Instead of replacing the screenshot(s) and accompanying narative each time I try something with the Golden Child, I'm going to append it here. That way the full deveopment of a technique will be available. I need this to remember what I've tried before and what didn't work and you may enjoy following along.
Credit for discovery and development of Ghosting the Golden Child goes to Sneak of the EIDOS Thief Forum. Sneak noticed that the Golden Child fidgets and that this motion results in his moving forward and to his right. This is very slow movement. Sneak says it took 18 hours for the Golden Child to move all the way to the other end of the room. The problem is that he gets hung up on the left hand side of the windows so I'm placing stuff in the window area to prevent him from sliding in and getting caught. The second shot is just prior to tossing the scouting orb out so I can monitor the Golden Child's progress. He can't see Garrett all the way into the far corner. It so happens that there is a period after tossing the orb and before it flashes white and gives a picture, that Garrett can be moved with the straffe keys. So, after throwing the orb, move Garrett by straffing right until the light gem shows dark. That's when Garrett has moved back into a dark corner of the room where the Golden Child won't spot him as he shuffles by. Once the Golden Child is all the way down, Garrett can sneak out of the shadow and out of the room without the Golden Child spotting him.
Wednesday, March 28th, 06:00
Here are shots of the Golden Child hung up on the first window. The second shows him Snudged out away from the wall far enough for him to get past. Clearly the Speed Potion vial is not thick enough or he's not clipping it. The only thing thicker is the Scouting Orb and possibly the Hammer head. I've tried the Scouting Orb before and he get's hung up on it. I guess I'll have to try again and see if the Speed Potion vial will get him out far enough to slide around the Scouting Orb. It's a real pain that the physical and visual shapes and sizes of these objects don't match -- very difficult to see just what's happening. I do recall thinking he was about 8" to a foot out from the wall before he gets to the window and that's where he gets Snudged out to in the second screenshot so I'm starting to think he's just not clipping the Speed Potion vial. While I was setting up for my next attempt with the Scouting Orb in the corner of the window when I pushed the Speed Potion vial up against the Orb they didn't clip and the vial ended up inside the Orb. Or perhaps the Golden Child's clipping is above the vial? There is some evidence for this. Sneak's successful attempt included boxes which the Golden Child did not clip and also had vials stacked higher up in the window.
Wednesday, March 28th, 15:45
There is evidence that the Golden Child clips the edge of the window at sill level too. Sneak's successful Ghost of him included use of the Mechanist Mace which sits on the window sill and prevents the Golden Child from getting hung up. So, now I'm thinking maybe even that the Golden Child may clip some potion vials and not others since he seems to get hung up when setting them on the window sill where they clearly clip Garrett out away from the edge of the window.
No matter. I've decided on a little different approach to figuring this all out. Part of my problem is days pass during all this and I'm not remembering what I may have tried before. I have been setting up the window with items then reading the Scripture Passage which spawns the Golden Child and then letting the game run for 3 or 4 hours until he works his way across to see if he gets stuck or not. This isn't really a problem since I've plenty to keep me occupied while waiting but I'm thinking there may be a more direct and quicker way.
I've bonked the patrolling guard and will run the game to get the Golden Child up to the first window. At that point he still doesn't spook off Garrett in the far corner. I'll set up a configuration in the far window and quaff an Invisibility Potion to get behind the Golden Child and Snudge him down to the last window and then let the game run to see if this'll do the trick or not. I'll still have to wait while he works his way across the window but not nearly so long.
Wednesday, March 28th, 20:30
This first set of shots I took as a sort of benchmark with nothing in the window. It takes about ten or fifteen minutes to Snudge him down from the far end of the room just before the first window to a spot just before this last window. The first screenshot is just before he gets to the window, the second at about the middle of the window, the third at the hang up point, and the last just past the window. I Snudged him past the hang up point. I tried to take all shots at about the same point in his cycle.
