Tracking Bond

In the game GoldenEye 007, guards can be alerted to Bond's presence either by seeing Bond or hearing enough Noise.

Overview

Tracking refers to when a guard has been alerted and is trying to find Bond, without having a direct line-of-sight to Bond. For example, if you make a lot of noise, guards are going to start running towards Bond's position, even though they've never seen him stand there. Similarly, if you let a guard see you, then run and hide behind a wall, the guard is going to run after you.

So how does a guard know where to run if he hasn't seen Bond? Well, the answer is pretty obvious: Bond's position gets copied, and then stored among the guard's data.

In the case where you alert a guard by making noise, the guard will copy Bond's position the instant he is alerted. On the other hand, if you let a guard see you, he won't run immediately, but will instead play a shooting animation. Bond's position will be copied as soon as the guard actually starts running, after the animation has ended. The same is true if you alert a guard by shooting next to him, he might do an animation such as looking around himself, and will not store Bond's position until that animation is over and he starts running.To summarize:

Guards copy Bond's position at the same moment they start running

Once the guard starts running, he will try to reach the exact position that was copied, no matter how far away it is. What happens next is either:

1. Guard finds Bond and starts shooting
2. Guard doesn't find Bond, and stops at the copied position.
3. Guard doesn't find Bond, breifly stops at the copied position, and then starts running again (towards Bond's new position).

It's obvious what triggers #1, but what about #2 and #3?

It turns out that Bond's position isn't the only thing that gets copied. At the moment the guard starts running, he will also copy the current time. When the guard has reached Bond's position and stopped, the game compares the guard's stored time with the current time, and if more than 10 seconds have passed, he will stop running. Otherwise, he copies Bond's new position and starts running again. However, this time he won't copy the time. Therefor he will eventually stop, as long as he doesn't see Bond again.

#3 is triggered if less than 10 seconds have passed since the guard started running.

Some guards use non-standard scripts. Caverns blue hat guards/Control black hat guards have no timit limit and will always choose to continue running after reaching the copied position. However, on a level like Control DLTK, we could still easily manipulate the black hat guards to go around in circles. You just have to make sure you stand in a good spot once they reach your previous position.