0009759: friendly followers will walk into hostile clouds created by other friendlies

Notes
(0029148) PleasingFungus (administrator) 2015-06-07 21:17	This has nothing to do with orcs or friendliness, I think. Monsters will walk into clouds if they think they have enough HP to survive for a few turns, which e.g. high-level orcish followers (knights, warlords) do. The fact that they end up being in the flame clouds for more than a few turns is mainly the result of short-sightedness on their part. (: Still not ideal, but I'm not sure there's anything to be done from a dev perspective; players may just have to be careful? Monsters being dumb is not a bug, in general...

(0029182) coledot (reporter) 2015-06-16 06:42	I took a quick look at the pathfinding code and found the method mons_travel_cost(). It appears there's no check at all for clouds? I only see terrain & trap-related checks. Could we add something like the following to help intelligent monsters avoid damaging clouds? Pseudocode: # in mons_travel_cost, between the trap check & return if monster.intelligent(): if (cloud_exists_at(pos) && mons.vulnerable_to(cloud_type_at(pos)): return 2; I'd be willing to code this up if it sounds like a reasonable change.

(0029183) PleasingFungus (administrator) 2015-06-16 18:26	For reference, the existing monster cloud logic is cloud.cc:mons_avoids_cloud(), mainly called from mon-act.cc:mon_can_move_to_pos(). It looks like this is used considerably after the pathfinding code you were looking at; the monster chooses a target destination & a path to it, and then, on each move, uses this logic to decide whether or not it can actually use the tiles with clouds on them. That's my impression, anyway; certainly this logic is used, I'm just not sure how it interacts with the mon-pathfind stuff.

(0029184) coledot (reporter) 2015-06-16 19:43 edited on: 2015-06-16 19:45	Cool, thanks for the pointer to mons_avoids_cloud(). I took a closer look at the cloud avoidance logic and found a couple of issues with one particular line: const bool hp_ok = mons->hit_points >= hp_threshold; hp_threshold appears to be an expected amount of damage that the monster can receive from a cloud each turn. This means that a monster could enter a cloud and potentially die the next turn! This is not ideal for intelligent monsters; I think they should have a larger margin of safety for entering clouds. The check should also be > w/o = for similar reasons: what monster would enter a cloud that could just barely kill it? I tested the following in wizard mode & it seems to work pretty well. Do you think this is a reasonable change? // intelligent monsters want a larger margin of safety int safety_mult = (mons_intel(mons) > I_ANIMAL) ? 2 : 1; // dare we risk the damage? const bool hp_ok = mons->hit_points > safety_mult * hp_threshold;

Issue History
Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2015-06-07 19:57	coledot	New Issue
2015-06-07 21:17	PleasingFungus	Note Added: 0029148
2015-06-16 06:42	coledot	Note Added: 0029182
2015-06-16 18:26	PleasingFungus	Note Added: 0029183
2015-06-16 19:43	coledot	Note Added: 0029184
2015-06-16 19:45	coledot	Note Edited: 0029184
2015-06-16 20:25	PleasingFungus	Relationship added	related to 0002980