It turns out his movement can be seen. Recall anytime a mobile AI starts walking up a stairway when he meant to miss it and walk by. At some point not too far up he'll get close to an edge and fall back down to the level he started on. But you can't see him fall. One instant he's on the stairway and next he's on the floor. Something like that happens here. At some point during the Golden Child's movement cycle he'll jitter in the direction he's moving. This doesn't happen during all movement cycles but it is very clear when it does happen. It only takes five or ten movement cycles to determine whether he's moving forward or not. Stand just behind him and pick out a small spot on the edge of his skin, match it with a small vertical spot on the window or wall, wait a few cycles and check again. As far as these screenshots go, whether or not he is into the window opening is shown by the position of his feet.
These next two shots are with the Hammer Mace in the window. This worked for Sneak. I wanted a benchmark of something that worked. Although I Snudged the Golden Boy to the first shot and then close to the hang up point and then let him work his way past the edge I'm pretty confident he could do this all by himself. This Mace sequence demonstrates that an object on the window sill and the Golden Child will clip each other so I shouldn't need to position objects higher up in the window.
So now I've got a method to try a set up that takes no more than an hour. Next I'll try the Invisibility Potion vial. Sneak positioned two of these, one atop the other, in the sticking edge of the window in his successful attempt.
Thursday, March 29th, 09:30
Here are the results of the Invisibility Potion vial test. The first shot in the centre of the window he should be as far into the window as he's going to get. The second shot he's hung up on the vial! I had set up for a full run through with the Invisibility Potion vials in both windows last night. I left the Orb pointing at the first window thinking he would be at least that far by the time I got up today. Nothing! Of course the AI aren't animated if they're not rendered so he didn't move at all! Duh!
Here are a couple of more shots demonstrating my method of determining whether he's moving forward or not. Note especially the second gold band from the end of the top exhaust pipe coming out of his back relative to the white circle feature on the window. I see it moving from inside the circle to outside. These two shots were taken 8 movement cycles or about 72 seconds apart. I also notice now the pointed tip of his left shoulder moving from on the vertical black line to past it.
Hold the phone! I had noticed on other occasions that if I ran around to the Golden Boy's left side almost up with him he sometimes started and jumped back a couple of feet. So, rather than start back with him at the first window for the Invisibility and Healing Potion vials test I thought I'd see if I couldn't get him back before the last window with one or two of these moves. I couldn't get him to jump. I kept working my way forward until I was directly in front of him as seen in the screenshot. He's blind. When did this happen? Well, this is certainly something to check into. If he goes blind early on then maybe I don't need to worry about the windows after all. Maybe I can just creep out. Dunno yet whether I can get out without red in my visibility gem. If this doesn't work out I'm going to carry on with the tests I was doing.
Thursday, March 29th, 11:30
Okay. I've played around a bit with the blind Golden Boy. You can do pretty much what you want with him like this but he doesn't spawn blind! I tried a few times slow crouch-creeping out and he spotted me every time. BTW, I noticed that you can return him to his spawn point anytime just by reading the Scripture Passage again. Don't know why you'd want to but there's another detail. This shot is the test I'm trying now with the Invisibility and Health Potion vials jammed left on the window sill. I'll try jamming them to the right side if this doesn't work. I've got 2 Invisibility and 8 Healing Potion vials which is just enough to do two windows this way. I think even if I used the Mace to get him all the way up to the second window he'd spot me since he seems to have pretty good peripheral vision. At least, I quaffed an Invisibility Potion and ran out and around the pillar so I was parallel with him and when the Potion wore off he started.
He's made it past the first vial so I'll just leave him while I go for my walk and check back in in a couple of hours.
Thursday, March 29th, 17:30
That set up didn't work. Neither did all Healing Potion vials. I did some experimenting and to my eye the Invisibility Potion vial is the smallest, the Healing Potion vial next, and the Speed Potion vial the largest. I'm of the mind that the Golden Child is not getting hung up on the vials but that the vials aren't pushing him far enough out of the window and he's still getting stuck on the edge. Just in case I made sure I could escape from the shadow by the chest with him stuck on the third window. No problem. Next I'm trying a progression of vials, Invisibility first, Healing next, and finally Speed to see if this works.
