MONSTER PROBLEMS
See also: Monster Entities - Grunt Squads - Coding Monsters -
Updated May 19, 2002 - 10:20 AM

Monster Problems

MonsterMaker - Problem: Monsters Don't Fade

When made with MonsterMaker, some types of monsters (grunts, assassins, etc.) don't fade after death. (If a body gets blown apart, the gibs will fade. But the intact corpse won't.) Those bodies add load to the engine -- a game that unleashes a lot of MonsterMaker monsters can get progressively more laggy.

You can dispose of MonsterMaker monsters with KillTarget -- whether alive or dead, the monsters instantly disappear (which looks unconvincing, if done within player's view). How it works:

• Monstermaker: assign a name in "Children's Name"
  • Two monstermakers can have the same name, both will generate monsters
  • Two monstermakers can have different children's names, so you can KillTarget some children and not others
• In some other entity, set KillTarget to the name you assigned in Children's Name.

Many (not all) entities have the KillTarget property. Use whatever entity works best for your situations. (See also Scripting.)

I like to use Trigger_Relay, because you can trigger it from other entities -- including entities which don't have the KillTarget property, such as Multimanager.

Alternative to Monstermaker:

You can also use "real" monsters (which have the Fade Corpse option checked) when possible, instead of MonsterMaker -- keep them hidden until needed, then use scripted_sequence or teleportation (or other tricks) to get the monsters into position.

On the other hand, MonsterMaker will do tricks that you can't do any other way ... and some MonsterMaker monsters do disappear after death (Monster_Gargantua, for instance), in various ways.