[MUA1] About giving specific commands to allies with code

[Shabranigdu]

As BloodyMares asked about this, I'll try to explain what I did with some boosters to give commands to allied characters and minions.

Commanding an actor is as "simple" as putting them into a custom fightmove using "victimeventtag" on the attack of your choice, just like any interaction type does with grapples, but instead of an existing interaction you can send them into new fightmoves where you decide what they will do. I used this to force Regina's t-rex to use only some states and animations instead of throwing kicks around as a Regina clone

Another part of a custom command that I wanted was giving directions, which I used with the "victimface" property in the "victim" trigger to make sure the affected actor moves in the direction the player character is facing at the time. I used this to command enemies to move in specific ways with Emma Frost and to direct minions like Multiple Man's and Goblin Queen's

The idea that I had for all this to work with existing allied actors including your team, is to do the same after briefly becoming an enemy, I turn the player to the enemy team with the "team_switch" affecter for powerups, just for a fraction of a second before I use a radial attack that affects everything around. Another important detail is to use the "apply" properties as follows to turn enemies as well, otherwise they may get affected when you only want to command allies:
      apply_self = true ;
      apply_ally = false ;
      apply_enemy = all ;

I've also used this in a more direct way to command invisible actors to change states for interactive stuff instead of minions, for example with Boom Boom or Snake, where an explosive charge can be detonated manually by forcing the invisible actor to explode with another specific fightmove. In this case I used just powerups that changed the "affecter" directly on the invisible allied actors, and allowed them to chain into their other explosive states, which they can't chain normally from idle because of the "require"

Last but not least, you can define "require" properties with "affecter" variables to make sure only specific affected actors receive commands. I've used this with the aforementioned summoners, so ally commands only affect Multiple Man dupes or goblins instead of the whole team, by giving them the affecter when the actor is created, and adding the requirement to the custom fightmove that you will command them into.
Without the affecter, I've used this to force the team to run in specific directions and use generic attacks


As a side note, I tried to use this to make allies use specific powers from their own sets but it didn't work properly and they seemed to use generic powers, so this works with your character's own defined fightmoves until I find another way because I also tried to make Nick Fury command specific power usage from other heroes so for now I'm stuck with defining them as new moves in the commander's specific files