Friendly waves - respawning your friendly chain guys.

So, you've made an SP map, got your friendly AI on the friendly chain for movement, but they dwindle in number cos they keep getting killed as you play through your level.

Here's how to respawn them so you always have friendly AI helping.

If you haven't read the tutorials on friendly_chains and general AI usage - do that first.
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Make a trigger multiple give it a "TARGETNAME" of "friendly_wave".

Place a few friendly actors where you would like them to respawn. Check their SPAWNERS box in entity info.

Select the "friendly_wave" trigger and connect it to your spawners. (not the other way round). Select the spawners and connect them to the player_info_start, like you would with normal actors on a friendly chain.

And that's about it.

The default number of respawners for a friendly_wave is 7. So if you want another number, you'll have to script it.

#include maps\_utility;

#include maps\_anim;


main()
{
maps\_load::main();

level.maxfriendlies = 6;
}

That easy. When you hit the trigger, the new AI will spawn and join your friendly chain - so make sure you have enough nodes for all of them.

You can also change the number of AI that respawn with a trigger and script. So if you call a trigger_multiple "maxmen", then use this bit of code to change the number of respawners to 3.

max2()
{
maxmentrig=getent("maxmen", "targetname");
maxmentrig waittill("trigger");

	level.maxfriendlies = 3;

}

It's important to note that just because you have less respawning friendly AI on your friendly chain, doesn't mean that you get rid of the original 6. They'll still be there, but won't respawn until the number of AI drop under 3.

Once you have a working friendly_wave trigger, make others and put them throughout your map, that way your AI won't have so far to run when they respawn. The last friendly_wave trigger the player touches is the one in use.

It's also important to remember that the respawners on your friendly chain are spawners. If you want them to do funky things in script it's best to give them a script_noteworthy value as targetname won't always work (as it doesn't with standard spawners).

For instance, if you want to kill them all with script. Give your friendly AI a script_noteworthy with a value of 1 (or anything you like). Make a trigger_multiple and call it doom1.

doom1()
{
doom1trig=getent("death1", "targetname");
doom1trig waittill("trigger");

	dead1 = getentarray("1","script_noteworthy");
	for(i=0;i<dead1.size;i++)
	{
		dead1[i] dodamage(dead1[i].health + 1, (0,0,0));
	}
}

When the player hits the trigger the AI die, and then you can watch them respawn from the last friendly_wave trigger you walked through. They'll run up and rejoin your friendly_chain.

Never again will you run out of friends in battle!

Good tut, could have been written in a paragraph but meh.

If you don't want a friendly to be part of the friendly_wave system, set script_nofriendlywave to 1 on the ai and/or spawner in radiant.

Idiot Proof Tutorials don't condense into one paragraph

Good reminder about the script_nofriendlywave.

Nice tutorial, defently going to use it in the future.

The tutorial has a bad part to it.
-- You don't need to connect the spawners to the info_player start, the _spawners utility file does that for you. Heh, someone didn't read how the code works.

Yep, you don't need to connect the spawners to the player. I didn't even do that in my practise map.

The old grey matter is deteriorating with age!

Hehehe, sparks is to smart. But it would work also on this way so. Maby add it to it as a side note.

i've always wondered how i could put spawners to be part of a friendly chain...thanks yorkshire!

Nice job York, I will have to use this with my next SP map. By the way I am glad to still see you around here!

Ace, after saying that I wasn't doing any more SP mapping for COD ---- well, I am doing one more for COD2!