Thursday, March 29th, 22:00
None of the variations of vials standing up worked. I tried also laying the vials down perpendicular to the Golden Boy's direction of motion base sticking out into the room. No luck here either. In fact he seemed to be getting hung up on the vials themselves. When he stopped I'd retrieve the vial and could see him progress a little further before he got caught on the edge of the window. So I fiddled a little bit with laying the vials down and on an angle to see if he might be able to get past them this way. I didn't have any luck yet but I'm wondering if since I've got the slanted vials flush left maybe they'd work better in the second last position. Having the base of the vial further out into the room than if it were standing should push him a little further out too. Anyhow, it's time for bed so even though I'm not sure about this set up working I've set it up to run right through and will leave it run overnight to see what happens.
Friday, March 30th, 04:30
That didn't work. I'll continue testing variations of angled vials laying flat. Sometimes I get frustrated or bored working out these sorts of things. In this case I'm lucky that I've still got some loot to find so I can take a break to find it. Or I may even start over since I haven't tried any boxes here and Sneak's successful Ghost involved boxes. I dropped all seventeen boxes onto the roof of the main entranceway to Angelwatch so if I want some here I'll have to go back out of Angelwatch to get them or, as I said, start over. I may even take a break to play a fan mission or two.
06:30
This progression of angles on the Healing Potion vials is promising. Will see in a while if he can get around the edge with this. At least he has worked around the first two vials. May need steeper or shallower.
Saturday, March 31st, 09:30
Nope! This didn't work either. Plus a whole bunch of other configurations didn't work either. And after a few tries with the Hammerite Mace failing I'm looking around for an alternate method. Since one of my all time favorite tools, the Box, wasn't available (I'd thrown them all onto the entranceway roof), I went back to my save just after cleaning out Angelwatch but before the front entrance Ghost and redid it. I was a lot quicker this time and many fewer fall attempts to get the zero damage ones. I'm continuing to experiment with the Golden Boy.
19:00
Not much to report now. I have gone out and found the missing 20 loot. It was one coin in the fountain in the Angelwatch Ballroom on the sixth floor. I've had a few e-mail chats with Sneak about the Golden Child and it sounds like the Hammerite Mace is a tricky bit of work too. Anyway, I reread Sneak's Ghost report of this mission and one time he had boxes stacked around the Golden Boy's spawn point he spawned and spun looking toward the door. I've been playing around a bit with this. And trying to get the Golden Boy to move to his left. So far no luck.
Sunday, April 1st, 09:00
Always playing in the back of my mind was the path the Golden Child was trying to make but being blocked by the wall. It niggled at me that this angle may relate to the angle between clip points of objects put in the window sill to deflect him out past the window edge. I managed to get him away from the wall by startling him back into a stack of four Healing Potion Vials and then to position him as showing in the screenshot. Specifically where his toes touch is pretty close to the seam junction of the floor tiles. The tiles are four by eight wall stripes so we'll see where he crosses out of the tile and figure the angle he traveled from the junction he started at. I've run it for a while now and can already see after he's traveled only about a foot that this angle is quite sharply into the windows. Say, perhaps seventy of so degrees away from the path along the wall.
11:00
Here's the result so far. I may let him carry on over the next tile to the right to be more accurate but this may serve. The result is that he moves at least two wall stripes forward for four wall stripes to his right. It looks to me like he actually goes a bit further forward than this but since I'm trying to come up with a maximum deflection angle I'll underestimate this distance to maximize his angle into the wall. That way any deflection pattern I come up with should suffice. As suspected early in this test this angle is a lot steeper into the wall than I had originally thought. I had always assumed this angle was shallow, more like along a line straight forward from his orientation while are rest between his pointings. At most 10 degrees. Not so!
