Questions about MASS system.

Development Programming & Scripting AI
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1

Good Afternoon,

I just went through this tutorial First 60 Minutes in Mass and have a few questions before I dive any further.

  1. How do you connect Zone Shape points to form a complete shape. Currently they go the direction they’re supposed to (a two lane “road” passing by each other) but they stop at the seam and bunch up.

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  2. In the tutorial it sets up a “Default” movement style of just scooting along the direction of travel. I would like for it to be a hopping motion (actor is at rest when on the ground and must jump in the direction of travel to actually move), so where and how would I work on this movement style.

  3. The tutorial didn’t seem to address whether zone shapes were necessary or not, so is it possible to dictate their movement by having them spawn in one area and travel to a “goal” point, and deviating only when within a certain range of the player/other actor?

  4. Can this system handle “engaging” with the player. For these it would be little more than more aggressive jumping at the player leading to the character exploding on the player.

2023-09-12 16-21-55.mkv (24.6 MB)
^This is kind of what I’m shooting for, these are actors that jump to move around and hop towards the player when they get close, exploding on contact. With this I can get around 300 actors before frames drop below 60 and I would like to use mass to inflate this number several fold if possible.

Any direction or help would be much appreciated!

2

So I found you do not need to use the Zone Shapes/Graphs for spawning, you can default to the EQS SpawnPoints Generator shown in the tutorial.

Now I have an additional problem of if I spawn more than 100 on the Mass Spawner, my actors lose all collision. Might be more accurate to say the start overlapping all, as they are still destroying themselves through an On Overlap event I set up.

Here’s a short clip of what I mean:
2023-09-13 16-19-16.mkv (14.7 MB)

There is a counter in the top left that counts these spawned actors (3 are located elsewhere in the level) which is how I know they are still triggering their On Overlap event somehow.

Also I would like to drop this here for anyone else looking into MASS: Github Megafunk