It seems that under some circumstances which I cannot yet divine, benign a emergent will attach itself to an Omni, and stick under it, not moving away.
Does anyone know why or how to replicate/prevent this? It's rare, and only visible because the Omni seems to gain a blue spot in the middle.
That's cute. I'll try to make that happen. Does the omni need to be "flying?"
It should not happen. Save the map, take a screenshot and upload both and the game log for Virgil to investigate.
I had Omnis in space, and Emergent flying past. I'll see about replication, though I got it twice by accident and once by more-or-less design. I haven't played a map since, so we'll see.
Just finished another Exchange map, and did a test. Less then a minute to spot it, and two Emergent sat under the same Omni.
Running the current general Steam build, rather then the beta branch.
This possibly needs to change boards now...
Having played a bit with the game in the save, it looks like the Omnis may look like small Emergent, which the growing Emergent try to merge with, and end up stuck. Moving the Omni releases them, and they depart after additional collisions grow them to full size. I don't think that time makes a difference.
A quick test map in the editor (Emergent tech, mired land square, emergent at rate 2, health 1/200, max count 200) easily allowed 32 Omnis to gain emergent friends.
Yeah, the emergent was confused and was trying to "merge" with the omni. It is because omnis use virtual particles for collisions detection (just like emergent do), but the emergent wasn't checking to see if the virtual particle was owned by an omni. So, fixed in the next build (which I hope is the 1.0.2 release build, assuming nobody finds fatal flaws in the current 1.0.2b3 beta build).
I initially thought it might be a feature, and the Omni was using it in some way. This makes me more curious about the virtual particle back-end, however...