Questions about combat taunts

[Abs]

I have seen some discussion about combat taunts, but I just had some questions if anyone knows;

How or where are the racially based taunts assigned (e.g. ghoul, deathclaw, reaver etc)?

Is it possible to add new races to assign taunt sets to (i'm thinking raider or civilian or military specific)?

Also does adding new taunt lines to the pre-existing sets actually work? I have already added a bunch of variations to many of the taunts but haven't tested enough to see if they all appear in game.


I've noticed that the "wimpy" taunts only seem to trigger when an NPC with the "coward" nature is triggered by their HP% and they flee or break, so clearly it's a function that is variable. I'm just curious as to how...

On a similar topic there, is there a way to cause a fleeing enemy to "rally" and return to the fight? I know their Player AI aggression rate is relative to their HP% so maybe healing them might work? Or changing their player if they flee into a certain area?

 

[nadeauhugo]

Hi @Abs

So, taunts are indeed racially assigned, and they are set here :

As you can see, you can't do much there except choose racial taunts or no taunts at all. So your only option is pretty much to assign a race and then fill the .txt with wathever you need.

All taunts are set in the locale/game/taunts.txt file. I'd be really surprise if adding lines work, as I already tried adding missing body parts string entries for the UniqueHumanoid and UniqueOther races, but it just didn't work. Currently unexistant strings are probably not search for at all by the engine?

But for the taunt and Ai behaviours, you might have some luck playing with the VTable as introduced by @Melindil : https://melindil.github.io/FTSE/vtable functions/Entity_Vtable.html. This is usable with FTSE (Fallout Tactics Scripting Engine) : https://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/ftse-fallout-tactics-scripting-engine-0-56a.216025/.

It might seem a bit overwhelming at first to setup, but when you get the gig of it, there's a lot you can do with these functions...

Using FTSE, you can easily heal any character on the map, which would, theorically, rally them back into the fight, yes...

Check the FTSE examples here to start familiarizing yourself with LUA coding, and you'll get to it eventually.

 

[Abs]

@nadeauhugo
Hey man, thanks for the response.

When it comes to the race assignments, I assume those are set via sprite editing? I've not even dipped a toe into that side of things and I have so much on my plate I'm worried to start there lol. What are the best programs for editing or looking at sprite variables like race and the like? Can "new" races be made and set in a functioning way? If there are too many problems with that idea let me know so I don't waste to much time, please

I know in the taunts.txt file there are racial presets like "wimpy", "tribal", "reaver" etc, but I haven't seen where "wimpy" is used outside of fleeing entities. I was expecting to see it on the civilian entities but have not as of yet, I wonder how/where they are assigned?

Are there actually sprites with a race tag of "wimpy"?

Looking through those FTSE links are daunting lol. Not sure if I'm going to make use of it, I'm looking for triggers and quests to play out "naturally" not force or make scripts on the fly while playing. But I will check it out at some point, still though, that FTSE readthrough it's a lot to process.

 

[nadeauhugo]

Well, yess, FTSE is a bit for advanced FT modders, as it forms a new layer on top of everything else that can ben modded, and includes qui a few .lua files, implying you learn some lua coding beforehand. So, yeah, I recommend you dive into that only when you'll have some level of mastery in all other modding ressources. The most important is that you know that it is there, and eventually explore it if one day you learned everything you could and still feel limited.

So, sprites (I mean the .spr files containing the sprite images), don't have a big impact on the gameplay except 3 things :
- They control the speed of an entity, with a distance value associated to each step, ranging from 0.0 to 2.0ish.
- They can prevent an attack if the associated animation does not exist.
- They might not react at all to triggers or break (like science switches) if the associated animation does not exist.

Entities on the other hand store almost every behavior data, and can be set either in the Entity or Level editor (available from the game files directly with the version 1.27). You have to know that everything set in the Level editor will have priority over the Entity editor value. So to assign AI behavior, look for the game original editors, Entity and Level editor only.

"Wimpy" is not a race, but I think a state of taunts assign to most races after the game set it to flee. It is probably related to the choice you do under the "BaseAI" category of an entity, either in the Entity or the Level editor. You can set a "Nature" there, like "Coward", "Agressor", "Critter", etc. These are pretty important, but they almost all have the same base behavior, which is attacking the player. "Coward" and "Agressor" will behave exactly the same way, but a "Coward" entity will soon flee after taking some damage or if having a very low hit chance while "Agressor" will mostly fight to the death.

What creates the most difference in the AI behaviour is in the Level editor. There, if you go to "Level" tab - "Player...", and then "Setup AI...", and finally scroll down, you'll see 3 values : "Agression:", "Communicate:" and "Mobility:", with values from 0 to 10. Agression of 1 will make the entity attack very rarely the player, a value I set for every low level critter like cockroaches or rats. At 10, the entity will attack as soon as it sees you. Communicate will set a range (10 is all the map) to tell every other entity of the same player to join the fight. Mobility should always be set to high (even 10) for all entities with waypoints, except for wandering animals, because every value below 10 will add delays between each move command. A Mobility 1 ghoul character set to flee to the edge of the map, for instance, will take loooong breaks between each steps, and will leave the map after a enormous amount of time.

 

[Abs]

Yeah, a while ago I did a bunch of testing with the AI functions and came to happy level of understanding regarding the kinds of settings you want in different scenarios.
From basic coward NPC ai with 0 aggression in their player ai (for generic citizens for example), down to more complex styles like, an aggressor with the retreat NPC ai that will be more likely to close in first but will also try to flee from melee attackers (for lighter ranged weapons like an smg for example), etc etc. I know you want to have some variation with hold advance and default modes, and generally keep the player communicate ai low to prevent the ai all trying to charge in and blob up (as much as possible).

And I've seen that there's also the aitable.txt for potentially editing those 0-10 variables for each ai type as well, which I haven't needed to do any testing of yet.

I really appreciate you continuing to help and provide valuable advice, but I'm just still stumped as to how the "taunts" list get assigned via whichever race tag it might be.

Like a ghoul will have different taunts from a human (or even a reaver), but I'm trying to find a way to make a distinction between generic raider versus generic soldier combat texts for example, or how that would be gone about (if it's even possible). What is the correlating factor that the game uses to assign the "generic" taunt list to the human "races" (whether that be the "civilian alpha" race or the "raider" race or the BOS race etc etc).

Similarly, I was hoping to find out how the game changes that taunt list in game, like how it does for fleeing actors. Because that essentially means it has to change that "race" tag (whichever one assigns a taunt list) during combat somehow.

But these might be questions that have no answers, or I might be asking them too poorly, but I'm still just curious about it.