The next test I do may be to see if he'll rotate like other AI when flush up against a wall. Since it's been over an hour game time since I finished Snudging the first floor sentry against a wall I have gone back down to see if he's rotated. He has not! He's still face up against the wall. This is disappointing. The AI in Lady Louisa's rotated. The ramp sentry in Benny's Dead also rotated. I don't know what the difference between these AI is. I have no preconcieved notion about whether the Golden Boy will rotate or not. In any case whatever I come up with to block his path will have to block him from moving along this path. I make it a tangent of 2/4=.5 which makes it an angle of about 63 degrees to the right from the window wall line.
If I jam him into a corner what might he do? Or, more importantly, if he's left up against the edge of the window he keeps getting caught up on what will he do. I suspect he's been stuck like this before for considerable time while I've left him overnight. He never seemed to ratate at all in these cases. If the jerky motion I observe while watching him closely is any indication he seems only to be knocked back along this path he wants to travel on rather than rotate. We'll see. If he could be rotated to his right at some point Garrett could probably just amble out when he's looking away!
Okay, I've got him into the far corner and will leave him for a couple of hours to see what he does. Not sure what this might prove since I'll need to build a corner to simulate this. If he does rotate. And to his right. Then Soulforge may be ghostable since this steep angle might put him into the corner to his right and then if he rotates to his right he'll be facing the wall and Garrett can pass. Hope he doesn't turn too quickly or Garrett won't have enough time to do anything before he'll be spotted getting back out.
Monday, April 2nd, 08:30
I've had no special results trying to get the Golden Child to rotate or move to this left at all at his spawn point. I've laid down a tight pattern of Healing Potion Vials and he comes down right in the middle of them and wiggles through. Garrett's model goes down close to the floor and he can shove Vials around on the floor so I know I got them all flush up against each other. I think the clipping portions of objects are points rather than lines or even solids.
Anyhow, I'm back to fiddling with objects on the window sill. A couple of things I haven't tried yet are pushing them flush to the right of the window. I suspected sometimes he was clipping the left window edge even before he got to the last object. If he gets by the first four Healing Potion Vials in the first screenshot why can't he get by the last one? So, push them all flush right and see what happens.
I always pushed the objects into the window as far as they'd go too. So, the second setup I've left them where they land and further tried to have them work out away from the window progressively.
11:30
The first test above didn't work. Not only that but when he was hung up I retrieved the last Healing Potion Vial and he didn't move forward at all. So, now, let's try the progressive one and see what happens. The set up I put the first two in as far as they would go and tried to inch backward and to drop the other three each one a little more out of the window. Some of these last three aren't as flush to the one on their right as they could be. I have checked and I can make them flush by dropping the next one slightly on top. The one I'm dropping bounces off and away but the one it lands on does move a little over to the right. I had thought I could only push them right back walking into them and this always pushed them into the window too. When the dropped onto one stops moving right it's flush against the one on its right. Next time maybe.
13:30
Not ultimate success yes but for a change some encouraging news. He did not get hung up on any of the Vials. When he did get hung up I removed the last Vial and he did not move forward. So I conclude he was still getting hung up on the window edge. I then did a short test with the first Vial as far out of the window as I could get it which visually put it right out beyond the window sill and he got around it! Another plus is that he didn't push any of the Vials into the window. I had worried that since his angle of movement is so steep into the wall he might have anough force to push them in. Even though there is a little more space than five Healing Potion Vials on the sill I hope that getting five on it will be enough. I haven't tested this yet but he may not be strong enough to move even a single vial. But I don't want him sliding between them if there's a bigger gap and getting hung up like he did when I lay them down pointing out of the window. In any case, now that I've got him at least a little ways out may I could put the last one or two laid down to get even more effect. So this set up.
