I would suggest letting the actors in your squad fire and act on their own to some degree, it would probably be best to have it toggleable. Otherwise having squads with mixed actors in them would be counterproductive. E.g. a sniper in a squad would currently only fire when you fire instead of when it sees a target, an actor with a grenade launcher would aim like he was using your assault rifle (or if aiming for squads is weapon dependent they'd still try to target stuff probably out of their range). Plus this means that as is, your whole squad will always focus on one target so you have to micromanage instead of letting the ai do some of the work.
Also, will the ai also make use of this squad behaviour in such a definite way? It'd be nice to see the ai being coordinated about stuff like this, especially if the player will be.

All that said, this squad stuff is great, I think it'll solve one of the major irritants in cc.

I think you'd just need to Select Group, Way-point to Actor, Deselect Group, Control said Actor.

Pretty much, you are mass allocating actors, groupies, to follow (via go-to orders) a certain actor, a leader.
When groupies are set to follow (via go-to orders) a leader, they follow the leader much like they would if they were grouped (via group orders), but they retain the ability to fire independently.

The main concerns about this work around method involves the difference between how they follow the leader.
(Do follow-actors follow differently than grouped-actors? A huge issue when you want to keep a group together.)

The way the squad works is that it just makes all the actors within the selection circle set to GoTo on your currently controlled actor.

The followers are able to fire freely on their own, but will fire at what you shoot at if you do so. Different trajectories for weapons is an issue, yes, so far I'm thinking about having only followers that have the same weapon type as the leader for coordinated fire. The idea is to give players a way to force large number of units to fire at a single point, which they'll need to do if they have a faction like Ronin and are up against Imperatus.

For moving groups of actors around, you have two ways to do it:

Form a squad and make the leader GoTo a place, and the squad will stay in a group (because the followers are following the leader)

or

Form a squad and make the leader GoTo a place, and then disband the squad. Then every follower will head towards the GoTo point without trying to stay in a group.

Well that's pretty decent then, making it so they don't get slaved to you unless you're shooting and they have the same weapon type seems like it'll keep it from being too much of a double edged sword.

I do think a way of toggling the forced firing would be good (maybe let the player toggle between none, only actors with the same weapon type and all actors) so squads won't be too restrictive. The way I see it, if the rest of your squad is shooting at some big heavy enemy or group of enemies and a small one flies at you, you probably wouldn't want to have them all spray fire at that one small actor because you're aiming at it to take it down before it squishes you. Plus not having it toggleable would make it a pain to briefly go ahead of your squad and solo an area, since you'd have to disband your squad or else you'd have a bunch of guys trying to shoot stupidly at your target from way behind you.

Also, does the squad aiming take obstacles into account? I.e. will they try to get somewhere where they can see the target before they start shooting, or will they happily shoot straight into a wall? Cause the latter could be troublesome with explosive weapons haha

They'll only shoot if they have line of sight. If they can't see it, they'll just do whatever they're currently doing.

Also, I'm not sure where we can fit in a toggle option. Your leader won't be able to move ahead in an area and solo anyways, since your squad will be following you.

I think the solution to restrictive fire would be to assume control over one of the squaddies for a short stint, then reassume the leader actor.

Unless goto has gotten very quick and clever since last release it's pretty easy to leave people following you far behind. But yeah, fair enough, you don't want clutter up the pie menu too much. There is that useless minimap button that could probably be replaced without losing much.
That said, Foa's solution seems like it'd work fine too and alleviate the worry of pie menu clutter. Do squadmates stop being in the squad if they get player controlled like normal ai modes or will it keep working?

Bad Boy: GoTo is currently being worked on so actors will follow a lot more closely, since it's essential for the squad feature. The minimap button has been removed, as well.

When the leader dies, the followers switch from GoTo to the last AIMode that the leader had. So if the leader was on GoTo to a particular point in the map, the followers would individually head to that spot by themselves if the leader died.



The issue with having every squad member selectable is that it's extremely hard to select the leader when the group is bunched up, so it'll take a bit more to make easy to use.

Hm, is there a difference between the drag-select, and quick-select?
It adds some complication to the system, but I think that drag-select should ignore squad members, while the quick select shouldn't.

There isn't a difference right now. However, if GoTo can be made so actors won't clump up but be side to side, that will make selection easier.

Also, progress on weapon type coordinated fire:



Edit: another one

Will there ever be custom AI actions for more complex weapons like the remote explosive?

The AI is a bit clumsy with grenades in general, too. In most situations won't even change to grenade when losing it's primary weapon.

Oh, and while you're still at it;

It'd require a rework of how weapons are handled in the engine. It's not first on the agenda, but it's a known thing and a thing we'd all love to have.

Priorities have to be made though.

Any plans for command groups like in RTSes? If this is going to get all tactical we'll need to be able to manage our forces more smoothly.

To generalize the above: "Will there be a way to set hotkeys to switch to \x\ actor"

There is already one for the brain actor (tap both quick keys)
A meta-game concern would be: "This may make keyboards very preferential to controllers"

• (This may be as minor/ignorable as the scroll wheel vs. controllers when changing weapons)

An ergonomic concern would be: "How would one reasonably map the hotkeys? Let alone designating them?"

• If I recall, holding a quick switch button, and moving with the directional keys activates the drag select.

Would "Hold switch button + pie menu button" be a reasonable fit?
(Adding more contexts within control space is weird, and could eventually broach Konjak's level of sophistication)

The number keys don't serve a purpose yet, right? How about holding the switch pointer over an actor and pressing a number key? You could have 1-9 marked squads that way. Controllers would have a hard time keeping up, though

Also, what exactly are these fresh icons that were mentioned a while ago?