Enhanced Sandbox NPCs

This mod enhances some of the NPCs spawned in the Sandbox gamemode. It's great for anyone who likes to fight NPCs or pit them against each other...or anyone who just wants to fight moving gunships on gm_bigcity .

Unlike most enhancement mods, which have their own NPCs in the spawn menu, this directly modifies any NPC spawned by the player. This means NPCs already in the map, or NPCs spawned by other means, will not be affected by default.

The video explains what this mod does pretty well, but here's a list of the most important features:

• Allows gunships, hunter-choppers, and dropships to move on more maps (only very specific maps, see FAQ) and gives the option to change their navigation pattern, only moving to chase their enemy.

• Has the ability to change the hunter-choppers' behavior to a variety of attack modes seen in Half-Life 2, including dropping bombs in front of the player's vehicle.

• Makes striders move automatically on maps with strider nodes, e.g. gm_construct

• Has an option for striders to automatically use their warp cannon (off by default)

• Hunters can now follow the nearest strider when spawned, shooting down Magnusson Devices and sticking close in combat. (Requires HL2: Episode Two, off by default)

• Combine soldiers can be mixed into different squads, which greatly increases combat variety involving large groups of soldiers.

• Combine Elites can have their accuracy automatically bumped up to Very Good.

• Combine soldiers' tactical variants can be set.

• The number of grenades a combine soldier will have can be overriden.

• Metro-Police can randomly carry manhacks on their backs based on a percentage set by the player. (off by default)

• Metro-Police can now start with their pistol drawn.

• Citizen, soldier, and metrocop reskins can now be fixed up to modern NPC standards. (Squads, grenades, etc.)

• Dog can now play fetch.

All of these features can be toggled by the player. Look for "Settings" under "Enhanced Sandbox NPCs" in the Utilities tab. These can be changed on a per-user basis, so each user in a multiplayer server can select which settings they desire. Please note that these settings only apply to NPCs spawned after that point and do not affect NPCs that have already been spawned.

If you have any questions, please see the FAQ page in this addon's "Discussions" tab.

I cannot stress this enough. It includes questions like whether this is compatible with iNPC, troubleshooting for common issues, etc.

Updates usually have associated change notes, so check the "Change Notes" tab if you're curious about a new update.

I don't have much to say about this, except that it was easier than I expected. I made this myself in about a week and I didn't know very much about Lua going into it. It's a very simple mod, as all it does is send a few inputs when a NPC is spawned and juggle a bunch of aircraft navigation stuff. There aren't as many issues as I expected, but if you encounter any problems that are not addressed in the FAQ, please post them in the comments or one of the discussions.

Again, many of these improvements use inputs from Half-Life 2, so there isn't much I could really do that I haven't done or considered already, but feel free to bring forward any ideas you might have.

The pictures were taken in gm_construct and gm_bigcity.