When there are more monster invasion spawns than monsters spawning, this should be truly random.

[Moesh-zz]

As a level designer, I want to create a scenario where monsters spawn in many, many locations and begin pathfinding towards spawnpoints. Think a city level, or Strogg mutant production facility.

How the current behavior works:

• The first n invasion monster spawns are chosen when summoning in spawns:

Minimum proposed behavior:

• All spawnpoints are entered into the randomization pool.

Additional proposed behaviors:

• A flag on a spawn point that says, "a monster must always spawn here"
• A flag on a spawn point that says, "enter spawn pool at [x] wave"

[zardoru]

I want to consider some other aspects to this issue. I think we can use map triggers to control this without the use of scripting, activating and deactivating spawns.

I propose the following:

• "trigger_invasion_wave" that activates its targets when a wave is reached.
  • 'count' property would say what wave.
  • 'style' can have a flag that would say if it repeats every 'n' waves, where 'n' is a different property from count, like 'delay'.

In effect, every 'mass' waves it starts counting from 1 again, so 'count' would trigger again with such a flag.

Regarding the flags, in addition to the previous trigger:

• Add a flag to spawnflags to monster spawns, indicating "a monster must always spawn here."
• Interpret 'delay' as being the wave where the spawn self-activates.

And the following behaviours:

• Spawns start inactive if a spawnflag is set
• Activating a spawn via a trigger allows it to be used as a spawn point
• Activating a spawn via a trigger that already is active deactivates it.

What do you think? Are there any other tools we may need to have a better control?

EDIT: I had forgotten, due to how pathfinding works now, caching links to valid nodes, I also propose the following:

• target_pathfinding_refresh: when triggered, the pathfinding cache is dropped to allow monsters to navigate previously closed off areas.