Cool, thanks. I've always believed full customaization was the goal but the project ended up on the back burner for whatever reason. But we've wasted alot of gas, lets get cooking. At the end of the day, as long as the devs get the idea eventually and they have the potential of substanitive comments from threads, I'm good.
Cool, thanks for the response. I'm going to put the same thing out to hopefully hear that I'm wrong about trashing the whole thing but if thats the case, then I must have a point about fixing the whole thing? Catch 22 lol
so, please feel free to respond: Would you miss sidekicks if they were gone? My answer: No Would you like them if they were at least as stylish as henchmen? My answer: Yes Should you depend on Sidekicks or henchmen? My answer: No
My answers - Yes. I use sidekicks on my healer and troll builds mostly, and like having them for stuff like Heatwave in the duo as they draw away a lot of the agro, more than henchmen most times, and are on separate timers from my Nightmare bat. Sure. I'd like to see some cooler looking sidekicks, but via some convoluted 'imprint' system where it might take lots of programming time away from DLC develompent, bug fixes or character style improvement? No. 'Depend' on them? No. Get some use out of them, sure. If the only thing separating you from a loss or win in a run is your sidekick or henchmen, you are doing something wrong...regardless of how they look cosmetically.
Would I like to see more customization? Sure I would. I just think that this particular idea may be more complicated then you are assuming. Even with my limited knowledge of coding (but almost 2 decades of experience seeing what mistakes can break) I can foresee a lot of potential issues with it. Here, let me give you an example of how complicated things can get from my attempts to code. I started up Unity and created a pair of cubes and a sphere on a flat featureless plane. I then sprinkled trees from an asset pack I bought. I made the sphere player controllable for my coding experiment, using a script I copied from one of the tutorials. I colored one face of each cube red, to count as the front. I then added a non-physics cone to the front of each sphere. The cone I was using as a visual cue. With a bit of effort (and lots of trial and error) I got a working that had each cube patrol back and forth along a different route. At the end of each path the cube would stop, turn to 'look' left and right a couple times, then turn around and go the other way. That worked fine. Next I added a script to cause the cubes to do ranged attacks against the sphere, which I'd given 100 health. That worked fine, although they wouldn't patrol due to always knowing where the sphere was, which overrode the patrol script. Finally I got a script working which would cause the cubes to only notice the sphere if it entered that cube's cone. On it's own, that too worked. Finally I tried combining everything... And everything got chaotic. During the next hour of playtesting my creation the cubes never once acted as they were suppose to. Sometimes they would patrol without ever noticing the sphere. Sometimes they would start attacking the sphere from across the map despite having never entered the 'notice player' area. Sometimes they would patrol until I entered the cone of perception, then run off to attack a random tree. And once a the cubes kept attacking each other. I'm still trying to figure out where the problem in my code is that caused such random behavior, since each of the 3 scripts on their own did mostly work. Just one example of how complex it can be.
Please don't assume what I'm assuming. I'm not assuming anthing. Its acknowledged in the OP about the difficulty. I just believe it is time for action and I have submitted several potenitially actionable plans if the developers seem them that way.
I dont mean to seem "snarky" but you are not aware of my professional or educational experience and I dont feel the need to continue down a technical debate about the topic based on some of the appeareant limitations you have brought up. I see your point and understand fully but I'm tired of excuses being made for why feet were dragged in these areas for a decade. I just want action in these areas and these are attempts to support that end goal.
Okay everyone this guy had troubles in Blender once so it's official; Game Development is just too hard and risky and Game Developers shouldn't be expected to develop games or add new long requested features ever. On a serious note, one downside to adding customizable sidekicks through an imprint method would be the memory performance for things like world bosses, having essentially more "players" added in the map. But that's an issue that should have been resolved with a new UI as Jens said the current one is terribly coded and buggy and performance heavy, I'm hoping the planned fix of "text" will improve performance to open up for features like this one.
I get that the potential for having more "players" on the map but also the potential for less actual bodies overall (if you consider choosing a sidekick over three henchmen as less). Now I get that the demand on performace may be more due to memory stresses caused by the extra sidekicks and the tech used to pull this off but, you probably know, that when people are added to full phases, it gets pretty glitchy too. I believe that's comparitive to your point. While believe there are certain processes that could be done to limit the impact of such a change, I'm used to dealing with bugs and glitches. Doesn't have to be perfect (slightly downgraded quality or whatever) I just want them to fix it, do something, one way or another. lol