21:30
None of this has worked. I have yet to be able to get any configuration of items in the window to prevent the Golden Boy from clipping the window edge. This includes Healing Potion Vials stacked three high, extending to the top of the Golden Boy's head, and flush against the window edge. In all cases when he got stuck I retrieved the objects but he didn't move so I concluded he was stuck on the window edge and not the object. Also included is the Hammerite Mace which did do the trick for Sneak. Here are a couple of screenshots of the Mace in an attempt to map its clipping position, size and shape. On the floor there are Healing Potion Vials in the shaft at either end of the clipping area to illustrate that the shaft itself does not contribute to clipping. The highest Vial is actually sitting on top of the clipping zone like the screenshot in the window. The Mace head appears to go past the window pane. How is this since the other objects don't? The Golden Boy has a clipping size slightly larger for the upper boxes. But he does clip single boxes. Box heights are an inch or two above the window sill. Why won't he clip any of the objects except the Mace that I put in the window? Does he not clip Healing Potion Vials. I know he clips Speed Potion Vials at least laying down because he did move forward to the window edge after I retrieved it. Sneak had the Golden Boy inside boxes and raised a few inches off the floor and this must have changed the clipping dynamics somehow. Maybe I'll try a set of five healing potions all laying down in the window sill and see what that does. At what height does he clip the box? By watching his feet as he goes along the wall and then slides into the window opening I have an idea how far in he's going and it's pretty close to the distance the upper box is relative to the lower box. What does this mean? In order for the Mace to work the clipping area that was affected by the Mace has to be between the window sill and the top of the Mace clipping zone which seems to extend up to about the height of a Healing Potion Vial. If that's true why doesn't the Healing Potion Vial on the window sill affect him. Nothing seems to keep him from sliding into the window. But it is further to the pane than he moves in so I'm thinking it's his lower clip that hits the wall and stops him from going further in. That would put his upper clip in the window space and it catches on the edge. How high up is his upper clip? No higher than two boxes. Stack stuff this high?
Tuesday, April 3rd, 07:30
Although I didn't calibrate how far out in front and beyond the lower box his upper clipping zone is I'm going to assume that it does for now. That may explain why he hits the edge before he clips the last object. It may be higher up too. But not higher than the Mace zone. If it is true that he doesn't go into the window all the way then it must be his upper clipping zone that is up against the wall outside the window and his lower clipping zone against the wall while in the window. Like I said the distance between his lower and upper clipping zones as shown by the boxes is about the distance he goes in by my eye. So don't worry about his lower clipping zone I guess is what this says. Worry about his upper clipping zone. Exactly how high is it? No higher then the top of the Mace. It looks to me like the top of the Mace clipping zone is at about the crossbar on the window pane.
11:30
Well now. By standing so when I look straight forward over top of the Golden Boy I've dropped everything in my inventory. Some bounce off him, some don't. Most don't. Those that do: Scouting Orb, Gas Mine, Mine, Hammerite Mace, Sunburst Device, and, of course, boxes. All of the Potion Vials, keys, food items, etc. fall straight through. This would explain why I'm having so much difficulty getting him to clip around stuff in the window sill. I'll reload with Mines and Scouting Orbs and see what happens.
15:00
Well suck me dry and call me Dusty! First thing I try and it works. Stacked a couple of Mines, Snudged him up about half way through the window and flush right, went and hit a bucket of balls. Voila! I really expected him to get stuck on the Mines but he even worked his way out around them to boot. Wow! And that "Eek!" jump back reaction I'd gotten out of him while Snudging about three feet back from the Scouting Orb and the Mines didn't fire this time. Difference is he had not already been alerted -- fresh start this time. Will have to wait until tonight to fire it up for real. If I can wait. Boy, that's a load off. All smiles now.
Wednesday, April 4th, 04:00
I started this about 4:00pm yesterday but I've Alt-Tab'd out for about an hour and a half so it's been running for about 10 and a half hours. Just past the second window. I've abandoned the Scouting Orb and will monitor his progress from here directly. Just a matter of time now!
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