tain.totalcodex.net

I am trying to setup ambient wildlife on DoD, but the problem I keep running into is that the flying units: hawks, sparrows, and bats, all seem to end up congregated in the middle of the map after a short while. They are all set to soaring. I am trying to experiment with some other types, but it's hard knowing how exactly they affect the unit.

I was hoping we had a description of what the following Map Action Tags do for a unit:
- deer
- chicken
- shaman
- soaring
- peasant
- harass
- meander
- wander

MEAN and GIRL are not ambient unit map actions, but actual in-game map actions. You can safely eliminate them from your list.

Edit: Neither are WAND or SHAM.

Take a look at the units that already use these. By the way the GIRL action Graydon mentioned is the Harass action. The others he mentioned should be obvious.

duh, chicken does this:

# Chicken

* No additional subordinate parameters--this map action is called from the unit via its Map Action attribute. You can use Fear to edit this characteristic.


Seriously though, it would be very cool if someone would compile more user friendly documentation. I know when I first started I printed out the docs and made lots of notes clarifying this stuff, surely others did too.

Well, in game chickens (and pigs, which must use the same action) alternate between standing still and moving randomly, as though they're grazing or just chilling in the barnyard. Soaring is constant motion above the mesh, but I don't know more about it than that. Deer involves roughly the same sort of motions as chicken, except that it also involves a fear of approaching units, i.e. the unit using deer will run away from the player and possibly also from other teams. Peasant is like soaring in that it is constant motion in random directions, but it's on the ground (like the peasants in Willow Creek).

Additionally to what A-Red has stated, some of the actual map actions like MEAN and WAND can be used to make units that _don't_ have map actions attached in their monster tag, act like ones that do. Perhaps you want your peasants to wander around aimlessly like they do on willow creek, but you want to restrict them to wandering within a certain location on the map (like the town they're in).