DO NOT LET THE MONSTERS GET THE FLAG!

[EvilGrins]

This has kinda bugged me for a few years; it's not a big thing but it just kinda won't leave my head. I've looked around and haven't found anyone else posting about it anywhere.

I should also mention when I say 'monsters' I mean the actual thing, not models based on them.

In CTF games I have, on occasion, used a mutator to introduce monsters in. Though I don't do this anymore. Back when I either used MonsterSpawn or BadNews or some other random mutator or other. I stopped doing it pretty quick after I noticed a rather bizarre issue that I've never managed to find a way around. Even though they're not motivated to do so, periodically a monster would get the flag...

...and then the flag would go bye bye!

Once a monster gets the flag, it's gone. If you kill them there's no flag. Waiting for the flag to magically reappear doesn't work either, longest I've waited was 20 minutes before I gave up.

It just goes away.

Why it does this I have no idea.

Any ideas? Theories? Paranoid delusions?

[MrLoathsome]

I know exactly why that happens.

One of the settings the original BadNews mutator used for spawned monsters was bIsPlayer=True.

This caused them to grab the flag, and also a number of other problems.

My update to that mutator corrects that problem.

[EvilGrins]

I know exactly why that happens.

One of the settings the original BadNews mutator used for spawned monsters was bPlayer=True.

This caused them to grab the flag, and also a number of other problems.

My update to that mutator corrects that problem.

Then why does it happen with MonsterSpawn?

Also randomly spawned monsters via the old 'summon' command.

[MrLoathsome]

Good questions.

Note, typo on 1st reply. Variable in question is bIsPlayer, not bPlayer. It is actually defined in the Pawn Class.
The ScriptedPawn source has a number of references to it, but it appears to be initialized nowhere..... ?

I skimmed thru the source for most of the default Unreal monsters, and none of them reference or change it at all.

Re: Monsters summoned via the summon command.

I just did some testing, 1st online on my DM/CTF server, which has a few mutators running, and again offline in a practice
match with zero mutators. Summoned a few Sliths and a few SkaarjSnipers on a small CTF map. (CTF-2ChickenPancakes)

I can't get the suckers to pick up the flag at all. They just run right through it. The Skaarj fight the Sliths and they both try to kill me and
pretty much ignore the bots, unless the bots bump into them, but they do not pick up the flag.

Check that again with no extra mutators running. If any of them are setting that value to be true for scriptedpawns, it would make that
happen.

Re: MonsterSpawn.

No way to tell for sure as the author of MonsterSpawn did not include the source code.

I did a search with Notepad on the binary, and there is 1 reference to bIsPlayer, but no way to tell if it gets set true or false.
I will respect the authors decision not to include his source, and would not attempt to look at it any further than that.
Believe he did sub-class the whole ScriptedPawn class for his custom MS pawns, so not surprising to find that in there.

I just double checked the source for my BadNews rewrite, and the fix was to take out any reference to bIsPlayer at all.

I think the default for that should be False, but looking at the Pawn and ScriptedPawn source, I don't see where that is set or initialized
anywhere.... I think all the Epic code I glanced at was checking for a True condition however, so that is probably not an issue.
Null and False are both != True.

Class PlayerPawn, does set it to be True, as it should.

[EvilGrins]

I can't get the suckers to pick up the flag at all. They just run right through it.

There may be a factor I didn't mention. I didn't consider it until just now.

In each case I saw a monster get the flag, they'd just killed somebody running with it. I don't know all the coding specifics but perhaps the flag is different from when it's at its stand and when someone just dropped it.

[Hook]

Yeah, it probably turns the flag into more of a pick-up status or something.