a 1v1 spar against the chosen bot.
- ARENA CREWBOTSPAR <ai> <diff> [ai2] [diff2]: Starts a crew spar with players on one side and bots on the other. You can specify up to 5 bots to fight against simultaneously, no matter how small or large your crew is.
- ARENA INIT <arena> <event> [BOTS]: Specifying BOTS will make bots spawn when the event starts (not during prep phase). Includes 1 random bot personality of normal or hard difficulty per spacer. In FFAs and Rampages, bots fight each other as well as other players.
As for the entity responsible for hacking these bots into the Omni Arena... Well, more on that later.
(P.S. I love my little bots like I love my children. Repeatedly beat up on them and I will just simply have to teach them new tricks.)
Regards,
Neritus
