Servants Tutorial
By MasterAssassin


· How to make them run away when they notice you

I have heard many people have the problem of adding servants in their levels and when they walk near them, although they say stuff like 'Thief here!' and 'I surrender!', they don't actually run anywhere - in fact, the first time I added a HammerNovice to my level (OK, so he isn't a servant, but its close enough *), he started hurling Hammerite insults at me and even tried to attack me (with nothing)!

Anyway, this tutorial is based on JordanCS's little guide posted on the GameForum, but I know that many people try other's guides to solve their problems, and fail. So what am I going to do about this? I'll tell you what, I'm going to try out the guide myself as accurately as possible, and then re-write it adding a clearer step-by-step guide with more detail that you can shake a blackjack at, as many people have been requesting this (especially newbies). So here I go (oh, and with added pics of DromEd to make things easier at no extra cost, natch): 

1) Type 'find_obj servant' (without the quotation marks) in the command box (see pic 1), or go to the Object Hierarchy - physical > creature > animal > human > bystander > servant. Click on the 'servant' tab and choose a specific servant type if you wish, and then click 'create'.

2) Click-drag the cursor in one of the 2D views to create the servant. Shift-click and drag him in various of the 2D windows until he is in the centre of a room somewhere - probably best if you place him out of the view of the player's starting point. Click the 'floor me' button on the DromEd toolbar (see pic 2).

3) Save and press 'Alt-G' to go into your level and see your servant so far - run up to him and he should notice you and say something like 'Who are you? Help!' - he also might try 'searching' for you even though you are right in front of him. Press 'Alt-E' to go back into DromEd and we'll make him run to a specific point when he sees you.

4) Click on the servant in one of the 2D windows, and click the 'properties' button, then click - Add > AI > Responses > Alert response (see pic 3).

5) In the window that pops up, enter these properties:   

Alert level > 3 (high)
Priority > Absolute
Response > Goto object

Argument 1 > 6 
(or whichever object/guard number you want the servant to run to - in this case we've made him run to the torch in the first room, whose number is 6)
Argument 2 > very fast  

(see pic 4)

6) Click 'OK' at the bottom of the window to get back to the main DromEd screen, and go to 'Tools' and click 'Compute Pathfinding Database', 'Build AI Room Database', 'Portalise' (see pic 5) and finally save and press 'Alt-G' to go into your level and this time, when the servant sees you, he should run to the torch, or whatever you assigned to the 'Goto' property.

Good luck with your levels, and should you run into any problems using this tutorial, e-mail me at Error! Reference source not found. and I'll try to help you out. Also, e-mail me any other problems you may have with DromEd, and if there is a specific area that many people are having problems with, I'll try my best to write another detailed tutorial for it. Accompanying this tutorial is the actual test map that I used to test everything and got the screenshots from - feel free to explore it should you need to. Just place it into your main Thief directory and open it through DromEd.

By the way, you may have noticed that you hear none of your footsteps in the example level, although you do hear the servants - I spent ages trying to fix this but couldn't - it only occurred after I set the property for the servant to run away - if any of you know how to fix this, please e-mail me the solution, or even the test level with the problem fixed. Many thanks to JordanCS for providing me with the information that this tutorial originated from - read it at the TEG GameForum section, its titled 'Servants'.