Escorts Are Ambushes... Say WHAAAA?
By
Clave_Dark_5,
Posted on: 2011-10-03 07:42 in Mission Architect
Escorts have always been sort of buggy in AE from what I've heard and my experience (which is only one use, but anyway). I have been able to set things up to lead them to the objective though, and I think others have too, so maybe you're just hitting a particularly bad bug on yours.
Or, maybe the "creative way" you're trying to use one is the problem? There's not a lot you can do with them that I know of other than "set escort, set their item, the end".
I'm not way experienced with them - just my best guess - but that's what I know from here. Hopefully someone will come along and clear this up for both of us. 
The thing is I don't consider my problem to be that "out of the box" thinking to be such an issue. The particular instance I'm trying this time is simply this:
The "bad guy" of my arc is an escort and once you defeat his "guards" he says that he will surrender peacefully and lead you to his stash of weapons.
The weapons are a clicky that is the escorts waypoint.
When you arrive the escort says "a-ha! It's a TRAP!" and runs away.
All I want is to then have an ambush spawn off of the clicky when you click it. That way as you click it he will yell it's a trap and run away while an ambush spawns to fight you...
It's not overly complex, and in fact I have seen this exact plot used in missions in the game. But in MA since the escort is considered an "ambush" of the clicky, you can't spawn an ambush off of the clicky.
Like I said, there are a number of ways around it and I can still get it to work, it's just a question of why the devs designed an escort this way in MA. Why treat an escort as an ambush at the code level?
You can't trigger anything off the same objective as an ambush. It isn't just escorts.
The trigger loops are incredibly irritating, mostly because for about two weeks shortly after the additional "lead to" options were added they worked properly. Then they broke and haven't been fixed since.
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Yeah, but that's exactly my question...
Why is an escort being treated like a trigger? It's not a trigger. The escort doesn't trigger anything, nothing needs to rely on the escort, the escort relies on the waypoint, not the other way around.
There is absolutely no reason why an escort should be treated like a trigger.
This may have been asked already but clearly nothing has come from it if it has so I will ask again...
Why are Escorts treated like Ambushes in Mission Architect??? Anyone who has ever attempted to use an Escort in a creative way will find that the internal MA system treats the Escort trigger system as an ambush.
This prevents you from leading an escort to an objective, and then having that object trigger an ambush - because the system attaches the escort to the objective as if it were an ambush. It also creates a series of trigger loops that prevent you from using an escort in any creative way. You also can't use an object that is not required for completion as the waypoint for an escort because the system acts as though the object is the trigger that creates the escort.
It's not game-breaking and there are ways around it but I just want to know why this seemingly lazy design scheme was used. Copy and paste the ambush code and call it an Escort? Come on, it couldn't be that hard to write a series of code specifically for Escort...
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