Creature Handler Archive

We all know about how when you REALLY want a pet to come out of combatNOW before its done, it will stay in combat and won't listen to a bunch of commands, most importantly attack and store, because it gets totally stuck in combat forever and ever.Well, here's a weird situation for ya:

There I am playing around at the tusken Vs. jawa sandcrawler POI near the krayt graveyard, and im letting my pets try to single-handedly turn the tide. I failed since the respawn was so high and pet DPS is so very low, but that's not the point. When I tried dragging the pet off of the tuskens by spamming follow when it was weak, it would of course stay in agro like a creature always would before finishing a dinner of NPC, even though the tuskens turned back. So i get it to stay a good distance away, and its still stuck in combat of course, while I go and personally study the habits of a Tusken vs. Jawa war. It was pretty interesting watching them blast each other, but I soon became bored, and wanted my pet to do something. Which of course it couldn't, being still stuck in combat, despite the fact its tusken target was dead quite a few minutes ago. So I decided to see just how big a range pets would hold this agro which has been annoyingly freezing people's pets. First we get 100 meters away, then 200, then 300, and finally I decide to see what total isolation 400 meters away would do to the pet. I burstrun to get out of its range, and when we pass the about 500 meters mark, it finally nears the edge of my radar. The moment it hits the edge, the invisible agro goes away. This seemed most strange. Furthermore, a few days ago, I had a kimogila who had gotten stuck as well, and when I swooped out of range of it, it also dropped agro. This leads me to develop a theory behind our pets invisible agro when we want it to come out of combat early.

I Believe the reason their not dropping this invisible agro is because its actually not invisible. When I had swooped out of range of my kimo the days beforehand, I had barely made it go maybe 100 meters away from the imperial stronghold I has just attacked when it stopped being agroed by something. This tells me that it's not distance related to where you issued the follow command, since in the casetonight my pet and Ihad gone a good 400 meters away to no avail. Further, since in the case tonight the target of the pet was already dead,it couldn't possibly of been targeting an NPC which had already vanished from the world several minutes ago. My theory is that the only possible reason that the pet isn't being affected by distance from the first target but will drop agro when you get out of range fromthe petis because it's not getting stuck on the agro from it's target, it's agroing THE PERSON CONTROLLING THE PET! *Big dramatic sounding music* *thunder flashes*

Yes, I believe that issuing the /follow command to a pet while its still in combat will switch the agro from its target to its very owner! The follow command, if my theory is correct, is not correctly changing the creatures state from attacking its target to following its target, and instead leaves the pet targeting you as its heading for you AND leaving it still attacking its target, which is now you. This confusion between following the owner of the pet, trying to kill the owner of the pet, (Which im guessing the game wisely doesn't let pets do, at least since Mpowers lost its /animalscare command or whatever) and trying to attack a compleatly new target is throwing pets into a loop, and the only thing they can do is follow their owner when thier issued a follow command or something. This seems to be the only explanation why my pet would immedietly drop its mysterious agro when i get out of range of it on the radar, rather than stopping when it's target was long dead and we were over 400 meters away from its last location. My radar is always set at 128 meters, so when my pet neared the line, that was about 110-120 meters when it lost the agro and became responsive again. I can't get a pet to attack a target that's more than about 100-110 meters away, it just won't see it from that range to go get it, which means that if my theory is correct, my pet dropped agro because it was outside its range of attackability from me. As far as I know, range of attackability is a constant for all CH, but i've never seen it tested anywhere, so im only assuming.

In conclusion, if anyone can think of anything that will support/weaken my theory, please tell me :/. If it turns out that my theory is correct, then we know the cause of the problem, and it's always easier to fix code when you know whats wrong, am I right? :/.