A question on summoned animals (from spell). Currently when I summon an animal it does nothing. I am wondering if this is because I also have an animal companion who is not yet trained to attack, or whether the behaviour of summons has been changed so that they are not for attacking.
Ooooo good question... summons obviously shouldn't have to be trained, they should do something. I'll have a look at that, they should be different to the training thing. Can I ask was this summon an animal-companiony sort of critter (a bear or wolf) or something exotic like a fire bat?
Usually when you summon stuff you have to be close for them to act. If my M U summons something and is hiding too far away from the action the summoned creature just stand and watch
Usually I summon my stuff just behind the enemy, but that's me. BenWH, that's probably it: the wolves are set up as ACs. If you're still in the mood for some Conjuring, please try summoning something exotic like a Quasit or Efreet and see what happens.
Commanded undead tend to just stand around most of the time, too ... but this was also a problem in ToEE proper, probably has nothing to do with the TC.
It doesn't seem like it's an animal training issue - the scripting has an explicit exemption for summoned creatures, and I have also tested using a summon vs. the gnoll caves and it was fine. More likely it's a faction issue - I've observed this behavior in a random encounter where the wolf wouldn't attack other wolves and gnolls, who also had the same faction. To confirm this, can you describe the situation in which this bug occurred?
Working on fixing this now (it's a big issue - or is if you do it thoroughly - so was not included in the 1.0.1 patch) and I've hit the first moment of interest. Summon Nature's Ally 1 has 4 animals, 2 of which (Dire Rat and Wolf) are the same protos as animal companions. Does that cause a problem? Presumably it would, but it's perhaps a comment on how few rangers / druids cast the spell against the player (let alone against a player playing a ranger/druid who has one of those critters for an animal companion). Anyway, I am taking no chances: all ACs (which are hard coded), Summonses, Random Encounters and animals in the game generally will be kept completely separate.
