make pheromone visible for all aliens regardless of distance?

Wyzcrak · January 2016

I've created a pheromone with Pheromone.lua's CreatePheromone(...). It's a LargeThreatMarker.

How can I make that pheromone visible to all alien players regardless of distance or location, such that the pheromone's icon appears in the player's HUD and provides a waypoint on the ground no matter where that player is on the map when the pheromone is created?

Put another way: How do I override the distance at which the pheromone renders in the alien player's HUD?

Wyzcrak · January 2016

I've tried overriding Pheromone's GetAppearDistance to return kMaxRelevancyDistance.

function Pheromone:GetAppearDistance()
return kMaxRelevancyDistance
end

This seems not to change the distance from which I can see the pheromone as a player, and I'm not sure what else to modify.

My goal is to see the ThreatMarker pheromone, and its waypoint, from any location on the map.

Wyzcrak · January 2016

I made the pheromone render regardless of distance by replacing GetMostRelevantPheromone in PlayerUI_GetOrderPath such that 300 is passed into GetEntitiesWithinRange when my mod needs the greater render distance.

local function ReplacementGetMostRelevantPheromone(toOrigin)
    local pheromones = GetEntitiesWithinRange("Pheromone", toOrigin, modSpecificCondition and 300 or 100)
    local bestPheromone
    local bestDistSq = math.huge
    for p = 1, #pheromones do
    
        local currentPheromone = pheromones[p]
        local currentDistSq = currentPheromone:GetDistanceSquared(toOrigin)

        if currentDistSq < bestDistSq then
        
            bestDistSq = currentDistSq
            bestPheromone = currentPheromone
            
        end
        
    end
    
    return bestPheromone
end

ReplaceLocals( PlayerUI_GetOrderPath, { GetMostRelevantPheromone = ReplacementGetMostRelevantPheromone } )

Many thanks to Dragon, McGlaspie, Samus, and Golden for their help in Discord.

Note to self: the contents above of ReplacementGetMostRelevantPheromone were copied from build 279's GetMostRelevantPheromone in Player_Client.lua, so I might need to update my replacement method's contents to suit changes in future builds.

make pheromone visible for all aliens regardless of distance?

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