Why won't they howl?

Hi everyone,
I made a wolf enemy a while ago which I haven't used until now. It has a "howl" animation and spell which makes it stronger and heals it. So I made it a caster (tried both defensive and offensive). It says that if it can't cast any spell it will start fighting so I gave it 1 magic point and made the spell cost 1 magic point, too. But when I test the game, the wolf doesn't do anything, it only runs. Doesn't even use it's spell.

Is there a way to make an enemy which both fights and uses spells?

Here's how I would try this: Make a stamp animation of the howling wolf and place it over the movement tile where you want the wolf to appear. Now make a "trip line" of tiles which call an event about seven tiles away from your noisy wolf. The event reads like this -->

Stamp control = delete wolfstamp 01
NPC control = place Wolf 01 at X, Y.
Change map cell (for every tile in "trip line") to clear.
End event.

The stamp animation could have the wolf pacing back and forth and howling only once in the loop with a "play sound" flag.

You would have to make each wolf and wolfstamp unique or the trip line would change all the wolves at once (Not good), so you would have Wolf 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, etc.

As far as the healing goes, you may run into difficulties there. In other places where a healing potion is in the NPC's possession, the NPC does not "use" the potion but continually draws on it. The blue dragon in the Sapphire plugin to PoG is a case in point. If the dragon "feels threatened" he heals himself over and over faster than the player can do damage. This is a Coldstone bug. I think you would do better to make your wolf strong on defence and hard to kill.

Ledorax, on Dec 11 2005, 11:39 AM, said:

Hi everyone,
I made a wolf enemy a while ago which I haven't used until now. It has a "howl" animation and spell which makes it stronger and heals it. So I made it a caster (tried both defensive and offensive). It says that if it can't cast any spell it will start fighting so I gave it 1 magic point and made the spell cost 1 magic point, too. But when I test the game, the wolf doesn't do anything, it only runs. Doesn't even use it's spell.

Is there a way to make an enemy which both fights and uses spells?
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Have you tried increasing the wolf's morale?

edit: You could also have 2 NPCs one wolf that howels and the other that attacks. Have the spell set up so that it kills the caster. Set the wolf's death animation to create a new attacking wolf in it's place (actual x and actual y).

This post has been edited by GrahamVH : 11 December 2005 - 11:04 AM

That all seems a bit too complicated for a simple special ability. Shouldn't there be a way to make an enemy which can both cast spells and attack? What about casters? Does this mean enemy mages will never ever fight the player but only run away if they can't cast spells? :mad:

Isn't there a "Mixed Random" option in the NPC editor? I might be wrong, but doesn't this make it so the NPC will both cast and attack?

It should. I tried it but the wolves still won't howl. I also have a goblin shaman who I made mixed random and he does cast spells, but his casting animation is not displayed. The spells system is quite... buggy, no? <_<