I'm afraid I don't really understand the speed attribute for mobs, despite having played around with it.

The Gridarta help says a bigger number is faster (makes sense), but there seems to be a restricted range of useful speeds.  i.e. setting speed to 100 doesn't seem to do anything.  The help also talks about negative value being used to ensure related mobs don't appear synchronised.

So, what I'm after is a definitive set of guidelines that state sensible values for speed, and also to explain what -ve or +ve values represent.

Anyone?

Afaik, speed is how many seconds it takes between the mob moving. One thing to note is a tick is 1/8 of a second, and the server is based on ticks, which is the smallest unit of time in game. So a speed of 0.125 makes the mob as fast as it can be, which is about as fast as a player at 100% speed. The next step is a speed of 0.0675, which makes the mob move once every two ticks, or the same as a player at 50% speed. Unfortunately, you can't make it so a mob can move twice every 3 ticks (66% player speed) for example, and I think the gap between moving once every two ticks and once a tick is a bit too much there, as the mob goes from quite fast to insanely fast, and nothing in between. You can set it to a value between those numbers but it will in reality set the movement speed to one or the other.

Negative values for speed is basically the same as a positive value, except it's randomised a little so a group of mobs with the same value doesn't all move at the same speed. This is what it means about them appearing synchronised.

Also a thing to keep in mind is that regeneration and casting time is also affected by speed as well, though I don't think it's restricted to such discrete values as movement is.

Thanks Lippy.  That makes sense.  And I see I've misunderstood the "synchronised" concept - I thought it was related to which animation frame each mob was on, but its really just about speed of mobs - i.e. which mob will move from one tile to another first.  Obvious now really

Is there any way to make it so that a bunch of identical mobs do not all swing their swords at exactly the same time - e.g. one starts on frame 1 of its animation, while the next starts on frame 2?

I don't think that's possible right now. Perhaps when the animation handling is moved over to being client-sided it could be synchronised to when the mob actually swings the weapon, which would allow for them animating at different speeds, etc.

There's an anim_speed attribute. I can't remember offhand how it works, but I fiddled with speed and anim_speed too stop Sarah from bounding about her map too fast Torch, so you might find it helpful to look at her.