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#908 Pet monster loses focus
It seems the Pet Monster can some times lose it's focus/attention. In this short video we see I read a scroll from inventory (Summon Pet Monster). The pet (angel) gets stuck in the corner with some goblins and does not attack. I also tried changing petmode to "normal", "sad" and "defend" all with the same effect -- no attacks.
Video here: https://youtu.be/bGZKYWBCVAo
This sounds similar to a problem that I've been seeing. What happens is that the pet gets focused on a single enemy that is not next to them, and nothing can break it's concentration. In your case it was probably trying to attack one of the goblins that was a few squares away. What I would like to see is each time a pet can move, it checks for any enemies that it can reach via a short path(no need to search through an entire maze, a few steps away is plenty), if there are any it attacks them, and if not it tries to return to it's owner. At least do this for defensive mode. And make sure that they only worry about enemies that can be reached, I've seen pets pile up against a wall that has an enemy on the other side way too often, apparently they all have xray vision and no clue that walls are impenetrable.
Tentative patch to fix this issue.
Also added "attacked_by" and "enemy" to object dump.
That looks promising, if I read it right it will make a pet forget who it's "one focused enemy" is if they can't be reached and pick a new enemy. I'm not clear on if having the enemy be protected by a wall of other enemies will count as being unreachable though, so it might still keep trying to reach the back row enemies while touching front row enemies. Hopefully this can get tested soon, I'd like to try out summoner more seriously, and having the pets stand around trying to stare a hole in a wall while I am getting pounded on is getting old.
Second version of the patch, which should make monsters move towards an enemy even if unreachable, instead of standing still.
Thanks! This now looks quite good, at least for "Defend" mode. However, "SAD" mode certainly needs more tuning. Perhaps the first question should be: How aggressive do we want pets to be about the "Search" ? As of right now it seems they move around randomly and linger on one side of the room when there are a cluster of monsters on the other side of the room (10 or so tiles away). I've also seen a monster heading straight for me, while my pet walked randomly nearby. Even when the monster walked directly next to the pet, the pet didn't attack, until the monster finally made it's way right next to me and started doing damage to me. The pet was already pretty close by so I couldn't tell if it suddenly became more protective once I took damage, or if the random direction it chose just happened to be toward the monster (and so attacked).
Previous patch pushed to master (fffcb4fc526ea6ec712f857cb328b4e4be529ef4), as well as other fixes for SAD mode which should improve things.
I've tested this now on my private server, and pet monsters are now useful, huge improvement. Before this patch, taking 20 pet panthers into the second level of the raffle would be almost no help as they would generally not attack and just get in the skeleton's way a little. Now they actually clear an area around me and as long as I kept replacing the panthers that got killed I was able to sit in the middle and watch the undead die :)