I hope this hasn't been asked? But I'm sure it has and I just cannot find it. I was goofing around with a mod that would make The Baron a pet, and it dawned on me that I'd never seen the Trained Hunting Diggles burrow through the earth, and using a mod that made The Baron into a pet? I noticed that his on-hit blink doesn't work, and never casts spells. So it seems pets cannot cast spells or use procs ... Is this the case or am I just missing something?
I'm not privy to all the details because I never tried to get a pet working all properly and stuff, but there is the fact that friendly monsters use a different AI than unfriendly ones. I don't remember what the exact differences are, but burrowing I think was a lost cause. As for on-hjt effects, I know something was wrong with those, but I don't quite remember what it was now. It did have to do with some effects not working properly depending on what triggerered them, that much I remember, and it may have been about pets, but I can't tell you for sure that it was. There certainly are work-arounds, the simplest of which is giving the skill that gives you the spell for summoning such a pet an on-hit effect for the player with an aura that would only work on monsters with an obscure tag that you'd give to the summon that triggers the effect you'd want the monster to have, though obviously there would be some spell juggling for this (but it's simple enough if you know what to do) and obviously it wouldn't be quite the same.
Wow, as much as I love this game and have played it to death (and back again), the programming sure is out of this world ;o
Yes, well ... some of those things certainly could count as “amateur mistakes” of sorts, if it's possible to call someone who released a thing and had people buy it an amateur, but at least when it comes to writing working AI-esque stuff for games I can say that this can be a challenge that stumps even experienced people on occasions. Sure, it's not a programming disaster like some games are (won't name anything, but there are some absolute monstrosities with idiot programming running rampant), but we can't hide the fact that the last few updates that this game got were as much about expanding support for modding (a lot of it via adding hooks for things so that stuff can actually work outside of the original capacity and thus be useful for modders) as they were about fixing bugs. I don't think any of the dev team thought, until the point when it happened, that the game will get as much support as it did.
